“If you aren’t making mistakes, then you aren’t accomplishing anything,” observed John Wooden, a great basketball coach. Totally agree. This is not a post about receiving constructive criticism or receiving a blueprint for making constant, problem-free advancement. It’s a look back at some of the most common coaching blunders I’ve seen over the past decade and a half, along with some easy ways to fix them.
Absence of variety
Routines are important for building habits and committing to things. But the thing I see most often in the training of both new and experienced runners is that they don’t do enough different things. Most of us train at too narrow a range of speeds, with our easy runs being too hard and our hard runs not being hard enough, or we keep doing our favourite sessions and runs over and over.
The fix: Make it more clear. Without getting into the details of training sessions, many runners would improve just by slowing down their easy running a bit and trying to push some regular harder sessions up to 90–95% of their maximum heart rate (think 3-10km race pace). Try not to do the same sessions every week, and make sure your training is a mix of strength training and running drills.
Failure to learn from your mistakes
Before I tell you the next nine, I want to say that making mistakes as a runner isn’t always a bad thing. Most of the time, we learn from our mistakes. Your best training plan probably won’t be a template you download. Instead, it will be something you tweak and change as you go.
The solution is to have a growth mindset. Keep a journal of your thoughts. Write down your workouts and anything else you notice about your life. If you hurt yourself or your race didn’t go as planned, write down what might have gone wrong and then make changes.
The dreadful ‘toos’
This one could not be left out of a list of running mistakes. Too much training, building it up too soon, running too hard or too often—”too soon” is a big, red, flashing light that says “injury.”
The fix: Pay attention to FITT. There are a lot of things you can change about your training: how often you train, how hard each session is, how long each session lasts, and what kind of exercises you do (type). Be careful when you change a lot of things at once.
Training for copycats
It’s so easy to look through Strava and blog posts to see what worked for other people and then do the same thing. The truth is that performance is affected by a lot of things. You can see a person’s training sessions on Strava, but you can’t see their genes, their lifestyle, how they train, or where they come from.
The fix: Be yourself. Try to understand that there’s no one “right” way to train. We always take ideas from other coaches and runners. Learn from what works for other people, but don’t forget to trust what works for you.
The idea that everything is in the body
Running terms are all about the body, including the heart, lungs, and muscles. A lot of runners know what words like “threshold,” “VO2 max,” “aerobic,” and “anaerobic” mean. But it doesn’t make sense to separate the mind from the body. Even if you train well, if you don’t pay attention to the mental side of training and racing, you might not reach your physical potential.
The fix: is to get a fit mind. Spend time training your mind with things like self-talk, affirmations, setting clear goals, and making a routine for before a competition. And don’t forget that having fun should always be at the centre of your training if you want it to be long-lasting and worthwhile.
