Perfectly imperfect – RunningWell

Hi Everyone!

Huge congrats to all who raced in the Gravenhurst Tri this past weekend! Of the people I coach I had a 16 yr old and 60 yr old athlete who competed and crushed it! I love sport for bringing everyone together like that. And I’m still feeling the joy of celebrating sport being back!!!

I’ve been thinking a lot about training lately, and the principles and techniques to apply to get the most out of ourselves. And then I’ve been reminded about the coaching course I took a few months ago. It was led by experts who study and analyze the best training methodologies. The idea was to learn how to take elite athlete training principles and apply them to community running groups. What was interesting to me was that, although there were a few new ideas and theories, in general, it’s not rocket science. It’s “apply a new stimulus and allow for adaptation”. Fine. But what I found so funny was that when they’d go into specific principles like whether we should prescribe weights before or after a running workout, or how many drills to do before a workout, or how much mileage and how much supplementary cross-training is best – we all realized that the theories didn’t matter when it came to applying them to our groups. We just had people doing the best they could. After the instructor covered the “perfect” way to do something I’d look around and say “ya – that’s not gonna work for my crew” and we all agreed. It made me laugh. If you can fit strength into your program at any point, you’re doing great. If you can get a few drills in before your workout, that’s fantastic. If you can make it to the pool or onto the bike for some supplementary training you are killing it. We all just have to accept that we’re doing everything perfectly imperfectly. Basically every thing we covered was “in an ideal world this, but for most folks, whatever works will work”.

I’m embracing the perfectly imperfect philosophy as I train for multi-sport. It feels like everything I do is somewhat compromised by something else. I’m not obsessing over that. I’m just doing what I can. I think we can all do well to accept this. Nobody is training “perfectly”. It’s impossible. We’re all making compromises all the time and fitting in what we can. And anything is better than nothing. I asked my swimming instructor how many days a week I should be swimming to train for my event. He said 5. I laughed. I said there’s no way that’s happening! I’ll aim for 2-3. Most weeks it’s been 2.

The biggest learning from that course was that theory is just theory. Real life is messy and imperfect. And if we don’t embrace that messy imperfection we’ll drive ourselves crazy and lose the enjoyment. So onwards with our messy imperfect training – we’re getting somewhere!

Workout tomorrow – we’re back to Lakeshore! 6:05 drills, 6:15 GO.

800’s. Let’s aim for 5-7 w 1:30 rest.

If you’re training for a fall marathon this is a good starting point from which to take your average time of 800’s. We will do another benchmark one later in the season. Just keep them nice and consistent.

If you’re training for 5K’s or 10K’s this summer, do every third one HARD (outside your comfort zone) – max 6 total. You can take 2 mins after the HARD ones.

If doing these by time, 5-7 x 3 min On, 1:30 Off.

That is all – see you in the am!

Seanna