Agree or disagree: Kyle Merber: "The value of training partners greatly outweighs the benefit of good coaching."

Your point here seems to imply that one rep in a session is more important than the totality of your training. That is incorrect. A second or two slower on a rep, or even bagging the last couple reps on a tough day means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

100% correct.

Part 1- Coaching and groups probably both very overrated: there’s plenty of top runners without 1 or the other or both.

Part 2- The difference between 13 and 14min guys is physical, obviously. The difference between a bunch of 13min guys is less obvious.

I'm 35, married, with kids, over a decade removed from my D1 days. If I were ever to try to get back to my "glory days" shape I'd start looking for a great training partner or group loooong before seeking out any coaching.

This says everything about Merber's intended audience and the applicability of his point to elite athletes.

I hear what you are saying but I think I meant the "over-all training quality, day in and day out" not the individual reps per se.

For most of us, we needed others to help keep the efforts really honest. You might not have needed that, but a lot of runners found training with others is the best way to get the most out of every rep, and every run.

I talked to a pro who had run on the Farm Team in the 90s and he told me that he had no idea what real training looked like until he joined those guys. He didn't mean that they had better workouts, he meant that they took everything more seriously, ran everything harder, and finished the reps with the correct effort & intensity.

That is why Africans and pros generally have teams in the first place, right? Imagine you did hill repeats and quarters for a year by yourself vs. with a team of runners just slightly better than you. Which would result in more improvement for most athletes?

That's not extreme... The baseline would obviously be following some generic 80/20 plan with track, tempo and long run. Kipchoge would do better training with his team and zero coaches rather then come to America solo and get coached by some elite coach. The same would go for the majority of people unless you only like to run solo.

It definitely is beneficial to have good training partners. You would want to define "Good".

1. Understanding the workout and not going crazy on the pace.

2. A relative peer in terms of pace so that you can trade off.

3. Committed to the process and available for the training.

So you can come up with a more individualized training plan without a coach; the training partner can do things the coach won't be able to do such as take the edge off a workout. I really find it beneficial to me to take my turn and let another runner lead at times and just focus on trying to stay right behind.

The best of both world would be to have both a good coach and a good training partner. A good coach would know how to match training partners up and individualize workouts as necessary. Maybe something not talked about a lot that a good coach would do is help with racing strategies. Overall pacing strategy but not just that but how to react to different moves during the race.

This is a great topic. I don't know why there are so many down votes. Even if you disagree it is still a great topic to discuss. I guess some people just miss the point.

There is a difference between a 5 mile tempo and 10 x 1k slightly faster with short rest. This is what separates the good coaches from the great coaches. Knowing that the difference does matter much.

It sounds like the statement of a guy who never had a good coach or good training partners and wishes he had both. Self-belief is important when you're talking about a) starting training, b) ramping training up, and c) differentiating between equally fit athletes or yourself in a two week period after running 3:34. The value of good teammates is tremendous not only for the training stimulus, making running fun, pushing you to compete, making running easier, and getting good feedback. Bad teammates can turn a lot of things bad. They can talk you down, puncture your self-belief, make you not want to try or compete. I see it with soccer and bad teammates affecting each other and making the team worse. They yell at each other constantly, blaming the other guy every time, running them down verbally, saying they'll never succeed. As a result, they underachieve as a team, don't play together, and get worse in comparison to other teams they played early and late in the season. That's youth soccer for you. In running, there's less of an effect, but there is an effect. Great coaches yield better training and better training partners as well.

That's a bit of a backflip. He trained alone while others were at the track. I like the cannon system - stops them from racing which is very common in training with 800m runners.

Is it possible Cruz has the best clean time ever?

The problem is that too many people think "the correct effort" is just "harder". In a group you get into a situation where someone feels good every day so you're running hard every day.

I'm struggling to think of someone from the Farm Team who really developed in that environment. Lunn maybe? Farm Team was mostly just a gap year environment for Stanford grads before they entered the real world. Like early OTC but less drinking.

Many pioneers of distance running didnt have training partners and were self coached. Eg. Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek, Ron Clarke, Frank Shorter to name a few.

In many ways coaches can hinder you from finding out what works for you because most of the time they are just guessing. Herb Elliot once said that he didnt like training partners because he felt they were just a distraction to what he was doing, and that guy never lost a 1500m his whole career.

So I said it’s really not any different than some of the hot take garbage opinions the BroJokes spew out.

Does Citius hide behind anonymous and inconsistent moderation too?