Trust The Process

Hold the vision for long haul gains.

- Megan Mackenzie & James Montgomery

In a society driven by instant gratification, running can provide a wonderful illustration of how being patient and playing the long game can pay dividends.

As Arthur Lydiard, the great New Zealand running coach said, it takes five years to become good and 10 years to become world-class.

Whether your goal is to become the best runner you can be (given your lifestyle, work and family commitments) or to become the best in the world, the road map is similar.

For athletes, it can be really difficult to balance the desire to get the most out of yourself now, while trusting that the best version of yourself may only be five or 10 years down the line.

Complexity

Perhaps too often we hear the adage that instead of short-term goals we should embrace the process of training and take joy and gratitude from the discipline, patience and intention of what this entails.

Without a decent understanding of physiology, it can be challenging to see the importance of layering different training stimuli over years to get the most out of your body on any single day on your racing calendar.

For many, the thought of this may be either too daunting or boring to even comprehend. Instead we do as much workload as we can when we’re motivated, and try to limit the fitness losses when we’re not.

While for some this may provide some level of success, for most it just leaves us despondent, plateauing – or worse – injured.

Managing Intensity

What makes our job as coaches even more challenging is that for any endurance sport, but particularly running, the majority of our training will be at an easy to moderate intensity. The nature of this exercise is aerobic.