You can log virtually any and all manner of activity on Strava, from running to cycling to swimming to weight training to walking to the mailbox and back to yoga to canoeing to kite-surfing, and even badminton, for crissakes. But you cannot log a rest day—at least not intuitively or “officially,” anyway. But rest is an important part of training, right? I believe so, as does any experienced coach or athlete worth their salt.
Performance is performance, it doesn’t matter if it’s sports, music, business, or some other field. The main principles of getting better at, and eventually doing something pretty well, are universal: work appropriately hard, recover adequately, repeat. This happens on the micro (day-to-day), meso (week-to-week/month-to-month), and macro (season-to-season/year-to-year) levels. Employ these principles for a long time and you’ll get pretty good at whatever you’re trying to do. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. But as hard-charging Type-A strivers, pushing hard isn’t the problem—the real challenge is in forcing yourself to go easy, rest, and take breaks from time to time.
When I was a little kid, whenever my mom would drive me somewhere—and she drove me everywhere: basketball practice, summer camp, a friend's house, wherever I needed to go—whenever the song, "Here Comes The Sun" by The Beatles would come on the radio, mom would remind me every time, without fail, that when I was a baby she would sing this song to me.
I’ve been writing down quotes, song lyrics, and other random collections of words that meant something to me since sometime back in high school. One of the first songs that ended up in one of those early notebooks was “Name” by the Goo Goo Dolls
Anton Krupicka and I are about the same age. I’ve been a big fan of his going on twenty-plus years now—for his ultrarunning accomplishments, yes, but perhaps even more so for his writing about running, training, lifestyle, process, philosophy, and more, which I’ve always found interesting, thought-provoking, and insightful. He doesn’t race or write as much as he used to, but when he does either these days, it’s worth paying attention to. His latest post, “Snow Shovels and Singlespeeds,” has nothing to do with running specifically but everything to do with honesty, simplicity, intention, and effort that you could extrapolate out to so many different areas of life. (And it also speaks to how apples usually don’t fall too far from the tree.)
The short of it is that we’re in a third running boom, many runners—especially newer ones—are going too far, or trying to do too much, too soon (most of this driven by social media and/or ego), and that real progress comes from nailing the fundamentals, being smart about your training, and “earning the right” to level up in distance, workload, etc.
I picked up this book, How To Fight by Thich Nhat Hanh, a few years ago and revisit it often. It looks like it should be a quick page-turner but instead encourages you to slow down and spend some time thinking about the “note” you just read.
Marius Bakken wrote a detailed blog post about the Norwegian model of lactate threshold training and lactate controlled approach to training that outlines the methodology followed today by folks like the Ingebrigtsen brothers and top triathletes like Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden.
I can’t remember if I’ve shared this before in the newsletter or not but Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles for Good Design is applicable to so many areas of life. I reference it often when designing training programs for my athletes. Number 2 is something of a guiding light for me: Good design makes a product useful.
81-year-old is doing well after a recent car accident and as usual, I found a lot of wisdom in this interview he recently did with Amby Burfoot for Outside.
