What's wrong with "feeling good" in training

I think the difference on feeling good comes in the line between intensity / volume vs fatigue. For example, a down week for us would either be the same mileage but lower workout intensity, or lower mileage with harder workouts. Either way, you could be heavy legged, but the fatigue difference is what makes the difference.

With the former variation of a down week, I would argue that it would be a scenario where we could get a little super-compensation going by letting our bodies readjust to some more easier miles. On the other end, the recovery rate from the workouts is much faster but the fatigue overall lowers because we've run xx less hours than the weeks prior. With the same mileage, I would argue my legs stay equally heavy and we are "running through" the races, whereas with the lower mileage, my legs are a little less heavy. I think it can vary heavily from team to team however, or for certain individuals. I suppose my answer was convoluted anyways.

Long story short, I think it's not a bad thing by any means, but feeling good can differ from team to team. In the case of the Stanford experience, it could just mean they're not going to back off of mileage while increasing intensity. At that level, having a higher adaptation turnover is to be expected. Of course, all of the training will be individualized at that phase of the season.

You watch flotrack? That's embarrassing.

Bumpity Bumpity Bump.

What did the session look like? Did it seem like the team was burying themselves?

I only ask because I wouldn't be surprised if teams/coaches talk like this sometimes. Especially in front of cameras. Usually when I watch workouts on flotrack I'm surprised out how much the athletes run within themselves. Sure, they're working hard, but they are not killing themselves in the workout. All stuff I wish I knew when I was younger.

But yeah, now I totally agree with you. Better to err on the side of feeling good than reaching too deep.

There is a fine line between making gains and being injured.

But if you're feeling too good you're not triggering an adaptive response. The athletes I have that are pushing the edge are the ones performing in competition. I have had a few athletes that had "watered down" the training I assigned. Seeing as I couldn't entirely control them I would observe to see if maybe that worked. In the long run it never did.

An example of that is the athlete that complains of some sort of pain the day before a race and asks to take the day to ice, roll, etc. It's mid season and the rest of the team is tired from training through their races. The rested athlete usually has a decent race but when the end of the season comes around and I reduce the volume for the others which usually results in a performance gain, the rested athlete from the middle of the season stagnates. You race how you train.

It's simple. They don't want their athletes to peak early.

I don't think that they will peak early from one down week unless it is a much bigger than 25% cut in mileage.

But if you are breaking down your athletes to the point that they never feel well during the season, doesn't that suggest that their muscles are not adapting to the work, that they are not re-knitting stronger and faster, and that they are heading for injury and slow season-end races?

Nothing at all is wrong with "feeling good at practice." Foolish distance running coaches run their teams into the ground with bullsh*t slogans like "no pain, no gain", "never take a day off", and garbage like that. I feel sorry for the runners on their teams because there are some coaches like that in the area I coach and every year I see their teams shoot out of the gate strong, often beating the team I coach, and then we are killing them at the end of the year in championship meets while their team is injured, stale, well past peak fitness, and just wants the season to be over. Every. Single. Year. It's not a coincidence. If you never give your athletes rest/recovery days over the course of the season, they may run well early, even into the middle of the season, and some rare individuals may thrive (although I suspect those runners bagged some hard days to get recovery they knew they needed), but the teams usually have a hard time replicating their early and mid season races because they are too tired, stale, or injured to run well. And as their race results deteriorate, their confidence wanes as well. They've raced it away in practice and earlier meets and ground themselves down too much to gain from a little bit of rest near the end of the season to try to peak.

As is often the case on these boards, we are tending towards the extremes without looking for the nuance.

I suspect that what the coach was getting at was far more subtle than "no pain, no gain" and all of those other tropes, and it isn't that he wanted his athletes to feel bad, but rather that they are focusing their energy on feeling good at regionals and nationals, and if that means training through those other races and feeling a bit tired as a result, so be it.

I work with individual athletes, not teams, so my experience is different than that of some others posting here. But in working with individual athletes, we commonly design our training for a goal race (most often a marathon or a half marathon). Everything in training is oriented toward that goal race, and performance at interim races may suffer as a result. For example, I had a woman that was training for the Chicago Marathon this year. She had several other races on her race calendar during the training cycle, including Peachtree and several local races. Our focus was on getting her a big PR and potentially an OTQ in Chicago. Everything in the training plan was oriented toward that. That meant that the week before Peachtree was one of her peak mileage weeks. We made a decision that we were not going to rearrange the training calendar to back off at all to perhaps get a better result at that race, because the focus was on Chicago. She ran an awful time for her fitness (although it was still her best time at Peachtree), and we kept moving on.

It wasn't that I wanted her to feel like crap that week, it was just that I didn't care if she was prepped and ready for that race because that race wasn't the goal for her training. Same thing with our local races - we trained through those too. But when she had a good day and ran a new 5k PR three weeks before Chicago, I wasn't at all bothered that she felt good, I was still just focused on the fact that her training was all oriented toward Chicago, where she ran a 2:30+ PR but narrowly missed her OTQ.

