I’ve been running for more than 45 years, and I’ve made just about every training mistake possible.

Some of them merely slowed my progress. Others left me exhausted, injured or mentally burned out. A couple cost me entire seasons.

The positive side is that those mistakes taught me lessons that still shape how I train and coach today. Most came from doing too much: copying athletes whose lives and abilities were completely different from mine, training harder than I could recover from or chasing mileage that didn’t fit the rest of my life.

Here are five of the biggest mistakes I’ve made and what they taught me.

Subscribe now

Mistake #1: Copying the pros

When I joined my first track club, Sebastian Coe was the best middle-distance runner in the world and the world record holder in the mile. My coach had read about Coe’s training and gave us interval workouts based on what he was reportedly doing.

At the time, this seemed perfectly logical. If those workouts helped make Sebastian Coe the fastest miler in history, surely they would make us faster too.

The problem was that we weren’t Sebastian Coe.

We didn’t have his talent, training background, support system or ability to recover. We were young runners still developing, trying to complete workouts designed for one of the greatest athletes of all time.

Elite training can be interesting, and there are often useful principles we can learn from it. But copying the sessions without understanding the context is rarely a good idea. What matters isn’t whether a workout worked for a world-class runner. What matters is whether it is appropriate for you right now.

The lesson: Train for where you are now, not where your favourite professional runner is.

Mistake #2: Training too hard

My later high-school coach had us doing extremely difficult interval workouts three times per week.

I did improve somewhat. Hard training often produces short-term improvement, especially when you’re young and enthusiastic. But there was a cost.

By the time the important races arrived at the end of the season, I had nothing left. I was physically exhausted and mentally drained. The training that was supposed to prepare me to race well had taken so much out of me that I couldn’t perform when it mattered.

This is one of the traps of hard training: it can feel productive because you’re tired. You finish a workout exhausted and assume that exhaustion is proof that the session worked.

But the purpose of training isn’t to demonstrate how much discomfort you can tolerate. It’s to create an appropriate stimulus, recover from it and adapt. If the training leaves you unable to perform, it hasn’t done its job.

The lesson: Train, don’t strain. Save the all-out running for your races.

Want some help with your own training?

I help runners over 40 train in a sustainable way to reach their goals while avoiding injury and burnout. If you’d like a free, no obligation review of your current training, send me a quick message and we’ll chat.

Mistake #3: Doing interval training every day

If three hard workouts per week sounds excessive, one of my university coaches took things even further.

We did hard interval workouts from Monday through Friday, five consecutive days of intensity.

This is very similar to what runners used to do in the 1940s and 50s. And some of those runners survived and ran well, but most didn’t and even the successful ones tended to have short careers.

As it turned out, I ran personal bests in the 1500m and 3000m in my first meet of the season. For a brief moment, it appeared that the program was working.

Then, shortly after, I got injured and missed the rest of the season.

That early personal best probably reflected fitness I had carried into the season combined with the short-term sharpening effect of the intervals. What the program couldn’t provide was sustainable progress. There was too much stress and nowhere near enough recovery.

Hard interval training can be extremely effective, but it is also expensive. It places significant demands on the muscles, tendons, nervous system and mind. The harder the workout, the more carefully it needs to be placed within the overall week.

For most runners, one properly executed quality session provides plenty of stimulus. More isn’t automatically better, especially when the additional intensity compromises recovery and consistency.

The lesson: Interval training is a powerful tool, but it needs to be used sparingly.

Mistake #4: Trying to run too much mileage

In my late 30s, I became convinced that I needed to run as many miles per week as possible. For me that was 65-75 miles per week with a few excursions into the 80s.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with running 70 miles a week. For the right runner, at the right stage of development, with enough time to recover, it may be completely appropriate. Many can do more comfortably.

But that wasn’t my situation.

I was working 12-hour rotating shifts and had a growing family with kids in travel sports programs. I was trying to force high-volume training into a life that didn’t have enough room for it. Sleep, recovery and family responsibilities didn’t disappear just because I had decided on an impressive weekly mileage target.

The result was predictable. I ran well at times, but was burned out and injured more often than not, which hurt my progress and kept me from reaching my potential.

Mileage can be valuable, but your body doesn’t experience running in isolation. It experiences the combined stress of training, work, sleep, family obligations and everything else happening in your life.

A training volume that looks reasonable on paper may be completely unreasonable once the rest of your life is taken into account.

The lesson: Your training must fit your life. Don’t sacrifice consistency to reach an arbitrary mileage number.

Mistake #5: Not having a plan

After years of trying to do too much, I made the opposite mistake in my late 40s.

For much of that decade, I simply went for a casual run several days per week. I raced only a couple of times each year and didn’t have clearly defined goals or much structure to my training.

This approach kept me reasonably active, but it didn’t give me a reason to progress. My performances stagnated, and eventually my enthusiasm began to fade as well. I didn’t see any improvement until I started racing more frequently again in my early 50s.

Not every run needs to be part of an elaborate master plan. There’s real value in running simply because you enjoy it. But if you want to improve, it helps to know what you’re preparing for and why each part of your training is there.

A specific goal gives your training direction. It helps you decide when to build mileage, when to introduce faster running, when to race and when to recover. It also gives you something to look forward to.

The lesson: Set meaningful goals and train with a plan in mind.

What all these mistakes taught me

Looking back, most of my biggest mistakes came from one of two extremes.

At times, I trained as though harder and more were always better. I copied professional runners, completed too many interval sessions and chased mileage that didn’t fit my life.

At other times, I went too far in the opposite direction. I ran without enough structure, rarely raced and lost the sense of purpose that had always made running exciting.

The best approach lies somewhere between those extremes.

Training needs to be challenging enough to produce improvement but sustainable enough that you can continue doing it. It should have structure without becoming unnecessarily complicated. It should include hard running, but also enough easy running and recovery to absorb it.

That’s why my current approach is generally built around one quality session, one long run and one complete rest day each week. Everything else supports those three anchors. It isn’t a magic formula, but it creates a sensible balance between stress, recovery and consistency.

I still make mistakes. Every runner does. The goal isn’t to create a perfect training plan and follow it flawlessly. The goal is to pay attention, learn from what happens and make better decisions going forward.

After more than 45 years in the sport, that may be the most important lesson I’ve learned: the best training isn’t the most impressive program you can survive for a few weeks. It’s the training you can absorb, enjoy and build upon over time.

Share

If you’re a runner over 40, you’ve probably heard some version of this advice:

You’re getting older. You need to slow down.

There is some truth buried in that statement. Our bodies change as we age, and pretending otherwise isn’t particularly useful.

But the research on Masters athletes suggests something considerably more interesting.

Older runners don’t necessarily need different types of training. They still benefit from easy running, long runs, tempo and threshold work, faster running and strength training.

What may need to change is the dose, frequency and recovery between those training stimuli.

In other words:

Keep the ingredients. Change the recipe.

Subscribe now

What Actually Changes as We Get Older?

One of the landmark reviews of Masters endurance athletes was published by Hirofumi Tanaka and Douglas Seals Endurance exercise performance in Masters athletes: age-associated changes and underlying physiological mechanisms.

They found that endurance performance tends to remain relatively stable until approximately age 35, declines gradually through the 40s and 50s, and then begins declining more rapidly after approximately 60.

The primary physiological reason appears to be a decline in VO₂max.

Maximum heart rate decreases with age. Maximal stroke volume and the ability of the muscles to extract oxygen can also decline. Together, these factors gradually reduce the amount of oxygen we can deliver to working muscles during hard exercise.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Two other important determinants of endurance performance, lactate threshold and running economy, appear to hold up considerably better.

Longitudinal studies cited by Tanaka and Seals found that running economy didn’t significantly deteriorate with age in endurance-trained Masters athletes.

So an experienced older runner can still remain remarkably efficient.

The engine may gradually become smaller, but the runner can remain very good at using the engine they have.

Training Still Matters

It’s tempting to attribute every performance decline after 40 or 50 to ageing.

The research suggests that’s a mistake.

Part of what we call an age-related decline in fitness may actually be a training-related decline in fitness.

A 2022 review examining Masters endurance athletes found a remarkably strong relationship between changes in training volume and changes in VO₂max.

Across longitudinal studies, changes in training volume explained approximately 54% of the variation in VO₂max decline among male athletes and 39% among female athletes.

That’s significant.

As we get older, life tends to get in the way. Careers become more demanding. Family responsibilities increase. Injuries accumulate. Training becomes less consistent.

Someone who ran 80 kilometres per week at 35 might be running 35 kilometres per week at 55.

Their performance decline isn’t necessarily entirely because they’re twenty years older, the reduction in training volume is a significant factor as well.

Researchers studying lifelong endurance athletes consistently find that athletes who maintain substantial training loads preserve extraordinary levels of aerobic fitness compared with their sedentary peers.

Consistent aerobic training becomes even more valuable as we age.

But Recovery May Take Longer

This is where I think Masters training should begin to look different.

Older runners appear capable of producing substantial training stress. The issue may be how quickly they’re ready to produce it again.

Research comparing Masters athletes with younger athletes suggests that older athletes can experience similar levels of fatigue but may require longer to recover.

Research specifically examining distance runners has reached a similar conclusion: muscle damage following long-distance running may not necessarily be greater in Masters athletes, but restoration of muscle function may take longer.

It’s worth adding an important qualification. The evidence isn’t completely settled. A recent systematic review found that advancing age itself was not associated with greater exercise-induced muscle damage, and researchers continue to debate how much of the apparent recovery difference is caused by ageing versus training status and other factors.

It’s not that you can’t train as hard, it’s just that you need more recovery between hard sessions.

Don’t Eliminate Intensity, Reduce the Frequency

A traditional competitive running schedule might include:

Tuesday — intervals
Thursday — tempo run
Sunday — hard or progressive long run

For a younger runner with excellent recovery capacity, that can work beautifully.

But that’s three significant training stresses in six days. For many Masters runners, that’s too much.

Instead, a week might look something like:

Monday: Easy
Tuesday: Easy + strides
Wednesday: Quality workout
Thursday: Easy
Friday: Easy + strides or short hills
Saturday: Long run
Sunday: Rest

Now we have two primary stressors: the Wednesday workout and Saturday long run.

But we haven’t eliminated faster running. The strides and short hills maintain contact with speed and recruit the neuromuscular system without creating anything close to the fatigue of a full interval workout.

And the Wednesday session can change depending on the athlete and the training cycle.

One week might feature cruise intervals. Another might be a continuous tempo run. Occasionally, it could be a VO₂max workout or a longer hill session.

This allows you to accomplish many different training stimuli over time without trying to squeeze threshold work, intervals and a hard long run into every seven-day period.

Want Some Help With Your Training?

If you’re a runner over 40 who still has goals, I offer personalized one-on-one coaching built around your fitness, experience, schedule and ability to recover.

Smart training. Purposeful workouts. No generic plans.

👉 [Learn more about Full Stride Coaching]

Don’t Give Up Speed Just Because You’re Older

This is another place where I think some Masters runners go wrong.

They gradually eliminate everything fast. Their training eventually becomes nothing but easy running, or more likely moderate zone 3ish running.

