No Plan

How many of us spend the majority of our days planning to do something? As a teacher I plan a lot. I have to plan how to get my students to participate in lessons and how that will lead to them gaining some knowledge they didn't have before. We all plan though. We plan to do work, plan to eat, plan to sleep even. Some of us go so far as to plan what we will wear for the whole week. Is this healthy? Where does it lead us?

I have seen the talk shows (unfortunately) that have on some master of organization who takes some disorganized and dysfunctional person and teaches them to plan and itemize their life. This is followed by a video montage of the person undergoing changes and then culminates in their total transformation. That would have us all believe that if we follow suit, we too can be productive members of society, as if planning is the key to success. Maybe planning is a key to success. I am a big advocate of going into a situation with a plan of action, but planning can only take a person so far.

What worries me is that some of us become consumed by the act of planning and forget to act. I don't think that everyone is meant to put on the "master planner" hat. In fact, I think that if too many people who are involved in the same activity try to plan, those plans end up canceling each other out. Then what are you left with? Well, you either end up with no plan at all, which isn't so bad at times, or you end up following some destructive mutant plan that will lead to disaster.

Runners plan too much in my opinion. It really isn't an athletes job to plan. Athletes are not objective with regard to their own performance and can not see that they really aren't capable of jumping over the moon. The act of planning should be left to coaches who are capable of remaining objective and are well-studied enough to make careful decision for an athlete. The athlete's job is to act on the plan. Some coaches believe that their athletes should play an active role in the planning stage. I think that a good coach has to be receptive to an athlete's feedback, but athletes shouldn't really be allowed to plan a season or a workout for that matter.

At least half of coaching is listening and interpreting what you hear. If you are a varsity coach, working with seven runners, you half to be able to speak seven different languages. Every athlete on that team is going to tell you something different and in a different way. You have to be able to read body language and decipher vocal inflections. It is not easy. So, if it is a daunting task for an adult coach, why would anyone reasonably expect an adolescent athlete to have any success at it. That is why I now advocate the No Plan approach to running.

The No Plan approach is pretty simple. Coaches plan and athletes run. Coaches need not micromanage though, let your athletes fulfill their half of the equation. If you are going to get any meaningful feedback from a race performance, then you have to allow your athletes to race naturally. Far too often I have athletes come to me with a need for a race plan. I help them plot and dissect the course, but I do not at any point expect them to do exactly what I have laid out, in fact, I hope they do not. Racing is pure. Good racing is usually the result of a mix of training, competitiveness, and personality. I break that mix down as: 30% personality, 50% training, and 20%competitiveness. There is an argument that could be made for a person's competitiveness being a component of their personality, but I prefer to think of it as an underlying trait of all humans, so it is tied more to instinct than to personality.

With all of this in mind, I suppose the best advice I could give to any athlete or coach would simply be to listen and be willing to fail. The coach has to plan for personality, competitiveness, and a myriad of other items. No one is right all the time. Coaches have to go out on a limb with their planning at times in order to push a runner to achieve a new level or breakthrough performance. Runners have to be willing to try out those hair-brained ideas that their coaches come up with so that if nothing else, they know what doesn't work. So plan away coaches, but remember that you hold another person's future in your hands. Make decisions that instill trust in your athletes and show them that if they believe, there are no real limits.

My advice to athletes: Feel your run, don't think it.

Anxiety

I am all too familiar with the anxiety that comes from something unexpected either de-railing a season or at least interrupting it. Every season, I have an athlete that unfortunately has a season-threatening or ending injury. I have been the victim of that myself, so relating to them is not too difficult for me. The challenge is helping the athlete to calm down and effectively deal with the problem.

I think the natural reaction is to panic and feel like you are the first person to ever get injured and there is no way anyone could possibly understand how you feel. This is especially true with teenagers in my opinion. As the coach, or just as the adult, the important message to send is that every injury heals with time. I always preach patience and persistence to an injured athlete. The two most common reasons someone gets a major injury are that they neglect a minor injury and are not patient enough to let it heal or they do not have the correct balance between their training intensity and volume. The later of those two reasons is almost invariably tied to missing practice for whatever reason, or rushing back into full training before their body can adapt.

