There are a million ways to skin a cat, and even more ways than that to make something simple sound complicated and novel.
Social media is excellent at this. The problem is that the consistent, boring stuff doesn't get clicks so content creators are forced to come up with new and exciting ways to say the same things.
Whether these things are new, reframed ways of saying what we know works, or just useless nonsense, isn't always their concern.
While you can dress up the same old things differently, underneath, it's always still the same old things. I think know what these things are and really grounding yourself on them can help you become a better, more mature and ultimately healthier runner.
I call these things "The Basics" because I'm not very clever or creative.
I live by "The Basics" when it comes to everything about my running. This includes:
How I approach training
What I spend my time worrying about
The tools I use to achieve goals
Literally everything else
What are the basics of running?
I boil down the basics to a few key ideas. These aren't new or clever ideas, they've been known for decades and better runners than me have used them to great success.
Basic Principle One: Consistency is king, always
This simply means that what you do over several months, will always mean infinitely more, than what you do in a given day or a week.
Consistency means getting out when you don't want to, when it's raining, cold or hot. It means sticking to the plan despite your brain giving you every reason - valid and invalid - to just skip this one.
Consistency is the golden rule of running and is the first thing I preach to people when they ask how to improve.
Consistency in actually running
Consistency in a minimum volume
Consistency in quality workouts if speed is your goal
To stick to this rule even when it's hard, I have two main methods.
Something is better than nothing.
If I have a 8 mile threshold planned but my brain really doesn't want to, i'll let myself say i'll just do an easy 5k instead. By the time I'm at 5k, I end up doing what I initially planned anyway.
Even if I do end up just running the lesser amount, it's still fine and I can not give myself a hard time because I got out and most important, stayed consistent
This rule can even be applied to full weeks. If i'm unwell or just going through a lot outside of running, I can turn a week of hard training into a week of less hard training. This is much more rare but has been known to happen.
The excuses from my brain aren't real
When you really want to skip a run, your brain will give you a ton of really genuine, valid reasons to do so. These are compelling because it's your brain that wants to skip, and it's your brain that is giving you the reasons why. Of course they're going to sound good.
So how do you get around this? Not easily unfortunately, and not without practice.
I hesitate to call it discipline, but it is a form of just gritting your teeth and getting it done.
The best method I've found for this is just the knowledge that I will always feel better for just getting it done. This, combined with the something is better than nothing rule, and the last rule below, are more often than not, enough to get me out the door.
Basic Principle Two: There are no special workouts
Running, as far as I'm concerned, is a solved problem. There's no unknown scientific breakthrough that is going to take my training from where it is, to Olympic level. There might be new discoveries that take world class athletes further below two hours, but that will never impact me.
Everything that can help me improve as a runner, is known, established, and available to learn on the internet.
How I use this information, is in planning my workouts. I stick to the essentials and combine that with my first principle, do them consistently.
The basic workout types as far as I'm concerned are:
Sprint training
Intervals
Threshold work
Long runs
Long runs with work
Now of course these can be diced in clever ways, but the core ideas remain the same.
The energy systems being trained, the impacts and adaptations you're aiming for, and everything else, are the same.
Basic Principle Three: The stats for a single run can be largely ignored
This principle is probably the single most useful when it comes to helping me train properly with a focus on the longer term.
Avoiding the trap of over analysing every single run is so important. You can get lost very quickly in the details of a run. Modern running watches give you more data, numbers and things to think about then ever before, and the sad truth of 99% of those numbers, is that they're largely useless when looking at a single run in isolation.
Now of course, your pace, distance and some heartrate metrics are useful for a single run, but pretty much every other metric can be glanced at and ignored if you're only looking at a single run.
The reality is that improvement in running, to a level where all of your numbers show it, takes lots of time and many many runs.
During those many runs on the road to improvement, your numbers will get better, get worse and bounce around in the middle. Some weeks will show less progress than others and some days will just be hard.
Focus on trends over time, not single runs
This means your numbers cannot be trusted for any single run, each metric is a tiny piece of a larger picture that with training, you are putting together. Some pieces are nicer than others and together, they're all vital to the finished product. But alone, they don't tell you much.
All of the other metrics can be used of course, they are far from useless. But their value is in trends. How they develop over time, which way are they trending in general. That information is more valuable than any single number from one run.
The most commonly over analysed running metrics
VO2 Max. It's a trendy number, so checking every run to see if it's gone up is natural. But it's also pointless. Your watch never really knows your VO2 Max, it's estimating. Plus, your watch doesn't know a myriad of things about your life that go into how it estimates your VO2 Max. A bad night sleep, a deceptively warm day or a hilly course that doesn't show actual elevation can all plummet your VO2 Max, without much about your body changing.
Basically all running dynamics metrics. This includes metrics like cadence, ground contact time and things like that. These metrics are so changeable between runs, and mostly useless as training signals, that they should be looked at with caution when assessing trends, and mostly just glanced at for single runs. How these change over time does matter and is important feedback for all runners, but spending time overanalysing these with the data point as a single run is largely pointless.