That may reduce some training stress, but it also removes precisely the stimulus that ageing muscles increasingly need.

Ageing is associated with reductions in muscle mass, strength and particularly power. Losses in type-II muscle fibres and neuromuscular function contribute to declining athletic performance.

That gives us a strong argument for keeping some faster running in the program.

But “faster running” doesn’t have to mean 10 x 400 metres on the track with short recovery.

Four to six relaxed strides after an easy run can provide a neuromuscular stimulus with very little metabolic stress. So can several 8–10 second hill repetitions with complete recovery.

This is one reason I like strides so much for Masters runners.

The goal is maintaining the ability to run fast without adding significant fatigue.

Strength Training Becomes More Important Too

For similar reasons, resistance training probably deserves a larger role as runners age.

Endurance running provides an enormous cardiovascular stimulus, but it doesn’t completely prevent age-related losses in muscle mass, strength and power.

Reviews of Masters athletes therefore recommend continuing resistance training rather than abandoning it with age.

It means maintaining enough strength to continue running efficiently, tolerate training and resist some of the muscular changes associated with ageing.

Two relatively short strength sessions each week can be plenty for many runners.

What About Mileage?

This is perhaps the most interesting question.

Should Masters runners run less?

Not necessarily.

Research on Masters endurance athletes repeatedly identifies maintaining the overall training stimulus as one of the most important factors associated with preserving aerobic capacity with age.

The challenge is figuring out how to maintain enough training volume without exceeding your ability to recover.

That’s where easy running becomes incredibly valuable.

If you want to run 50 kilometres per week, you don’t need to turn 20 of those kilometres into hard running.

You might get a better result from running 40–45 kilometres easily and concentrating most of the week’s harder running into one carefully controlled session.

In fact, the 2022 review of Masters endurance training mentioned above concluded that the general endurance-training principle of performing at least 75% of training at low intensity, with relatively small amounts of threshold and high-intensity training, appears appropriate for older athletes as well.

That fits nicely with a simple principle:

Run enough. Run consistently. But don’t make every run a test.

Share

The Masters Training Equation

Put all of this together and I think the research points toward a fairly simple approach.

1. Maintain aerobic volume

Don’t assume mileage suddenly stops working when you turn 40 or 50. Consistent endurance training remains one of the most powerful tools we have for slowing age-related declines in aerobic capacity.

2. Keep some intensity

Tempo running, cruise intervals and occasional VO₂max work still have value.

3. Reduce unnecessary intensity

More hard workouts aren’t automatically better. One well-executed quality session may accomplish more than two or three sessions performed while chronically tired.

4. Keep touching speed

Strides and short hills provide regular exposure to faster running without becoming exhausting workouts.

5. Strength train

Maintaining muscle strength and power becomes increasingly important with age.

6. Protect recovery

Easy days should actually be easy. Rest days shouldn’t be viewed as missed training.

And when your body is telling you that it hasn’t recovered from the previous workout, listen.

So, Should Runners Over 40 Train Differently?

Yes, but probably not in the way people sometimes think.

Turning 40 doesn’t mean you suddenly need to stop running hard, slash your mileage and accept that your best running is behind you.

The fundamental principles of endurance training don’t suddenly change.

You still need aerobic volume, threshold training, VO2max sessions and pure speed training, and increasingly, strength training.

What changes is how carefully those ingredients need to be distributed.

A younger runner might be able to survive several demanding sessions every week. A Masters runner may get better results by concentrating the hard work, surrounding it with genuinely easy running, and allowing enough time for adaptation to occur.

Training creates the stimulus. Recovery allows the adaptation.

And ultimately, adaptation is what makes us faster.

For the Masters runner, the goal isn’t to train like you’re 25. Nor is it to resign yourself to training cautiously because you’re 45, 55 or 65.

The goal is to continue giving your body enough stimulus to adapt while recognizing that your capacity to absorb that stimulus may have changed.

Keep the ingredients. Change the recipe.

That might be one of the most important principles of training well for a lifetime.

Subscribe now

Runners tend to worry about whether they’re doing enough.

Am I running enough mileage? Should I add another workout? Should my long run be longer? Should I be pushing harder on my easy days?

But there’s another question we probably don’t ask often enough:

Am I doing more training than my body can handle right now?

Training works because we apply stress to the body, recover from that stress, and adapt.

Remove the training stimulus and there’s little reason for the body to adapt, but keep adding stress without providing enough recovery and eventually the equation stops working in your favour.

That’s why sustainable training isn’t necessarily about training less. It’s about finding the amount of training you can absorb consistently.

Here are five signs you may have crossed that line.

Subscribe now

Want some help building your training program?

I offer personalized one-on-one running coaching. Your training is built around your experience, goals, schedule and life, with an emphasis on sustainable training, purposeful workouts and long-term consistency.

If you’d like someone in your corner to take the guesswork out of your training, send me a DM and we’ll talk about how I can help.

1. You’re Tired All the Time

Some fatigue is a normal part of training.

If you’re building mileage or you’ve just completed a demanding workout, you should expect to feel somewhat tired.

The problem is when tired becomes your normal state.

You wake up tired. Your legs feel heavy walking up the stairs. Your easy run feels like work. By afternoon, you’re already thinking about going to bed.

One tired day doesn’t mean anything.

But if you’re feeling unusually fatigued for several days, particularly without an obvious explanation, pay attention.

Your body may be telling you that the training stress you’re accumulating is greater than your current ability to recover from it.

And remember that your body doesn’t distinguish particularly well between training stress and everything else going on in your life.

A 70-kilometre week during a quiet period at work isn’t necessarily the same stress as a 70-kilometre week when you’re working overtime, sleeping six hours a night and dealing with family responsibilities.

Training has to fit your life, not exist separately from it.

2. Your Performance Has Plateaued Or Is Declining.

This one can be particularly frustrating.

You’re training harder than ever, yet you’re not getting faster.

Your tempo pace stalls. Workouts that were comfortable a few weeks ago suddenly feel difficult. Your race performances stop improving.

The natural response for most runners is:

I need to train harder.

But usually, the opposite is true.

Fitness doesn’t improve during the workout itself. The workout just provides the stimulus. Improvement occurs afterward as your body recovers and adapts.

If you’re constantly applying another stimulus before you’ve adequately recovered from the previous one, you can end up doing more work while getting less from it.

Before adding another workout or increasing your mileage, ask yourself whether the missing ingredient might actually be recovery.

Sometimes the way forward isn’t another workout, it’s absorbing the training you’ve already done.

3. Your Resting Heart Rate Is Consistently Elevated

Your resting heart rate can provide another useful clue.

I’m less interested in any single reading than I am in the trend.

Maybe your normal morning resting heart rate is around 50 beats per minute. Suddenly you’re consistently seeing 60, 65 or 70.

That doesn’t automatically mean you’re overtraining.

A lot of things can affect your resting heart rate. Poor sleep, dehydration, illness, alcohol, heat and life stress can all manifest in a higher resting heart rate. .

But that’s exactly why it can be useful.

An elevated resting heart rate several days in a row can be one piece of information suggesting that your body is under more stress than usual.

Don’t panic because your watch gives you one strange number on Tuesday morning.

Look for patterns, and combine the number with how you actually feel.

For example, if your resting heart rate has been elevated for several days, your legs feel terrible and your workouts are deteriorating, that’s considerably more meaningful than any one metric by itself.

4. You’re Losing Motivation and Focus

This one is easy to dismiss because we tend to think of training problems as purely physical.

But the mental side of things is an important cluse as well.

When training load becomes excessive, sometimes the first thing to disappear is enthusiasm. You stop looking forward to runs, and start to see them a chore or a second job.

You find yourself unusually irritable or unable to concentrate. You may even begin wondering whether you still enjoy running.

Everyone has days when they don’t feel like training. But if you start to dread training on the regular, it’s a sign you’re overdoing it.

Running should require commitment, but it shouldn’t feel like a daily battle against yourself.

Sometimes losing your enthusiasm for training is your mind’s way of telling you what your legs haven’t managed to say yet.

5. Your Sleep Is Getting Worse

This sounds counterintuitive. Surely more training should make you sleep better?

Sometimes it does.

But excessive training stress can sometimes have the opposite effect.

You may feel exhausted during the day but strangely wired at night. You have trouble falling asleep, wake frequently or notice that your sleep simply doesn’t feel restorative.

You train hard, but don’t recover properly. Your sleep deteriorates, which then further reduces your ability to recover.

And then you train hard again. It becomes a viscious cycle.

Sleep is one of the most powerful recovery tools available to runners, and unlike a new pair of carbon-plated shoes, it’s free.

If your training is consistently interfering with your ability to sleep well, that’s a problem you need to address.

One Sign Doesn’t Mean You’re Overtraining

One bad run doesn’t mean you’re overtrained.

Neither does one poor night’s sleep, a slightly elevated heart rate or a day when you don’t feel like running. Some days will always feel better than others.

What I’m looking for is a cluster of changes that persists over time.

Maybe your resting heart rate has been elevated for four days, your sleep has been poor. You’re starting to feel a scratchy throat.

Wednesday’s normally controlled tempo run felt much harder than expected.

And now Saturday morning arrives and you’re dreading your long run.

That’s when I’d start asking questions.

What Should You Do?

The answer isn’t necessarily to stop training completely. Many times a relatively small adjustment is enough.

Take an extra rest day.

Replace a workout with an easy run. Cut your mileage for a week.

One of the biggest mistakes runners make is worrying that backing off for a few days will destroy their fitness. You don’t lose fitness overnight. You could take a week or two off and essentially pick up where yo left off.

But stubbornly pushing through accumulating fatigue can turn a few easy recovery days into several weeks of poor training or even an injury.

The goal of training isn’t to see how much punishment you can tolerate, it’s to create adaptation.

That requires enough stress to stimulate improvement, but enough recovery to allow that improvement to happen.

Pay attention to persistent fatigue, declining performance, changes in resting heart rate, loss of motivation and disrupted sleep.

Your body is constantly giving you feedback about how well you’re handling your training.

Learn to listen to it.

Share

A good marathon training plan isn’t just a collection of workouts.

It’s a rhythm.

One of the biggest mistakes runners make is looking at individual workouts in isolation. They worry about which interval session to run, how fast their tempo should be, or whether their long run should be 28 km or 30 km.

Those things matter, but the way the entire week fits together matters even more.

The goal is to arrange your training so that you get enough stimulus to improve while still having enough recovery to absorb that training.

For most runners, that means something surprisingly simple:

One quality workout. One long run. A few small doses of faster running. Lots of easy running. And one complete rest day.

Subscribe now

My Preferred Marathon Training Week

Here’s the basic structure I like:

Monday: Easy run

Tuesday: Easy run + 4–6 strides

Wednesday: Quality workout

Thursday: Easy run

Friday: Easy run + 6–8 strides OR short hill reps

Saturday: Long run

Sunday: Rest

The exact mileage will vary considerably depending on the runner. What matters here is the structure.

Let’s look at why it’s organized this way.

Monday: Easy Running

Monday is deliberately easy.

You’re starting the training week with relaxed aerobic running. There is no need to force the pace or try to make the run more productive.

