Hey Reader!

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of going to Bright to watch some of my athletes at the Bright Fun Run and then to Ballarat for the marathon.

Though my coaching is all online, I love getting to the events my athletes are running, where feasible. As their coach, you become invested in their success and journey as much as your own, if not more. And being there for the highs and lows—they both happen—and everything in between is a privilege.

While there, it got me thinking about training design and how each coach has a framework, which we apply to individual athletes based on their experience, goals, life, and the event. It's the fun challenge of coaching, what you'll hear referred to as the science and art of coaching.

However, learning how to create your framework can be challenging if you aren't working with a coach or if you're new to the coaching journey. There isn't much available, at least not without a paywall.

So, today, using Jake's 2:48 PB at the Ballarat Marathon—a time that has improved by over 30 minutes in the last two years and 7 minutes for the Gold Coast marathon last year—I'm going to share how I think about each athlete's training and how you can apply this to whatever event you are doing, from track to trails, first time or searching for that extra 1%.

Lastly, I have a couple of coaching spots open. If you are interested in working with me, having someone invest in your training, and supporting you in your running goals towards a faster, stronger, healthier you, then book a free discovery call so we can chat about your running.

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How to plan your training

Before we delve into Jake's training, let's first discuss the checklist I use when considering any athlete's next block of training and their overall regimen.

Programming questions

Honestly, this bit doesn't need to be complex, and the more times you repeat it, the better you get and the more it will evolve. I'm sure this will change for me in ways over the next 12 months, and even more so over the next 10 years.

What to consider:

1. What are the specific event considerations? What distance, terrain, elevation, weather, competition, and location need to be considered?
2. What direction of training for this athlete? I will talk more about this later, but this means what improvements we want to make based on their past training and the event considerations.
3. When do we do what? Each block, whether 12 weeks or 4 years, requires consideration of the adaptation and growth we aim to foster and the appropriate timing. This is periodisation, which is why we don't follow the same routine throughout the entire year, every year.
4. How much recovery and what type? We all recover differently from different types of training (I have 15 questions for this in my onboarding questionnaires, often with the answer "unsure"). How beaten up we feel after different types of runs and intensities tells us what sort of runner we are – specifically the ratio of fast and slow twitch muscle fibres – and how we need to structure sessions to promote the growth we want without incurring too high a recovery cost (not burning out/getting injured). Then is it a rest day, recovery run, cycle, swim, hike, etc?
5. What environmental factors should I consider? Knowing yourself or your athlete is really important. What is going on in life that is filling your stress bucket needs to be considered when determining the space available for training.
6. How do the adaptations interact? This takes practice and knowledge. You can't do everything at once; some changes positively and negatively impact others. For example, a higher emphasis on developing strength in the gym will not blend well with a higher intensity period of run training.
7. What adaptations are required?
   1. For the event? Knowing the event demands, what areas are we trying to work on specifically?
   2. For the individual? Looking both physiologically and psychologically, what do we develop?

The critical thing to remember is that you can't improve everything in one 12-16-week block. Be deliberate and patient—your best running self is years in the making!

The exact questions you must ask yourself don't, and probably won't be these. Hopefully, this will give you a solid foundation from which to start.

Applying this: Jake's training plan

Now that you've seen how my brain works when considering an athlete's training, let's examine how I designed Jake's training for Ballarat.

1. Background

The first step is knowing where you/your athlete is coming from. The more years you have training, the easier this reflection becomes, as you have more data points. However, there are also fewer low-hanging fruits. From a coach's perspective, working with an athlete for multiple years creates a recipe for success, as you both learn about each other and understand the answers to the above more clearly.

Jake and I have worked together for two years. This is our third marathon together, and in that time, Jake has gone from 3:20 (he ran this just before we started together) to 2:48. Each marathon, and the other events we have done, from 5 km to Half Marathons and training for a Hyrox, have been building blocks and learning opportunities.

Before Ballarat, I went back through all his training. I identified what we needed to work on, what he responds well to and doesn't, any gaps we haven't exploited, and any other little nuggets of information that can guide the direction we take this next block.

It doesn't need to be complicated; often, I come away with 4 to 6 bullet points (a lot is also in my head). But this is key to a successful block.

