The last four weeks of the outdoor track season are when most athletes will run their season PRs. In this special time of year there are six keys you’ll need to do to ensure you’re ready to run your best races of the season at the most important time of the year.

1) Sleep

Sleep is crucial for great performance this time of year. Sleep ranked number one in importance in my article on  , and it only increases in importance during the championship season.

In addition to supporting the training loads and academic workloads you’ve been doing for the past months, you now have the addition of key races. You’re focused for these races and often using a bit more mental energy for the important races. In the same way a concrete foundation supports the structure of your school and your outdoor track, your sleep is the foundation for all your activities.

The problem with this recommendation is it’s much less exciting than race tactics, which I’ll discuss in a moment. But if you ask the best runners in the world how much they sleep invariably they’ll say 9-10 hours a night, plus a nap most days. Most high school runners can’t sleep in as late as they want, so you need count back from when you wake up and be disciplined to go to bed early enough to get at least 8 hours.

While you won’t see your favorite collegiate or professional athletes talking about sleep on the social media feeds, know that it’s crucial to their race performance, and it’s crucial for you if you want to run PRs.

2) Make Peace with Bad Weather

Racing well in bad weather is difficult. It’s also frustrating when you’re fit and you and your coach know that in better weather you’d likely run a PR. Yet the weather will be bad for most teams for one or more meets in the last four weeks of the season. Accept that now, then simply say, “I can run a great race in bad weather. And I might even run a PR.”

You may get off the bus to a cold rain and strong winds. Or here could be a heat wave, and on top of that gusty winds. Be prepared for both extremes now so that when the day comes you’re not bothered by this reality. Plus, you’ll no doubt beat a competitor or two, even one that is fitter or more talented, because you had the right mindset and are eager to compete, regardless of the conditions.

3) Execute Your Race Plan

You and your coach no doubt have a thoughtful race plan going into each race. Once this is established, you need to do your best to execute that plan. Because you can get a 200m split and a 400m split in the first lap of a race, you’ll get the feedback you need early in the race to run a smart race. After the race you two can analyze what happened and see what adjustments you can make for the next race.

Often the plan will have you running a negative split race, which simply means the second half of the race is faster than the first half of the race. Let’s use a 1,600m race as an example. An evenly run first 1,500m, then a 100m kick, still counts as a negative split race since the last 100m comes in the second 800m of the race. You can have an even more dramatic negative split if you finish going fast, faster, fastest for your final 4-500 meters, which we’ll discuss in a moment. You do not want to run a positive split race, one where you run hard in the first half of the race, only to fade at the end. It’ll be hard for you and your coach to learn much about your fitness or see if there should be adjustments made in training, since your poor race tactics dominated the result.

Have a plan, execute the plan, then be open to feedback that sets you up to run faster in the next race.

4) Be Ready to Cover Moves

The best runners in the world can “cover moves.” This simply means that when a competitor (or two or three) suddenly speed up, you speed up as well. If you’re going to win a race, or place as high as you and your coach are hoping for, you’ll need to stay close to your competitors. If you let a gap between you and them form, even if it’s just 10 meters, it will be much harder to close this gap in the final 400m of the race.

Another way to say this is that you need to “keep contact” with them, often running on the outside shoulder of the leader if you are confident you can beat them. It should be noted that all of this assumes you can execute a negative split race, yet the winner, as well as the other top finishers in late season races, will be running a negative split. And since, to compete with them, you and your coach have some version of a negative split race in mind, being able to cover moves so that you can maintain contact with your competitors is crucial.

“But Jay – you just described what an athlete needs to do when they’re trying to win. What should runners who are trying to run fast, yet will finish in the middle of a race, especially the 3,200m, do?” Great question.

You’ll still have to cover moves in the 3,200m, even when you’ll end up finishing in the middle of the race (or even the back third of the race – which could still mean a PR in a competitive field). And I’d argue that the skill of covering moves in these races for younger athletes is the best way to learn to cover moves for the coming years.

What happens if you don’t cover moves, or let yourself slowly get gapped? It’s harder to maintain a pace when you’re running by yourself. It takes exceptional mental fortitude to run lap after lap 20-30-40 meters behind your nearest competitor.

If you have doubts about the pace you can maintain, make sure you have a conservative plan for the first half of the race. Which sets you up to run faster the second half of the race (the negative split execution).

5) Prepare Yourself to Run Fast, Faster, Fastest

If you were to break down 100m splits in a 1,600m race – which most coaches don’t, and that’s fine – you’ll find that in 2021 the athletes who win 1,600m races run their fastest 100m last. And their second fastest 100m or 200m came before that. And often, the 100m-300m before that is run faster than the pace they ran the first half of the race. In this case, they ran a certain pace, then changed gears three times: they went fast, then faster, then they ran their fastest in the last 100m.

