Author: Rene Borg (Running Coach)

TRAINING: Adapting to the changing times

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

The great coach Bill Shankley said: “Some people think running is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that. “* Now, look, running is not a matter of life and death and the corona-virus is for some people so here I’ll do you a favour: I won’t spout my uneducated opinion about what you should do on the virus and instead give you a well-educated opinion about what you can do with your training while this situation persists.

* come to think of it he might have been talking about football, but let’s move on…

The situation

Most of my clients have had their upcoming races cancelled or postponed and as such I feel that I can offer a few ideas for how to continue training along in the absence of your previous goal event.

You may have put in some very hard work to peak for a particular race. This is certainly the case for most of my clients as I employ a peaking model meaning we build a base first and then we do very race-specific workouts in the final 6-10 weeks. This means we can find ourselves with a very ‘sharp’ ability to race but a floundering ‘capacity’ – we are just about ready to ‘hit the race’ but our basic physiological abilities are beginning to sag around the edges. What do we do now that all this pent up energy has no place to go?

I think I have a good view of everyone’s pain. I am an athlete with my own goals. My three next race goals are nearly certain not to go ahead and for my main goal of the year (early June) I judge that the chances of my getting to race it is 60/40. Yet I will continue to plan for reasons I’ll outline below.

But I also see this from a race organisers point of view: I direct the Lap of the Gap Marathon and I am co-organiser of EcoTrail Wicklow. The first race is not under immediate threat but I know from people in the industry that May events are by no means safe. We could be forced to reschedule. There’s lots of preparation we are doing behind the scenes for these eventualities. For events further ahead – like EcoTrail Wicklow – there are other considerations about how we will be affected.

As a club coach, we have been told to suspend all training activities for the upcoming period so some of the cherished regular weekly meet-ups will go down the toilet for a while.

I also run an AirBnB with my wife. We decided to close this already a month ago. It did not seem prudent to invite strangers from all over the world into a house with our three small kids for an income stream we can survive without for a while. Apart from this, I onboard less clients and expect I will onboard less in the coming months until people gain certainty again about what goals they can commit to. Every business will probably feel the impact of this over the coming three months at least.

Finally, I am a holiday organiser and had been looking forward to a trip to the Lake District end of this month with a group of Dane with Paul Tierney as our local guide. This trip was also postponed until October.

So whether you’re losing your holiday, your race, income for your business, or have to reschedule or cancel your running event or even your weekly training with your club or your friends, I feel your pain. Now to what we can do about it (again this is about training – if you want to know what to do about the virus go to the HSE.ie!).

The solutions

The first step in this type of process is acceptance. There is no value in labelling any situation as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Situations simply are as they are and it’s always best to deal with what is in front of you and totally put aside any notions about how you would like things to be. it could be worse – it’s still nice to go for a run every day on your own even if there is no race next week and no training session with the club. Our sport thrives in solitude too.

Whatever training plan you are currently in the middle of will have gained you some fitness. You may not be able to employ it right now but you can hang onto it. If your race goal was imminent – such as the upcoming Vienna or Rotterdam Marathons or the Maurice Mullins races – then you should enter what is called a ‘Refresh Period’ for 2-4 weeks first of all.

Refresh!

What is a refresh period? It’s a period of training where you refocus briefly on neglected parts of your physiology. A ‘General Endurance’ refresh is used to rebuild the basic aerobic foundation usually gained through running in zone 1 and to a lesser degree zone 2 or under what scientists call the Aerobic Threshold or First Ventilatory Threshold. During race specific training this system always begins to erode a bit. In the absence of a race – rebuilding this a bit again is a great idea.

You can do other types of refresh if you need it more: a General Refresh focuses on both rebuilding basic endurance but also basic strength ,technique and speed through training such as weight-lifting, easy sprints and strides and form drills.

It’s also possible you were training for an ultra but now have something else in mind. If so your anaerobic capacity has likely suffered a bit and you could decide to do a period with some more intense work to revisit that system ahead of figuring out new goals.

If your race is a bit further way – like my own goal is – I advise that for now you continue as if nothing has occurred. Keep training until you hear for certain that your race is gone. At that time you can move into a refresh period as described above.

Return to basics

Should it become clear that the disruption will last longer than 2-4 weeks then your best bet is to ‘return to base training’ and simply stay in that base training until things normalise and then prepare a new build-up. You can never really do too much base training as long as you understand where your current weaknesses are and what needs attention (modern base training doesn’t just mean lots of slow volume although it’s a start as long as you can handle the volume you pick).

Finally, if you’re worn out by your training and you don’t really care any more whether you lose some of your race fitness, then this is THE IDEAL PERIOD to take a 2-4 weeks mental break from serious running similar to what you would do after a hard race. Think about something else and follow a lose and non-demanding schedule – just enough to keep you healthy and active.

 

So hang tight folks – we can still train and keep ourselves fit so we are ready to resume ‘life as normal’ whether it be in 2 weeks or, as some epidemiologists think, more like 12 weeks or more.

