help everyone remain accountable in the pursuit of their goals. But most importantly, Uma shares the benefit of the coach-athlete relationship and we at Runcoach are grateful for all of the runners we get to support.Major milestone:
Marine Corps Marathon 2018 - Ran it in 5:06, which is almost an hour faster than the last two times I ran the same race. 2016 - 6:01 and 2017 - 6:05
What is the secret to your success?
Following the schedule given to me by Runcoach, which consisted of speed work, cross training and yoga.
What is the biggest obstacle to reaching your goals and how do you get over it? Consistent training and training alone combined to form the biggest obstacle for me. I trained alone for the most part, and was lucky enough to run with my local running group for a few of the final long runs. I tried to get over it by committing to reporting my workouts to the coaches at Runcoach and uploading my workouts through the app.
What is the most rewarding part of training?
Self awareness - Realizing that I am stronger than I thought - physically and mentally.
What advice would you give to other members of the Runcoach community?
Stick to the schedule that the Runcoach app gives you. Report back to the coaches via email. It creates a commitment. Don't skip out on speed work. It was very challenging for me, and I had no track nearby where I felt safe to train alone in the dark hours of the morning. I tried to get in as many speed workouts as I could and that helped a lot to improve my pace.
Anything else you would like to share?
I would like to say that the timely encouragement from Coach Cawood and Coach Hiruni went a very long way to help me PR my race. I felt like they were my personal coaches. During a difficult phase during the race, when I wanted to walk the bridge, I told myself that I would not let Coach Cawood and Coach Hiruni down, I would run that bridge. And I did it!
What feedback would you offer on the Runcoach experience?
The overall experience was very awesome. I will do it again. The app needs some upgrades. For tempo workouts, I reported warm up, cool down, drills+strides, speed run and cool down separately so coaches could see my pace, but the app did not total them correctly. So I had to delete all of that and enter one aggregate number which did not show the effort I put into the workout.
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