Just this week a coach asked me how their athletes should race the 1,600m. I asked them if they had a copy of my book and they did, so I suggested they read the section titled “Practice Running Fast, Faster, Fastest.” In this section I describe a race where a runner runs the first two laps of a 1,600m at an even pace. Then they run 300 more meters at the same pace. Now they have 500m left in the race: the home stretch and one full lap.

The goal now is to run fast for 200m, faster for 200m, then run their fastest 100m of the race in the last 100m. If we watched this race, they’d run the homestretch to the 300m hurdle mark fast (200m), then speed up and run the backstretch and second curve faster (200m), then have a great finishing kick and run the last 100m as their fastest running of the race. Even if you can’t win a race this is a great race plan to execute as you’ll surely be passing athletes in the last 500m of the race.

But like many things in running, this is easier said than done and you must practice “shifting gears” in practice. Obviously, you can’t run race simulations that are 1,600m long each week. But you can run 300s and practice the early pace of the race, then with short recoveries, run some 300s where you run 200m fast, then speed up for 100m. You can even run a couple of 300m at the end of the workout where you run fast, faster, fastest for each 100m segment.

The bottom line here is you and your coach can’t expect you to be able to execute fast, faster, fastest in a race if you haven’t practiced it before the race. Even if you have a big aerobic engine, you still need to learn the skill of changing gears when you’re fatigued.

6) Trust Changes in Training

The final point I want to make is a simple one, yet it’s likely going to be the hardest for some runners.

Your training should change in the last four weeks of the season. In some general sense you’ll likely decrease the mileage you’ve been running (though many of the best coaches in the country don’t decrease it by more than 10 percent). And often there are harder hard workouts and easy recovery days.

This type of training isn’t new, but it is being employed by more thoughtful coaches. While the changes in training will be subtle, there will likely be something a bit different in these last few weeks. While I no longer believe in the paradigm of “build a big base, then taper and peak” I do think a modest decrease in volume, coupled with more work that has athletes running fast, faster, fastest with “fresh” legs, is a recipe for success.

It’s your job to trust that these minor adjustments are going to lead to faster racing. If your coach didn’t think so, they wouldn’t be doing it. And that said, you should ask your coaches why you’re doing what you’re doing. A good coach will always be able to explain the rationale behind these decisions (and the best coaches will have you excited about the changes).

I wish you the best during the last four weeks of the season. Get as much rest as you can as the first priority, and follow the suggestions above to put yourself in the best position to run PRs and advance to the next meet.

Jay Johnson helps high school runners through his website, , and through his , which has over 2 million views. You can find him on social media .

The post High School Runners: Want to Shine in Championships? Here’s How. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I love following a select group of professional runners on Instagram. Getting insights into their training and racing, and the occasional photo of their pet, is so much fun.

That said, what we see on social media must be filtered before it’s applied to our own training. As someone whose coached multiple USATF champions, I know that what you see on Instagram is, as you might have guessed, just a snapshot into what training and racing at that level is really like.

Where’s The Sleep?

For example: the first thing you need to understand is that the athletes you see on Instagram must sleep more than you do to handle the training loads that make them elite. A 10-hour night of sleep, plus a 60-minute nap, are very common for elite athletes, yet this crucial aspect of training doesn’t lend itself to an engaging post. Before social media, fans read articles and interviews to get a glimpse into the lives of these athletes. Deena Kastor, former professional runner and current American Record Holder in the marathon (), said in an that she slept 10 hours a night and took a 2-hour nap each day. In other words, she spent half of her day sleeping.

I wasn’t surprised to read this as her coach, the legendary Joe Vigil, outlined her training prior to her bronze medal in the marathon at the 2004 Olympics. She had two weeks of 140 miles a week, separated by down weeks of 100 miles a week. Couple that with the intensity of Coach Vigil’s training and Kastor needed a volume of sleep that is unrealistic for busy adults.

Knowing that there is a big part of the professional runner lifestyle we’re not seeing, let’s look at three things you can do that your favorite athletes are doing.

See This/Do This

Make Time for the Little Things

The best runners in the world do dynamic warm-ups and muscle activation exercises prior to their run. They do general strength and mobility, as well as fascial release daily. All of these athletes can do a high volume of body weight strength work, and most will be in a weight room several times a week.

The key is not to copy what they do, but rather to ingrain into your mind a simple fact: If you want to stay injury-free, then you’ll need to do the little things each day that you run. When I work with adult marathon runners many of them only run five days a week, yet they’ll still do my on their cross training day, meaning they do SAM six days a week. Regardless of the plan that you and your coach have, you must value the non-running work as much as you value running. Seeing your favorite athletes do this work daily confirms that this work is vital if you want to stay consistent.

Take Easy Days Seriously Easy.

If you dig around deep enough, through the descriptions of various posts, you’ll often find professionals mention how easy they run their easy days. I’m a big fan of marathoner and in she says she “shuffled” through her easy day. What pace was she running? Roughly 8:25 a mile. To put that in perspective, she can run 5:35 a mile for a marathon (her PR is 2:26:33) and 4:44 a mile for a 5k (14:42 pace). She’s running roughly three minutes a mile slower on a 6.3-mile easy run than she can run for a marathon.