 

Mistaking the icing for the cake

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

As 50 years of practice and the recent Stephen Seiler study has shown, the most important determinant of success in running is ‘volume’. And to do volume we need to achieve consistency. To have consistency we need to have good recovery. To have good recovery, we need to have a very strong aerobic system. To have a very strong aerobic system, we need to do as much easy running (defined in TFTUA as Zone 1 and Zone 2 training – or every run done below the ‘aerobic threshold’) as possible.

 

In Rene Borg’s latest Patreon post on Educated Runner, he looks into some key principles deduced after reading the fantastic ‘Training for the Uphill Athlete’ by Scott Johnston, Steve House and Kilian Jornet.

 

Read full article (free)

Predicting pacing in the hills

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

In the microcosm that is our own private goal-setting, the question ‘what time will I run for this trail race?’ emerges regularly. I have used a particular way of estimating performances for some time and I will share it here.

It’s harder to estimate what times you can shoot for when you run on trails, hills, mountains, and fells. Some purists will, not without justification, say that it’s also unnecessary as you are racing the other competitors primarily rather than the clock and ever-changing conditions on the mountains and trail-surfaces make direct time comparisons from run to run and race to race nearly meaningless.

I see the truth somewhere in the middle: changing underfoot and weather conditions does make it difficult to compare ‘like for like’ what a time on a course will be one day versus another day, one year compared to the previous year. Still we keep records for most classical off-road routes and many runners seriously target them. Kenny Stuart’s magnificent records on Snowdon, Ben Nevis, and Skiddaw, for instance, are still prized, if elusive, possessions. While conditions on a given day can make a race a ‘slow day’, this matters much less when we look at results over 20 years because these 20 years will reflect both several ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days.

 

Baseline

I begin by running over the course in training at a known controlled effort trying to keep it even throughout the run. If I cannot do this I look at historical gpx files for the run completed by myself or by other runners. For races like Snowdon this was particularly easy as the year’s progressed, as I had access to several recordings. This allowed me to pick splits consistent with my own strengths and weaknesses. The Snowdon race is a classical ‘up/down’ route. A weak climber will spend a greater proportion of the race on the uphill than the downhill and vice-versa for a strong climber but weak descender.  When running the route in advance – such as I could do for a local race like Leinster’s highest peak Lug na Coille – I could use the existing splits as they were as long as ‘ran true to myself’ during the training run.

Once I have secured a reasonable baseline run recording, I will copy and paste the splits into an Excel sheet. I then insert my own subjective estimated (or desired) target time next to the time of the baseline run. In the example below a baseline run of 67:37 is compared to a target time of 55:00. The difference between the two is calculated (in this case a difference of 18.7% is desired).

I then apply this difference to each individual lap split – that means I reduce the time for each split by 18.7%. The result can be shown below:

splits1.png

Using the information

How do you read this? So if you look at ‘lap 1’ which is the split that represents the first kilometre (uphill as you can see from the slow time), the training run time was 8:44 min/km. In order to, run 55 minutes with the same distribution of effort as in the training run, this needs to be reduced to 7 minutes 6 seconds. The second kilometre needs to be reduced from 8:31 to 6:56 and so on.

This allows me or my runner to have a rough goal in mind – we’d know in this case to try and get to the 2 km mark in just around 14 minutes. Any slower than that and we need to push the pace more. If we’re too far ahead we may be in danger of blowing up OR we may be able to hold back a bit more on the descent (by building a ‘cushion’ on the uphill).

I can also mark out ‘hot spots’ or splits that look too difficult to achieve.

splits2

A potential hot spot may be the 3:21 min/km on kilometre 6. From the recording I know that this is a downhill kilometre with a drop of 73 metres so 3:21 min/km is likely not unrealistic at full tilt. But it’s worth highlighting as runners often run downhill quite fast in training and then it becomes difficult to run them MUCH faster in the race situation. More time then needs to be clawed back on the uphill.

 

Breaking records

Let’s take a more exciting example: the Scarr mountain race (ok, maybe not exciting to me but I live on it). There’s a relatively new record on this course set since the course was amended from a straight up and down to a ‘looped’ course. It’s held by Des Kennedy in 36:43 and set in 2018 (remarkably as conditions were notoriously windy – showing you can run good times on ‘slow days’). Des Kennedy also holds the second-fastest run in the modern era (some old results have been lost to the mists of time) for the traditional course and thus we know the current record is from good pedigree.

By inserting the recording of the record run into an Excel sheet, we can calculate what it would take to run a record of say – 35 minutes:

splits3

A potential challenger could use this to gauge where to insert their main charge. They can see they need to go below 22 minutes at the top (which Des reached in 22:51) in order to break the record and descend in 13 minutes 15 seconds. No kilometre looks truly unachievable for someone talented and fit enough to even consider attacking the record but putting them together is obviously the challenge.

 

How to use the information

Personally, I used these markers to establish rough segment targets within the greater run to help me along. On Snowdon I’d know when I should reach the climb halfway point to be on track for a sub-1-hour ascent, for instance.

