The MTN RDY community shares more than a love for adventure and athleticism. We share a thirst for knowledge.
One of my personal favorite success stories within my coaching career came a few years ago. A local marathon runner had hired me to help him Boston Qualify at an upcoming race. Now this wasn’t his first rodeo. He was a seasoned athlete having 17 years of running under his belt. He had completed over 20 marathons and had come so close to Boston Qualifying but had never quite been able to hit the mark.
Whether you are new to the sport or well immersed into the scene, most of us like to test our fitness against a distance or course. When an athlete asks for my opinion on which races they should sign up for throughout the year, my suggestion is to start with their “A” race and work backwards from there. An “A” race is your most important race of the year and the one that you want to show up to the start line in the best shape possible for.
Look, I get it. Running slow makes you faster? It sounds counterintuitive, which is why most novice runners go too hard/too fast/too soon. I seems logical to think that the harder I run, the faster i’ll get. And so it goes, we want to finish every run gasping for air to make us feel “like we got a workout”.
Here’s a quick trailrunner life hack: always have a towel with you in the car. We all know what it’s like when your shoes are caked in mud (signs of a good time) and you step into the car. The simple solution to this is removing your shoes before you get in. But what if you’ve got a bad case of stinky socks?
I was so close to having the race of my life 2 years ago. I had made my way up to 2nd place female during a 100 mile trail race and had been able to comfortably hold my position all day and night. My training had paid off and I was able to execute pacing and fueling according to plan. It was a fluke weather race for the history books with a blizzard and tornado (yes, a tornado in Utah) that hit the day before the race.
I have always struggled with the dichotomy of achieving a desired weight on the scale and achieving a specific performance goal with my running. That’s not to say that hitting a certain “race weight” has its benefits in your performance (optimal VO2max for one). The problem with my past obsession with the scale is that I found myself restricting my calories in order to lose weight during my training season. There are two problems with this:
he ever frustrating scenario: you are on a roll with your training, nailing all your effort sessions and hitting some new levels in your fitness. You feel good! And then you wake up in the morning and you aren’t feeling so good anymore. In fact, you feel awful. You’re sick. Now what do you do? Here are some simple guidelines to help you decide whether you should continue training or take some time off:
During preseason, a common phrase you’ll hear thrown around is base training. So what is it? In a nutshell, there are two main types of training: aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic training focuses on improving cardiorespiratory endurance. Anaerobic training focuses on increasing muscular strength and your body’s ability to buffer lactic acid in the body. So when we are base training, we are trying to keep our body in an aerobic state. Anaerobic training is still important to the endurance athlete, but for the sake of discussion, we will keep this to the base training and talk about anaerobic training in another article.
I recently got an email from someone that said:
“Dear Coach K,
I wanted to ask your advice. I have been running fairly regularly for the last 7 years. Last year I completed my 5th marathon and was very happy with my progress. I am thinking that I am ready to take the next step and dive into a 50k distance race but am not sure I am ready. What advice can you give me to help me decide if this is a good idea?”
I get emails like this fairly often so I thought I’d post some thoughts.
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