I recently sat down with my good friend and three-time podcast guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, for the second installment of our yet-to-be named quarterly conversation, which you can listen to wherever you get the morning shakeout podcast or at this handy link. An excerpt of this exchange can be found in Issue #36 of LtW, which comes out later this week. In this one, Simon and I talk all about coaching: our experiences with being coached and what we got out of them, the different forms that coaching takes, the impact a coach can have on an athlete, and a lot more.
If you look at the training schedules of top runners throughout history it's more likely than not that you'll find regular bouts of tempo running in there. Why? Quite simply: They work. Tempo runs, which involve maintaining a steady effort for a prolonged period of time (e.g. 5-8 miles at 1/2 marathon effort or 10-14 miles at marathon effort), give you a lot of bang for your aerobic buck. It's hard, but not too hard, running that helps build aerobic strength, improve efficiency, and/or practice running race pace. The Tempo Plus workout is the leveling up of a standard tempo run by pairing it with a short set of faster intervals afterward.
In this conversation, Randy Ashley and I tall a little about how he got into coaching, before discussing all things related to working with high school athletes: keeping it fun, building and maintaining team culture, dealing with the pressures of social media, interacting with parents, generalization versus specialization, how he thinks about training, and a lot more.
In the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about the myriad parallels between running and life, both of which, in my opinion, can be competitive pursuits for many of us. The idea I’ve spent the most time on is that of slowing down so that we can get more out of ourselves in the long run.
My guest for this episode is Starla Garcia, an Olympic Trials marathoner, registered dietician, and body and cultural diversity advocate. After sharing her story of how she got into running and eventually became a dietician, Starla and I talk all things nutrition and fueling for runners: maintaining a healthy relationship with food, being comfortable in your own body, how and when to fuel in training and in racing, eating for performance and recovery, hydration and electrolyte replenishment, different considerations for women versus men, supplementation, and much more.
Most interval sessions are pretty straightforward in their construction: X number of [fill in the blank] intervals @ Y pace with Z recovery between repetitions. There's nothing wrong with these types of workouts. They're easy to understand and effective at producing a desired adaptation. Hammer intervals, made popular by coach Scott Simmons of the American Distance Project, throw a slight twist into the mix: every third or fourth repetition (whatever cadence you choose, really), you "hammer" it (i.e. run it quite a bit harder) before returning to the prescribed pace. The catch? You don't get any more recovery time after the hammers than you do the other intervals in the session.
This year's 127th Boston Marathon was my sixth time running the annual Patriots' Day event. It's going to take some time for me to process this one but I can say that it was the most fun, best executed Boston I’ve ever run. It’s such a hard race, even when it goes well.
My guest for this episode is Dr. Justin Ross, an avid endurance athlete and licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in health, wellness, and human performance psychology. In this conversation we bust some myths about sports psychology, unpack what it means to be a mentally tough athlete, discuss how to approach goal setting and performance standards, and a lot more.