Don’t get caught up in numbers here and look for a magic equation regarding the pace of your easy days. You simply need to say to yourself, “Can I run this pace for 75-90 minutes today if I had to and be okay?” Since your recovery day is likely 60 minutes or less, this rule of thumb works well. Remember, once you’re fit, you’re not gaining much additional fitness from easy days, but rather they are a bridge to the next hard day. As I say in my books, Easy Days Easy, Hard Days Hard, something the best runners in the world are doing.

Eat Mostly Nutritious Foods

I love seeing what professional athletes eat. They truly view food as fuel. When you see their there’s a balance of carbs, vegetables (you won’t see as many posts about breakfast as that’s a light meal prior to training). And often the plates of food look as good as anything you’d see in a restaurant. The flip side is over the course of a couple weeks you’ll see them showing off their favorite sugary treat. And it’s this balance that I think is important: food is fuel and nutritious food is necessary to train and race at a high level. And, everyone needs a treat now and again.

All of this said, there are times as a single father with a hectic life, I roll my eyes at the meals I see. I’m barely getting rice cooked in the Instapot, broccoli sautĂ©ed and a pineapple cutup after picking kids up at school and getting us fed at a reasonable hour. If you’re a busy adult like me, cut yourself some slack and know that you may only have one meal a week that looks as good — and tastes as good — as a professional runner’s meal.

Personally, this is where an investment in a quality blender and making two days’ worth of green smoothies really helps. I can make four — two for me, two for my oldest daughter — and that’s our fuel for the first part of the morning. Greens, berries, vegetable protein, and a combination of hemp hearts, chai seeds, flax seeds ground and added make for a simple, nutritious and tasty drink (though with certain combinations of berries and greens it’s going to look a bit brown – but it tastes great!).

The point I’m trying to make here is simple: the pros view food as fuel, and so should you. But the pros are in part paid to eat well and their Instagram photos of dinner are usually going to look better than yours. That’s fine, so long as you’re eating enough and getting in enough nutrition. And don’t skip the treats!

See That/Don’t Do That

Don’t Double

You simply don’t need to run twice a day to be a competitive adult runner. The first reason is simple: the fitness gain you’d make — which would be mildly impactful — comes at a fairly high risk, and that risk is you getting into a cycle of overtraining. Keep things simple, run once a day, and have a great training plan to get the most out of those single sessions.

The other fact with double runs, and one that was pointed out to me by my college coach, is that it takes a significant amount of time to get ready for the second run and then to shower and change clothes again. Plus, you should be doing things like leg swings and mini-band work before the run, and at least 5 minutes of mobility or active isolated flexibility after the run. This all accumulates into a notable time commitment.

Leave the double runs to the pros and focus on getting the most out of your hard days, and running easy enough on your easy days to be ready for the next harder session.

Don’t Go to the Weight Room

Here’s the deal: A middle-aged athlete like myself can get a lot of benefit from a weight room session. The decline in absolute strength as you age is real. Upregulation of human growth hormone (HGH) and testosterone are so important for adults, and you don’t get those benefits from a recovery run, or even a track workout.

But the problem again is time: Do you really have time in your week to get to the weight room after your harder sessions? If you believe that hard days need to be hard and easy days need to be easy, then you have no choice but to schedule the weight room work on the hard days. Now you ask yourself the simple question: “Do I have the time to go to the weight room after my threshold run?”

I’ve never made weight room work part of my coaching when working with adults. I’ve always made general strength work a key part of the training. For the athletes I advise, every day they run they do at least some body weight work. After several months of this we can move from body weight work to light external load, which simply means using a medicine ball or a kettlebell… tools you can keep in the trunk of your car and use at the park, trailhead or track.

You don’t need more than 20-25 minutes of strength work after hard days and you only need 10 minutes or so after easy days.

The one exception I’d make to this is that a handful of serious runners I know have constructed a solid weight room set up in a basement or garage where they can do heavy loads – hex bar deadlifts for example – and take only 10-15 minutes more to do this than my athletes who are doing their anabolic work near their car. Yet this is not a must have. A makeshift weight room in your home is a long way down the list of things you need to have to be an excellent adult runner. In the context of what you’ve learned thus far, I’d argue the best investment you can make after reading this is the quality blender, even before you buy a medicine ball or kettlebell. You can do a lot of great body weight exercises that have an anabolic effect and not spend a lot on equipment.

Reality Check: Does This Sound Like You?

A professional runner can (and probably should) be expected to do three training sessions on their hard days. Their workout in the morning will be at least two hours, a weight room session that’s likely an hour mid-day, and a second run at night, somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Add one of Deena Kastor’s two-hour naps between the weight room session and the double run, then add the time it takes to cook a great meal for dinner, and they have a full day.