If we have access to the route we are trying to ‘attack’ with this level of detailed preparation, we can go out and run the key sections in training to see how far we are from the level required. Looking at Des Kennedy’s example from above we could try to ascend in a sub-22 minute time, for instance, or simply try an ‘all out climb’ and see how far we fall short. As the workout is relatively short (4 km up / 22ish minutes), it would not stress our bodies unduly as long as general conditioning has been done before.

When working with Jason Kehoe, we often used this approach even when we didn’t have daily access to the mountains he was attacking. We would know pretty much how long it would take him to be at the top of the various summits to be ‘competitive’ and we’d be familiar with the average gradient. So, if we knew he had to climb for 48 minutes up a 5 km slope of an 18% incline, we could design a simple progression of workouts:

  • 8x 6 minutes uphill rep (15-20% incline), 90 sec recovery
  • 6x 8 minutes uphill rep (15-20% incline), 90 sec recovery
  • 4x 12 minutes uphill rep (15-20% incline), 90 sec recovery
  • 45-50 minute uphill time trial (15-20% incline) at ½ to ¾ effort
  • 2x 24 minutes uphill tempo (15-20% incline), 90 sec recovery

This particular progression is just an example but illustrates the basic logic. The general fitness needed to do the above had to be completed before this type of training began. Most runners do not engage in this type of very specific preparation because mountain running is either a ‘side-show’, ‘2nd priority’ or simply ‘part of the conditioning for road and cross-country’ – so it’s only an approach I would suggest to people for whom the mountains is the be-all end-all.

What could I do?

For ‘mere mortals’ it may interesting simply to see what running part of a course at ‘record pace’ feels like. I remember once going out on Scarr to run a section at the estimated record pace. It was a humbling experience but gave an insight into the physical requirements.

Scientifically, we can go much further with this level of analysis by using correction for terrain and climb based on mathematical equations as well as input from the new Power meters for running (such as the Stryd to which I am affiliated). Power meters allow us to calculate what power output we currently can create for a certain duration (uphill, downhill or flat) and then estimate based on that what is required to generate the desired pace on uneven courses. I may dedicate a future post to exploring this if I sense an interest from my readers.

Real world goals will do it

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

Runners today have access to more measurements and metrics than ever before. Once upon a time an estimate of distance and the time on your stop-watch was the maximum you could hope for. Then the heart rate revolution happened and in later years GPS enabled real-time measurement of distance and pace and finally an estimate of power output, Ground Contact, stride length and more.

The ‘Unreal’ World

We can call these ‘primary metrics’ in that they measure one direct phenomenon: i.e. the speed you are travelling at or the number of beats your heart makes per minute. These measurements exist in two types – those that measure real-world effects (pace, distance, power) and those that measure elements of the process (stride rate, Ground Contact Time). To this, initially confusing, cohort of data points, has been added many ‘secondary metrics’ which are calculations based on a combination of ‘primary metrics’ such as looking at the Efficiency Factor of a runner by assessing how far a runner runs per Watt of work he creates or assessing stress by comparing the intensity and duration of your run against certain test performances and so on.  It goes without saying that once you delve into that level you’re no longer putting the tyres and chassis on your car – you are polishing the chrome. Like in this metaphor – polishing the chrome is worthwhile but not a priority for driving.

An advantage I possess as a coach is that I can look at all this (it’s my job) and make sense of it within the greater picture I am trying to paint with an athlete. Even then I have a cardinal rule when it comes to all measurements which I strongly suggest non-professionals adhere to in the interest of their own time:

“Look at your measurements to find answers not to create questions.”

To elaborate: use your measurements to identify the likely answer to specific questions you have – do not go to look at them because it’s the nerdy thing to do and come up with all sorts of distracting questions. This time would be better allocated to do something practical for your running instead (such a longer cooldown). If you need to go for a few minute to look and bask that is ok: positive emotional reaction to all things running is a good idea.

The Real World

This returns me to the title of this article. The human mind is not motivated by improvements in Ground Contact Time or a nice trendline for your Running Stress Score. Even if the intellectual mind could be fooled into considering this a primary aim, your subconscious mind (the ultimate arbiter) will find it irrelevant. No prolonged success can happen without the blessing of your subconscious mind. It’s needs must be met at all times or it will punish you (usually with pain – it’s way of saying ‘I don’t like how you are spending our time’).

Now: learning to run for 2 hours or completing a lap of a 400m track in 60 seconds or less constitutes real world goals. So does breaking 40 minutes for the 10 km distance or gaining the ability to run 7 days per week as a matter of choice. So does covering a certain well known mountain course close to your house in 1 hours 50 minutes this week and then hoping to do it in 1 hour and 48 minutes without too much extra effort the next time. So does running for specific reasons important to you and you alone as long as they are not delusional or dishonest (if you love running for the attention it get’s you, do not tell yourself it is for some higher cause – the subconscious will not be deceived). In my experience whenever runners run for reasons that are not entirely their own, pain results (psychosomatic – i.e. ‘physiological changes causing pain in tissues created by the subconscious mind’).