Remember that easy running isn’t filler. It’s where much of your aerobic development takes place.

Run comfortably and finish feeling like you could have done more.

Tuesday: Easy + Strides

Tuesday is another easy aerobic day, but we’ll finish with 4–6 strides.

Strides are short, controlled accelerations that allow you to run faster without creating the fatigue of a hard workout.

Think smooth and relaxed rather than all-out.

They’re a simple way to maintain running economy, coordination and speed while you’re accumulating a lot of relatively slow marathon training.

They’re also useful preparation for Wednesday’s workout. You’re reminding your legs what faster running feels like without tiring yourself out.

Wednesday: Quality Day

Wednesday is normally the primary quality session of the week.

For marathon runners, this will often be something like:

• A tempo run

• Cruise intervals

• Marathon-pace running

• Occasionally, faster intervals such as VO2 max sessions

The exact workout will depend on where you are in the training cycle and what we’re trying to accomplish.

But there’s an important principle here:

Every workout must have a purpose.

We aren’t running hard on Wednesday simply because the schedule says it’s “workout day.”

There should be a specific physiological or performance reason for the session, not just ‘run the session as hard as you can’.

The goal is to create a specific training stimulus to produce adaptation without creating so much fatigue that it compromises the rest of your week.

Thursday: Easy Means Easy

Thursday is recovery through easy aerobic running.

This is one of the days where runners sometimes get themselves into trouble.

Wednesday went well. You’re feeling fit. So Thursday’s easy run gradually becomes a moderate run.

Don’t do it.

The purpose of Thursday is to recover from Wednesday while continuing to build aerobic volume. This run needs to be easy, likely the easiest day of your entire week.

You should be setting yourself up for the training ahead rather than proving your fitness on an easy day.

Friday: Easy + Speed Maintenance

Friday is another easy run, but we’ll often finish with one of two options:

6–8 strides, or

Short hill repetitions of approximately 10 seconds with full recovery.

*These are not meant to become another hard workout!!! *

The hill reps in particular should be short, controlled and powerful, with plenty of recovery between repetitions. We’re developing recruitment, coordination, strength and running economy without producing significant fatigue.

You should finish Friday feeling good.

Remember: the long run is tomorrow.

Saturday: The Long Run

Saturday is our second major training stimulus of the week.

Early in the program, the long run may simply be comfortable aerobic running.

As you become fitter and move deeper into marathon preparation, some long runs may become more specific and include sections at a faster pace.

But not every long run needs to be hard.

There’s enormous value in simply spending time on your feet and gradually developing the endurance required for the marathon.

Wednesday and Saturday therefore become the two anchors of the training week:

Wednesday develops quality.

Saturday develops endurance.

Most of the remaining training supports those two sessions.

Sunday: Actually Rest

A lot of runners prefer doing their long run on Sunday.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

If Sunday works better for your schedule, move the long run to Sunday and organize your week accordingly.

Personally, however, I like Saturday long runs followed by a Sunday rest day.

There’s a practical reason for this that has nothing to do with physiology.

Sunday can actually be a rest day.

For someone working Monday through Friday, taking a weekday “rest day” doesn’t necessarily mean resting.

You work all day. You commute. You pick up groceries. You run errands. You make dinner. You deal with everything else happening in your life.

You may not have run, but it wasn’t exactly relaxing.

Sunday is different.

After Saturday’s long run, you can sleep in a little, have a relaxed breakfast, spend time with your family, read, watch a movie, or simply enjoy having nowhere you need to run.

The key lesson here is that even though it’s a major goal that require significant focus, marathon training needs to fit into your life rather than consume it.

Want some help building your own marathon training week?

I offer personalized one-on-one running coaching through Team RunRun. Your training is built around your experience, goals, schedule and life, with an emphasis on sustainable training, purposeful workouts and long-term consistency.

If you’d like someone in your corner to take the guesswork out of your training, check out my coaching page here.

Also, paid subscribers to Full Stride Running are eligible for a free coaching call to discuss your current training in detail and provide recommendations you can implement on your own.

Subscribe now

Notice What’s Missing

Look back at the schedule.

There’s only one traditional quality workout during the week.

You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) try to cram three hard workouts into seven days to become a better marathon runner.

The long run itself is a significant training stimulus, particularly as it becomes longer or more marathon-specific later in the program.

The strides and short hills provide small doses of faster running without creating much additional fatigue.

Everything else builds aerobic fitness and supports recovery.

That gives us a week containing:

1 quality workout + 1 long run + 2 small doses of speed + 3 easy runs + 1 rest day.

Simple.

But over months of consistent training, extremely effective.

The Week Should Have a Rhythm

One of the themes you’ll see throughout Full Stride Running is that good training doesn’t need to be complicated.

You don’t improve because you managed to squeeze the maximum possible amount of stress into seven days.

You improve because you apply an appropriate training stimulus, recover from it, adapt, and then repeat the process.

Wednesday gives us quality.

Saturday gives us endurance.

The easy days allow us to accumulate aerobic volume.

The strides and hills keep some speed and athleticism in the program.

And Sunday gives us genuine recovery.

Train. Recover. Adapt. Repeat.

Share

Many runners spend months training for only one or two races each year.

They treat races like final exams, a months long suffer fest of a training program that builds toward a single day.

I think that’s a mistake.

Some of the best runners I’ve known raced regularly. They didn’t expect a personal best every time. They raced because racing itself made them better runners.

Here are some of the reasons I’d argue that runners should race frequently.

Subscribe now

Racing Is a Skill

Running fitness and racing well aren’t exactly the same thing.

Racing is a specific skill that, like any other skill, requires practice to master. It’s difficult to replicate race effort in training, and in most cases I don’t think you should.

Training is for building fitness, racing is for expressing that fitness.

The more you race, the more you learn:

• How hard you can really push.

• What different paces actually feel like, especially as fatigue sets in.

• When to stay patient.

• When to start competing.

No workout perfectly recreates the pressure and excitement of race day.

Like any skill, racing improves through repetition.

You Learn to Pace Yourself

One of the biggest mistakes runners make is going out too fast.

Regular racing teaches you:

• what sustainable effort feels like

• how to resist the adrenaline of the first kilometre

• how to respond when someone you’re competing with throws in a surge (or how to throw one in yourself).

• how to finish strongly instead of simply hanging on

Every race becomes another lesson in pacing.

Racing Takes You Somewhere Workouts Can’t

Even your hardest interval session comes with built-in recovery.

A race doesn’t.

There comes a point where your body is asking you to slow down, but your mind decides whether you will. That willingness to stay uncomfortable is difficult to develop in training alone.

Racing teaches you where your real limits are and often they’re farther away than you imagined.

Success Isn’t Always a Personal Best

When you race frequently, you stop judging every performance as either success or failure based on your time alone. Not every race will be a personal best, and that’s ok.

Instead, success can mean:

• executing your pacing plan

• racing smarter than last time

• beating someone you’ve never beaten

• handling difficult weather

• discovering a weakness to improve

Every race provides valuable feedback that you can take forward with you.

Racing Builds Community

One of the overlooked benefits of racing is the people you meet.

If you spend enough time at local races, you’ll start to see familiar faces. You’ll make friends. You’ll encourage beginners and be inspired by athletes twenty years older who are still competing.

The running community becomes much richer when you’re part of it instead of just training alone.

Share

Racing Should Be Fun

Somewhere along the way, many runners forget why they started.

Races have:

• nervous excitement

• road trips

• coffee (or another beverage of choice) afterwards

• conversations at the starting line

• stories you’ll remember years later

Not every race has to be about chasing a qualifying standard.

Sometimes it’s enough to simply enjoy testing yourself. You work hard, you get a result, and you have a great time doing it.

My Philosophy

One reason I believe in regular racing is that races aren’t interruptions to training.

They are training.

A local 5K, parkrun, cross-country race, trail race or mile can often replace a hard workout while teaching lessons that no workout ever could.

For many runners, racing every three to six weeks keeps motivation high, sharpens fitness and reminds us why we love this sport.

Run enough races that the finish line feels familiar.

Some will go brilliantly, some won’t. But you’ll almost always come away with memories you’ll treasure.

Because in the end, racing isn’t just how we measure fitness.

It’s where we learn how to become better athletes.

Leave a comment

One of the most common mistakes I see runners make is treating every interval workout like a race.

Subscribe now

The thinking usually goes something like this:

“If 5 x 1000 metres at 5K pace is good, then 5 x 1000 metres faster than 5K pace must be even better.”

That’s not how training works.

In fact, running intervals too fast often produces exactly the opposite result of what you’re trying to achieve. You finish the workout feeling exhausted and accomplished, but you may have missed the intended training effect entirely.

The purpose of interval training isn’t to see how much suffering you can tolerate. It’s to create specific physiological adaptations that make you a better runner.

The Goal Is Optimum Pace, not Maximum Effort

Many runners approach interval workouts as a test of fitness. They reason that running a workout at a given pace equates to an equivalent race performance. As a result, they race their training sessions and end up over training or overreaching and leave themselves vulnerable to injury, burnout or poor performance.

Most traditional interval workouts are designed to improve aerobic power, often referred to as VO2 max. To accomplish that, you need to spend time running at an intensity that stresses the aerobic system without pushing so hard that the workout becomes a test of survival.

I was a perfect example of what not to do when I was in my high school and university days. I ran every interval session as hard as I possibly could. I would sometimes run so hard I would get sick or get brutal headaches afterward.

It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t get me the results I’d hoped for.

I would run great races early in the season, but by the time the championship races rolled around later on in the summer, I’d be too exhausted mentally and physically to give my best. I’d get to the point where the race started to hurt and instead of seeing it as a challenge to see how well I could perform, the only thing going through my mind would be “Oh god, not this again ...” and I’d mentally check out, often running much slower than my capability. I left my best races on the training track.

You don’t want to be like that.

Here are a couple of reasons why running your interval workouts as fast as you can is a bad idea:

1. You’re no longer targeting the intended energy system.

Instead of spending time working near VO2 max, you begin relying more heavily on anaerobic metabolism. The workout becomes more about tolerating acidosis and accumulating fatigue than developing aerobic power.

2. Excessive speed creates excessive fatigue.

You might still complete the workout, but the cost is often much higher than necessary. You arrive at future workouts carrying fatigue that doesn’t need to be there. That fatigue takes away from your ability to properly execute the next days’ run and maybe more after that.

A workout should feel challenging but doable, not leave you depleted for the rest of the week.

3. Running too fast increases injury risk.

The faster you run, the greater the mechanical stress on muscles, tendons, and connective tissues, and unnecessary speed carries unnecessary risk.

If your goal pace is 4:30 per kilometre and you’re repeatedly running 4:00 pace, you’re exposing your body to significantly more stress without necessarily gaining additional fitness. This excessive stress makes you more vulnerable to injury or overtraining.

Share

The Goal is Time at the Target Pace

One of the most useful concepts I’ve learned over the years is that interval training is really about accumulating quality time at the target intensity.

The goal isn’t to run the fastest repetition, it’s to maximize the amount of productive work you can perform.

Let’s say two runners complete the same workout.

