Running is constantly an exercise in patience.  This is no more so the case than when workouts or training cycles meet poor performances.  Having a strategy to make training modifications when training doesn’t go according to plan will get your training back on track in short order.

Prevention:  The first step in avoiding poor workout performances or training slumps is to be organized.  Often these bad days are a result of spreading yourself too thin and neglecting proper nutrition or recovery.  Plan ahead for when you are going to workout, eat and rest as well as the logistics of your training locations, travel and coordination of essential training partners.  Addressing these common sense tasks will reduce poor workout frequency.

Identify the challenge:  Often runners meet their best intentions in a workout with times below their goal performance or with a sate of abnormally high effort to achieve the prescribed workout times.  Identify what is causing your rough patch that day.    If your goal times are based on realistic estimations of your current fitness you should be able to narrow it down quickly and doing so helps affect a positive medium term change.  A poor nights sleep and lousy or skipped meals?  Did you hammer your recovery run the day before?  Are you amidst a severe increase in mileage?  Determine what is likely the cause of your bad day and make a choice.

The choices:

Modify – Often when a workouts underlying goal is to add a general aerobic or muscular resistance (as is often the case in early to mid season training) they can easily be modified to accommodate a rough session and still constitute the same effect with more manageable pieces.  Ex:  An athlete struggling with a 4 mile tempo run 1.5 miles into it might see significantly slowing speeds for the splits on the second mile.  A good modification would be to break up the tempo after 2 miles and take a short rest and resume in 1 mile segments.  A similar training effect is achieved and a greater sense of achievement is obtained than struggling with a weak performance over a continuous 4 miles.

Reschedule - If you workout is truly a ‘key’ workout that is intended to be predictive of a near future race performance or is a simulation for an upcoming race, you may want to make the call to amend or reschedule your workout early in the session.  Doing so should be reserved for only the most important workouts where the derived confidence from this workout is at a premium.  Consider bagging the session to give you 24-48 hours to reschedule.

Cancel – If a session is shaping up to be particularly poor after giving it a reasonable chance to right itself, and this has occurred three or more times to you in the last 3 weeks, you need to cancel and reevaluate your training, goals and lifestyle.  It happens to the best athletes.  In 2008, Olympian Anthony Famiglietti found himself with a string of poor workouts and chronic fatigue.  He attributed this extreme downturn in performance to his unique diet of pizza and junkfood.  Address your situation thoroughly and immediately and develop a plan to correct your training errors.

Caveat-  Carefully consider changing your workout plans mid workout, especially if you don’t have the consultation of a coach or advisor.  It can be emotionally frustrating to miss the sense of accomplishment that comes with the completion of a workout and this can hound you in future training and racing.  If you do modify, reschedule or cancel, do so with confidence and stick firmly to your choice.

Although ‘Bad Days’ happen, they don’t have to define your training or reduce you to questioning your ability.  Take a systematic and analytical approach to mitigating these challenging workouts and you’ll be back to strong performances quickly.

Sean Coster

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Running by Feel:

No Watches, No Monitors and No Distractions

The training for a runner can become one constant assessment.  “How heavy are my legs up this hill?”, “Did I drink enough water today?”, “How fast am I going?”.  Monitoring the body and knowing where it’s limits lie is the talent a seasoned racer cultivates.  This quality can balance the intensities of training and the stresses of life to allow ones potential to unfold.  But the flip side of this, when the focus of the assessment becomes an obsession with pace or heart rate, can become a detriment to progress.

The concept of perceived excursion has been formalized for most of us in what is known as the Borg scale.  The 15 or 10 point scales act as a thermometer for intensity and ties a point value to it.  But long before someone pointed to a tower of numbers to ask us to quantify what running at top aerobic speed felt like, we observed and noted how long and how hard we could go.  For most of us this was part of our discovery of running.

Running ‘hard’ is relatively easy assuming a willing participant.  But like most things in life simply banging away at it gives you little more than you put into it.  With running simply ‘hitting the splits’ and ‘logging the miles’ has its place, but there needs to be an accompaniment of awareness to the attitude, form, and effort that goes into this work to make it sustainable.  Running by perceived effort can allow a runner to break apart the race she is training for in an interval session, rejuvenate a weary body in a recovery run and stoke the passion of the sport on long hard runs.

To create a language of perceived effort beyond numbers we can center effort around the concept of the ‘steady state’.  Steady state effort is one that is near the top speed where energy can be largely obtained from aerobic metabolism.  Specifically this is where one begins utilizing the substrate from carbohydrates for fuel in as great a quantity as fat.    But that doesn’t tell us what it feels like.  Comfortably hard, steady and rhythmic, up tempo are all terms used to describe this pace.  As a coach I like to describe it as an ‘even in and even out’ in your breathing.  That if you are focused on how your breath changes you will find that the volume on inhalation feels very similar to the volume on exhalation at the steady state effort.  This is caused by the increased use of oxygen and therefore the larger amount of carbon dioxide that is leaving the body an each expelled breath.

Play with the concept of running by effort or ‘feel’ in your running.  See if you can find that feel of steady state.  Don’t over do it.  Don’t run all your runs at this effort, but find it and know it.  It’s a technique that will serve you well.

Sean Coster

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