True deep motivation and connection to our goals (which will help meet the needs of our selfish, childish and overprotective subconscious) can only be gained through connection to real-world goals.

Implications

As a coach it is easy to be a nerd. The coach can survive this flaw as long as he does not transfer it onto his athletes. The runner can survive this as long as he or she does not let it get out of hand. The primary goals set for a runner or that you set, as a runner, for yourself  must be concrete. Not only does this mean they must be primary metrics, the goals should make sense in a normal conversational sentence containing no three-letter acronyms and no jargon. Yes ‘reach an ATL of 2000, three weeks out from my peak race’ will not cut muster. ‘Complete a 2 hour easy run and a 1 hour steady run through gradual progress in the next 6 weeks’ will pass.

Every workout we do is a task set for our bodies to solve. I want to delve into this more in upcoming posts. For the moment I bring it up only to support what I am trying to express here: you were designed to solve problems in the real world not the unreal world. Your body and mind (which are the same thing, it’s unfortunate language has provided two words for it) will respond better to focusing on a real world concrete task. Everything becomes easier: measuring progress, keeping motivation, planning the steps to complete the task.

So – no measurements?

Does this make other measurement irrelevant? We revert to my principle above: ‘Use your measurements to answer rather than create questions.’ This means if my stated goal was to progress to 9 hours of weekly running at intensities that will be beneficial for my long-term healthy, I can go into my data to look at heart rates and stress scores to see if the condition was met – does the data suggest I was straining rather than training?

Questions can also be asked ‘on the run’ by a look at the watch. My question might be as simple as ‘this feels a bit faster than I expected’ which a look at the watch can confirm or disconfirm. Like in almost every case, the question is never whether we should use something or not (a gun, a running metric, a treatment) but how we should use it.

Summary: keep your overall training and racing goals tethered to real world practical outcomes. Use more esoteric measures only to answer concrete questions that arise during the process of achieving these goals.

Change of my business

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

One of the advantages of not being a ‘faceless corporation’ is that I can communicate about changes to my business the way you’d have a chat in the pub (or cafe as it is these days).

7 years in the making

It’s been 7 years since I began the venture ‘ChampionsEverywhere’ with Jason Kehoe, the first athlete I began to coach, as my business partner. Our goal was to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for runners combining both products and servics runners would need. This was later refined to services only as the business grew organically.

The last few years I noticed my work was becoming a victim of the core idea: trying to deliver everything. We had trimmed the business already by discarding certain side-projects (such as Primal3 and the Running Superstore clinic) but I still felt I was not spending a large enough proportion of my time coaching athletes. Over the years, our business had grown to 5 separate profit centres – corporate services, workshops, training plans and online coaching, Neuromuscular Therapy and personal consults – along with various ad-hoc projects.

Apart from the work involved in maintaining focus on these different parts of the work, all the mundane administration also bloats when you have such a structure: web design and maintenance, accountancy, marketing, scheduling, customer support, budgetting, venue booking, equipment purchase and replacement, insurance and so on and so forth.

Specialising again…

The area that suffered most was my writing output which I consider critical as part of the ongoing conversation with both my current runners and those I may work with in the future. So Jason and I decided to do another trim and effectively this means ChampionsEverywhere does note exist anymore as a legal entity but is rather just the online shop through which you can book our services.

From the 1st of April this year (2018), all online coaching services will be delivered solely by me through my new company Borg Coaching Services whereas Jason Kehoe will deliver all of our previously ‘face to face’ services such as personal consults and Neuromuscular Therapy through his clinic: JK Therapy in Tallaght. We no longer promote or schedule any workshops although groups or clubs can approach us to host one on request which we will consider based on availability.

This move allows me personally to focus 100% on the area I am most interested in: coaching you for better running performance. It does mean that I will no longer be providing advice on running technique, rehabilitation, strength and conditioning and injury in general.  This is despite recently qualifying as a Neuromuscular Therapist as another part of a hard-won skillset acquired the last 7 years. I decided against setting up a clinic here in Wicklow for reasons I may expound on at a later time but will not do here for the sake of brevity. If you have a niggle or injury but want to work with me, I have written an article suggesting what you do first.

The benefits

This change takes an enormous adminstrative burden off my table helped along with some automations and changes to how I sell my plans. Instead of doing it upfront I now use monthly subscriptions which involves less administration both for my runners and for me. My goal is always to spend less time on marketing, accounts and other admin and more time with coaching runners and writing plans as well as articles. I hope with this move everyone is going to see positive results even if it was bittersweet to say farewell to the workshops this weekend having invested so much time in first introducing them to Ireland and then continuing to develop them beyond that.

So for those reading my articles or working with me – I look forward to this next focused chapter. My only remaining side projects are Trailloebsferie.dk (where I deliver trail running holidays for Danish runners) and Lap of the Gap – the marathon here in Wicklow where I serve as Race Director. Apart from that I continue to serve as Head Coach and Chairperson of Glendalough AC. I have cleared my plate of certain other long-term commitments such as my race directorship of the Wicklow Way Relay which I am transferring to my ‘co-Race Director’ Jason Kehoe this year.