The first runner blasts through the first few repetitions, fades badly, and spends the final few intervals hanging on for dear life.

The second runner runs every repetition at the intended pace, remains controlled throughout, and finishes feeling like one more repetition would have been possible.

Who had the better workout?

The second runner accumulated more effective training time, experienced less fatigue, and will get the better adaptation while recovering faster for future sessions.

Leave One Rep in the Tank

One of my favourite training principles is simple: Finish the workout feeling like you could have done one more repetition.

This idea keeps you from trashing yourself, leaves you feeling confident and in control of the session, allows you to recover more quickly and reduces your injury risk.

Final Thought

When designed and executed properly, interval workouts improve aerobic power, develop running economy, and help you become a stronger runner. They should challenge you, but they shouldn’t destroy you.

Train hard enough, not as hard as possible.

Leave a comment

When runners talk about getting older, the conversation almost always focuses on what we’ve lost. We’re told that recovery takes longer than it used to, that we can’t handle the same training load, that our speed is fading, and that our best performances are permanently in the rearview mirror.

To some extent, that’s true. A 55-year-old runner isn’t physiologically identical to a 25-year-old runner, and most of us aren’t going to be setting lifetime personal bests deep into our 50s and 60s. There are realities that come with aging, and pretending otherwise doesn’t accomplish much.

Subscribe now

What I’ve noticed, however, is that we spend an enormous amount of time talking about the things age takes away and almost no time discussing the things it gives us. That’s unfortunate, because while aging certainly closes some doors, it opens others that younger runners simply haven’t had enough time to develop.

As someone who has been running for most of my life, I’ve come to appreciate that some of the advantages masters runners possess can’t be measured by a stopwatch, a VO2 max test, or a race result. They come from years of experience, accumulated fitness, hard-earned wisdom, and a perspective that only time can provide.

One of the biggest advantages older runners possess is the accumulation of years, and in some cases decades, of aerobic development. A runner who has been training consistently since their twenties has built an aerobic foundation that can’t be replicated in a single season, regardless of how talented or motivated a younger athlete may be.

This is one of the reasons experienced runners often return to fitness much faster than beginners. Even after a layoff, the body seems to remember. The younger athlete may have more raw potential, but the older athlete often has a much deeper reservoir to draw from. Every easy run, long run, and training cycle completed over the years contributes to that foundation.

Another advantage that tends to be overlooked is pacing. Younger runners often believe every race should start aggressively and every workout should feel heroic. Most of us thought the same way when we were their age.

Experience eventually teaches a different lesson.

After enough races, you develop a much better understanding of effort. You learn what easy actually feels like. You learn the difference between discomfort and distress. You learn that the first half of a race doesn’t matter much if the second half turns into a survival march.

Share

Many masters runners may not be the fastest athletes on the starting line, but they are often among the smartest. They know when to push, when to hold back, and how to distribute their effort over the course of a race. That knowledge has been earned through years of mistakes, and mistakes are excellent teachers.

I’ve also noticed that older runners tend to train more realistically than younger runners. When we’re younger, it’s easy to believe that more is always better. More mileage. More workouts. More intensity. More suffering.

Eventually, most of us learn that improvement doesn’t come from training as hard as possible. It comes from training hard enough to stimulate adaptation while remaining healthy enough to train again tomorrow.

That may not sound particularly exciting, but it turns out to be incredibly effective.

Masters runners often understand that consistency is the real secret. A training plan that can be followed for six months is almost always better than a perfect plan that can only be sustained for three weeks. We become less interested in proving how tough we are and more interested in staying healthy enough to keep moving forward.

Another gift that age provides is perspective.

Younger runners often feel pressure to chase ambitious goals, compare themselves to others, or measure their success entirely by race results. Social media has only amplified that tendency. Every day we’re exposed to someone running farther, faster, or accomplishing something extraordinary.

At some point, however, many runners begin to realize that comparison is a game nobody wins.

Older runners tend to have a more realistic understanding of their circumstances. They recognize the demands of work, family, recovery, and everyday life. They understand that training exists within the context of a full life, not the other way around. As a result, they often set goals that are both challenging and achievable.

Ironically, realistic goals are frequently the ones that produce the best results.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of all is experience itself. Every training cycle, every breakthrough, every injury, every disappointing race, and every unexpected success becomes part of a personal library of knowledge that younger athletes simply haven’t had time to build.

Over the years, you start to recognize patterns. You know when fatigue is normal and when it’s becoming a problem. You know which workouts work best for you and which ones consistently leave you feeling flat. You know when to push through discomfort and when to take an extra day off.

Those lessons aren’t found in books or podcasts. They are learned one mile at a time.

I’ve often thought that younger runners have an advantage in physiology, but older runners have an advantage in judgment. Given enough time, judgment becomes one of the most valuable assets a runner can possess.

Perhaps that’s why so many masters runners continue to enjoy the sport long after their fastest years have passed. Running gradually becomes less about chasing personal bests and more about the satisfaction that comes from the process itself. We run because it keeps us healthy. We run because it helps clear our minds. We run because we enjoy being outdoors. We run because the routine has become part of who we are.

The stopwatch still matters, of course. Most runners are competitive by nature. But it no longer has complete control over our enjoyment of the sport.

That’s a valuable lesson, and one that many younger runners spend years trying to learn.

Yes, age changes us. Recovery may take longer. Speed may decline. Training may require a little more patience and a little more restraint than it once did.

But age also gives us a deeper aerobic foundation, better pacing skills, smarter training habits, more realistic expectations, and a wealth of experience that can’t be rushed.

The truth is that every stage of running has its own advantages. Youth brings enthusiasm, energy, and potential. Age brings wisdom, patience, and perspective.

Both have value.

So the next time you’re tempted to focus on what you’ve lost as a runner, take a moment to consider what you’ve gained. The list may be longer than you think.

Age takes away. But it also gives.

Leave a comment

One of the biggest mistakes runners make is assuming that more training automatically leads to better results.

Sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t.

More training is the stimulus, and more stimulus helps if you can recover from it and rebuild stronger. On the other hand, if the stimulus is so strong that it overwhelms your body’s ability to adapt, or if you have repeated stimulus before you’ve adapted to previous training, it will break you down and cause injury, illness, or impare your ability to respond in the future.

I recommend a different approach.

Rather than chasing the maximum amount of training possible, we focus on finding your training sweet spot.

Your sweet spot is the amount of training you can consistently absorb, recover from, and enjoy while continuing to improve. It’s where your overall training load feels challenging but doable.

It is where you can make progress while avoiding injury and burnout.

The Problem With “More”

Many runners spend years searching for the perfect mileage number.

If 40 kilometres per week is good, maybe 60 would be better. If 80 is good, maybe 100 would be even better.

Sometimes those increases work, but more often they lead to fatigue, injury, burnout, or inconsistency.

The reality is that every runner has a point where additional training produces diminishing returns. The challenge is finding where that point exists for you.

The 3 Questions

When evaluating your training, ask yourself three questions:

1. Am I Recovering Properly?

Recovery is the foundation of adaptation.

If you are constantly tired, sore, or struggling to complete workouts, your training load may be too high.

2. Is This Repeatable?

A great week means very little if it leaves you unable to train effectively the following week.

The goal is not a single impressive training block, it’s sustainable progress over time.

3. Am I Enjoying It?

This question is often ignored. It shouldn’t be.

Remember one of the core beliefs of The Full Stride Method:

Train in a way that allows you to enjoy the process.

If training constantly feels like a burden, it’s impossible to maintain over the long term.

And hey, if you’re not enjoying it, why do it?

The Sweet Spot Changes

Another important reality is that your sweet spot is not fixed. It changes throughout life. What works for you at 30 years old will not work when you’re 60.

Factors that influence your sweet spot for training include:

• Age

• Fitness level

• Work demands

• Family commitments

• Sleep

• Stress

• Health

There may be periods when you can handle more training. There may be periods when less is appropriate. Both are normal. It’s about constantly listening to your body, learning and finding a way to adapt.

Successful runners learn to adjust rather than force a rigid plan.

More Isn’t Always Better

One lesson I learned over many years of running is that the highest mileage I could survive was not necessarily the mileage that produced my best results.

There is a difference between:

• Maximum training

• Optimal training

As exercise scientist Stephen Seiler rightly points out, “Training is an optimization challenge, not a maximization challenge.”

The more training you do, the more risk you take on in terms of injury, illness and overtraining. Ideally, you want to do the least training possible to achieve a desired training effect. You want the best bang for your buck.

The goal is not to discover how much training you can tolerate. It’s to discover how much training helps you thrive.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Signs You’ve Found Your Sweet Spot

You are probably close to your sweet spot when:

• You look forward to most runs

• Recovery is manageable

• Injuries are rare

• Training feels challenging but sustainable

• Performance is gradually improving

• Running fits comfortably within your life

Notice that none of these measures require perfect workouts or perfect race results.

Instead, they reflect a healthy and sustainable training process.

Thinking Long Term

Many runners ask:

“How much can I run?”

A better question is:

“How much can I run consistently for months and years?”

An even better question is:

“How much can I run consistently while still enjoying the process?”

Those questions lead to a very different approach to training.

And in my 46 years of experience as a runner, they lead to better results.

Key Takeaway

The goal is not maximum training.

The goal is optimal training.

Your training sweet spot is the amount of running you can consistently absorb, recover from, and enjoy while continuing to improve.

Find that balance. Refine it over time.

Because the runners who stay healthy, motivated, and consistent are often the runners who improve the most over the long term.

Saturday morning I had a heart attack. (Spoiler alert, I survived).

Woke up at 6am and knew immediately something was wrong. I had been having some tightness in my chest during my daily runs for the past week or so but figured it was just the heat or maybe exercise induced asthma, too much pollen in the air or something.

I’ve run most days for almost 47 years and would’ve never have thought I would be a candidate for heart trouble. In fact I’ve gone as far as 20km a couple of times in the last 3 weeks with no issues at all.

But it seems you can’t out run your genetic and lifestyle risk factors.

Subscribe now

Shelley (my spouse) drove me to the hospital where they got me in for testing and eventually shipped me off to a nearby hospital for an angiogram. They found that one of the main coronary arteries was 100% blocked.

The doctors were able to clear the blockage completely and after a couple of days in hospital, I’m back home feeling good and relaxing, taking my meds, getting some light exercise and doing all the things I’m supposed to do.

So What’s Next

This has been a good reminder of all the principles I advocate with Full Stride Running. Listen to your body, gradual progression, health before fitness and so on. It’s easy to get away from this patient approach to running when you’re chasing a new PB or age group result, but impatience always backfires.

I’m approaching my recovery as the longest base building period of my life. Starting with a couple of 5 minutes walks the day after the event and have progressed to a 20 minute, comfortably paced walk 5 days later. I’ll continue building easy volume (of walking this time) for quite a while until I feel comfortable and get clearance to do some walk-jogs, then gradually build to continuous easy running as capacity allows and my cardiologist approves.

Intensity will come later, once I have a substantial base of easy activity to build on.

Slow and steady will be the key, not only on daily walks and jogs, but in the pace of the overall build up as well.

