Questions Coaches Hate #1,2,3

My scattered thoughts should cohere eventually.


The question I've heard the most often and hate the most when coaching is "What's the absolute least I have to do?" It's usually couched in terms of efficiency, as in I don't want any wasted effort so I can rise faster and higher, but really it's more "I only have an hour before work unscheduled each day." These are the people that, if you tell them they have to run 30 minutes, get on a treadmill and set the timer and the second they hear the bell, they step off. I much prefer the rare "What more can I do?"


The next one is "Should I try to run farther, or should I try to run faster?" The more you know about training, the less the question means. It depends upon who you are, what you've done, how you responded to what you did, what your goals are, how long you've been training and how long until your next goal, etc. This is where the "performance curves" of my last post come in; you have to know how one effort at one distance compares to another effort at another distance - and that varies from person to person. And just improving that average performance doesn't really mean much (except that you are getting fitter), as your race times don't necessarily correlate well with your average. [Mine actually DO, though. My average run is almost exactly 79% of my race performance, regardless of distance, but that doesn't mean it works for anyone else.] What you want to improve is your race performance, the outlier in your runs, which I call "Beamonizing" (after the long jumper who added two feet to the world record), and the math there becomes 5th partial derivatives of a gamma function... don't worry, no one else understands that sentence, either.


The question that plagued me my whole career was: "Should I go with my strengths, or should I shore up my weaknesses?" This, too, turns out to be a meaningless question.


Okay, I think this gets me to the next step in my thought process.