I couldn’t help but think of Warren Buffet who said ‘the key attribute of very successful people is that they say no to almost everything’. We can all learn a lot from that without turning into ‘selfish bastards’ – when we overcommit or spread our skills too widely, everyone around us is not served as well as they would be if we are committed to the right level and focused on the right priorities. I personally am very excited about this change.

Training people when time is short

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

I’ll admit it here: as a professional coach I sometimes have to make business decisions along with coaching decisions. Ask my wife and she’ll  tell you I’m not nearly enough of businessman but here’s the rub: if I told every person who wanted to work with me exactly what I think they must do, most of my clients probably would not be able to work with me. There’s a simple reason for that.

It takes time…

To train to full potential you first of all need a long time: much longer than most people are comfortable investing in before we have developed a personal relationship. It’s cheaper to buy most subscriptions for a year yet most of us try a month first. It’s understandable.

Secondly, the decision to hire a coach often occurs to runners I work with ‘too late’ for an optimal build-up. My approach is not to turn these people away and ask them to come back later because quite frankly it means a lot of people will never come back. This is again the business man speaking but I need food on the table in order to be able to write and think coherently enough to coach. This decision-making does not have to be bad for you or for me as a coach as long as it’s clear what’s happening.

How short is too short?

I do not accept clients for shorter build-ups than 12 weeks (nothing material can be accomplished with shorter plans). If someone works with me for 6 weeks almost all the results they get (good or bad) is down to historical training – not my plan. So if things go badly, they will blame me in the wrong and if things go well I could take credit for results that are not my doing.

When I work with people ‘short-term’, I try to change things gradually away from current training and I consider the current plan a ‘stepping stone’ towards a longer term commitment where we have ‘time to do everything right’ later. I call this my ‘slow-track’. It does have the advantage of not shifting people out of their regular routine too quickly – something the body hates.

The Path to Full Potential (Arthur Lydiard)

The ‘fast-track’ is ironically the approach that takes longer to implement. I still call it the fast-track because it will get you to your full potential quicker. Focus on short-term success ALWAYS comes at the expense of fulfilling your ABSOLUTE POTENTIAL. I understand that for many of my runners long-term success is not the main goal – the next race is the goal and that may be it. I coach many runners who prepare for one big race and then that’s the end of their main running career. It’s pointless to impose career planning in those cases. It sometimes comes later.

The fast-track requires starting at least 28 weeks out from the main goal race of the season. At that date you already need to be fit enough to take on 10 weeks of heavy volume training (‘heavy’ is relative to you) so if you’re unfit (by your standards), you’d need to start even further back. You can see the problem here from a consumer (or I should say ‘client’) point of view: not many people plan THAT far ahead. The 28 weeks normally consist of:

  • 10 weeks GENERAL practice
  • 6 weeks RELATED practice (transition)
  • 12 weeks SPECIFIC practice consisting of about 6-8 weeks training, 2-4 weeks coordination work and 0-2 weeks Taper

BY FAR the majority of my clients sign up initially for 12 weeks or less – so we cannot run the full gamut of necessary work – we have to compromise initially. Keep this fact in mind here: most biological adaptations only begin to be build in the 6-12 week period after the initial stimulus. So a lot of what is achieved during a 12-week training plan is only ‘harvested’ by week 18 and 24! If your race is in week 12, you’re seeing only the early physiological adaptations especially the neuromuscular ones that happen quicker than processes such as capillarisation, mitochondrial biogenesis and so on.

Clubs and peer groups contribute a lot to the pressure here because we are often in the situation ‘here’s a club race 10 weeks from now – you ready’ and your scenario is that you’re just a few weeks back from an injury. It’s hard to say know especially if you’re a ‘goodist’ (want to please others) – there’s a reason selfishness is a vintage trait for high performers.

Going forward (I am launching my new coaching packagtes this month) I will try to make this clearer to anyone who works with me: the current plan works within certain time constraints (so it’s the ‘slow track’) but next time we work together we should be on the ‘fast-track’ (so be thinking about the right training roughly 28 weeks or more ahead of the next big goal.

 

The dangers of switching and of short plans

The most consistent underperformers are runner who constantly rotate their approach. I try to sniff them out in the early conversations as I know that although I will receive a payment, the relationship ultimately won’t work because the person wants immediate results and has a habit of shifting to another system ‘mid-stream’. The old heuristics nearly always work: don’t change horse in the middle of the fort.

Those who do have been brainwashed by our society to expect the results of a pill no matter what they buy – our culture of instant gratification. Many runners without coaches do the same – trying one approach of training for six weeks then changing to another. This has little value and won’t facilitate any real improvements except for learning about different methodologies (something I have to do a lot).

So when starting with a new coach – be it I or someone else – I advise you to give them quite a long commitment (I’d say that eh?). The only reason you should cut a new cocahing relationship short is if you can feel the chemistry is not there.