I don’t know about racing, that it TBD based on how I recover and progress. I’m ok with running for fun or at no mare than 80% effort if it keeps me healthy. I just want to be able to do those relaxing easy runs by the lake that made me fall in love with the sport nearly half a century ago.

I’m still trying to process everything but here is what I would recommend to anyone in a similar situation:

• Exercise helps but is not a cure-all. Doctors said my running history left my arteries in good shape and made the angioplasty easier, and in retrospect, but obviously it didn’t prevent a 100% blockage. I thought running made me bullet-proof. It didn’t.

• Be especially careful if you have a family history. I have 2 uncles and a brother who have had heart attacks, and the influence of family and genetic factors is very strong. If you have a family history, you must be extremely careful.

• If you have symptoms, call 911. Don’t drive or allow anyone to drive you to the hospital. If I’d done that it would’ve saved an hour or more waiting at the local hospital for a diagnosis.

• Keep up with regular checkups. This is one area where I’ve been a dummy. I hadn’t seen a doctor in years and ignored the occasional drug store blood pressure checks that indicated I had high blood pressure. I suspect I have had undiagnosed high blood pressure for years. All of my siblings do. I thought running would protect me and I didn’t want to deal with the potential side-effects of the medications. As it it turns out, the side effects of not taking the meds when you need them ie. the heart attack, are much worse.

• Manage your stress. It’s easy to feel immortal when you’re young, but none of us are. A little stress with proper recovery make you stronger, too much, beyond your ability to recover, over long periods of time, can be deadly.

• The main symptoms I was feeling were chest tightness, left arm discomfort and difficulty taking a full breath. When I got to the hospital, I started sweating heavily and feeling clammy and nauseous.

  If you notice any of these, don’t ignore them!!

  The cardiologist said that I lost 5-10% of pumping capacity in my left ventricle due to the attack (and that may improve somewhat over time), but had I waited another 30 minutes for treatment, it would have been 50% reduced capacity which would have been life-changing.

Thanks to Shelley in particular and to everyone who checked in on me, I appreciate it more than you know.

And thanks to the doctors and nurses who pulled me through a very difficult time.

Those people save lives every day and don’t get enough credit.

Run strong, stay safe.

Dan.

Share

If you’ve spent more time worrying about whether your easy run was “easy enough” than actually enjoying the run, you’re not alone.

Many runners are convinced they’re doing easy runs wrong. You see a lot of content online about how to do easy runs, Zone 2, MAF, are you in the right heart rate zone etc.

Some of it can be helpful. Most of it is unnecessarily complicated.

The reality? Many runners I’ve known over the years, (including myself at times) are overthinking it.

Here’s why:

1. Easy Is a Feeling, Not a Pace

Easy pace is highly individual.

Even among runners of similar ability, there can be significant variation in how fast they do their easy runs. Many times I’ve run with training partners who ran very similar times in races, but their easy pace would feel too fast or too slow for me.

Some of us prefer a slower more relaxed pace on easy days, others can run a little quicker and still recover properly. There’s no one size fits all pace for a runner of a given ability.

Easy pace also changes quite a bit based on fitness, fatigue, weather, terrain, stress, sleep, and age. If you did a big workout or a long run yesterday, today’s easy effort run will be slower than if you’re rested.

That’s ok, in fact, it’s how it’s supposed to be. Easy means easy for the exact conditions you’re dealing with on each given day.

Key takeaway: Learn to run by feel first, pace second.

2. Easy Run Adaptations Happen Across a Wide Range of Paces

Most of the benefits of easy running occur across a fairly broad intensity range.

The aerobic system doesn’t suddenly switch off if you’re 15 seconds per kilometre faster. As Steve Magness has often said, the differences between zones are more like a dimmer switch than an on-off switch. That is, the benefits and adaptations between, say high zone 2 and low zone 3 are almost identical.

Your metabolism is not an all or nothing, aerobic or anaerobic process. All energy systems contribute at all speeds, it’s just a matter of degree. There’s no magic pace where adaptation suddenly appears.

Key takeaway: Consistency matters far more than precision.

3. Most Runners Are Told They’re Doing It Wrong

Social media often promotes rigid rules:

• Stay below a certain heart rate.

• Never let breathing change.

• Slow down at all costs.

These rules create anxiety instead of fitness.

Many successful runners throughout history trained largely by feel. Bill Rodgers, for example, 4 time winner of the Boston and New York City marathons would train anywhere from 6-7 minute mile pace on his easy days, depending on how he felt on the day.

Learning how to read your body and dial into the correct effort is an underrated skill for runners. This kind of awareness can only be developed by trial and error, but it comes in very handy on race day.

Key takeaway: Your body gives better feedback than your watch.

4. Use Simple Cues Instead

Rather than trying to be super precise, introduce a few practical cues:

The Talk Test

• Can you speak in complete sentences? You’re probably in the right range.

Breathing

• Relaxed and controlled. Not gasping.

Effort

• Finish feeling like you could keep going. Easy runs should be at what cyclists call, “All day pace.” You should feel like you can run for a long time at your easy pace without significant effort.

These cues work regardless of your fitness level.

Conclusion

Easy running shouldn’t be complicated.

The goal isn’t to hit a perfect heart rate or pace. The goal is to accumulate aerobic training while staying fresh enough to run again tomorrow. If you can complete your weekly workout and long run while hitting your weekly mileage goal without getting injured and still look forward to your run most days, you’re doing it right.

Trust your body. It knows more than your watch.

Subscribe now

I joined my first track club at the tender age of 11.

I’d watched the 1976 Olympic 1500m a couple of years prior and decided I wanted to be like that. I was lucky enough to win my first public school race at the age of 10 on 2 weeks’ training and figured I was on my way.

Like most young runners, I thought success came from working harder than everyone else. I didn’t think I really had any talent and so decided I must train more or smarter than everyone else in order to win. Run more, run faster, never miss a workout.

Some of those ideas helped.

Some of them cost me years of progress.

After nearly five decades of running from childhood races to personal bests, burnout, injuries, masters competition, road races and marathons there are a few things I wish someone had told me when I started.

Here are five lessons I learned the hard way.

1. Base Building Matters More Than Almost Everything Else

When you’re young, workouts are exciting.

Intervals, hill sprints, races. I assumed that the hardest workouts were what would produce the greatest fitness.

In the short term, that’s true. In the long term, it’s a recipe for burnout and injury.

Over time, I learned that aerobic fitness is the foundation that supports everything else.

A strong aerobic base allows you to:

• Recover faster

• Handle harder workouts

• Stay healthy

• Race stronger late in events

• Train consistently year after year

Many runners spend too much time looking for the perfect workout when they would be better served by simply building their mileage gradually and consistently.

The best training plan in the world won’t help if you don’t have the aerobic engine to support it.

Lesson:

Don’t rush the process. Build your base. The easy aerobic miles are the foundation of your fitness, not the hard sessions.

2. Intensity Helps, But You Need Less Than You Think

For years I believed improvement came from harder workouts.

Then I watched talented runners burn out.

I did it myself more than once.

One period of my career included hard interval sessions three times per week. I improved somewhat, but I was constantly tired and eventually lost my enthusiasm for training.

On race day, especially later in the season, I’d get to the hard part of the race and instead of being excited to challenge myself and see what I could do, I’d be thinking, “Oh god, not this again.”

Then I’d beat myself up after the race and resolve to just work harder. Which, I now know, was exactly the wrong approach.

Today, I believe most runners get far better results from a small amount of quality training supported by a large amount of easy running.

A simple formula often works remarkably well:

• One faster session

• One long run

• Everything else easy

Hard workouts are important.

They’re just not as important as consistency.

Lesson:

Use intensity as seasoning, not the main course.

3. Take Some Downtime Every Now and Then

For a long time, I viewed rest as lost fitness.

Now I view it as an investment in future fitness.

The body needs periods of recovery to absorb training and stay motivated. “Micro and macro recovery”, as the running nerds (of which I am one) would call it.

I used to finish one season and be charged up to start training hard for next season right away. Then 3 weeks later the motivation would be flagging or I’d pick up a minor injury, at a time when I should have just been gradually rebuilding my general fitness.

After a racing season or a goal race, you need to recover mentally and physically before you can fully commit to the next build.

It means occasionally:

• Taking a few easy weeks at the end of the season. Or even, gasp, a couple of weeks off.

• Reducing mileage after a goal race

• Taking a short break when mentally fatigued

• Allowing yourself to recharge

Many runners get injured or burned out because they never stop pushing.

The goal isn’t to train hard for one season or one race.

The goal is to keep running for decades.

Lesson:

Sometimes the fastest way forward is a brief step back.

4. Treat Small Injuries Before They Become Big Ones

One of the biggest mistakes runners make is hoping an injury will magically disappear.

Sometimes it does, most of the time it doesn’t.

A slight ache becomes a nagging pain. A nagging pain becomes a month off. A month off becomes an entire season lost.

I’ve learned to respect the early warning signs.

When something feels wrong:

• Address it immediately. Continuing to run on it (especially if the soreness doesn’t go away in after the first 10-15 minutes of your run) is likely to make it worse.

• Reduce training if necessary. A couple of missed days does almost nothing to reduce your fitness, but could be the difference between a down week and a missed goal race.

• Strengthen weak areas. A lot of runner hate strength training. I do. But working on your overall body strength helps keep you on the road and out of the doctor’s office.

• Get treatment sooner rather than later. A good physiotherapist is worth his or her weight in gold. If you can find one who is also a runner, so much the better.

Most major injuries start as minor ones.

Lesson:

Don’t be tough. Be smart. A bit of caution with minor injuries can save your season.

5. It’s Supposed to Be Fun

This might be the most important lesson of all.

Running is not a job. For 99.9% of us, nobody is paying us to do it.

Yet many runners create unnecessary pressure around every workout and every race result.

I’ve done it too. In fact I was the king of putting too much pressure on myself.

The irony is that some of my best performances happened when I was simply enjoying the process.

Quick story:

I ran a half marathon a couple of years ago that I had trained hard for and was hoping to hit a specific goal. Training went well but my Achilles tendon was very tender at the end of workouts and long runs. To make matters worse, there was a street party outside my hotel room until 3:30am. I might’ve had an hour of sleep, I’m not sure. Then the day dawned at 27C, warmer than I had seen all year.

I considered not running at all, but in the end decided to just run the race to finish at a comfortable pace. “Just make it around the course without needing the paramedics,” I told myself.

So I started slow, high fived the kids along the route, took in the sites. No pressure, no struggle. I was actually enjoying the run, which was quite a revelation and quite different from my usual frantic glances at my watch to stay on pace.

By the 10km mark, I realized I was feeling really good and not too far behind my original goal pace. I picked it up, ran a solid last 10k and ended up within less than a minute of my original goal.

Running relaxed an pressure free gave me a far better race than if I had allowed myself to get stressed out and forced myself to maintain the goal pace early on.

No matter how fast or slow I’ve run over the years, running has given me:

• Friendships

• Travel

• Confidence

• Stress relief

• Challenges

• Memories spanning nearly half a century

The stopwatch matters. But it isn’t the reason most of us started running. And once you’ve passed a certain age, chasing times can take away the joy of running.

