Have a Detailed Competitive and Training Strategy: Mental Attributes of Elite Runners #5/15
#5 — Have a detailed competitive and training strategy.
There are 4 different types of training for runners in my book.
Training for Health
Training for Fitness
Training for Results
Training for Performance
Health drives performance. Meaning they’re all interconnected but also separate. To compete at the world-class level in running you need to be healthy, fit, get results, and perform when it counts. To run 26.2 miles without stopping you must be healthy and fit enough to meet the demands of the task, nothing more.
Here’s the difference between each category and examples of each:
Training for Health
This is training geared towards improving the basic health of the organism — losing 10 lbs of fat, increasing red blood cell count, decreasing “bad” cholesterol levels, etc. This is the foundational level.
Training for Fitness
This is training which readies you to meet the demands of completing a task successfully — walk up 10 flight of stairs without stopping, run 20 miles without breaks, bench press at least once your body weight.
Training for Results
A step up from fitness, training for results is about completing a task at a specific standard — walk up ten flights of stairs in 3 minutes or less, run 20 miles in 2 hours or less, break 5 minutes for 1 mile.
Training for Performance
This is the highest level, which piggybacks on the prior three and is focused on performing aginst others in a certain class of known ability — walk up ten flights of stairs faster than anyone else in your building, run 20 miles faster than anyone in your age group at the next race, being prepared to compete for the victory in the 1 mile at a championship meet.
A lot of my writing and focus is on the final level — performance. Proficiency at the foundational levels is assumed. No level is better than the other. Each is important in their own right. Remember, health drives performance. Health is wealth. Without it, what we can do is limited.
Training for elite runners is therefore performance focused. The preparation of the body and mind is a long, detailed, rigorous process. Planning and measuring go far beyond simplistic measures of miles and paces. Intensity levels, rate of perceived exertion, recovery quality, etc. all influence training for performance.
It’s the hardest and easiest level to train. It’s easy because the performance athlete is very talented and seasoned to competition. They are very fast adaptors and responders. But it’s hard because there is a much wider array of variables than at the foundational levels. Both athletes and coaches need to continually upgrade and evolve because their competitors are.
A deep understanding of nature, people, training theory, sport science, modern and historical best practices is needed to advance an athlete at this level. Again, not to say the advancement at the foundational levels is not hard or tricky in their own right — they are. And many coaches at those levels do amazing work.
But at the performance level, at the end of the day, all that matters is how the athlete performs. Whether they’re healthy, fit, or capable of running a certain time for a distance means little to them if they do not finish in the top handful of competitors. It’s a brutal reality. And this is the degree of difficulty is precisely what makes the game of coaching (at every level) so fun.