There is little chance that you have the time in your life to replicate this type of day. And that’s why you need to be mindful of what you choose to emulate when you scroll through your feed and see what your favorite runners are posting. Filter their images and stories through a simple question: does this photo — which looks so cool — apply to my training?

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About the Author

Jay Johnson is the author of the book . You can find him on social media , as well as at .

The post Copying the Pros: Do This, Not That appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Having coached marathoners both in person and online for well over a decade, I can safely say the change every runner has needed to make in their training is to focus on specificity. Specificity simply means that you’re training for the specific pace you are hoping to run on race day. While most runners also need to lengthen their long run, do more general strength and mobility after their run, and do strides on most days that they run, it’s specificity that is the first element we need to adjust.

Specific training starts from the beginning of training. Running strides — for just 20-30 seconds — just two or three days a week, starting in your first week of training, is a first step towards being able to put in a lot of work at marathon pace.

The old model of building a big aerobic base, then doing some speed work for a few weeks, and then “peaking” is dead. Today all these elements are present throughout training. 

I love using a car metaphor to simplify training: you need to build your aerobic engine with long runs, fartlek runs, progression runs, and threshold runs. You need to strengthen your chassis with general strength and mobility (and possibly some more work in the weight room). And you need to rev the engine with strides, at 5k pace or faster. It’s this last element that is rarely part of a marathoner’s plan in their first two weeks, and that’s a problem. 

Specificity Starts with Strides

Will you get injured if you do strides the first week of training? No. Strides at your 5k PR pace are relatively slow and a completely reasonable addition on the second or third day that you run. Let me explain, and please bear with me with one paragraph of math. I promise it won’t hurt!

Let’s assume we have a runner who has run 3:25 for the marathon and wants to run 3:20. If you choose any of the online performance calculators, you’ll find that this runner, when they’re in 3:20 shape, should be able to run 1:36 for the half marathon, roughly 43 minutes for 10k, and just under 21 minutes for 5k. Specifically, a 20:50 5k time is 6:40 per 1,600m, or 1:40 per 400m if we had this athlete run on the track. So 100m at this pace is 25 seconds (what a nice, clean number that is).

And that’s what we’ll use for this athlete – 25 second strides which need to be done at 5k effort. If you’re serious enough to do all the hours it takes to be a good marathoner, and you’re serious enough to be reading PodiumRunner, then you’ll want to go to the track and run 5 x 100m strides in your first week of training. For this athlete this means running 280m easy (most of the way around the second curve), then accelerate for 20m, then running the 100m straightway in 25 seconds. Repeat four more times. This helps you “groove the pace” and with just one more day on the track, you’ll be able to run this pace on your favorite path or road rather than finishing a run at the track.

Think about this: this is just 500m of running at 5k pace, which is one-tenth of the race distance. Obviously, this athlete could run an entire workout at this pace with just a few weeks of training.

From there, the 3:20 marathoner needs to get comfortable at half marathon pace. For this athlete that’s just under 7:20 a mile. Again, 7:20 pace, if you’re only running for a few minutes a time, is not challenging, even in the first or second week of training. And when you’ve done some running at 7:20 pace, goal marathon pace, which is 7:38 per mile, feels a lot easier. 

That’s the key to all of this – we want 3:20 pace to feel easy, yet for most marathoners, running more than 7-10 miles at this pace in the first month of training feels hard. My experience shows that when you have all three of these paces in your training in the first few weeks of your program, you’ll run a much better marathon. The problem for most marathoners is in their quest to run a marathon PR is that they’re never running 5k pace. 

Learning to Feel the Pace

Runners often ask me, “Should I learn to ?” Yes! You do need to learn to run by feel. This is one of the few skills you need to learn as a runner. 

Unlike your friends who play golf or tennis, or mountain bike or fly fish, and need to learn a variety of skills to have a good time, you only need one primary skill, which is running by feel. The recipe is then very simple: so long as your strides are at 5k pace (and you should be doing 4-5 strides at least three days a week) then you can run both half marathon pace and marathon pace by feel in the first month of training. 

The first workout you’ll do is a fartlek, specifically 30–40 minutes alternating 2 minutes at half-marathon effort with 3 minutes steady. What’s steady? It’s simply a pace that’s faster than your easy run pace, but slower than your threshold run pace. I know, that’s a big window. For many runners it’s a pace you would run for an early season long run, say a 10-12 mile long run that you might do in week 1 or 2 of a 20-week marathon program, slow enough to recover slightly while keeping the overall effort steady.

The next workout toward learning to feel a specific marathon pace is a progression long run. I think most long runs should be progression runs, which are simply long runs where you speed up a bit as the run goes on. An example is a 90-minute run where you run 60 minutes easy, then 15 minutes a bit faster, then 10 minutes a bit faster than that. You’re now at 85 minutes and you can back off just a bit for the last 5 minutes, then go directly to your general strength and mobility. Going straight into the non-running work is a great way to continue to get an aerobic stimulus. Each Strength and Mobility routine (aka SAM) is designed to have the harder exercises early in the routine, with the exercises getting easier, making this the perfect way to cool-down from a harder run.

