What you NEED, or what you’re TOLD you need?
This is a really important question that most runners never think to ask themselves. Let’s check it out.
How do I know what I NEED?
Your actual training NEEDs are based on two main criteria:
Your “sticking points”.
When we talk about training based on what you need, we’ve got to first look at where you’re falling short. Let’s say you want to run a marathon in 3:00, which is 6:52 pace per mile. You have a friend pace you on a hard run and, much to your dismay, you find you can only sustain this pace for 16 miles. That’s a sticking point. Let’s say you want to run a 5k in under 20 minutes. You can run 1000m repeats at 6:25 pace all day long, but when you try to run it for the full race distance, things fall apart. That’s a sticking point. Maybe you train like an animal, but you get super anxious during races and just lock up. Or maybe you hate doing tempo runs. Whatever it may be, sticking points are the limiting obstacles that stand between where you are and where you want to be.
2. Your detailed training history.
This doesn’t just include how long you’ve been a runner, or how many miles a week you’ve been running, or how often you do speed work. More detail about your past training must be known for you to figure out how to deal with your sticking points. For our marathoner with sub-3-hour aspirations, he might tell you “I’ve been running 60 miles a week pretty consistently for 6 months, and done a bunch of 20 mile long runs.” Seems legit. But a closer look reveals that basically none of his longer runs have included anything faster than 8:00 pace. That’s a big missing piece! Now we know something we need to change. Let’s look at our 5k athlete. She has no problem clicking off 1000s at goal pace, but a deeper examination of her training reveals that she does zero sustained running at a moderately tough pace, and zero runs where the pace progresses throughout. Now we’re seeing what’s missing. Now we’re seeing what we NEED.
When you combine your sticking points (where you are) with your detailed training history (what’s gotten you here), you start to get a usable blueprint of what your training should look like to get you where you want to go.
What is training based on what you’re TOLD you need?
This is much less ideal, and it’s unfortunately the norm in the training book/online coaching world. This refers to a top-down and inflexible training approach that takes no or minimal background info into account, and then attempts to contort your training into something predetermined as “proper” or “correct”. Did you google “half marathon training plan” and pull some random program off the web? That’s being TOLD what you need. Does an online coach claim to use a “proven system” or “method” or “formula”? You’re being TOLD what you need. Does the training approach claim to possess a secret, or cutting-edge technique, and then stuff it all into a weeks- or months-long schedule that never gets modified? That’s you being TOLD what you need. All of these are generic training plans, and with a generic plan, here’s what you’re getting:
AT BEST, you’re getting some aggregated, averaged-out set of “tendencies” that a bunch of different runners of different experience levels and training backgrounds demonstrated over time. AT WORST, you’re just getting things that worked for the coach themself in their own running, or some arbitrary projection of what the coach feels should work best. It doesn’t matter how much science or research or refinement has supposedly gone into the creation of the generic plan–it’s still trying to conform the RUNNER to the TRAINING instead of the TRAINING to the RUNNER.
So don’t settle! Find yourself a coach who will look at what you NEED, and build training accordingly!
-AED-
