How you train may not matter

For someone who's spent 45 years trying to find the best way for runners to train, it's an odd thing to say it might not matter. If you take a typical career and plot performance over time, you get something like the plot below (intentionally not labeled, as this is just to help illustrate)

When you first start running (point A above), your body considers not running to be normal, and it makes you stiff, sore, and tired to try to keep you from changing the status quo. You try everything: running more, running faster, running hills, switching hard and easy days around, and nothing works. You keep trying and don't improve. This is when people quit, and for good reason; "I tried it and it wasn't for me." How you trained doesn't matter. 

If you keep with it, though, you might start improving, and improving quickly (point B). Your body has accepted running as the new normal and decided to make some changes to accommodate this new activity. This is when racing is fun and addictive. You get better fast and it seems easy. The work you did before is starting to pay off. Every type of running you do is still new to you, so it all helps. How you train doesn't matter. A lot of people when they hit this point have added some new type of training and they think that that is the secret to their success. Many have written books on their "revolutionary" training regimen, when they could have done as well doing almost anything else.

Then improvements start to slow (point C). This is, I believe, the one point where how you train is all-important. That's what I'm going to be writing about in posts for some time. 

Eventually, performance plateaus (point D). You want to improve, but nothing works. You try increasing mileage, you try decreasing mileage but doing more speedwork, you cross-train, you change diets and shoes and try running new race distances (this is when aging runners decide to move up in distance because they don't have the speed they used to). But it's of no avail; how you train doesn't matter. Then you hit the downslope (point E), where you keep getting worse and usually out of frustration, retire.

I'm now 38 years past that point. And I'm still learning. I hope I can pass on some information that's a little more hopeful than this post. Next up: where do you start?