My guest for this episode is Mark Coogan, coach of Team New Balance Boston and co-author of the new book, Personal Best Running: Coach Coogan’s Strategies for the Mile to the Marathon. In this conversation, Mark and I discuss his book, get into his training principles and the influences behind them, the importance of effort over exactitude, and a lot more.
In this episode, Simon Freeman and Mario Fraioli have a great conversation about emerging footwear, apparel, and media brands and trends in the running space. It’s very much two friends with a lot of industry experience just shooting the shit and speculating about what we’re seeing and we hope you enjoy being a fly on the wall for it.
Fartlek, in its purest form, is unstructured speed work. "Speed play" is its literal translation. Now, I'm as guilty as anyone else who has ever called any structured interval workout done off the track a "fartlek" session, but if we're being honest that's not a fartlek: it's just an interval workout. A fartlek is simply a series of faster pickups with a recovery interval in between. It's also an interval workout, but the length and speed of the pickups, as well as the recovery intervals in between, are not pre-planned and totally up to you.
Mario Fraioli recaps his experience racing the Masters Mile at the 2023 New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston, Massachusetts.
We're in the midst of marathon season which means the long run takes on an extra level of importance if you're training to race 26.2 miles. The 3 x 3 Cutdown is one of my favorite go-to long runs to help develop the specific fitness and skills necessary to succeed on race day. Here are the details:
As runners, we all have unique backgrounds and different reasons for getting into the sport. The following seven habits are tried-and-true behaviors the most highly effective runners — not necessarily the fastest runners — have in common and practice every day. Make them work for you and become a more motivated, happier and fitter athlete.
Variety, it’s said, is the spice of life. It can also be the key to spicing up some of the same old workouts you do week in and week out. Can't decide between hill repeats, a tempo run, or an interval session? Try rolling them all into one workout! I call this cover-all-your-bases butt-kicker “The Mixed Bag” and it will help to stimulate fitness gains that you didn’t even realize were stuck in stagnation.
This final episode of the year is a “best of” compilation of highlights from 12 of the most meaningful and impactful conversations that I’ve had over the past 12 months. As I’ve written in years past, putting together this episode is equal parts exciting and impossible. It’s a real treat to revisit all of the amazing exchanges I’ve had over the past year but it’s a tough task to pull out twelve that stood out above the rest. The honest-to-God truth is that they’re all pretty special otherwise I wouldn’t have had them in the first place. Each and every person that has been gracious enough to give me an hour or two of their time for this podcast has taught me, inspired me, entertained me, moved me, or changed me in some way—and it’s my hope that they’ve done the same for anyone who has taken the time out of their day to listen in on our conversations. They are, in order of episode release date: Bolota Asmerom, Luis Grijalva, Amy Leedham, Phil Shin, Nell Rojas, Tommy Rivs, Jinghuan Liu Tervalon, Tommie Runz, Peter Gilmore, Alison Mariella Désir, Chris Mosier, and Marielle Hall.
I’m excited to bring you the 11th and final installment of Common Ground for 2022, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. In this year-end episode, we talk about our running highlights of the year, podcast highlights of the year, music highlights of the year, and a lot more.