Coach and athlete chemistry is essential no matter how knowledgeable the coach is. If there’s no chemistry and rapport the message and the trust won’t develop necessary for working together. And don’t feel guilty about ‘dumping me’ or any other coach: I do the same – if I can feel early on that the chemistry between a client and I is not what it should be, I try to let the relationship naturally fade out. This means doing as good a job as possible for that runner but not making any effort to recruit them again or upsell them (businessman again – you see!) on future plans. In the rare instances where I have come up against a brick wall I do the same – I try to let the client ‘slip away’. Every one of us encounters a puzzle we are not made to solve and it’s important to give up then before too much time is wasted. In one case I had to tell a client that we could never work together again due to a breach of trust – this is crucial to in a coach and athlete relationship as trust is the foundation for any real relationship and your ability to adapt to training is directly affected by your subjective belief in and enjoyment of your training.

Season planning – part 1 (pleasing everyone!)

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

IMG-20171219-WA0006.jpg

Going into each new year, I have to sit down and plan out roughly what workouts I want to do with the club.

What complicates this ideally simple task is the number of different priorities, experience levels and interests in every athletics club. Rarely do we have more than 2 or 3 runners targetting the same race and when we do it is generally ‘by decree’ such as when we tell the membership that we ‘want a good crowd out for the County 5 km championships’. Even then, the target race for the club may not be the target race for the individual runners turning out. You can ask people to represent you but you cannot ask them to prioritise the club’s goals over their own. Running is too strongly an individual sport.

My solution is to simply accept this imperfection and try to provide solutions so that members and club can have their cake and eat it too. I’ve split this into two parts – one part (this one) about how to handle sessions and one about the overall annual planning process.

Individual customisation within group runs

At the beginning of the year I send out an email to all members to encourage them to attend group training. Simultanously I provided suggestion for how runners can tweak each session to their own need. I have provided you, dear reader, with a few examples below to take into your own practice:

  • Adjust your pace and/or intensity: If you are doing an easy or medium run and the group is doing a Fartlek or interval sessions simply change your pace very gently so you still get your moderate run while the rest work hard.
    • Example: The group is doing 5 km pace intervals with easy recovery. A runner next to you may be doing 400 m in 75 seconds and then 2 minutes dead easy. You simply speed up a little bit on the 400m and then slow down a fraction during the 2 minutes recovery. Hey, at least you are there!
  • Put on the brakes: My favourite strategy when I have a runner partaking in another coach’s session (when the other coach’s session doesn’t fit our plan) is to give the runner a ‘ceiling’.
    • Example: We use this with Jason (Kehoe) all the time – early cross-country season, he can partake in interval training but is only allowed to bring his heart rate up to a certain level (such as 167 the first month then 173 the second and so on). Again, the runner is ‘there’ and ‘showing their face’ but doing the correct training for them
  • Add your workout back in: If the group is doing a 10 km ‘steady’ run but you have a 10 minute hard tempo planned, then I suggest simply planting the 10 minutes hard tempo in the middle of the 10 km run and run the rest of the 10 km at whatever pace you had planned. No one even needs to know what you’re doing!

It should go without saying that the normal rules of ‘train to your own level’ applies no matter what session is on. Too many runners get hurt or overtrained because they are trying to drag themselves behind better conditioned runners. When I was at my best in 2012, I often got outperformed by runners in sessions that I would go and beat solidly in races. The reason may have been that I was training quite control and well within my capabilities whereas some of my training buddies may have been ‘out on their feet’.

There’s no medals for ‘winning training’ and the only benefit can be a short-term ego boost.

Communicate early

I try to provide workout information earlier and earlier and with more and more details so the club runners have a chance to calibrate their own schedules with the club workouts. It’s hard to expect someone to jump into some ‘hill sprints’ when they have been building their next three weeks around a Thursday night tempo.

I’ll show some graphs of how we do this one in the next post but essentially I present the workouts in six week blocks so people can see the logic and the progression. I believe that if a club members knows ahead of time that the next 6 weeks are focused on ‘improving power’ and there’s  progression of six workouts, then it makes it easier for them to place that into their own schedule or to think about how they can attend and modify it to what they are doing now.

If a runner was ‘peaking’ while the rest of us are ‘building’, for instance, then they might do the hill sprints shorter and sharper or cut down the total volume. There are many options here – almost any session can be tweaked to do something else than its original intention.

Built-in flexibility

A final way to ensure runners attend group workouts even when they are not ‘exactly what they had scheduled’ is to ensure the formats are flexible.  We have often used Fartleks because it is easy to insert whatever intensity you want into such a workout and to run it as a tempo (just run the recoveries faster) instead of as an interval-style workout.

Our regular Winter ‘Handicap League’ is the same – you can do anything you want on this course. You can run the 5 km or the 10 km and you can run it as hard or as easy as you want (and still be competitive). You could even run it as an interval session – just program it into your watch and speed up and slow down during the run and then meet-up with everyone else for coffee after.

 

Oh dear, pay walls!