In fact, CoachB, I think one of your athletes probably had a similar race profile during that time, with a series of so-so races leading up to Chicago, but then crushing Chicago and getting a healthy OTQ in the process. I suspect that your attitude toward her interim races is what the Stanford coach's was trying to convey.

My coaching philosophy is far from those coaches` talking about "No pain,no gain" and sometimes doing workouts too hard so the runner will throw up or almost....

In my world of coaching the workouts should be designed at exactly best individual pace , and that pace has always a good space from being too hard. Gain without pain and smart training is my motto.

When I've made my best progress it's where I'm just recovering enough to handle the workouts as the workload gradually increased over the season/cycle. If the workouts themselves get too hard, or I'm doing too much between and start needing to empty the tank to finish workouts...then it's too much. Eventually somethings going to give and I'm going to have to back off way to much and lose progress, or just hammer my head at the same workouts not being able to progress anything because I'm too fatigued.

E.g. running 5x1000 at 3:15 first week of the season and repeating over and over doesn't get you anywhere....something has to progress. That 5x1000 needs to get short recoveries, more repeats, longer repeats, or get faster to continue to drive adaptation. The only other thing you can do is just run more overall mileage, which does increase the training stress and drive some adaptation, but in season usually not the same as you can get from driving workout progression.

For me, it's always worked best to cycle four weeks. Each week gets just a little harder than the last, to where I'm getting pretty tired (but not quite to the brink of cracking apart) at the end of a third week. Usually then it's two or three days of short, very light recovering, a moderate workout, and then if I'm recovered enough back into it...or another easy day or two if I still don't have my legs back.

No

The question is "what's wrong with feeling good in training?"

Obviously, one will train through races up until the goal race.

We're talking about runners who are in a perpetual state of fatigue and not able to fully recover from workouts. One should feel pleasantly tired throughout a training cycle but never overworked.

Here's to feeling good all the time

There is a fine line between reaching one's potential and stress fractures and other overuse injuries. Unfortunately no two individuals are the same.

You can ramp up the intensity and miles with younger people and actually see results---for a time---with the stronger or lighter athletes. However this mentality eventually does not work. So I agree with you 100%. In addition in high school we are teaching lifetime habits. They will eventually learn that NO PAIN NO GAIN does not work. Unfortunately for many of us we only see our 20s once.

Perhaps some coaches think they can re-invent the wheel or that they have a secret. That is a problem sometimes.

Seriously, why not just let the athlete have a moderate 2 or 3 days before Peachtree (or whatever race) so they can at least feel good going in? Is that really gonna ruin the whole training plan?

Some places have so many top athletes that they can afford to weed out the talent and still have some good runners afterwards. Stanford has always been that way and always will be because of their weather and the school.

We took it easy on the front end of her week and backloaded the latter half, but for a woman running 80-90 miles per week, that still meant she was running lots of miles the week before. The big mileage weeks are fairly important in marathon training and based on what her workload looked like leading up to that, with some big weeks before it as well, it wasn't worth sacrificing the key workouts or the volume for a race that was never the goal. And that race came right towards the end of an important phase of work at some of our faster speeds. This was a woman coming off of a spring marathon and that speed work was important for her long term development (she's only 28), to keep her from losing all of her ability to turnover. Plus, she always had some challenges in focusing, so keeping her on task was important.

I get what you're saying, and I acknowledge that my position is equal parts intuition, judgement and science. Not everyone would make the same decisions, but that doesn't mean there's only one right approach. In the end, it got her a two and a half minute PR (over a PR established on a downhill course).

You know, whenever I am feeling good in training something goes ping the next day.

It's "coach speak." It is a way a coach can deflect any bad midseason race performances. "Don't worry we are "training through" this meet. We'll be good at the end of the season." It's a cover your ass statement to tell the team to keep doing exactly what coach says and not worry about results, and then HOPE that they actually DO run fast at the end of the season.

Then if they DO run fast mid season you can say "See, and we are "training heavy" right now, imagine how good you are going to feel and how fast you are going to be at the end of the year."

It's just a "thing coaches say."

OF COURSE the end of the season is the most important and WHEN you are supposed to run fast. Coaches say it, but its obvious. There is no alternative.....coaches don't say "we are really going to back off our training for this mid season invitational, even though that will compromise your end of season performance." Even when coaches DO EXACTLY THAT in an effort to gain points at Notre Dame......they don't advertise it to the team.

It's coach speak, pay no attention to it.

Cross country coaches have the best jobs in the world. They get to talk about how NONE OF THE COMPETITION RESULTS MATTER until the end of the season. There is very little accountability for performance, and it is perpetuated by the accepted coach speak. "we're training through" blah blah blah