Lesson:

Never let your goals steal your joy.

Looking for Personalized Coaching?

If you’re a runner over 40 who wants to train smarter, stay healthy, and enjoy running for life, I’d be happy to help.

I offer one-on-one coaching calls focused on practical, sustainable training that fits around real life. Whether you’re preparing for a race, returning from injury, building consistency, or simply looking for guidance on your running journey, we can create a plan that works for you.

Send me a DM if you’d like more information about coaching or to discuss your goals.

I’d love to hear about your running journey.

Leave a comment

A lot of runners ask:

“Which is more important, mileage or speedwork?”

It’s the wrong question.

For most runners, especially runners over 40, the fastest times don’t come from choosing quantity or quality.

They come from understanding that quantity creates quality.

The aerobic fitness you build through consistent mileage is what allows you to handle harder workouts, recover faster, and stay strong when races get difficult.

Why Most Runners Get This Backwards

Many runners fall in love with workouts. I certainly did back in the day.

I used to think that more intervals, more tempos, harder workouts were the sessions that led to faster running.

Those sessions are exciting because they feel productive.

Easy mileage often feels too simple to matter.

The result?

A runner doing low mileage but trying to cram in two or three hard workouts each week because they think the workouts are the thing that’s creating fitness.

It’s a recipe for burnout, self doubt and bad races.

The fact is, you need a strong aerobic foundation in order to handle the faster sessions, recover properly, and actually benefit from them.

Without that foundation:

• Recovery takes longer

• Workouts become inconsistent

• Injury risk increases

• Race performances become unpredictable

I was a classic example of this in high school and university. I put everything I had into the 3 intervals sessions we did each week. Weekly mileage was an afterthought.

The result was like trying to build a house without a foundation.

I would run some good times early in the season, but inevitably fall short as the season progressed. Partly because of a lack of aerobic fitness, and partly because I was putting so much into the workouts that I had nothing left for the races.

As the season went on I’d often find myself getting to the hard part of the race and instead of being challenged and excited to see what I could do, all I could think was, “Oh god, not this again …”

I could usually manage a decent 800m, but anything longer saw me drifting further and further back from where I thought I should have been. My 1500m races were significantly slower than they should’ve been and 3000m on the track or 5km cross country? Forget it.

The Real Purpose of Mileage

In the years since, I’ve learned that aerobic mileage does far more than just look impressive in your logbook.

Consistent aerobic running:

• Increases capillary density

• Improves mitochondrial function

• Builds fatigue resistance

• Strengthens connective tissues

• Improves fuel utilization

• Expands your aerobic capacity

All of those adaptations not only build your endurance, they make quality training more effective.

The runner with a larger aerobic base can simply absorb more training.

Subscribe now

How Quantity Creates Better Quality

1. You Recover Faster

A stronger aerobic system clears fatigue more efficiently.

That means you can complete a quality workout on Tuesday and feel reasonably good by Thursday.

The less aerobically developed runner may still be recovering when the next workout arrives.

2. You Can Handle More Work

Consider two runners.

Both run 6 × 800m.

One runner trains 70 km per week.

The other trains 30 km per week.

Who is more likely to:

• Finish the workout strongly?

• Recover quickly?

• Repeat the session next week?

Almost always the higher-mileage runner.

Not because they’re tougher.

Because they have a bigger aerobic engine and therefore they recover more quickly between intervals and can hold a given effort level for longer.

3. You Become More Durable

One of the biggest benefits of mileage is durability.

Higher mileage runners tend to become more resilient to:

• Long races

• Consecutive hard weeks

• Minor setbacks

• Late-race fatigue

Durability isn’t glamorous, but it’s often what separates good races from great races. In fact, right now durability and how to build it is one of the hottest topics in running research right now.

4. You Finish Stronger

Many runners can run fast for the first half of a race.

The challenge is maintaining pace after fatigue arrives. A larger aerobic base delays fatigue and preserves efficiency later in the race.

This is how Jakob Ingebrigtsen wins his races. Not because he is faster in a sprint than everyone else, because he can keep going at a pace the others can’t live with.

Share

What This Means for Masters Runners

After 40, recovery becomes more important.

That doesn’t mean quality disappears. In fact, it’s important that you maintain significant quality in your training as you age. But that quality becomes even more dependent on aerobic fitness.

Think of aerobic training as the cake, and intervals as the icing. In the right proportions, it tastes great. Too much of one or the other and you’re going to be left disappointed.

Many masters runners improve by:

• Running more consistently

• Increasing mileage gradually

• Keeping most runs easy

• Using moderate workouts instead of all-out sessions

The goal isn’t to eliminate intensity, it’s to create the foundation that allows intensity to work.

Takeaway

The short term studies we see posted often present a false choice.

Quantity vs quality. Zone 2 vs HIIT. Mileage vs speed.

The truth is that quality training has to be built on a foundation of quantity to get the best results.

More aerobic running allows you to train harder, recover better, race stronger, and stay healthy longer.

The challenge becomes, “How much aerobic fitness can I build so quality training becomes most effective?”

Because in running, quantity and quality aren’t opposites.

Quantity leads to quality.

(This is a repost of an article I wrote on Medium in 2024. I still use the same simple formula and am now using it to build for the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in October of 2026)

Running competitively as a masters runner (age 40+) can be a real challenge. It’s a constant juggling match trying to balance training in a way that produces meaningful results without getting injured or overly fatigued. You want to do enough to remain competitive without beating yourself up and either getting injured or sacrificing the consistency of training required to produce your best possible racing fitness.

Despite my over 40 years of experience in the sport, I still find it a struggle sometimes. My solution is to simplify it as much as possible. My simple strategy has allowed me to put together a few years in a row of consistent improvements since turning 50 back in 2018. I’ve improved in absolute terms over the past 5 years despite getting older and my age graded performances have improved from the mid 60% range to the low 70s.

Here’s my basic weekly plan:

• 1 long run per week

• 1 speed workout

• 1 rest day

• 4 easy aerobic mileage days

Let me break down each of these elements:

Long Run

I aim for one long run each week of between 90 minutes to 2 hours at a relatively comfortable pace. Often this run will start slowly and gradually get faster over the course of the run, finishing with the last 30 minutes or so approaching my half marathon pace + about 20-30 seconds per km. Not fast, not straining, but enough to make me feel like I’m getting a solid run in. Usually my long run will fall on a Sunday, but that may vary depending on other life commitments.

Speed Work

This is the area of my training that varies the most. I aim for between 2 to 5 miles or so of speed work and I aim to run race pace or a little faster for the distance for which I’m training.

For example, when I’m training for indoor track season, my primary event is the 1500m or mile. During this time, a typical workout would be:

20 minute jog to warm up + 4 or 5 accelerations of 50–80m

8–10x400m with a 2 minute rest

10 minute jog to cool down

If I’m training for a half marathon, my speed work day would be more like:

20 minute warm up

3x10 min @ about 10km race pace, with a 5 minute jog between reps

10–20 minute jog to cool down

The point of these workouts is to become more comfortable running at race pace. I don’t worry too much about physiological parameters such as VO2 max or lactate threshold. Regardless of those constructs, if I’m training at race pace, I know I’m developing the physiology to support running at that pace.

Easy Aerobic Runs

These are just the easy, putting in the miles type of runs that support your overall endurance and build your aerobic capacity. Your basic “Zone 2” training if you will. I don’t worry about heart rate or lactate or anything on these runs, I just run easy enough to feel recovered for my long runs and speed work.

Rest Day

I find I need a rest day the day after a long run. If I try to run the day after a long run, I can get through it ok, but then often find myself dragging for a few days after. Taking a complete rest day helps recharge physically and mentally thus helping me stay healthy and consistent in my training.

I have tried occasionally adding a second speed workout, but have never managed to keep it going for very many weeks in a row without undue fatigue setting in. Also, I don’t seem to find much benefit from lots of speedwork. Generally a good mileage base and 4–6 speed sessions gets me pretty close to a peak.

The simple easy formula of 1 long run, 1 speed work day and the rest easy running has helped me stay injury free and continue to improve into my 50s.

Subscribe now

Share

Most runners think improvement comes from hard workouts.

I thought so too for many years. In high school we pounded 3 hard interval workouts a week and I still didn’t think I was training hard enough. Then for a time in university I had an old school coach who had us do interval training Monday through Thursday and sometimes Friday as well. We spent the weekends lying around trying to recover.

Long story short, I set 2 personal bests in the very first meet, then got injured and missed the rest of the season.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the gains from intense workouts were fleeting and came with a huge cost in terms of energy, injury risk and consistency of training.

Subscribe now

For all runners, but especially for those over 40, the greatest long-term gains come from something much simpler:

Easy running.

Or as coach and runner Steve Boyd once eloquently put it in his PhysiKult Running blog, “The ability to get your ass out the door for a run every day.”

While there is definitely a place for intense work, easy runs are the substance behind the style. They are the backbone of every distance runner’s training plan and the area that leads to the greatest long-term improvement with the lowest (assuming they’re done right) injury risk.

Building the Engine

Easy running builds the aerobic engine through:

• Mitochondrial Development. Easy running increases number and efficiency of mitochondria which allows you to produce more energy, so you can run faster for longer.

• Capillarization. Easy running builds more capillaries, the small blood vessels that deliver oxygen to your muscles. More capillaries means more blood gets to your muscles, which mens more oxygen, which means improved endurance and recovery.

• Fat Utilization. Easy running helps teach your muscles to burn fat more efficiency, which helps you save muscle glycogen for faster efforts. This allows you to run farther and faster without bonking.

• Structural Adaptation. Easy runs strengthen your tendons, ligaments and bones to help you build durability over time, reducing your injury risk.

Even Greater Benefits for Masters Runners

Easy running works especially well for runner over 40.

Less stress on your muscles and joints means lower injury risk. There is also lower stress on the nervous system so you can sustain it over time without overtraining.

Doing mostly easy running allows you to be more consistent in your training week after week. Those “Where’s the nearest garbage can?” type of interval sessions are very difficult to do on a regular basis.

More easy running also supports better recovery from harder sessions. The more easy mileage you can do without overdoing it, the faster you recover, not only in between workouts but also during workouts.

For example, a runner doing 25 miles a week doing 10 reps of 400m at mile pace might need 2-3 minutes of recovery between reps to maintain the correct pace. A runner doing 50 miles a week might only need 90 seconds between reps at the same effort level. The increased endurance from greater easy mileage allows for a higher density of training (ie. more harder efforts, closer together).

Who do you think has a better chance of maintaining the desired pace on race day?

The Hidden Benefit: Enjoyment

It’s also important to note that easy runs are an enjoyable way to train because they:

• Feel relaxed

• Allow conversation

• Reduce pressure

• Make running sustainable long-term

More enjoyment leads to greater consistency of training and hey, it’s just more fun.

How to Run Easy:

Keep the effort conversational. You should be able to easily chat with your running partners throughout the run. If you like to measure heart rate on your runs keep it to ~70–75% max. Any faster and it will start to feel like work. Running faster does not give more benefit and may delay your recovery. You should finish your run feeling like you could go much longer.

