Where Do We Go From Here?

Sorry if today's title has "Sweet Child O Mine" running through your head like it's running through mine.

I've written a number of serious posts in the past few weeks, but have only published drivel; the serious stuff just doesn't seem quite right, somehow. I've been doing the year-end analysis that most of us do and started thinking about next year, not just in sports but in blogging. There have been a number of times I've thought of pulling the plug on this blog, as I'm not doing much running or racing, but the emphasis of this blog has always been (aside from creepy silliness) teaching people how to decide how to train.

I had to learn everything anew when I started thinking about unthinkable distances and I chronicled my rather steep learning curve. I also tried to convey some of the "how-to" aspects of training. I've always been a "teaching" coach; I want my athletes to be able to coach themselves eventually, rather than always look to me for what to do. If you search this blog, you can find all of the "hows," but I wanted to cover the "whys," and I think I did an okay job of covering the intellectual side of that. What's been missing has been the emotional side of why an athlete does what he or she does.

I got the idea, of all places, from reality TV. In the first years of "The Biggest Loser," I was always saying that they needed to address the psychological reasons these people were 400 pounds; they've started doing just that in the more recent seasons.

I'm going to do a series of posts on "training curses." The first one is probably the most common and the most serious: boredom. Thinking ahead, I might have dozens of these posts, covering the emotional problems that face runners in training.

So, beating everyone else to the punch: I'm writing what I know.