Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon by Brad Hudson Foreword Congratulations. By purchasing this book you are taking advantage of a remarkable opportunity: to learn not just to coach yourself but to coach yourself the way Brad Hudson would if you were a world-class runner under his care. What sets Brad's program apart is its responsiveness to the individual. Rather than relying on cookie-cutter regimens with weeks of prescribed mileage and workouts set in stone, Brad sees how a runner is responding to the training before he decides what the next step should be. And now, armed with the information between these covers, you'll be able to make similar assessments for yourself. The best runner is an educated runner. Here at New York Road Runners we believe in changing the world for the better, and enriching and enhancing the lives of individuals of all ages and abilities through running. Our efforts range from organizing weekly local races for thousands of runners, to our NYRR Foundation programs, which currently bring running and fitness to more than forty thousand schoolchildren every day in New York City and beyond. We attempt to win people over to the benefits of running, person by person. We know how good running is for people in so many ways. We also know the compelling satisfaction that improvement in running brings. I am happy for you that, with this book, you are on the road to such improvement and satisfaction. Running is hard. No question about it. It gets easier as one gets fitter, and it also gets to be more fun. This is true for all people, from the very best in the world to the rest of us. The best in the world, like American star Dathan Ritzenhein, Central Park 10K record holder and member of the USA Olympic Marathon team headed to Beijing, are extra talented and work really hard, but they also have some advantages over mere mortals like the rest of us. Some have world-class coaches to support them in their efforts to get fitter and faster. Dathan and his teammates are especially fortunate. They have the benefit of the attention and effort of one of the smartest, hardest-working, most intense coaches in the business, a young man who learned by doing and studying. Coach Brad Hudson leaves no stone unturned in his quest to help his athletes thrive. He's part engineer, part mathematician, part scientist, and part psychologist. Brad is one of those people who pours his heart and soul and mind into what he does. Lucky for our sport, Brad has chosen to coach long-distance running. Now, lucky for you, Brad has translated his learning and teachings into lessons and guidance for everyone. I remember my first chat with Brad well. It was several years ago in a running store in Boulder, Colorado. I had heard much of this young legend in running, and the moment I met him, I was drawn in by his intense passion for coaching his athletes. I barely knew the guy, but he chewed my ear for an hour on the science of coaching and his expectations for Dathan Ritzenhein to ace the marathon at an early age. He was buoyed by the challenge of getting the then injury-prone Ritzenhein to the start line strong and healthy. Working with Dathan, Brad has now done that repeatedly. He's now taking the show on the road to your home. Good for you. Enjoy the read and the ride. Run smart and hard and enjoy the satisfaction of the journey ... all the more satisfying with Brad. I wish you the very best of luck with your training. And I hope we'll see you at a New York Road Runners race sometime soon. Mary Wittenberg President & CEO New York Road Runners Introduction: Every Runner Needs (to Be) a Coach My life as a runner started with an amazing stroke of good luck. When I was 9 years old, I joined a newly created community running program called "Run for Fun" that was based in my New Jersey hometown. The coach of that program was Mark Wetmore, then a student at Rutgers University, who went on to become the legendary multiple national championship-winning coach of the University of Colorado track and cross-country teams. That's like a musically inclined third-grader taking his first piano lessons from a young Beethoven. Running appealed to me right from the start, not only because I had a great coach but also because I liked the individual nature of running and because, well, I was really good at it. Back then I was still playing soccer, which was my first sport. One day at practice we ran a one-mile race and I finished second against a group of kids who were mostly two and three years older than I was. In that moment I realized I should probably leave the ball alone and focus on running, and thereafter I did. At a very early point in my running life I became totally obsessed with the art and science of training, so I read every relevant piece of material I could get my hands on - magazines, training manuals, biographies and autobiographies, you name it. By age 13 I had read more about running than many college-level coaches have. At the same time, I was applying my rapidly growing pool of knowledge in training for road races, open track meets, and school events. When I entered high school I started training even harder. I remember reading a book called How They Train, which detailed the workouts of the great high school runners of the '60s, like Gerry Lindgren. The one thing these guys all had in common was that they logged copious mileage, so I thought it was normal to run a lot. Before long I was running more than 