Let the pace come to you. Some runners feel they should run a certain pace for their easy runs, but easy isn’t a pace, it’s a feeling. Some days you’ll be feeling good, and the pace might be a little quicker despite being truly easy. Other days, you’ll be tired and may have to slow down as much as a minute or more per mile compared to your usual pace. This is perfectly ok.

The main benefits from easy runs come more from time on your feet than from pace. Better to run longer and slower than shorter and faster.

Easy runs build your aerobic engine, protect you from injury and allow you to run longer, faster with less stress. If you want to run faster, run easier more often.

What’s the biggest challenge in keeping your easy runs truly easy?

Let me know in the comments.

Cheers,

Dan.

Share

Most runners over 40 fall into one of three traps: they try to follow training plans designed for younger athletes, they do too many hard workouts, or they run most of their miles at the same moderate effort.

On the surface, it feels productive. You finish a run tired and feel like you’ve accomplished something. But over time, this approach leads to a familiar outcome: fatigue, plateaued performance, and eventually, injury.

What worked in your 20s or 30s doesn’t always work the same way in your 40s, 50s, and beyond.

After 40, you need a plan that covers the same types of training, but spread out more through the week to give you better recovery and allow you to hit your hard workouts at an intensity that truly moves the needle.

Subscribe now

Why It Happens

There are a few reasons this pattern is so common.

First, many runners still believe that more hard work equals better results. That mindset is reinforced by what we see online, where workouts are often highlighted more than consistency.

More hard work only makes you faster if you can recover and adapt to that hard work.

If you do more than you can truly handle at a given point in time, you don’t get faster, you get fatigued and injured.

Second, easy running can feel too slow. It doesn’t give the same sense of accomplishment, so runners drift toward a steady, moderately hard pace that feels “just right.”

Finally, there’s a fear of losing fitness. Slowing down feels like going backward, when in reality, it’s often the key to moving forward.

The Fix: A Simple 3-Part Weekly Structure

Instead of trying to do everything at once, the most effective approach is surprisingly simple. Structure your week around three key elements: one faster session, one long run, and everything else easy.

1. One Faster Session (Quality Day)

This is your primary stimulus for maintaining and improving speed, efficiency, and running economy. Your weekly faster session could be an interval session, hill reps, a tempo run or a fartlek session.

The key is to keep it controlled. This is not an all-out effort. You want to challenge your body without leaving yourself exhausted for days afterward.

Examples include a 20-minute tempo run, 6 × 3 minutes at a steady-hard effort, or 8 × 400m at a relaxed but quick pace. The exact workout parameters will vary depending on the event you’re training for, where you are in your training plan and your fitness level and experience.

Think of this session as a way to stimulate adaptation, not to prove how hard you can push. If you push too hard, you dig yourself into a well of fatigue that will have a negative effect on your other important training.

2. One Long Run

The long run is the foundation of your endurance. Depending on your level and goals, this might range from 75 minutes to as much as 2 1/2 hours. Once again, this depends on the race you’re training for and your level of fitness and experience.

Keep the pace easy and conversational for the most part. This is where your aerobic system develops, and over time, it becomes one of the biggest drivers of performance. It may not feel impressive in the moment, but this is where your fitness is quietly built.

As your fitness improves, you may be able to finish this run with the last 15-30 minutes at a slightly faster pace, provided you don’t build so much fatigue that you derail the rest of your training week.

3. Everything Else Easy

This is the part many runners get wrong.

Easy runs should be truly easy. You should be able to hold a conversation, keep your heart rate low, and finish feeling better than when you started. These runs support recovery, allow you to build consistent mileage, and make your harder efforts more effective.

Easy days are not wasted days. They are what make the entire system work. Younger runners can get away with running these a little bit quicker, but for masters runners, recovery is at a premium and your easy days must be easy in order to get the max benefit and adaptation from your harder runs while avoiding injury.

Sample Weekly Layout

Monday: Easy run
Tuesday: Easy run
Wednesday: Faster session
Thursday: Easy run
Friday: Easy or rest
Saturday: Easy run
Sunday: Long run

Share

Why This Works After 40

As you get older, recovery becomes the limiting factor more than effort. This structure respects that reality.

It gives you enough intensity to improve, enough volume to build endurance, and enough recovery to stay consistent.

The goal is not to feel tired after every run. The goal is to feel good often enough that you can keep showing up week after week.

If your running feels like it’s too much work, you’re probably trying too hard. Be willing to back off a bit on the easy days so that you can get the maximum out of your hard days.

What This Approach Avoids

Many masters runners are stuck in the cycle of slowing race times, lingering fatigue and small injuries that never quite seem to go away.

Training in a way that allows for enough volume to build your endurance base and enough intensity to sharpen your race fitness without going overboard into injury and burnout allows you to keep building week after week, month after month and year after year.

When you do this, you can build your fitness to a much higher level and avoid:

• Constant moderate effort that leads to fatigue

• Back-to-back hard days

• Injury cycles caused by poor recovery

• Plateaus from doing too much of the same intensity

If you can get to your next hard session feeling fresh, you’re training correctly.

If you’re a runner over 40 struggling to figure out a training plan that makes sense for your goals and lifestyle, let me know in the comments.

If you’re a runner over 40 trying to stay consistent, improve your fitness, and avoid the cycle of injury and burnout, this is for you.

There are no shortage of complex training plans out there. Most of them look impressive on paper, but they’re hard to sustain in real life. Especially when you’re balancing work, family, and the reality that recovery isn’t what it used to be.

This is different.

Full Stride Running Club is built around a simple idea: the vast majority of us masters runners don’t need more complexity - we need a common sense structure we can stick with consistently that provides results.

Each week, I’ll share a straightforward training plan based on what I’m actually doing myself. It follows a proven format:

- One faster session (tempo or intervals)
- One long run
- Everything else easy

That’s it.

This approach is designed to help you build aerobic fitness, stay healthy, and gradually improve without constantly feeling exhausted or risking injury.

Subscribe now

The Community

This is where it becomes more than just a plan.

If you’re following along:

- Share how your week went in the comments

- Ask questions

- Encourage others

Most runners train alone. I wanted to create a better option.

This is a way to stay connected, even if we’re all in different places. If you’re self-coached, this gives you a clear path to follow. If you’ve been inconsistent, it gives you a structure to return to. And if you’re already training well, it might just simplify things in a way that keeps you moving forward.

The goal isn’t perfection.

The goal is to keep showing up, week after week, and let the results take care of themselves.

Here’s this week’s training program:

Monday - Rest or easy run 30-40 minutes

Tuesday - Easy run 40-60 minutes, finish with 4-6 x 80m relaxed strides

Wednesday - 15-20 minute warm up, 3x8 minutes tempo run with a 2 minute jog recovery, 10 -15 minute jog to cool down. (Tempo pace is approximately 10-15km race pace or 85-90% maximum heart rate)

Thursday - Rest or Easy run 30-40 minutes

Friday - Easy run 40-60 minutes

Saturday - Easy run 40-60 minutes + 4-6 x 80m relaxed strides

Sunday - Long run 60-90 minutes

How to adjust this training for yourself:

Easy runs - do as much as you like based on your experience and ability. For experienced runners, I’d suggest a minimum of 30 minutes and no more than 60. Keep it as an easy effort, as slow as you want but no faster than about 80% of maximum heart rate. You can approach it progressively, starting very slow and working into a slightly quicker pace as you get warmed up. No straining or forcing the pace though.

Strides - These short should be run about mile race pace or similar effort. Keep them relaxed, focus on good form and don’t try to sprint.

Tempo - Pace as indicated above but be careful not to exceed 90% of max heart rate. It’s tempting to push a little too hard on these sessions. The goal is to gradually push your threshold up from below, not to exceed it. Going too fast isn’t better than running the correct pace and extends your recovery time between sessions.

Long Run - Run as much as you like depending on your goals, experience and the event your training for. Could be anywhere from 60 minutes to 2 hours and 30 minutes. Longer runs than this take too much out of you and may affect the quality of the rest of your training.

That’s it for this week. I’ll post a new schedule each week for you to follow along if you like.

Let me know how your training is going in the comments.

Cheers,

Dan.

Share

October 30, 2025

Hey there, thanks for tuning in.

I’m going to try a new format this week, a more bite sized article with one big idea, one practical tip and a weekly challenge.

Subscribe now

On Your Mark - The Big Idea

Most runners chase the “hero workout” — that one epic session that leaves them spent, sore, and satisfied.

The problem?

Hero workouts feel productive, but they rarely make you faster. They just make you tired. The body doesn’t reward pain — it rewards consistency. You get better not from one great workout, but from hundreds of good ones stacked together.

Hero workouts are counterproductive because training beyond the optimal level provides diminishing returns, increases injury risk, and increases recovery time.

Rather than relying on extremely hard training sessions, focus on stacking consistent days and weeks of training. Instead of trying to max out on your workouts, focus on the goal of the session and perform it to the best you can.

For example, if you are aiming for a race pace session, run the reps at your current race pace for the distance, not 5% faster. If your goal is recovery, run at a pace that leaves you feeling ready to go for your next workout.

Set — The Practical Tip

Back off your next hard session by 5%. If you were going to run intervals at 3:50/km, make it 3:55–4:00/km instead. You’ll recover faster, train again sooner, and log more total quality miles this month than if you’d buried yourself trying to prove something.

Not only that, you’ll enjoy the session a lot more if you’re not gritting your teeth and racing the session. The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the more consistent you’ll be.

Go - The Challenge

This week, skip your hardest workout.

Replace it with a controlled progression run where you start slowly, gradually accelerate and finish feeling strong, not wrecked. The run should feel smooth and challenging without straining and you should finish feeling pleasantly tired but with more in the tank.

The fitness you gain from running at a challenging but doable level will outlast the fitness you get from overreaching. You’ll feel fresher, be injured less, and have more energy for racing when it counts.

Run strong,

Dan.

If this helped you rethink your training, share it with another runner who might need permission to train smarter, not harder.

Share

As you get to the big 4-0 and beyond, running gets more challenging.

Gone are the days when we could train as much as we want, skimp on recovery, eat anything without gaining weight and get by on little sleep.

Subscribe now

It’s not that you can’t still run at a surprisingly high level, but it gets tougher.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. While age takes away a bit of natural speed and the ability to recover quite as quickly, it give us two big benefits, experience and adaptability.

There are ways that you can continue to enjoy your running and run well into your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. And not just enjoy it, but continue to get better and improve for years to come.

1. Aim to optimize, not maximize your training.

For a younger runner, “doing more” is a reliable way to “do better”.

For masters runners, things change.

For one thing, many masters runners now have an enviable base level of fitness as a result of years of training. That base of training doesn’t easily disappear.

Years of training build more mitochondria, more and bigger blood vessels and capillaries (an old coach of mine referred this as your “internal plumbing”), and neuromuscular coordination and efficiency.

The result of this is that you no longer need miles and miles of slow running to create basic aerobic adaptations. I’m not saying these adaptations aren’t important at any age, but as you get older, you can focus more on specificity.

Aim for no more than 2 hard workouts per week.

