You Are the Umpire

My father used to tell a joke about baseball umpires. Three umpires are sitting around talking about their job. The first umpire says, “There are balls and there are strikes, and I call them as they are.” The second umpires nods and says, “I hear you, but I don’t quite share your confidence. There are… [view more]

Back to School: 4 Lessons from the Cross Country Team

As a cross country coach for more than a decade, I continue to learn lessons that help my own running. High school runners may be less than half my age, but they face similar challenges, and the controlled setting lets me try out new tactics and observe trends over the course of a season and… [view more]

4 Facts About Recovery for the Runner

If you visit the Rift Valley of Kenya and spend some time among the world’s greatest distance runners, you’ll quickly notice that everywhere you look everyone is walking. They also run, of course, long miles on red dirt roads and mind-blowing speed sessions on the track. But walking is how they get around. They walk… [view more]

How to Find Your Individualized Running Plan

Find your best running program

“We are each an experiment of one,” George Sheehan famously wrote regarding the need to individualize our running. While oft-quoted, Sheehan’s maxim is, however, too rarely applied. A quick google search reveals a wealth of research proving the maxim’s truth. A 2009 Swedish study on aerobic capacity, for example, found “substantial interindividual variability in training-induced… [view more]

Take to the Trail for a Natural Stride

Trail Running

You probably already know that getting off the road is good for your running health. Usually this is attributed to the softer surface creating less impact. More important, however, is that the trail is uneven, requiring you to change your stride with every step. That variability will not only spread stress across different structures in… [view more]