100 miles a week myself. In my junior year of high school I became an emancipated minor - my own legal guardian. I took advantage of my independence to relocate across the country to the running mecca of Eugene, Oregon. By then I was the reigning New Jersey state champion in cross-country. The following year I became the Oregon state cross-country champion and finished third in the National Championship. These results were good enough to earn me a scholarship from the University of Oregon, where I became a two-time All-American in cross-country and track and field. I ran professionally for ten years after college. My best marathon time was 2:13, which I achieved twice. I qualified for the Olympic Trials three times and won the Columbus Marathon on two occasions. While most competitive runners would be more than satisfied with such accomplishments, I believe I was capable of much more. As a teenager I was breaking national records, but at the elite level I never even qualified for an Olympic team. The problem was that I overtrained consistently for many years and wore my body down. I was also stubbornly self-reliant, hence uncoachable, and ignored a lot of good advice from others that could have helped me perform better. Toward the end of my career, as I began to see my mistakes clearly, I found myself thinking more and more about what I should have done differently in my training, the changes I would make in my development as a runner if I could do it all over again, and what sort of advice I would offer to today's young runners, if given the opportunity, to help them avoid repeating my mistakes and thus achieve their full potential. In short, I started thinking like a coach. I now believe that coaching is what I was really born to do. I used to think I had been born to run, but looking back I see that, as much as I loved running throughout my career, my passion for the craft of training was even greater. In other words, I liked coaching myself even more than I enjoyed running. My current situation as the head coach of an elite running team is thus ideal for me, because I am able to practice and develop the craft of training with several great athletes simultaneously. The first runner I coached was Sarah Toland, who qualified for the World Cross Country Championships while I was working with her. During that period Sarah did a few of my workouts with her friend and fellow elite runner Shayne Culpepper. Impressed by Sarah's sudden improvement, Shayne later asked me to coach her. By that time I had also begun advising Steve Slattery, a steeplechaser who won a national championship with the help of some of my suggestions. When Shayne won the Olympic Trials at 5,000 meters the next year, a lot of other top runners began to take notice of what I was doing and approached me to ask what I could do for them. Before I knew it I was a full-time coach. Sarah Toland © Alison Wade In 2004, I created the Boulder Performance Training Group, a team of world- and national-class runners who train together under my direction. We've since moved to Eugene, Oregon, and shortened our name to the Performance Training Group. My best-known athlete is Dathan Ritzenhein, who won two National Cross Country Championships in high school and one in college and has won several big races as a professional. I am regularly forced to turn away talented runners who want to join Dathan and the others on my team, because I put so much individual time and energy into each runner that I really couldn't handle any more without sacrificing my standards. When I started coaching, I thought that the most valuable service I would provide my runners would be to share the rich store of training knowledge I had accumulated in my head. But I have since discovered that the athletes I coach don't really need me for my knowledge of training. Ironically, they need me above all to help them gain knowledge of themselves as runners, because therein lies the true key to getting faster. There are two classic mistakes that competitive runners make in their training, and both stem from an underlying failure to gather and apply self-knowledge. Mistake number one is to follow someone else's recipe for success instead of developing one's own best recipe for success based on one's individual strengths, weaknesses, needs, and goals. Mistake number two is to guide one's training too much by plans and not enough by the way one's body responds to planned training. I made both of these mistakes in my own running career. Blindly mimicking the over-the-top training habits of Gerry Lindgren and others, as I did in my teens, is a good example of mistake number one. My entire professional running career was a protracted case of mistake number two, as I refused to face the fact that my ill-fitting training patterns were destroying my body. Without proper guidance, nearly every competitive runner commits these mistakes to some degree, as I did. Runners are always willing to work hard, but most of them have a certain lazy streak that prevents them from doing the mental work that is needed to properly customize their training and adjust it responsively day by day.Therefore my biggest job as a coach is not to show my runners the one true path to faster race times but is instead to help them discover their own, unique, ever-changing road to improvement. The Importance of Customization The most valuable resource that a coach can offer a competitive runner is simply another perspective. Because