In most sports a strong distinction exists between the competitive season and the pre-season. Take the English Premiership where the club squads spent the summer months preparing the bodies for a long and grueling season. They need this period in order to create the fitness necessary to sustain the rigours of the long season full of matches and to create a new level of performance by having time to develop new physical, mental, technical and tactical skills, something which cannot easily be done in the midst of a hectic match schedule.

Seasons without end

Both competitive and fun runners now find themselves in a season superficially without any real end and no real beginning. Almost any kind of race can be raced at any time of the year and even the disciplines that are not available year-round – such as cross-country and track – can stretch over 5 or 6 months. This creates a culture of perpetual racing and constant need to step-up and be ‘on duty’ for the loyal club runner or a source of ever-present temptation for the fun runner.

Because coaches are under a certain amount of pressure to create interesting sessions and often do not feel they can justify their position by saying ‘well, tonight we’re going to do 60 minutes easy to steady together’, we lose even more of the traditional focus of a pre-season. We have hard sessions and races of all types available – or even pushed at us – year-round, often by well-meaning coaches who are pushing these sessions on athletes because they themselves feel under pressure by the perceived expectations of their athletes. Coaches become part of the entertainment industry, rather than educators and mentors.

Full potential?

This does not create an environment for realising the full potential of each athlete. Without a long dedicated period of mainly easy to moderate training without any distractions or set-backs caused by hard racing or prematurely intense workouts, runners never get a chance to really develop especially the basic abilities. When injury rears its head it becomes particularly troublesome because the physical and mental preparedness of the athlete will be lower than ever when he or she returns to running. More often than not they will feel the temptation – or duty towards club or coach – to resume racing action well before it is advisable.

When the pre-season still existed

Moving back in time to 1950ies and 1960ies New Zealand when master coach Arthur Lydiard laid out the foundations for much of today’s training practices, a very distinct season existed:

• 12 weeks X-country schedule
• 6 weeks Road Racing (2 mile schedule)
• 10 weeks Marathon conditioning
• 6 weeks hills
• 10 weeks Track Schedule
• 4 – 6 weeks track racing
• 2- 4 weeks off training

The period of cross-country and road-racing was not considered too seriously and as a form of preparation for the pre-season which Lydiard labelled ‘marathon conditioning’. This consisted of 10 weeks although in his later books he recommended spending as much as 3 to 6 months preparing the body for harder training and racing. In this he mirrored the earlier advice of Percy Cerutty who dedicated 6 months of every year to ‘General conditioning’ and focusing on simply ‘getting stronger’ with 3 months of race practice and 3 months competition.

As a club coach, I advise that coaches clearly bulk out a sizeable part of the year – or even two parts (one in Summer, one in Winter) as dedicated ‘pre-season’ where racing should take a complete backseat and no high intensity workouts are done. The focus is purely on creating a new performance level, clearing up old injuries and moving past them and work on the areas holding the runner back. This could be done by not insisting every member of the club, for instance, be ready and available for the entire cross-country season or to train straight through most of the races (as Percy Cerutty’s athletes used to do) not paying them too much respect but merely treating them as a hard steady workout in the middle of the winter season. This means sometimes putting the needs of the individual higher than the needs of the club. A difficult but necessary balancing act for coaches to take upon themselves as we tend to be the main catalysts of the environment that exists around our athletes.

This way many athletes would be able to dedicate the dark and wet months from November to February mainly to training or, for athletes with a longer season, perhaps the period January to March or April. The mid-summer can also serve as a good period for pre-season if Autumn objectives are very important for the runner or the club. But this means avoiding the temptation of the many summer races and the club putting on workouts of a steadier more endurance-focused nature during that period. Smaller clubs struggle to accommodate this but there are solutions – such as providing your runners with heart rate or pace ceilings so that the person doing ‘pre-season’ is running ‘easy to steady’ in a workout where a runner further along the peaking curve is doing ‘steady to hard’.

Happy festive season and I hope the seasonal spirit of this post was of use to you going into 2017.