Masters runners can generally handle no more than 2 hard sessions per week.

What’s a hard session? Intervals, tempo runs hill reps and long runs. Anything that gets your heart rate above zone 2 or lasts longer than about 60 minutes.

I like to do intervals or tempo runs on Wednesday and a long run on Sunday.

This gives you 2-3 days of easy zone two training or cross training to allow you to recover from your harder efforts. It also allows you be recovered enough to give your hard workouts the effort they deserve, rather than going into the session with tired legs and low motivation and making a mess of it. (Been there, done that!)

Keep your easy days easy.

Generally no more than 40-45 minutes of running for most runners and at a very comfortable pace. Like the pace you might run as a warmup to a race or an interval session.

You have to recover properly, especially as you age, to put in the required effort on the hard days.

Allow at least one rest day.

Many runners hate rest days. They feel like they’re slacking off or that their fitness is deteriorating.

Actually, the opposite is true. When you rest, your body has the opportunity to recover and rebuild and become stronger. The mental side of this is equally important. Giving yourself a chance to relax and forget about running once or twice a week allows you to be mentally sharper and more focused on the days that you run.

2. Schedule Micro and Macro recovery periods.

Micro recovery periods include rest days or down weeks where you run significantly less than your typical weeks. Many runners take an easier week every 4^th week to help with recovery. While it doesn’t have to be strictly every 4^th week, it helps to have occasional weeks of lighter training, such as doing a mini-taper before a low key race.

Macro recovery periods are longer stretches of two to four weeks of significantly reduced training such as at the end of a racing season, or following a marathon or half marathon.

These should be scheduled once or twice per year to give you a chance to really recover and reset physically and mentally.

3. Consider speed and mobility training.

Many masters runners never sprint. They seem to think sprinting is for kids, or they’re afraid of injury and so they rarely run faster than about 5k race pace.

This is a mistake.

Faster running builds stronger muscles, improves neuromuscular recruitment and improves your running efficiency. The risk of injury is real, though, so it’s crucial to warm up and cool down properly before and after and to build up to it slowly.

Aim for 3-4 acceleration runs of 60-80m starting slowly and building to maybe 80% effort on the first one, working up to 90% effort for the last one. You can build up to as many as 10 of these as part of a warmup for an interval session or after an easy run. This shouldn’t be a hard workout and shouldn’t leave you sore the next day.

Think of running quick but relaxed and never allow yourself to struggle on these. If you start to feel fatigued, call it a day. One or two of these sessions a week will help preserve speed, activate your fast twitch muscle fibers and improve your efficiency at race pace.

Another thing masters runners often neglect are drills.

You’ve likely seen sprinters performing these drills at your local track or prior to competition. A skips, B skips, high knees, butt kicks etc. You can search these up on Youtube for a proper demonstration. It wouldn’t hurt to have a running coach or training partner observe you on these to make sure your form doesn’t suck.

These drills build specific strength and mobility in your running muscles and can greatly help with your speed and running economy, which tends to decline with age. They also help preserve whatever fast twitch muscles you have left.

By incorporating these 3 elements regularly in your training, you can keep running faster for longer and maybe even capture a bit of that fountain of youth that running can help you access.

Cheers,

Dan.

Share

Those of us who aim to continue running for a lifetime can continue to enjoy the sport and aim for meaningful goals long after the PRs have stopped coming. My fastest times are decades in the past, but I still enjoy getting out to run six days a week and aiming to improve within my current age group times.

More importantly, I still feel fit and healthy enough to enjoy an active lifestyle in my fifties and do all of the things I want to do.

With that in mind, here are three things you can do to age well as a runner and continue to maintain motivation and enjoyment into middle age and beyond.

Balance your training

Too many of the same kinds of workouts, year after year, leave you with one-dimensional fitness and, very likely, a slew of chronic overuse injuries.

If all you do is long, slow distance running, you build great aerobic fitness, but lose range of motion and can often become the "one pace runner" who can chug along at a steady pace but has trouble changing gears to sprint for the finish or catch up to a group ahead of you.

Similarly, runners who emphasize intense training year-round can become stale and lose that important aerobic base, which allows them to handle longer races better and recover well between workouts.

The way to avoid this and prolong your running longevity is to add variety to your workouts. There's a place in every training program for interval training, long runs, tempo runs, hill reps, and, at least as importantly, fun runs with your friends while in deep conversation.

All of these types of sessions contribute to your overall fitness and fulfillment as a runner.

Another advantage of adding variety is that it keeps you fresh mentally. Hammering away at the same types of training is guaranteed to leave you feeling stale after a while. Finding new ways to experience running can leave you feeling refreshed and breathe new life into your running.

Run a variety of distances and events

Focusing too much on one type of event, such as the marathon, stagnates your progress. Instead, try aiming for a marathon in the spring, cross country races in the fall, 5–10ks in the summer, and indoor track in the winter, or whatever variation appeals to you.

It doesn't have to be this exact mix of course, but mixing up your race distances can help build endurance or speed for your ideal events. All pace ranges and types of training build fitness in different ways and the variety keeps you strong, fast, and motivated when your key races come around.

Don't be afraid to take a breather

Another aspect of balance in your training is the need to incorporate rest and recovery along with the hard training. It's impossible to continue training hard for long stretches of time without a break, both physically and mentally. There's a time to train hard and a time to rest. Runners who stay in the game for years come to understand this sooner or later.

It's almost like your training becomes an extended interval workout, with regular periods of effort and recovery, repeated over and over. These recovery periods give your body a chance to heal and refresh your mind, allowing you to give your best effort when it comes time to train hard again.

I've had many seasons of rest and recovery over the years. After many years of hard training in high school and university, I gradually wound down my training, ran a couple of road races, hobbled my way through a marathon at 24, and then pretty much took the next seven years off.

When I returned to running in my early 30s, I had a bit of a renaissance and put in the hardest training of my life for a few more years. I ran my lifetime best marathon and half marathon along the way.

By the time I hit 40, I could tell I was getting past my prime and began to gradually ease off again. Then when I hit 50, I discovered masters track and started putting in the speedwork and intervals necessary to do well in those events again.

I'm sure at some point I'll start to hit a plateau and ease back on the running again for a while, and that's ok. Follow your motivation and energy in each season of your life and don't be afraid to take a step back and reinvent yourself from time to time.

By challenging yourself in different ways, changing up your training, and learning to take a step back and reinvent yourself every so often, you can keep your running fresh and enjoyable throughout your lifetime.

I used to be a perfectionist when it came to running.

For years, I scoured every running book and article I could find, looking for the answer that would take me from a decent regional runner to a great one.

I was convinced of two things: first, I had no real talent and would therefore have to rely on training smarter, harder, or simply more than anyone else. Second, I was sure there must be some secret to running well that elite runners possessed and weren’t sharing with others.

If I could only learn the secret, so I thought, I could finally get to the level I so desired.

Spoiler alert: I was wrong. Hopelessly, irretrievably wrong.

Subscribe now

The Fallacy of Training Harder and Smarter than Everyone Else

For one thing, I did possess some talent. Not world-beating talent, but enough that I won my fair share of races and had some achievements of which I was proud. But mostly, trying to train harder, smarter, or more than everyone else hindered my progress substantially.

It hindered me because trying to train as hard as I could all the time left me with little energy for actual races.

I trashed myself in practice several times a week and would frequently run some good races early in the season, then fail miserably later on when the Championship races came around.

I thought I was a head case. More than one of my coaches thought so too (not that they ever said it in so many words…).

I realize now it wasn’t a lack of mental fortitude, I was just over-trained.

All of that hard training left me exhausted, stressed out, and dreading the ordeal on race days. When the going got tough in the race, instead of looking forward to the challenge of seeing what I could do, all I was thinking was, “Oh God, not this again.”

One of my high school coaches almost stumbled on the problem. He noticed I was sweating buckets, even in warmups, and recognized that I was over-stressed and that something was not right.

He suggested maybe dietary issues or lack of sleep were the problem, never realizing I was running workouts three times a week that were far more difficult than any of my races. And on my “recovery days,” I was running far closer to a threshold pace than an easy pace.

I was completely cooked, but I was convinced I wasn’t training hard enough.

As I got older, my training errors started to hinder me in other ways. This time through injury.

As I got into my mid-thirties, I was convinced I needed to run the 100 miles per week I thought Olympic calibre athletes required. I never got higher than the mid-80s, but still, I was injured frequently, grumpy and irritable 90% of the time, and very inconsistent in races.

I’d run a couple of good races, then have a complete disaster next time out. I was still trying to train harder than anyone else and still paying the price.

It wasn’t until I hit my 50s that I started to become more consistent. I cut back to only one faster workout per week, slowed down a lot of my easier runs, and ran a weekly mileage level that was more appropriate for my age and ability.

To my great surprise, I started running better in races. I had more determination, more fight, and more desire to compete during the actual races since I wasn’t competing with myself several times a week in training.

I managed to string together long stretches of training without getting injured.

And I actually started to enjoy running more than ever before.

The Fallacy that Elite Runners Have It All Figured Out

The other mistake I made was my assumption that elite runners somehow had it all figured out.

Over my running years, I was lucky enough to be coached by an Olympian, a national cross-country team member, and a coach of an Olympic silver medallist. Three people who I assumed had it all figured out.

As it turned out, I ran at about the same level with each one.

None of them had any magic secrets to suddenly turn me into a world beater. Or even a National Team member.

No matter what training system I tried, the results were all more or less the same.

As Harold Abrams’ coach says in Chariots of Fire, “You can’t put in what God left out.” I couldn’t escape the level of natural talent I was born with.

Not only that, I’ve seen interviews with many former elites who’ve spoken about how they significantly overtrained during their competitive years and might’ve run faster had they trained more sensibly.

Undoubtedly they had a lot of talent and did a lot of things right, but they didn’t have a monopoly on training knowledge just because they made a national team or some other lofty achievement.

The Power of Persistence

Instead of focusing on all that, if I could start over again, I’d focus on the value of persistence.

Former Canadian national team runner Steve Boyd once remarked that if there was one singular talent required for running success, it was the talent for getting your ass out the door to run every day. There is a lot of truth in that statement.

Or there is the famous quote from John L Parker’s Once A Runner, “What was the secret, they wanted to know. In a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And none of them, not one, was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it was not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most un-profound and heart rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottom of his training shoes. The trial of miles, miles of trials. How could they be expected to understand that?”

There is no doubt that persistence is a key requirement for distance runners, both in finishing a tough race and in completing the required training to get to the starting line in the first place.

Nobody succeeds as a runner overnight.

It takes years of consistent training to get anywhere close to your best level. And in those years, you will experience setbacks, injury, illness, lack of motivation, and a host of other roadblocks that can derail your success.

More so than complicated training formulas or a willingness to thrash yourself in training, simple, dogged persistence over weeks and months and years will bring you to whatever level you are capable of achieving in running.

I think this is why there is so much respect and camaraderie among runners.

There is an unspoken admiration, not for any particular achievement, but knowing that you’ve put in the work, dealt with setbacks, and stuck with it long enough to have achieved your goal.

Regardless of whether that goal was running one mile or a hundred.

Share