Written by Coach Steve

Develop Your Running Strategy

Strategy refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal and strategy will gather all you learn while training into a plan of action on race day. Accomplishing your long-distance goal depends on the decisions you make during training and race day too, and the best decisions are based on information gathered during the training season. 

Experimentation

Every week during your training is an opportunity to experiment and gather information on the results of your workout "experiments". Approach each long workout with a goal pace and approach each workout properly fueled and hydrated. During your workouts ask yourself how you feel, how’s your performance. After the workout over the next several hours, ask yourself the same questions, again the following day. Depending on how you paced yourself during the workout, the distance you ran,

 and the nutritional condition of your athletic body, the decisions you made regarding hydration and choice of electrolytes, your performance and recovery can range from poor to great.

Pace, Nutrition, Hydration

So how do you know what pace to walk or run? And what should you eat, and how much should you have drank over the last week? These and other questions have answers that are personalized to you, and you’ll learn the answers over the course of the season by experimenting with different paces, different foods, fluids, shoes, commercial sources of carbohydrate and the like. Good information is available from your coaches, books, the web and fellow runners and walkers. Most Saturday mornings with BOISE RunWalk you take part in group discussions designed to deliver important information, get you thinking in terms of choices and decisions, and to help you experiment during the season so that you may create a solid strategic plan for race day.

Putting it all together

Strategy uses information gathered from past decisions to make decisions about the present and future. The decisions you’ll be facing over the course of the training season and race day will cover a variety of topics (see table).

Training topics to consider in a typical training program

Conclusion and Recommendation

Use each training week to make decisions on nutrition, hydration, rest, recovery, electrolytes, pace, splits (etc), and monitor the results of your performance on mood, aches and pains, resting heart rate and overall wellness. Adopt the attitude that training involves learning, and learning involves experimenting, and strategy is about making good decisions concerning what works good for you.

BOISE RunWalk. Boise running!