Note: This is why keeping a training diary is essential. For coaching, I use Training Peaks, and a non-negotiable for working with me is that you leave comments after each run. Not only do I respond to them daily for the consistent feedback/communication loop I'm known for, but when looking back—either with the athlete or in my training reviews—these comments give me 10 times the information their run data does.

2. Direction

Once you have the background, it's time to decide what direction to take for this specific block – this is also applicable for a training review where you are looking at longer 6-month-plus time frames.

First, think about the specific demands for the event, physically and mentally. Then, from the physical side, move away from the event pace/effort in 2 directions:

1. Speed
2. Endurance

For the marathon, +/—marathon-paced work is the specific work. The direct support is slightly faster and slightly slower than, Support work is the same again, and then the general or foundational work is further away again.

For this marathon, that meant before the block started, we identified that, after Hyrox, he was fast and very efficient at and around Lactate Threshold, but needed work on the endurance side. So, we spent December and January keeping in touch with LT and faster ( 10km and 5km) but focused on building the long runs, weekly volume, and intensity in high-end zone 2 and low-end zone 3.

Coming into the marathon, we knew these paces would gradually be made more specific, making sure never to leave anything before: this looked like strides two times per week and faster sessions every 10 to 14 days.

In addition, we needed to consider what style of sessions to conduct and when to conduct them, which we will discuss next.

3. Draft the block

Considering the above, it comes to building an outline of what you will do when. Session style and construction is for another time, but below you will see we had a few key aims:

1. Easy long run distance to 35km (build endurance and conditioning)
2. Use pickups at the end of LR's (build fatigue resistance and simulate race effort towards the end of a marathon)
3. Have a high focus on Lactate Threshold with an alternation, or metabolic fluctuation, approach (meaning steady recoveries and surges within reps to put junk in the legs and improve what's called Lactate Dynamics)
4. Use blended sessions, where you hit more than one pace – eveything is a sliding scale, not a silo.
5. Use Reps in LR's
6. Don't overcomplicate things (if you just laughed, I get it...)

Disclaimer: Though I am including an example below of what this looked like for Jake's block, please do not copy this. By all means, use the framework (the whole point of this newsletter), but Jake is a powerful runner who needs his direction to cause specific adaptations.

A lot is going on here, and acronyms that won't make much sense. What you'll see is I have put the dates, phases of the block, and 3 columns for the quality sessions - in Jake's case, 2 workouts and a Long Run.

You'll also see a lot of scribbling and changes. As the header says, this is a draft. Jake's block went nearly perfectly, so there wasn't much change. However, I've done these for other athletes and essentially had to discard them and restart halfway due to an injury, illness, or a change in life circumstances.

However, this gives you a template to work from, refer back to, and ensures there is progression, consistency, and connection as you go through training.

4. Draft the sessions

This next step is crucial to make sure you connect the intensities, deliberate about what to do when, and spend enough time developing what you need and recovering how you should.

Take the direction and the draft block and create progressive sessions for each workout style you intend to hit. Again, I won't go into this now, and session design and progression deserve more than a quick mention.

A quick example, though, would be wanting to max at 30 minutes of standard LT work, and breaking that into blocks of increasing rep length:

• 6 x 3 min On | 1 min off
• 5 x 4 min on | 1 min off
• 8 x 3min on | 1 min off
• 4 x 6min on | 90s off
• 3 x 8min on | 2 min off
• 3 x 10min on | 2min off

5. Get to work and prepare to change everything

This all sounds good, but a lot changes, as I mentioned. That said, this creates a plan that is intentional and specific to your/tour athlete and, ultimately, creates the foundation for whatever you need to do.

Practice makes perfect, or at least progress, and so as you go from block to block, year to year, fine-tune how you feel yourself as a runner, be objective and not driven by emotion and what you want to happen.

Running is a sport of delayed gratification – one of the reasons I love it – and being deliberate, knowing when to push forward and when to pull back, will ultimately get you where you want to go.

Past Newsletter Editions

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Closing Thoughts

Programming can be as complex or simple as you like. Hopefully, this framework can help you guide your own training towards your goals, regardless of your experience.

As I mentioned above, if you feel having a coach in your corner to structure, support, and guide this process sounds good, then book a free discovery call and let's chat.

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