If at this point you may be thinking, “Wait. Earlier you said there was a ton of math, and now you’re talking about ‘steady,’ ‘a bit faster,’ and ‘back off just a bit.’ How am I going to know if I should run paces off my Garmin or run by feel?”

Wonderful question, and it’s the crux of this article. 

When I work with an athlete for 20 weeks to prepare to run a PR in the marathon, they’re running mostly effort-based workouts for the first 6-8 weeks. I let type-A runners check their paces after the workout to make sure they’re not running too fast for the segments where marathon pace is assigned. Again, if you’re serious about running a fast marathon and you’re serious enough to have read this far, the chance that you’ll run slower than marathon pace in a 40–50 minute fartlek run is low. 

I firmly believe you need 20 weeks to prepare for a marathon, or at least busy adults with hectic lives do. Careers and children and life will undoubtedly cause some hiccups in training, and 20 weeks allows for a few 4-5-10 day periods of sub-optimal training. 

Over the course of 20 weeks there is plenty of time to both learn to run by feel early in the training, and then run enough work at marathon pace to run a PR. You will need to run lots of work at both marathon pace and half marathon pace to properly prepare to run a marathon. Yet, so long as 5k pace strides are in the training the first week, marathon pace and half marathon pace will feel comfortable.

20 weeks is a long time, so the shift from effort-based training in the first 40% of the training, to a strong focus on marathon pace training in the last 60% of the training keeps things fresh. And what allows for this smooth transition is running strides in the first week of training, and continuing to run them throughout training.

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About the Author

Jay Johnson, M.S., is the author of . He helps adult runners at .

The post Do These Strides to Prepare for Your Next Marathon PR appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

There are so many ways to improve as a high school runner. While the first thing runners and coaches focus on is running — volume, intensity and key workouts in the training plan — I want to help you embrace the importance of other, less “shinny” elements of training. Specifically, I’ll give you two things that you can control to become a better runner, and a mindset that you’ll need to adopt if you want to continue to get better, season after season.

Focus on What You Can Control

1) Sleep

One of the few bright spots for me during COVID-19 was interacting with professional coaches, professional athletes, high school coaches and exercise scientists during the Boulder Running Camps virtual camp. Two things repeatedly came up when these people shared their wisdom with the high school athletes, which are two things that every high school runner has some degree of control over.

The first, was the . Pete Julian, coach to American Record Holder Donavan Braizer and miler Craig Engles, said sleep is crucial for his athletes to handle the training he’s assigning them. Riley Macon, a college coach who has a master’s degree in exercise science, explained the two spikes of human growth hormone (HGH) that occur during a night of sleep. HGH is important for athletes of all ages, but especially important for the high school athlete whose bodies are adapting to the stresses of training while undergoing the physical maturation of adolescence.

So often high school athletes are – and rightly so – enamored with the workouts described on social media or in YouTube videos. What they don’t see is the lifestyle that supports this training, which includes much more sleep than normal adults. It’s cool to see a 10-minute highlight video of a 2-hour workout session, but it’s not interesting (or marketable) to show all the recovery needed to handle this work. Let’s be honest – sleep is boring, and sleep isn’t something a famous athlete can easily highlight in an Instagram post, yet when you ask them (and their coaches) what some of the keys are to running faster are, they’ll all say sleep.

How much sleep do you need?

You need a lot, and you likely need more than you’re currently getting.

The best tool I’ve come across to figure out what you need is from coach Paul Vandersteen, the boy’s coach at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Ill. His boys have won the Nike Cross Nationals, so he knows what it takes to become an excellent high school runner. He has a simple sleep chart that shows how many hours of sleep you need based on what time you must wake up. What’s genius about the chart is that at the top of it starts with the time you need to wake up, not the time you think you should go to bed. Your wake-up time isn’t up for debate: school starts at a certain time, or there is a time you need to get up by to meet your teammates for a long run.

From there, you work backwards. On the chart there are six categories: awful, bad, minimal, mediocre, good, and champion. If your wake-up time is 6 am but you’re only willing to go to bed at 10 pm, that’s minimal – which is eight hours of sleep. Good sleep is 9 pm, which means you’ll get nine hours of sleep. (As a collegiate runner, that was my magic number: nine hours of sleep, and not a minute less. It was the only way I could support my training of 80–85 miles a week in single runs).

What I love about Coach Vandersteen’s tool is that the numbers are clear: if you go to bed at 10:30 the night before you must wake up at 6:00 am, then that’s seven and a half hours of sleep, which is bad.

Check out his table at this end of from Consistency Is Key.