So, what can I do to prevent an injury or recover from one as quickly as possible? The first answer is listen. Listen to your body, it is a remarkable machine that knows when something is not going right. If you ignore the warning signs of an injury, you risk catching it at a point when it has progressed too far to be prevented. Listen to your coaches, they know more than you about training and have a different perspective on your running. For example, if a coach tells you not to wear Rainbow sandals all day because they will damage your arch, they do so for good reason, not because they care about your personal fashion in the least. Speak up. If it hurts, tell someone. No one can feel what you feel, so it you don't say anything, chances are nobody will know you are in pain until you start limping...when you are limping, you have passed the point of prevention and you have achieved injury.

There are many things a runner can do to prevent injury, from stretching after runs and taking ice baths, to strengthening the lower leg and feet. The things that often get overlooked are diet, sleep, and recovery. If you eat nothing but sugar and fat (aka McDonald's) you will not be able to build the necessary tissue that your body requires to grow and strengthen. If you don't sleep enough, you enter into a cycle of diminishing returns. That means that you might feel OK for a day or two, but after a few days you will start to feel more and more fatigued. Eventually you will crash. Recovery is when your body actually accepts and adapts to your training load. If you run hard every day there is no time for the body to adapt. That would be like trying to learn Calculus by just picking up the book and reading it from cover to cover in a couple of hours. Sure you read it all, but how can you possibly remember any of it.

Injured or not, the point is to be a good communicator. Listen when someone gives you valuable advice and don't be afraid to let your coach know that it hurts. Listen to your body and respond appropriately. Injuries are not like the boogie man...you can hide under the covers all you want, but when the sun comes up the injury is still there. Train hard, train smart, and always be willing to learn.

Happy running

Hard Work

I was watching a video on Flotrack earlier about Olympic marathoner Brian Sell. You can watch the video here. His coach was talking about how hard he works and how the type of work he does translates to his ability to perform well in adverse conditions. This got me thinking about a conversation I had with the team a week ago after a hill workout. That day we talked about what it means to feel comfortable when you are uncomfortable. To clarify: how to perform well in situations that do not match with your strengths. I have long admired Sell for his accomplishments, but probably more for how he goes about preparing for them.

To give you some background, Sell runs somewhere between 150 to 180 miles a week on average and probably at an intensity level higher than most collegians who run 90 miles a week. The interviewer ask his coach, Kevin Hanson, what makes Sell different from a guy like Dathan Ritzenhiem (another of the USA Olympic marathoners). Ritz is one of those "talented" runners. As Hanson put it, Ritz's talent is that he can do a lot with very little. Meaning, he does not have to train as hard or as long to achieve a fabulous result. Sell, on the other hand is one of those Chris Mosier types, he just simply out-works those "talented" runners. He runs 180mpw because he has to in order to keep up with guys like Ritz who run 100mpw at max. The interviewer in the video said something to the effect that because Sell has to work so hard, he is perceived as having less talent, which is a very common perception. However he also brought up another good point. He asked Coach Hanson if he thought that maybe Sell really has some "talent" after all. He did qualify for the Olympics for goodness sake. Hanson chuckled and then said "the ability to work hard is a talent."

Wow, I mean WOW. To a guy like me who values hard work more than all the talent in the world that short little quote made me want to shout out loud and pop the champagne (uh...spring water). I know that maybe my reaction is possibly a little over the top, but come on, how often do you hear a world-class coach say something like that. Some might say that it is nothing new, or that it is not that big of a deal, but hang on, stop and think about it on a high school level for a minute. What Hanson really did was validate the efforts of all those guys who get made fun of a practice because they put in extra miles or run hard 6 out of 7 days of the week. He stood up and basically said to all the pre-Madonna "talents" who can run 4:40 in PE class and then "train" at 25mpw, "if that is all the work you are willing to put in, take a seat, because guys with talent like Sell are going to run you into the ground."
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So, what does that mean for the Mustangs of Trabuco Hills...it means write what you want Dyestat, because when push come to shove, Dana trains at 50mpw and we train at 80.

Hard work is our talent!

XC Dates for the Summer

Some important dates to make note of for the summer.

Summer conditioning starts July 14 and ends August 9. We meet on the track from 7:00 - 9:45am Monday through Saturday.

Running Camp in Idyllwild is August 11-16.

Please take not of these dates and plan vacations around them. You plan on running varsity, I expect you to be at all practices.

On another side, we are slated to travel to Texas on October 4 for the Nike South Invitational. We will take the top 14 athletes as they are determined by the first 2-3 races of the season. Attendance and attitude also factor into the decision making process. The cost of the trip has not yet been determined, but it should be over $300. More information will come later in the summer.

