On Tuesday my mom came to babysit our child, allowing me to spend over three hours at the track, then go to two meetings – one with a fantastic young physio and one with a passionate runner who has found a way to make a living in running. When I arrived home I found a nondescript box on the poach. When I opened it and found roughly $500 (retail) of Nike product my mom was shocked…and I was psyched.
This shirt is the second best thing in the box (a pair LunarTrainers being the best as I’ve heard a sad, sad rumor they will be discontinued). That’s the preface to the post; here’s the post.
Run.
If you want to be good then run. A lot. Hard. Run to recover. Run when the air smells like leaves and feels like cross country. Run to Walgreens at 10 pm because you can and because you won’t stink much after it. Run 20 minutes more then you probably should on the Mesa Trail because you’ll be grinning for hours.
So when I received the following email last week I smiled after reading it. Here it is:
Didn’t want to post this comment on your website and come off as a d-bag. Hudson posted this on his facebook, just wondered your thoughts as you seem to be training the way he seems to despise?
”
I look at Brent Vaughn, Billy Nelson( this guy is not a steepler but a long distance runner) and Stephen Pfifer who have the talent to chase 13min. but know under their current regimes of training they will have a hard time developing their metabolic system to come close to this in 2-3 years. The athletes they are competeing against are their … Read Morealready by 19-20. Which is why i’m not a big fan of plyometrics/ stretching/ even weights unless it is a small supplement. It is very hard to do large volume metabolic changing training and plyometerics because of the injury risk.
Which is why i’m getting into representing athletes as i’m tired of them being steered the wrong way.”
- via Brad Hudson’s Facebook
I appreciate the person who sent the email and I respect Brad Hudson immensely as we all should given he helped Dathan run the AR for 5,000m.
Here’s the deal. I haven’t seen an exercise that most distance coaches would label plyometric on the track for over a month, which means that I’ve not assigned any plyometric exercises. I have seen someone run 12.5 100m pace for 120m, which in my view is plyometric because of the quick eccentric and concentric coordination needed to run that pace. I don’t advocate plyos for 97% of athletes and I said so in this series, which is why that email makes me grin – I have a damn video series about why I think plyos are inappropriate for most athlete because just like Brad Hudson I think the risk outweighs the benefit, yet I’m the guy who people think of as the foil to Brad’s training philosophy.
I think runners should run. And when Renee keeps saying after the workouts, “I’ve never run that long before but I can see why I need to” I think “well, no s*&^ you need to run more.” 15:20 is nice, but she’s capable of much more and 80-90 miles a week isn’t the answer. She’ll finish her season in two weeks at the USATF Women’s 10k champs and there is little doubt in my mind that that fact that she’ll have run four or five workouts on the track that add up to 10,000m means that she’ll then be ready for 12k and 15k worth of work in 2010.
I have the pleasure and challenge of working with two athletes who can run A standards at both 5,000m and 10,000m. Blog posts have been infrequent in the past two weeks as I’ve been taking out blank sheets of paper and writing progressions – for volume, for workouts/intensity, for specificity at the competitive distances from 800m through the marathon, for ancillary work and skipping cool downs and hurdle mobility. But at the end of the day we’re going to run more…and if I forget then I can look in the mirror and see the shirt that says Run.