2) “The Little Things”

The second item that was repeated throughout the virtual camps is the importance of doing the “little things.” This always includes the work you do after the run – general strength and mobility, fascial release, and possibly some work in the weight room. And in some coach’s minds this includes the work you do before the workout, which is more than just a “dynamic warm-up.” While adult runners, who are pressed for time, may only be able to do prior to a hard workout, a sound warm-up for a high school athlete should include both mobility work and neuromuscular work.

You may be thinking, “Coach Jay – I know this. I know I need to do a solid warm-up and I already do 10-20 minutes of non-running work at the end of practice. This isn’t new.” True. But do you focus on these little things?

Consider this: more than one coach talked about the importance of being intentional when you do this work. You have time on your recovery runs to chat with friends, and your coach likely has some time at the start of practice for chit-chat, which is important. But once it’s time to do your dynamic warm-up you need to be focused and do the work exactly as you’ve been taught. Not only is this important for your long-term development, but it helps you slowly “build your attention span for hard work.” You’ve got to both do this work and do it in an intentional way if you want to get the most out of a practice session.

You and I can’t change who our parents are, so we can’t change the genetic talent we were born with. But one thing we can change is to build our attention span for hard work.

I encourage you to do choose to focus on little things today. Get a piece of paper and a writing utensil and write down things that are small enough to be doable, but big enough to be meaningful.

When I did this exercise, I decided that I’ll do two minutes of Phil Wharton’s hamstring active isolated flexibility work after each workout. This means that some days I’ll have to cut two minutes from the workout, something you probably won’t have to do. But I won’t commit to doing the whole 10-minute routine because I know myself, and I know I will struggle to cut 10 minutes from a workout.

Here’s the deal: If you’ve read this far then you want to become a better runner. Heck, you may even think about running several times a day. If that’s the case you likely don’t need to add more miles to your weekly training plan to improve. Instead, simply add one thing today that is small that you can control that will lead to becoming a better runner. If you can’t think of anything, do something to improve flexibility and suppleness. Fascial release work is great, as is Phil’s “rope stretching” work. Or, you can do some hip mobility from my .

Adopt a Long View Mindset

Now that you’ve committed to getting enough sleep to support your training, and you committed to doing the little things, and doing them intentionally, there is one simple mindset you need to adopt: “Keep the long view in mind.”

What do I mean by that? As a high school athlete your year is organized into four major phases: Summer training, cross country, winter training, and outdoor track (and yes, I know you may run indoor track, but it’s not as important to you and your coach as your outdoor season). Thus, most athletes will have 8–16 seasons in which to make a jump in fitness, depending on when they start running seriously. When you look at it this way, it’s easier to see that if you want to run your fastest in your junior year of track, and then have all four phases of your senior year go well, you’ve likely got a lot of time. Yes, you should work hard in every season and yes, you should expect to make improvements most seasons, but when you take the long view of your high school career you can take a deep breath and see that you have time — time to put in the effort that results in long-term progress, not just instant results.

Consider this: If you were a professional athlete, and specifically a 1,500m runner, you’d be training with intent roughly 11 months a year. Yet your focus would primarily be on the months of May, June and July (and August for the very best athletes). I recently heard a coach say that his best athlete — a female U.S. 1,500m runner who has run at the World Championships — was focused on the third race of the Olympic trails. Why the third race? You must run two qualifying races — a preliminary round and a semi-final round — to make the finals, and then you must be top three to make the US Olympic Team. This happens in mid to late June, yet this woman was putting in focused work months earlier. She didn’t have more than a couple of races in the winter. So, she’s training roughly 10 months for the biggest race of her life. That’s the type of long view I’m talking about.

You need this long-term view for two reasons. The first is that you need to have the patience to have the long view of your training in mind, know that your progression from season to season will not be linear, but will have some ups and downs. Second, if one of your goals is to run in college, you and your parents should feel comfortable asking your high school coach how the four years you’ll spend with them fits into an eight-year plan. Don’t assume that you need to be “undertrained” to run well in college. In fact, the opposite might be true, especially for young men, as the volumes they’ll need to run to be ready to compete over 10,000m in cross country will be significant.

When you combine the three topics we’ve just covered, there is a recipe for success.

First, get enough sleep to support your training. Do the little things and do them with intent. Then take the long view – ideally looking at the last five phases of your high school career as the most important — and trust that patient work will lead to great running in high school, and beyond.

Coach Jay Johnson is the author of . You can learn more about Coach Jay’s training philosophies for both high school and adult runners at .

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The modern, informed runner knows that before they start their run, they need to do some sort of warm-up. We’re not talking about static stretching, but rather something dynamic. I’ve been coaching for over twenty years and I’ve had athletes do a variety of dynamic warm-ups. When I was a collegiate coach, I had four different warm-ups for milers, each to prepare the athlete specifically for different types of workouts. In my years working with adult marathoners the warm-up typically consisted of two routines, which together, took between five and seven minutes. In both the cases the warm-up’s aim was simple: to properly prepare the athlete to safely handle the running that was about to occur.

