It's All About the Training

Hi, Friends & Fellow Runners:

In any compendium of old jokes, here's one that's often included,.....

A tourist temporarily lost on the streets of Manhattan asks a native New Yorker how to get to Carnegie Hall.   The instant reply he gets is ``practice, practice, practice."

The message here is that if we really want to excel at something – playing the piano, winning at Texas Hold ‘Em, learning a foreign language, becoming a distance runner – we need to put in lots of practice.

We’ve probably always known that.  But what we may not have known is that the practice has to be of a certain quality.  In the words of Keith Anders Ericsson, a Florida State University psychology professor, it has to be deliberate.

Ericcson has done ground-breaking research on the subject and has concluded that expert performance is the result of a prolonged effort to improve through careful training.  He insists that differences in performance among individuals – whether they be piano or poker players, language specialists or competitive runners – is linked inextricably to how many hours they devote to that training. 

Others in the field have followed Ericcson’s lead and accepted his findings.  The consensus among them is that innate ability, raw talent, or genes inherited from our parents are rarely if ever significant factors in explaining why some people excel and others don’t. 

For us as runners, the research is telling.  What it comes down to is that we can certainly become better – we can even become very good – if we’re prepared to spend the necessary time on a goal-oriented, results-driven approach to training.  The approach involves constant monitoring of progress over months and years, coupled with appropriate adjustments, and it’s the very antithesis of following a familiar exercise routine with little thought to the concept of continuous improvement.”

The whole process starts with our recording the results of the great majority of our training sessions – not only the distance, time, pace, and possibly heart rate, but also the reasons why we may have done well or poorly.  What was the weather like?  When and what did we eat before the run?  How much sleep did we get the previous night?  What kind of day did we have at the office?   What do we have to emphasize or avoid the next time we run?  Etc.?

Deliberate practice is far from easy.  Obviously, we must get much more absorbed in our training than most runners.  This means that we start each workout with a performance objective, focus during the workout on training parameters like running form, breathing pattern and levels of perceived exertion (correcting and adapting as necessary), and reflect after the workout on the progress we made or did not make toward achieving our overall goals.

So deliberate practice clearly requires a ton of commitment.  But for those among us looking for a breakthrough performance in our next season, it might just be the answer to a maiden`s prayer.

Coach Stephen