Money in the bank 

The more you put in …

When I’m asked to differentiate between training and racing, I often use the analogy of a bank account – training is like putting money in, racing is taking it out. This idea is far from new, in the early 1950s legendary marathon runner Jim Peters and his coach worked on the principle that “the more you put in the more you can take out”. Jim was bashing out 100 or more miles each week (the hard-easy principle didn’t come into it) and in so doing over a few short years he reduced the world marathon best from 2:25 to 2:17, wearing out numerous pairs of ten-bob (50p) plimsolls in the process. No supershoes back then.

It's not quite so clear cut as that however, because too many people get close to their racing effort a lot in training on the basis of “no pain no gain” or “go hard or go home”. They erroneously believe that the key to improvement is simply to do more and harder training than anyone else. In effect they are taking money out of their account rather than putting it in.

This doesn’t mean that the way to success is never to exceed a slow jog – effective training is what we’re after, so remember the old maxim “effective training is always hard, but hard training isn’t always effective”. Or in the words of the famous New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard “train don’t strain”.

Making a deposit

There are various ways that we can make sure we are making a deposit and not straying into that withdrawal zone in training and generally this means making use of the most powerful personal computer we will ever have – the one between our ears.

One oft-used approach in repetition work is for the coach to say “I want you to finish with one rep left in you”. I’d go along with this, although what this means for me is that if the athlete were to do another rep it would mean digging down into close to or at a racing effort to complete it in the allotted time, ie crossing that boundary and taking money out if you like. A case of “I could if I really had to, but I’d rather not.” Fear not, missing out on that additional painful rep should still mean a “comfortably hard” session, you will still know you’ve been for a run - a state of “controlled discomfort” in the words of a world class GB coach.

One respected coach describes keeping going beyond that deposit / withdrawal boundary as “junk reps” and I would completely agree – they don’t fulfil the purpose of the session as the earlier ones did and that means junk in my book. Another puts it in terms of a question, more for coaches that perhaps aren’t quite sure whether that boundary has been reached - “are you making them better by going on or are you just making them tired?”

Relative perceived exertion

One other approach that you’ll commonly see is based on “relative perceived exertion” (RPE) and this can be applied to continuous running as well as longish repetition work. You can find different systems on the internet. The Borg system is based on a scale of 0 – 20 (which tends to be used under close medical supervision) but for athletes on track, road or field 0 – 10 seems much more practical to me.

A rating of 0 means lying down, 4-5 is easy – steady running, 6-7 is harder running, sub-threshold for example, 8/9 is running hard and 10 is an all-out effort. Yes there will be occasions when you need to hit 9 or 10 but this should be under pretty controlled conditions, a small number of reps with ample recovery for example.

I would add some observations when it comes to RPE. Firstly, a value of 10 is an all-out training effort and must be used with care. For many athletes however, whatever their level of ability, when it comes to competition simply pinning on a race number means that they can pull out a performance above the best they can manage in training. Secondly, you don’t have to maintain a given rating for the entire session. If for example there is a hill in the way on an easy run, you might hit a higher rating just for a short time before dropping back down again and in my view there is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, if you have to hit a higher rating for the whole of the last few miles just to keep going then next time start much easier and/or reduce the distance.

The talk test

For continuous runs there is of course the empirical “talk test” which is a useful guide in deciding whether you are running easy, steady or sub-threshold. “Easy” means you can hold a full conversation, “steady” means shorter, intermittent sentences and “sub-threshold” means the odd words (which tend to get increasingly monosyllabic as the run goes on). On a hard run of course you can’t talk at all. You don’t have to go to the more complicated RPE approach if you don’t want to, especially if that means compromising your enjoyment of the run.

So there you are, just like keeping yourself solvent financially, put plenty into the bank during training and then it will be there to draw on when you need it.

As usual, all views are my own.