a coach works with many different runners, he's likely to have a better sense of the individual needs of each runner. One of the most important lessons I learned when I began coaching several runners simultaneously is how different each runner truly is. There are a great many variables, including running experience, training history, relative speed, strength, and endurance, injury patterns, recovery capacity, and others that combine to make each individual runner unique. For this reason, the ideal training approach for each runner is also unique. No two runners should train in precisely the same way. A runner who has more natural speed than natural endurance should not train for a half-marathon the same way as a runner with more natural endurance than speed, even if the two runners have the same goal time. Similarly, a runner with one year of competitive experience should not train for a marathon the same way as a runner with twelve years of competitive experience, even if both runners share the same goal time and are the same age. These are just a couple of examples of the need for training customization that is unmet for most self-coached runners, who are never taught the importance of customizing one's training in such ways. Fortunately for me, and for my runners, my insatiable curiosity about training methods has put me in a good position to find the right methods for each runner I work with. Many coaches are locked into a system, which is usually a modified version of the system they were taught by their own most influential coach, and they in turn apply this system to every runner they train, regardless of how each athlete responds to it. But my situation is different, because I had no single coaching mentor; instead, for the past three decades and more I have aggressively sought out and studied, absorbed, and tested every training system on earth that has produced positive results with competitive runners. As a preteen I personally met and picked the brain of the great Arthur Lydiard of New Zealand, who established the foundation of modern endurance training methods. I have since learned at the feet of dozens of other great coaches, including my former coach at the University of Oregon, Bill Dellinger, as well as Renato Canova of Italy, Steve Moneghetti of Australia, and many others. Having been exposed to such a wealth and variety of training systems, I now have a bulging bag of tricks I can draw from in developing well-customized training programs for each runner I coach. One major advantage of trying out all kinds of different training methods is that it gives you a chance to compare them against one another. You never know if there's a better way of doing things if you keep on doing things the way you've always done them. In the process of testing various training practices, I have found that many conventional training methods simply do not work as well as alternative methods that are newer or less well known. As a result, each new runner I take on is exposed to at least one training method he or she has never used before. The Need To Train Responsively The key to avoiding the second common mistake related to self-knowledge that most self-coached runners make - that of not listening to their bodies - is what I call "training responsively." In my own running career I had to learn the hard way that the details of any runner's next workout should be informed 90 percent by how he or she feels after today's workout and only 10 percent by the training plan that was created before the training process actually began. So now, as a coach to other runners, I train my athletes from workout to workout instead of from training plan to training plan as I did with myself. Neither my athletes nor I know exactly what they will do in the next workout until we've assessed the state of their bodies after the most recently completed workout. Training plans are valuable, and I do create long-term training plans for my athletes, each culminating in the individual runner's next "peak" race. But I always bear in mind that these plans necessarily make a lot of assumptions about how the runners will actually progress along the path laid out for them. For the most part, training plans represent best-case scenarios, such that, if everything goes perfectly, the runner will be able to do all of the important workouts exactly as they are planned. But nothing ever goes perfectly. Unexpected periods of fatigue crop up, muscle and joint pains emerge, and illnesses occur. Sometimes, certain components of a runner's fitness develop more slowly or even faster than expected. In either case, the workout that will do the best job of keeping the runner on track toward his or her long-term goal is not always the workout I had scheduled for that day when I sat down to map out a plan several weeks earlier. For this reason, I plan every workout in pencil (literally and figuratively) and make a final decision about the workout at the last minute. My runners often grumble about replacing planned hard workouts with lighter ones when I determine it's necessary. And I am certain that in most cases they would go ahead and do the planned workout - usually with bad consequences - if I were not around. This is just the way runners are. It is very difficult for the typical competitive runner to truly accept the idea that backing off can be beneficial for performance. This is one reason why I believe that every runner needs to have a good coach - or