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
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.
I’ve worked from home for the past 6+ years and would like to pass along some tried-and-true advice for those of you who find yourselves out of the office for the foreseeable future.
