Coach's Bag of Tricks

No one's more surprised than I am that this blog is over 4 years old. I've spent a lot of time discussing training theory and philosophy, because no one else does; I had made the deeper series searchable, but only two people ever showed interest. There's two types of runners and it's time to start addressing the one that I'm not.

Coaches spend half their time trying to motivate runners and the other half trying to keep a few motivated runners from injuring themselves. These latter are the ones that, told to run 10 quarter miles in 72 seconds, will start at 70, get bored and speed up to 66 and then bang out 12 to 15 of them (and wonder why they're always tired and injured). Obviously, I'm in that latter group. These runners have to understand in great detail exactly why they're doing a certain workout to keep them from turning it into a competition with themselves.

Most people, however, aren't like that. They want a coach to tell them what to do so they don't have to think about it. And they want variety. While some runners thrive on consistency (I know a woman who's run the same distance on the same route every day for decades), most are looking for something to break up what they see as the monotony of training. That's why there are magazines that are always touting the latest trends, why people sign up for different exercise classes every year, why programs that never tell you in advance what you're going to do are popular.

This time of year, bored runners everywhere are thinking "maybe I'll try to run a marathon in every state," "maybe I should take up triathlons," "I keep hearing about barefoot running; maybe I'm missing something by not doing that."

I think I'll do a series of posts on my favorite "break up the monotony" workouts for runners. I haven't really thought about it, but... isn't it time for a change?