learn to be a good self-coach. If You Can't Have A Coach, Be A Coach Every coach has some kind of training system, but the better coaches do not apply their system in the same way with every runner they work with one-on-one. Instead, they create a new, unique, highly customized training plan for each runner based on that runner's specific running experience, fitness level, and ambitions. The best coaches also watch their athletes very closely to assess how they are responding to workouts and stay ready and open to making quick adjustments - usually small ones but sometimes large - to keep their athletes on track toward their goals. It's hard work, I assure you, but these efforts to gain, share, and apply knowledge of each runner do more to help runners improve than any "system" does. Most runners, of course, do not have the luxury of working face-to-face with a good coach every day. To achieve their goal of running faster in races, self-coached runners must find a way to become their own coach - to do for themselves what good coaches do for their athletes. Specifically, they need to learn how to create their own customized training plans that fit their individual needs, and how to tweak their training wisely from workout to workout based on how their body responds to the plan. I truly believe that learning and applying these self-coaching skills will have a greater impact on your race times than any new workout you might try or any new one-size-fits-all training plan you might find in a book or magazine. The truth is that any solid training system will eventually become the perfect training system for you if you continually customize and refine it using these self-coaching skills. I love helping runners become faster. I get such a kick out of it that a part of me wishes I could coach every competitive runner in the entire world who has an earnest desire to improve. I wrote this book as the next best alternative. There are a lot of good running books out there that teach effective workouts and present solid training systems. But a lack of effective workouts and solid training systems is not the primary obstacle to your running faster. The primary obstacle to your running faster is a lack of self-knowledge and self-observation used specifically to customize your training methods and make smart adjustments to your training as it proceeds. In short, what's holding you back is the unfulfilled need for a second perspective - a coaching perspective - that helps put your training on track and keep it on track. The purpose of this book is to teach you the tools you need to become your own best coach so that you can train better and run faster. Learning and applying these skills will require you to put more thought into your training than you may be accustomed to, and to pay closer attention to yourself as a runner. But, ultimately, mastering the craft of self-coaching will make your running more enjoyable and fulfilling, as well as just plain better. I will start in chapter 1 by giving you an overview of my no-system/every-system training philosophy, which my friend and the coauthor of this book, Matt Fitzgerald, has dubbed "adaptive running." The term fits, because adaptation is the essence of my training philosophy. The goal of training, as I see it, is to stimulate the precise set of physiological adaptations that are needed to achieve maximal performance in a peak race. To achieve this objective, your training plan must be adapted based on your knowledge of yourself as a runner. Your individualized training schedule must then be adapted daily based on your response to recent training and any other factors that may affect your readiness for planned training. And finally, you must adapt your training from season to season, year to year, in response to the effects of the most recently completed training cycle (i.e., a period of training culminating in a peak race), to stimulate further positive adaptations that will help you continually develop and mature as a runner. In chapter 2, I will present the 12 most effective training methods I have found among the hundreds I have learned and tried. These 12 practices represent the foundation for creating customized training plans. Chapters 3 through 5 cover the three basic types of training in the adaptive training system: aerobic-support training, muscle training, and specific-endurance training. In chapters 6 through 9, we will really get down to the business of adaptation, covering the topics of how to assess your needs, strengths, and weaknesses and set goals; how to plan a fully customized training cycle; how to execute your training responsively; and how to adapt your training for year-to-year improvement. Chapter 10 ties everything together to prepare you for your self-coaching journey, and chapter 11 treats the special topic of customizing the adaptive training system to the needs of youth and masters runners. Finally, in chapter 12, I will present a selection of training plans for each of four race distances: 5K, 10K, half-marathon, and marathon. These plans will help you get started with the adaptive approach to training and the process of becoming an effective self-coach. Just choose the plan that best fits your needs and use the tools you've learned in the rest of the book to further customize it and adjust it day by day. Before long, you will achieve a higher level of mastery over your development as a runner and you will run faster than you ever have before. |