Topo Blog
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]
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]
1. Ditch the watch The first rule for the runner moving from the road or track to the trail is simple: Lose your watch. The best way to ruin a trail run is to try to quantify it the same way you would a road run. If you want to record your totals, at least… [view more]
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]
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]
“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]