I should apologise for the lack of activity here – I am obviously writing for quite a few pages (Running Culture, Mountain-Runner, ChampionsEverywhere and others) but my main constraint these days is that I need to prioritise paid work. As a coach you want to constantly educate and communicate but once you become ‘a pro’, you need to spend enough hours marketing, accounting, and delivering services to paying clients. That’s the bread and butter that keeps the mortgage paid and the food on the table.

For that reason I am playing with the idea of starting a Patreon page which would allow me to charge a small fee for my writing – which again would allow me to put writing at the top of my list of priorities (if sufficient traction is gained). I was once a top-dog trainer in a big multinational and I’d like the be able to set the time aside to put together material allowing people to learn how to coach themselves in a really user-friendly manner. Because truly I believe people must be the captains of their own ship and the coach’s job is only done once the person you work with see you as more of a sparring board than a drill sergeant. This is not my original view either: it was the key philosophy of Percy Cerutty – the great Australian coach of the 1950ies.

If I do start a Patreon page I want to ensure the concept and material is unique if not always in content (after all – most things about running has been said by someone somewhere) but in presentation. I want something that is easier to use and understand than what you would get if you bought a book or read an article on a ‘free’ internet page. I grew up believing in the necessity of ‘value-add’.

Igloi intervals (misunderstanding intervals)

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

Today, interval training has become synonymous with hard training for the majority of runners. It is no wonder this type of training causes a bit of confusion as even the name is a misnomer. Often we will say ‘we’re doing intervals’ and we will think about the hard sections but the ‘interval’ in ‘interval training’ originally referred to the ‘rest interval’ (also the meaning of the word itself).

Leaving the name aside, it’s a bigger mistake to think of intervals merely as ‘hard’ training because they can be run at any intensity. Truly there are only two basic types of workouts: steady effort runs and varied effort runs. An interval session is varied effort because intervals of easier running or recovery break up faster sections. This basic format has spawned countless specific session types such as alternations, lactate shuttlers, cut-downs, Fartlek, cruise-intervals, tempo-intervals, and many more. Steady effort runs are the opposite – runs with the intention of maintaining even pace or effort throughout. In reality even steady effort runs do not truly exist because you can never hold the EXACT same pace all the time – there’ll always be some variation. But it’s the intention that counts here.

Igloi intervals are an example of intervals that are not necessarily hard but that can serve a different purpose than traditional intervals. First a bit of back story:

A problem to solve

In the recent year I have – with some success – tried to break what I call my ‘pace rut’ which is basically finding it difficult to do the hero workouts of my glorious 2012 season where I seemed I never trained as well as that year neither before nor since. The challenge is that recreating the circumstances as they were do not work because we are always operating on shifting sands – our bodies change and it takes more and more to make them respond with a training reaction. A beginner can be coached by just about anyone or do just about any training plan and they will improve. The seasoned runner often hits a point where nothing seems to make them truly better. There is so much paint on the canvas that nothing new seems to stick.

You can attack these problems from many angles and you don’t have any option but to simply try – you cannot intellectualise yourself to the root of the problem. All we can know for sure is that because human beings are complex dynamic systems, then we also know that they operate within constraining forces and bottlenecks. A limitation in one key system may be preventing all other systems from moving on. The best example is injury or illness: once present it is often impossible to get the body to adapt beyond a certain point because the injury restrains the adaptations. But it could be anything: the strength of your breathing muscles, your running technique, the way you eat, the stress level in your life or the more classical culprits – the aerobic and anaerobic systems.

I tried first to repair the aerobic system to see if this would bring paces back up. I noticed eventually that extending distance was easy enough but it only had a small effect on average pace. I could easily go out and run all day (as I did during a trail running holiday) without feeling one bit tired at the end as long as it was slow. So I threw strides and power training at the problem again with some positive effect – race performances were slightly better this year than previous ones and my 100m times began to drop again. But average training pace did not yet improve much which is what you’d expect because there needs to be some kind of transfer mechanism between very general work (long and slow or very short and very fast) towards the middle (medium work, medium speed). It does not magically ‘just happen’, in most cases. Enter Igloi intervals.

Format

Mihaloy Igloi utilised a format of interval training with many short repetitions interspersed with very short rest intervals done at various paces which were described through subjective statements such as ‘easy’, ‘fresh’ and ‘fast good’. Without going further into details about his method (others have done this far better elsewhere), you can make it work for you by selecting a very short interval (I opted for 150 metres) which you aim to run at the pace you’d like to restore as your ‘default’ – in my cause the 4:40-4:50 min/km pace I used to be able to hold for 90-120 minutes no problem even over undulating courses (that’s a 42 second 150 m). The recovery is a 50 metres float, very easy. Since Monday is my recovery day and I had decided I really needed it I confined myself to a very short 4 km run (20 x 150m, 50m float). So the session was:

  • 20 x 150 metre repetitions with a target of 42-43 seconds
  • 50 metre active floats with no target

I wanted to keep this aerobic (recovery run after all) so put my heart rate warning on to ‘beep me’ at 143 bpm or higher. The way I imagined the run I would be able to run longer total time at ‘better paces’ without pushing my heart rate into the ‘steady’ zone (which would have made the run a short easy tempo). Keeping in mind that the road outside my house is very hilly, I knew some reps would be a bit slower and to go by feel in those cases. So how did it pan out? The graph below show it:

pace dsitribution

Basically of the 20 minutes run only 4 minutes were slower than 5:19 min/km pace and I also got about 2.5 minutes at paces from 3:37 to 4:35 min/km. The heart rate did not run away on me doing this: the average was 142 beats per minute with the highest 153 bpm.

