There's an obsession in endurance sport with finding the perfect training plan.
The perfect weekly mileage. The perfect interval session. The ideal balance between training and recovery. We're constantly looking for the next thing that's going to make us faster.
And when something doesn't go to plan? A bad race, a disappointing workout, or a couple of weeks where progress seems to stall? Suddenly, everything needs to change.
The entire program gets questioned.
But what if the biggest improvement you could make to your training had very little to do with the sessions themselves?
What if you just needed to get out the door more often?
Build the foundations first
When an athlete first comes to me for coaching, one of the first things I look at isn't necessarily how fast they're running or what their training zones are.
It's how often they're training.
For many athletes, the biggest opportunity for improvement is simply establishing more regular movement throughout the week.
I'm talking about almost daily movement, sustained over months and months.
If someone comes to me running twice a week, perhaps 5–6km each time, my initial focus isn't on introducing complicated interval sessions or dramatically increasing their weekly mileage.
I want to understand their lifestyle, their availability and what other physical activity they're already doing.
Are they cycling? Swimming? Going to the gym? What does their working week look like? What commitments do they have outside of sport?
From there, we explore how to introduce more frequent training.
Perhaps that's adding another running day. Perhaps it's finding two additional opportunities for movement throughout the week.
The goal isn't to make every session harder. It's to build the habit of training more regularly.
We'll often spend the first 10–12 weeks doing exactly that before worrying too much about the finer details.
I like to think of training like building a house.
So many athletes are worried about putting the roof on their house, but they've completely neglected the concrete slab and all the framing that needs to go up first.
The fancy workouts, race-specific sessions and detailed performance targets are the roof.
Your ability to consistently train, recover and repeat is the foundation.
Without that foundation, there's not much point worrying about the roof.
Frequency matters
Training frequency is something I place a lot of importance on as a coach.
I'd often rather see an athlete complete more frequent, manageable sessions than squeeze their entire training load into two or three big days.
This doesn't mean everyone needs to run seven days a week. The appropriate frequency depends on the individual, their training history and what else they're doing.
And I want to be clear about something. Fatigue is real, and recovery is incredibly important. We need to give our bodies the opportunity to adapt to the training we're doing.
But I think we sometimes approach recovery from the wrong direction.
If an athlete is consistently pulling up so sore or fatigued from a run that they're unable to train the following day, there's a reasonable chance that the original session was simply too much.
Rather than automatically adding another recovery day, perhaps we should be looking at what happened in the session that created the need for it.
Could we reduce the duration? Lower the intensity? Distribute that training load more evenly across the week?
Something I often think about during my own training is:
Where do I draw the line on today's run to ensure I can run again tomorrow?
It's a simple question, but one that has a big influence on how I approach training.
Of course, I still get it wrong sometimes. I push a little too hard, run a little too far or underestimate how much fatigue I'm carrying. We all do.
But if that's happening every other day, perhaps it's time to reconsider how we're approaching our training.
Not every session needs to leave us exhausted. In fact, most shouldn't.
I think the internet has created a lot of unnecessary fear around training frequency and overtraining. Recovery deserves respect, but so does the process of gradually developing our capacity to train.
Many recreational athletes have considerable room to develop that capacity, provided they build towards it progressively.
The goal isn't to see how much training we can survive today.
It's to establish how much training we can consistently absorb, recover from and repeat over time.
Missed a session? Move on.
Life happens.
Work gets busy. The kids get sick. Something unexpected comes up, and suddenly that afternoon run isn't happening.
That's fine.
We move on.
One of the things I reinforce with my athletes is that we don't need to make up every missed session.
If you miss a run once a fortnight, or even occasionally once a week, it doesn't mean the entire program has fallen apart.
We simply pick things up where the program is prescribed.
Part of my role as a coach is helping athletes understand which sessions carry the most importance.
There will generally be key workouts or longer endurance sessions that we prioritise, alongside shorter, easier sessions that provide additional training volume.
If something needs to go, perhaps it's that easy 30-minute mobility run.
The athletes who tend to find their feet in endurance sport are often the ones who develop good organisation and discipline around their training.
Not because their lives are less busy, but because they've found ways to make training a regular part of them.
Consistency doesn't require perfection.
It requires a willingness to keep moving forward.
When things start working, don't change everything
Here's something I've been guilty of myself.
You start training consistently. You begin feeling stronger. Your pace improves, your fitness develops and suddenly you're thinking about what else you could be doing.
Maybe I'll add a few extra kilometres this week.
Maybe I'll run this easy session a little quicker.
Maybe that workout should be a maximum effort.
Before long, you've started changing the very things that were working.
We're a crazy breed, endurance athletes.
When something isn't working, we want to change it.
When something is working, we want to change it too.
It's easy to get ahead of ourselves, particularly when progress starts coming quickly.
But we're never invincible.
The small improvements we make over time are built on the ability to keep training. Getting injured, becoming excessively fatigued or constantly pushing beyond what's prescribed can quickly interrupt that process.
Sometimes the best thing you can do when training is going well is simply keep doing what you're doing.
Good training is often boring
If you look at many of the programs I prescribe, they're not particularly exciting.
An easy run.
An easy run with strides.
Another easy run.
A workout.
A long run.
Another easy run.
Repeat.
There's no magic session hidden in there.
And if you look at my own Strava, you'll see much the same thing.
I'm not posting incredible workouts every day. Most of the time it's another 35-minute easy run, perhaps with a few strides thrown in.
Not exactly the sort of thing that's going to turn heads on Strava.
But something is happening on nine days out of ten.
That's the point.
We're accumulating training, developing habits and gradually building the capacity to do more.
It's not always exciting. Sometimes it's monotonous.
And there's certainly a place for more specific, challenging and carefully structured training as an athlete develops.
But those things become far more valuable when they're supported by months and years of consistent work.
Stop searching for perfect
I think one of the biggest mistakes athletes make is assuming their training needs to be more complicated than it actually does.
The internet makes it incredibly easy to question what you're doing.
There's always another workout to try, another training philosophy to explore or another athlete doing something completely different.
But before you start worrying about whether your program is perfectly optimised, ask yourself a simpler question.
Am I consistently making the most of the training opportunities I already have?
Because if the answer is no, there's probably a much bigger opportunity for improvement sitting right in front of you.
Build the slab. Put up the frames.
The roof can wait.
Rhys Jones, Pacecraft Endurance Coaching
Personalised running and triathlon coaching based in Rockhampton, QLD.
Find your pace. Build your craft.