Many runners I’ve worked with, especially busy adults with hectic lives, have blocked off 60 minutes – no more, and no less – to workout. Unlike high school, collegiate, and professional runners, who can (and should) devote 15 to 20 minutes of their 2-hour session to the warm-up, busy adults simply need a warm-up that is both short and effective. The following warm-up is short enough to be doable yet impactful enough that it will set you up for long stretches of injury free training.

One of my favorite books, that every runner should check out is Atomic Habits, by James Clear. In it, Clear says, “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.” For the modern runners there is little doubt that injury-free running, over weeks and months, is rooted in daily habits of doing the “little things” each day that you train. Show me a runner who is injury-free for months and I’ll show you a runner who does these “little things.” Healthy runners do general strength and mobility after each session, and self-therapy at least a few times a week.

The flip side is the injured runner needs to take a hard look at their training and ask, “what are the habits I need to instill to avoid the injury cycle I’m in?” If you want to do things you’ve never done before, then you’ve got to do things you’ve never done before.

It Starts With the Hips

So how do we stay injury-free? Obviously, an intelligent training plan and great coaching are important, but so are things as simple as a dynamic warm-up before every run. On the micro level we simply want a warm-up that is going to set you up to safely run the workout you’re about to do. If you only have a handful of minutes to warm-up, it’s crucial that you focus on getting your hips – both the hip joints, and the muscles surrounding them – ready for the pounding that will take place during the run.

Many common running injuries – a tight IT-band, a sore planter fascia, or something more serious like a stress reaction in the tibia or fibula (the two bones that make up the lower leg) – are often due to dysfunction at the hip. It makes sense that a warm-up that focuses on the hips would help prevent IT-band injuries. What’s less obvious is that injuries further away from the center of the body can often be traced back to dysfunction at the hip.

For these reasons, I assign every athlete I work with leg swings as the mandatory warm-up before each run. They do these dynamic exercises before their first step of running, and they do not static stretch. Once they’ve learned this routine it takes three minutes. Will this eat into your planned run time? Yes. And will it ensure that you can do more runs this year? Yes! Let me explain.

3 Dimensional Movement

One of the key reasons leg swings are so effective is they get your lower body working in all three planes of motion. What are the three planes of motion?

The first one you’re familiar with – it’s the “forward-backward” plane, called the sagittal plane. When we run, we move in the sagittal plane. There is a slight rotation at our hips and shoulder when we run, which you understand intuitively: as your left knee comes up, your right arm comes up too, and as that happens, your right shoulder moves forward just a touch. Your left hip has moved forward a bit as well, though this is harder to visualize. This rotational plane is called the transverse plane. The best runners in the world are so aesthetically appealing in part because they have very little transverse plane movement. Or as I like to say, they have quiet upper bodies. The coordinative aspect of doing leg swings prior to your run gets you moving in both the sagittal plane and transverse plane, preparing you to run more efficiently.

The third plane of motion is the frontal plane. Think of a short stop in baseball moving laterally to field a ground ball. If your next thought is, “but when I run, I don’t move that way” you’re right. Yet your leg can and should easily move in all three planes of motion at the hip joint, and so we’ll need to do some movement in the frontal plane as part of our warm-up, even though you won’t be moving in this plane when you run. Frontal plan movement helps build and maintain your overall athleticism, and athletic runners are less injury prone than unathletic runners.

The Swings

Rather than try to explain the warm-up here, please take two minutes and fourteen seconds and watch to learn the six exercises in the leg swings (LS) routine:

The six exercises are:

• 10 x forward/backward leg swing
• 10 x side to side leg swing
• 10 x hurdle trail-leg forward
• 10 x hurdle trail-leg backward
• 10 x bent-knee side to side leg swing
• 10 x bent-knee forward/backward swing

It will take you a handful of times to memorize the six exercises, which means this will take longer than three minutes. But soon this warm-up will take three minutes or less.

A Daily Self-Check

After a few weeks of doing leg swings before every run, this short routine will become a kinesthetic screen. That simply means that you’ll feel tightness or asymmetries some days that you won’t feel on other days. You can address these issues with some post-run work I’ll explain below. Most of my issues are on my left side. When I’m doing leg swings and my left quad is excessively tight, it’s a reminder that I’ll need to do some extra self-therapy after the workout. It’s also great information to link the previous two days workouts to today. You’ll often find that tightness comes 24 hours after a hard-ish session, and soreness comes 48 hours after a hard session (this is due to the phenomenon of “delayed onset muscle soreness,” known as DOMS).

This is great information to relay to your coach, and may mean you need to adjust your training. By no means am I saying that you skip your run or workout if you’re tight when you go through this routine. But I’m absolutely saying that you should use the kinesthetic information from the warm-up to inform what you do in the other 22 hours of the day (such as finding 10-15 minutes to get in some self-therapy if you’re overly tight).

