About this time of year, I often get asked by runners to suggest or design a training plan to take them through the winter and get them ready for spring racing. While I will reluctantly create a schedule for someone who really wants it, laying out suggested miles for each day over several months, I… [view more]
Topo Blog
Tag: goal setting
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]
How to Find Your Individualized Running Plan
“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]
The Whole Athlete: The Fine Art of Goal Setting
What gets you out of bed in the morning? What drives you to run more each week, go longer on the weekends, dig deeper on speed days? For many runners, motivation comes in the form of a race goal, a date on the calendar when we want to run our best. Choosing an appropriate goal… [view more]