I had managed to peak at 54 VDOT performances for my three target races this year: the Wicklow Road Championship, the Wicklow Way Relay and The Relay. But most of the year I had hovered around 48-51 with my best level in 2012 being 58-60 (despite bizarelly having been measured with a VO2max of 78 in a laboratory – an engine whose potential has never shown itself in an actual race likely due to other constraints). After the recent race I had dropped to 49, recovering to 51 by this weekend’s session. This run immediately jumped it up to 52. Did I suddenly get fitter? Unlikely, but rather it shows that this workout type gave me a better relative pace for the average heart rate – so overall a better workout than had I just gone out and run 142 bpm average for the whole stretch (although I should really do that now to prove my words!).

A few weeks ago I covered an Out and Back over 6.1 km (so 50% longer) at a pace of 5:14 min/km with an average heart rate of 151 and higher maximum heart rate (today’s pace was 5:00 on average at a heart rate of 142). So I was 14 seconds faster per kilometer for 9 beats of my heart less per minute. The 6 km course is a bit hillier than the 4 km but Grade Adjusted Pace was also better at 4:59 min/km versus 5:09  min/km (so 10 seconds faster per kilometer adjusting for hill differential). Interestingly in the longer run I never got down to paces as fast as 3:37 min/km. So what does all that mean?

Outcomes and how you can use this

Potentially:

  • Igloi intervals can give you a better run in terms of overall quality of paces your body experiences
  • Igloi intervals can give you this increase in quality while putting less metabolic load on the body

Essentially, it is a way to extract ‘more time’ at certain paces at lesser cost by using small recoveries to extend the time you can maintain these paces. So how do you give it a try?

Here are the steps:

  1. Pick the pace you’d like to make your standard training pace again (or the pace you’re looking to get better at for other reasons)
  2. PIik a very short interval that you’re confident you can run this pace at without your heart rate going crazy (often 50m to 250 m will do)
  3. Pick a very short recovery period, preferably one that makes it easy to remember (for instance you could do 100 m on/50 m off, 150 m on, 50 off, 200 m on, 100m off, 250 m on, 150 off etc.). But there’s no hard and fast rules – the recovery should be just long enough to get a small bit of breath back – but be warned 50 metres goes by very quickly!

 

Juniors running the hills

Rene Borg (Running Coach) Leave a comment

As our club organised the Brockagh Burst Winter/Spring League race today, we had a good field of juniors partaking. The ‘short course’ was right on the limit of the distance and climb allowed by WMRA (World Mountain Running Association) for the under-15 age groups and included some features may have a coach unaccustomed to hill running raise an eye brow or two: a very steep grassy bank, some exposure to cold winds and sleet and a steep descent on grass, bit of rock and lots of fast fire-road.

Our junior coaching team had done a superb job preparing the squad by taking them out over the course on Friday so they had familiarised themselves with what lay ahead. One of our senior runners also ran with the pack and a special marshal manned the junior turn-off. So basic safety was not an issue.

What really impressed me was the reviews after: I was told that the juniors enjoyed this type of experience much more than training on the track (not to say they don’t enjoy that) because it’s ‘more of an adventure’. Thinking back to my own childhood I can understand why – I was brought up with radio orienteering (meaning running by torchlight through pathless forests and scrubs never knowing what you’ll step on next). So coming into mountain running I had no concerns about the terrain. These juniors going up a steep grassy bank will hopefully be more like Kilian Jornet in the way their minds scale challenges: they’ll see a hill in a road race or cross-country and think ‘that’s not a hill’. They’ll run over  muddy cross-country course and think ‘bit slippy but nothing like that hill race’.

As coaches and parents, we set the parametres for what children see as normal and what they see as extreme. Hill running really is under-rated in what it can do for the physical and athletic development of children. Psychologically children are generally adventurous and open to the outdoors and physically they are at a stage where motor skill development is rapid. So do we want a generation who see even a trail as extreme because it’s ‘uneven’ or a generation who have no fear of any terrain or any gradient. They can still grow up to be road, cross-country or track runners if they so wish or if their obvious talent is so great that they have to move off the hills to fully match their achievements to their talents. But it seems to me – not just on today’s evidence – that the trails and hills should be a core part of children’s running experience in the formative years of their athletic career because it is more natural, more physically challenging, more diverse and varied and simply more fun. The strict ‘against the clock and no variables’ type of running of track and road is very much a sport modelled on an adult mindset. There’s time enough for juniors to make the shift to this once they pass into our ranks.