The Minimum Habit

If you pay attention to what’s being said in the video, you’ll notice that I talk about doing the lunge matrix (LM). I used to have runners start with the lunge matrix, but I now have athletes make the leg swings mandatory – you don’t get to start the run without doing the leg swings. Then, if they have time, they can add the lunge matrix to the warm-up.

What I’ve found over the years is that the adult who feels rushed would often skip both routines, and long term that will likely lead to injury. For this reason, you simply need to ingrain the habit that before every run you’ll do leg swings. A quote a friend of mine likes to use comes to mind regarding leg swings: this routine is “small enough to be doable, but big enough to be meaningful.” Start with a commitment to devote three minutes to do leg swings before each run.

Add Ons


If you want to do more work in the warm-up, I’d highly encourage you to do so. You can add a variety of routines and exercises after you do leg swings. Here are two options I recommend:

The has worked for thousands of runners for years, though you’ll need to commit to two to four weeks of doing it before every run before you feel like it’s helping your run. For adults new to running, or new middle school and first year high school runners, I’ll often assign the lunge matrix at the end of the workout as a general strength activity. As with the leg swings, the lunge matrix gets you moving in all three planes of motion, and for this reason it’s a great routine to add to your training.

Alternatively, I love Phil Wharton’s active isolated flexibility work, aka “” — but as a cool-down, not warm-up. If you have abnormal tightness, or worse yet, if you have a significant asymmetry when doing the leg swings, you need to be doing this type of work after the run. If not then, do it an hour before bed (and ideally both, though I struggle to get in the second session – easier said than done).

The bottom line: You owe it to yourself to improve your chances of staying injury-free by devoting just three minutes to leg swings before each run. You can do more work if you want – and I recommend you do – but the key for the next 20, 30, 40 days is to simply do the leg swings before every run. Make it a habit, and soon you won’t have to talk yourself into it — it will be as routine as putting on your shoes.

Jay Johnson helps runners of all ages and abilities with free training articles and videos at . You can find him on social media at .

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In his new book, Consistency is Key, Jay Johnson draws on twenty years of studying the sport, working with high school, collegiate and professional runners, and learning from its best coaches to present 15 practical, fundamental principals to become a better runner. While directed at high school runners, the principals are universal and will help any runner unlock her or his potential.

In Chapter 11 Johnson presents one simple way to keep on top of your training, not buried under it.

Because we know that consistency in training is crucial for running PRs, we need to make sure that you’re not racing in workouts. The consistent runner wants to run hard in workouts, while also holding back a bit. How do you make sure you’re running hard enough to build your engine without running race effort in practice?

You need to finish workouts being able to say one of the following:

“I could have gone farther at the final pace if I had to. ”

“I could have gone faster at the end if I needed to.”

You should be able to say something along these lines at the end of almost every workout (the only exception being a time trial, where your coach instructs you to go “all out”). It’s even better if you can say both — that you could have gone farther and gone faster. If you can finish a long run, for instance, knowing you could have gone another mile or two at a faster pace than you were running at the end, you have successfully completed a controlled run.

If you race workouts on a regular basis — if you’re unable to go farther or faster — you won’t be able to properly practice race effort. On occasion, you’ll end a workout completely spent, especially if you’re getting serious about training and are motivated to work hard. A dedicated athlete will almost certainly finish a calendar year with one or two workouts that accidentally became race efforts. But don’t let that become your normal.

If your Saturday turns into a long race, that’s a more serious problem: your body isn’t mature enough to handle the hard long runs that a collegiate or professional athlete might incorporate. If that happens, it’s not the end of the world; you’ll simply need more time to recover from the intense stimulus.

If you let yourself recover after accidentally running race effort in practice, you’ll be ready for your next workout or race. And because high school athletes can often recover quickly compared to older athletes, you’ll be back to 100 percent in no time (as long as racing a workout is the exception, not the rule). While most coaches can tell if an athlete has gone all out, and not run controlled, recovery is ultimately your responsibility. Don’t be afraid of talking to your coach at the end of practice: “I ran all out today, coach. I know that wasn’t the point of the workout, and I wanted to let you know. I look forward to executing the workout correctly the next time. Is there anything extra I need to do to recover from today?” You want to run PRs and your coach wants you to run PRs, so this type of communication is crucial for you to be ready to train or race at full strength as soon as possible.

How does the principle of farther or faster relate to consistency? Simple. It means that you ran controlled. Running controlled for weeks at a time, with meets being the only days you run all out, gives you a better chance of staying injury-free and, ultimately, running fast races. It helps ensure that you’re “on top of your training and not buried under it.” Remember, you have a finite amount of energy for training. Your academic workload and family obligations put limits on how much sleep you can get during the week. Combine those two factors, and it’s crucial that while you train hard, you keep your workouts and long runs controlled so you are ready for what’s next.

Excerpted from the book Consistency Is Key: 15 Ways to Unlock Your Potential as a High School Runner, by Jay Johnson.

Consistency is Key is available on , or coaches can buy a bundle of books at a 10% discount at  if you mention “PodiumRunner” with your order.

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