Coaching Models and the LHR Way
For many years, much of my coaching came from a combination of experience and mentorship of the people who have coached me. I never questioned what or why they did it (still don’t), but just followed suit because it worked for myself and many others. What my high school coach did worked for us. What my college coach did worked for us. What my professional coaches did worked for us. Now, as I have gotten to a certain point in my coaching, I have had a strong desire to be able to pin down why we do things the way we do and be able to explain that reasoning. Whether it is for our athletes or other coaches, I have realized that these are important even if it is simply for legacy sake. Also, as we work through this, does my model work for different athletes, or does it need to shift, depending on who we are working with? So, let’s work through this together.
To be honest, what set this following thought process was because I was reading something from Steve Magness and it was about fatigue and modeling our coaching. They were two separate topics but lumped together in his writing. For me, I needed to separate the two topics out and then work through them. Within his discussion of coaching models, he describes four different modes- Mechanical, Experiential, Physiological, and Workout/Mathematical. That’s a great place to start sifting through.
The mechanical model is just that, focusing on mechanics over any physiological type adaptations. Sure, many distance runners are concerned about biomechanics, but I can’t think of any distance runner that sets up their entire training around fixing their biomechanics. I would say this is down the list of priorities. It’s certainly important, but not what we are modeling our entire coaching philosophy around. For LHR, this would probably round out our Top 5 priorities in coaching our runners.
The second model was experiential, where experience guides our training. I think back to my high school days of track. My coach was a good man, but he coached football and wrestling. Those were his sports. He coached track because we didn’t have one. He probably couldn’t have described anything about mitochondrial development or that there were two thresholds. I know I certainly couldn’t. So, we did workouts based on experience. What had worked in the past? What didn’t? We used experience to learn how to tolerate discomfort and if we replicated that in a race, then we’d do alright. And that was that! It worked, we had all kinds of All-Conference and Conference Champs, state qualifiers, and broke a lot of school records over my time there. So, you can’t say it’s wrong. I would say it’s a starting point for many runners. It’s incomplete, and will hopefully evolve in understanding why certain training is done and when it’s done. It’s not something I would abandon, just grow from it.
The third model is the physiological model, where our training is mostly written on the physiology required to perform well for a certain distance. All workouts have a specific physiological purpose. If you have read Hansons Marathon Method, you know that I spend a lot of time discussing physiology and the physiological purpose of the workouts. The idea is that if you improve certain physiological parameters, performance almost certainly improves with that. Obviously, not guaranteed, but you set yourself up well before even looking at any of the other factors involved with performance. It may sound like I am shying away from the physiological model now, but I still think this is true. I think for a person who is looking to perform well, learning physiology and writing training based on improving parameters is still key. I just think that when I wrote the Hanson Marathon Method book, Kevin and Keith wanted me to put some of the physiology into why their system works. So, I have always held on to that aspect. However, as we look at the fourth and final model, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not the sole way we’d look at coaching athletes.
With that, the fourth model discussed was the workout/mathematical model. The way I understand this is to think about the dating pace- or where you are right now. For instance, if I prescribe 3×2 miles at a marathon pace, your current marathon pace might be 7:15 a mile, but your goal marathon pace is 7:00/mile. So, we’d start at 7:15/mile, and then the next time is 7:10/mile, then 7:05/mile and then lastly would be 7:00/mile by the time we get to 8 weeks out from your goal race. Something like that. You start where you are at and gradually increase as your fitness increases. Also, along those lines physiological purpose of a specific workout may be secondary to simply doing a workout that is simply more race-specific.
When I think about that last part, I automatically think of track runners training for a championship-style race or trying to get through rounds of a race before racing a final. If you have ever watched the start of one of these races, the announcers call the pace “pedestrian” and it’s just a bunch of runners bunched up and tripping over each other. Then they gradually pick up the pace and the last 400-600 are just all-out sprints. Trust me, these athletes have done a lot of workouts to simulate these conditions. They trained for the race(s) being run, not just the physiological parameters needed for success.
Now, I don’t coach too many dedicated track athletes, but the idea of date pace work and race-specific work is certainly applicable to half and marathon training. Take, for instance, our Boston Marathon training plans. These are designed mostly to be able to handle the course and race to the course. Sure, physiology is important, but simply knowing what to expect on the course is probably at least just as important. Why, because most of the athletes running Boston are already high-level athletes and don’t need a ton of straight-up physiological work to expand these parameters.
When we look at these four different coaching models, where would LHR fit? As I look at it, I think, gosh, we are a little bit of everything. But at the end of the day, I believe we are workout-oriented based on experience. We are centered on what has worked in the past. We know it works as we have the results! However, we are workout-based as we do similar workouts throughout the training cycle which allows us to easily compare where we were to where we are now. Lastly, training the physiology of our athletes is certainly important. However, particularly with the half marathon and above, our number one goal has to be to train the athlete to the specific demands of the race. By default, this training will improve physiological parameters. It’s just that the workouts may not be specifically designed around particular thresholds.
I think about this, and I thought, well, maybe I am just cherry-picking ideas from the different models and taking what I like. However, the more I thought about that, the more I thought that it’s not necessarily picking one over another, but rather prioritizing where each model fits into your particular system. Each coach will probably incorporate a little bit of each of these models into their coaching system, it’s just a matter of where they place their value on each. For us, that level of preparation is specific to race prep demand. First, with physiological development, and second, which is largely based on the experience of the athlete. Lastly would be fine-tuning through biomechanical improvement.
Overall, I recognize that maybe this wasn’t an overly interesting read for the athletes, especially if you are in the camp of “tell me what to do!” However, if you are working on your own training plans, coaching others, or just want a deeper understanding of “why” then hopefully you got some value out of this!
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