GAMIFY TRAINING TO MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU

Instead of sticking to an iron-clad structure and numbers, I've tailored it to what motivates me, borrowing from the community around me and learning from their training.

I AM KNOWN as the guy who runs absurd distances that many people don't even like to drive, so you'd think that I must have training dialed in. It's actually the opposite. As a goal run or race approaches, of course, my running frequency ramps up, but I've always kind of hated structured training. The two jokes I tend to pull out when someone brings up my being an ultrarunner are: "I love ultrarunning because it doesn't involve as much running" and "I never learn my lesson."

Before I ever started running, I did just about every other sport-like hockey and lacrosse-and was super competitive. Back then, training meant doing tons of drills, listening to coaches, executing, repeating, whatever it took to get stronger, faster, more skilled. As I got older, and into high school sports, coaches got a bit tougher, and I got a bit more rebellious. The same stubbornness that gets me through a long night on the trails was, at that time, channeled into trying to prove a coach wrong or do something in a different way. In the end, it created more internal friction with the concept of training.