Thoughts for racers and pacers

I think that it was in college that I started to think about how runners often get labeled as a "pacer" or a "racer." I interpreted the meaning of both as -- Pacer: a runner who runs with a watch or can otherwise continually run consistent pace over a middle or long distance. Racer: a runner who thrives on beating his opponents over improving his times. The obvious implication here is that pacers are the introverted marathoner type that lack the competitive fire to win races against real competition and racers are only as good as the people around them. That all sound nice and good at first, but after 15 years of running competitively, I now know that neither label really works.

In college, I found that I had the natural ability to pace better than most, and I could do so with or without a watch. No I was not born with a watch in my head, and no, I did not count off seconds either. I didn't think much of it actually. It was simply the result of training solo for much of high school and trying to repeat good performances over and over again while focusing on how I physically felt while running different times. Because of this, I was labeled as a "pacer" straight away, and when my coaches planned my races and helped me prepare, everything was slanted towards that perspective. But they were wrong, I love to compete. I thrive on competition and I hate to lose. So why then did my coaches ignore those personality traits and convince me to hit specific splits for each mile regardless of where my competitors were? I suppose they thought what I have often thought as a coach: if a runner has no sense of his or her own ability, it doesn't really matter how competitive they are because they will never be in a position to use that competitive drive. I guess that is true.

My coaches had a plan for me and by the time I was a sophomore, I understood what they were doing. In track, they finally started to preach tactics to me and started to fuel me to attack my competition. By the middle of the season I was winning races convincingly and running fast times consistently as well. I was a complete runner. But what if I had not been so naturally competitive? What if I really was the introspective desert island type of runner who didn't give much thought to beating the people around me? Would my coach's plan have worked still? I think not.

Competitive drive is often thought of as one of those things you are either born with or without. However, I am not so sure if that is true. Competition is natural after all...right? Being someone who loves to compete, no matter the medium for the competition, I find it hard to relate to those who claim to have no burning desire to win. I just don't buy it, not one bit. There is no way that a human can survive in life if he or she never aspires to either be the best at something, or to at least be better than those around them. If such a person exists, they must surely live on a deserted island with no contact with any other life form. Why then, do I have athletes that appear to fall into this categorization? They plot along, more concerned with holding a conversation than holding onto the leaders. If I train them to simply focus on pace, am I not enabling their lack of desire to push themselves to a new threshold? Is it even possible to teach competitiveness?

I operate on the "to each his own" wavelength most of the time. That just means that I know every athlete is going to succeed by doing things the way that work best for them. However, there are some definite prerequisite traits that I think all runners must adapt at some point if they are to ever really succeed. Good runners are both "racers" and "pacers." Ryan Hall did not win the Olympic trials by simply running faster than the competition. He kept himself in check long enough to not let his pace get away from him, while maintaining contact with the leaders - that is pacing. Hall's well-timed surge late in the race that broke his competitors secured the win in the end - that is racing. If he had failed to appropriately apply either tactic, the race would have gone to another runner in the talented field. Every runner must at some point decide why they run. If it is simply to smell the world and feel their heart beat, then a long training plateau is in their future. If it is more in their interest to improve from race to race and season to season and beat their opponents, then I am confident that they will find success in their career. The problem is that success does not come easy, nor does it necessarily happen when we expect it to. That can be frustrating for even the most gifted of runners and it can lead to a lack of inner fire.

My advice to all is: First accept that you are going to lose sometimes, maybe even a lot. The fear of failure is the number one excuse we use to not take chances in sports and life. Allow yourself to admit that you want to win, everyone wants to win. When the day comes to race, go for it...all out. You don't need to be conservative with racing all of the time. If you get into a race that is "over your head," just race, don't worry about the pace. If you can do just one of these things, you will see improvement...and you will thank yourself later.

Flotrackr for all

I recently made changes to our team's Flotrackr site that allows parents and fans to see what is going on. I like the idea of parents being able to communicate with the team directly or to at least be communicated with directly regarding workout schedules and important team announcements. This in no way will replace the email system for parent communication, but it should provide more visibility with regard to what the athletes are doing. Parents and fans will have access to the team forum and the coach's corner, where most announcements are made. Parents can also see pictures and upload videos that everyone can watch, which just adds to the whole experience.

I see this as a nice companion to the main team website. I encourage parents and alumni to check it out. You can join and view the team by following this link: http://www.flocasts.org/flotrack/flotrackr/teams.php?tid=682

I hope that this adds to the overall satisfaction of the team experience and I hope you all enjoy the access.