The DUMBEST platitude in the distance running community!

"You got this!"

Usually reserved for runners that definitely don't "got this."

I like to stand a out 200 meters into the race and just scream "almost there, you are in the home stretch now". Gets a laugh every time.

As breathing is my life, to stop I dare not dare. J.L.

Let the meat hang on the bones. Actually, that is an interesting idea. Also, Gobble gobble MF.

We are not running in any big NXR or NXN meets. We just want to win state.

"I haven't done any speed work yet."

“I was a little sick this week”

"You're almost there!". This does seem to work when I run with my dog, though.

Hot Take: "The miles of trials and trials of miles" from Once a Runner is the worst platitude. Actually, that entire book is the worst platitude of distance running. Once a Runner has broken more running careers than helped them. I'm serious. The ways to being a good distance runner include easy runs that support your workouts, and workouts that your support your races. But Once a Runners message is: run yourself into the ground. Run yourself into the ground with way too much mileage and way too fast a pace and workouts that are hard just to be hard. F*ck Once a Runner. Seriously

Then you just trust the garbage. Sometimes faith can move a mountainous ass.

Okay, I'll bite.

When an athlete says their training is garbage, what they really mean is that they SUSPECT that their training is garbage--they can't know for sure. It's also possible that whatever difficulties they are currently experiencing are temporary, or necessary, or just an indication of their own limited ability. And even if the coach IS a hack, it's very likely that if the athlete stepped in and coached themselves, they'd do even worse.

Given this, an athlete in this situation has three options:

1. You can go with your hunch (and distrust the process). This almost guarantees failure. Your doubts about the training will almost always enter your head in races.

2. Or you can trust your coach/training, which will at least give you a chance at success. You can make a conscious decision to believe that the coach might actually be right and you might actually be wrong. And you can recognize that even if it turns out that the coach makes mistakes in training, there's no guarantee you wouldn't make worse mistakes. And, training and racing with a brain that is not undermining you with doubts is much more important than whether you did repeat 400s or repeat 1000s. You will undoubtedly run better if you trust a bad process, then if you constantly question a good process.

3. You can leave your situation and find a new coach.

So, if you aren't willing to go with #3, then, yes, shut up and trust the process.

"I could have run 5 seconds faster" said after a 10+ second 5k PR.

"Where your dreams become reality"

“Alphas only”

"Just a time on my feet day"

mostly used when guys go for an easy run with an average over 7:00 pace and they have to point out the fact that they meant to chill and could have ran faster if they wanted to

After someone rocks an incredible time at any distance:

"He/She should move up"

Came here to post this

100% this. As a coach, I'm 100% guilty of doing this when I see an athlete starting to die off.

To the people hating on "trust the process", I spend a lot of time researching how to be train and develop young people, and while I'm FAR from perfect, I do ask my kids to trust the process. In the age of strava, so many of my athletes want to do what they see others doing, when all I ask of them is trust the foundations of what we do- long runs, threshold, and hills. Just because random fast dude from neighboring town did 3 sets of 3 all-out 200s yesterday doesn't mean we should, too.