Happy to answer fans of the pod. You can thank Jon for getting me to reply!
My book lays out the principles and foundation of my training beliefs. It's heavily science and training program based. Meaning, it's more of how to write training and develop athletes performance abilities.
What we talk about in the podcast, is how to implement and coach. The art of it all.
The foundation of history and science has to be known in creating workouts and training schedules. But from there, the art of implementing is what matters.
It's not that everything is by feel or that we haphazardly select our workouts, it's that behind the scenes we have an idea of the type of stimulus we are trying to get, but the art of coaching is in getting that out of them.
So for example, we talk a lot about trying to get athletes to feel the right effort instead of letting the watch dictate it. So in my sessions I might know that we are targeting a high end aerobic workout, but I'm going to put the focus on the feeling of the tempo versus the pace.
Or if you want concrete examples, with Natosha Rogers, when she was coming back, most of our workouts were focused on a particular effort level and reaching a particular difficulty, versus an exact pace. My goal is to teach the athlete what we are trying to do, then give them the freedom and flexibility to do it.
I see my ability to manipulate a workout as my toolbox. Too often we get caught up into doing exacting workouts and think the only way to improve is to do more or faster work. So we do our 5x1mile at 5:00 pace, then two weeks later do it at 4:50 pace. This only addresses one physiological component.
In reality we can manipulate the recovery, density, pacing, environment, etc. But we can also manipulate how the athlete copes with the workout psychologically. And the more I coach, the more the attention I am giving the athlete, and to what the athlete is giving attention matters.
Use the tools you have. What tool you pull out depends on what the athlete needs. So if he or she has become a slave to the watch and only can pace because of that external feedback, then my job as a coach is to give them skills necessary to turn this into a internal skill. So, bye bye watch, hello pacing by feel. If I know an athlete struggles with mentally staying engaged when it gets tough, then instead of doing 5x1mile at 5:00 pace w/ 3min rest, I might do 4.5 miles of alternating 800m in 2:30 and 800m in 2:55ish, so that I get very similar pacing and physiologic stimuli, but I've changed the workout so the athlete can never truly disengage (because running 2:50-55ish after a 2:30 still takes focus!
Hopefully that answers some of your questions. If not, tweet at us and we'll try to answer your question on a future podcast!
I'd also suggest listening to episode 27 where we go into specifics of training for the 800m:
http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2016/02/new-podcast-training-for-800.html