Doing Other People's Workouts

My friend Lorin was complaining the other day about his recent race performances. "I don't understand it," he said. "I've been doing really good workouts on the track with Terry, but when we race 5K, I'm a minute behind him."

"And how have those workouts felt?" I asked him.

"Really hard! I've been trying to run with Terry as long as i can. I get through most of the workout OK, but I kind of die on the last couple of intervals. It's definitely my hardest day of the week."

"Well, maybe you're too tired from your workouts with Terry to race well on the weekends..."

Lorin allowed that it was possible that his track workouts were too demanding, but the very next time he stepped on the track, he repeated the pattern he had set for himself, exerting himself to the utmost to stay with his teammate in the early stages of the workout, and then dying at the end.

His experience is all-too-common. It's very easy to fall into the habit of running someone's else's workout in the hope of matching their race performances. It rarely works and often leads to frustration and setback. The way I see it, there are two problems with training by imitation: the first is that everyone responds to training differently -- what is right for your running buddies isn't necessarily optimal for you; the second is that training isn't just about what you do for an hour on the track once or twice a week -- it's the entire picture of stress and recovery that takes place over weeks and months. It's sleep patterns and diet and cross-training and stress at work. What you do on the track doesn't operate on your fitness in a vacuum.

Now I don't fault Lorin for wanting to work harder to improve. Nor do I deny how useful it is to be able to run with people rather than by oneself. running with others is a really good way to get more out of yourself than you thought was possible. But it does more harm than good if running with others means running too easy or too hard for your own fitness. In Lorin's case, I might suggest that if he was trying to "step up" the intensity and duration of his interval workouts, he might have to wait for a while to see results. After all, Terry had been doing similar workouts for years.

I think it was Peter Coe (Sebastian Coe's father and coach) who articulated the principal that in training, one should strive to achieve the desired results doing the least amount of work. That amount might be more than what your buddies or less, or it might be very, very different.

If you want to train more effectively, start by asking yourself whether your workouts are based on what is best for you, or are based on what everyone else is doing.