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July 11, 2013

Train at Current Fitness, Race at Peak Performance: The runcoach Approach

Written by Dena Evans

logoIn July, many athletes begin training in earnest for a fall goal race. We’re glad that this year, more runners than ever are doing so with runcoach.

 

A runner announces their new training cycle with a fresh pair of shoes brought home from the running store, or an acknowledgement they are about to embark on their first official long training run.  Then, he or she often gets the fun questions to answer – Wow!  When / how did you decide to run a marathon?  Why did you choose that race?  What time do you want to run?  In contrast, runcoach wants you to be able to answer the questions no one will ask – Wow! What is your predicted half marathon time?  Do you have access to a treadmill?  Can you run on Thursdays?

 

In short, one of the significant ways runcoach is different than almost any other training solution is the amount of focus we place on you and your current profile, rather than your hypothetical goals and hypothetical self.  Don’t get us wrong – we are completely invested in providing a path to progress your running as far as you can go.  However, instead of taking a random target and working back from it, we take your actual current profile / performances (or if there are no current or relevant races, we instruct you how to produce a hard effort to approximate a race).  From this, we forge an appropriate, sustainable path forward. Achieve mastery at your present level, then recover, adapt, and perform at peak productivity.

 

What if your goal was to break 4:00 hours for the marathon, but in 20 weeks, it turns out you might be actually better prepared to run 3:45?  What if you had in mind a 1:35 half marathon time, but forgot to factor in the crazy hills and stiff headwinds notorious on that course.  Goal setting is an important motivational cornerstone, but we know at runcoach that each person begins at a different spot – in their experience level, in their current fitness, in their weekly schedules, and in their natural strengths and weaknesses.  Our system provides our athletes with a program that is unique to each person, because each person is indeed unique.

 

As with any new coach/ athlete relationship, initially an athlete might be skeptical if the assigned workouts differ from what is expected.  Often we hear from runners who are used to a “go until you can’t go any more” approach to workouts, or a pattern of going hard everyday out on the roads. Other athletes have never followed a structured plan before and maybe sell themselves short on what they can do over various distances. Hundreds of thousands of workouts and successful goal races have reinforced for us that an approach including proper stress based on your current fitness profile, followed by sensible recovery, will lead to racing at peak performance.

 

Today, an aggressive approach and an ASAP mentality are present in many of the products we buy.  It is easy to be antsy over a five-minute wait when you are used to getting your Starbucks latté made in two. Remember when traveling across the continent or the ocean meant a risky wagon or boat ride and the very real possibility that waving goodbye to home was forever? Now, we are grumpy when a five hour plane ride is delayed one hour. Patience is in short supply.   At runcoach, we want you have fun answering the enjoyable questions from friends and family, but we also want you to be knowledgeable and confident enough about your present fitness to answer the tough questions as well.  We’re ok being the ones with the answers to the unpopular questions, and we’re excited that as our athletes achieve these goals, these unpopular questions are becoming much less so.

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