How long do you "trust the process" for before moving on?

trust the Drinking

when you have a Drink, it can feel like an old friend

welcoming you in from the cold

if you do not incorporate Drinking

into your training

then you are not training at all

and therefore there is no trust

Drink, and train, Drink, and train

enjoy it, my Drunk friend

"Trust the process" is only invoked when things don't go well. I like to quote a famous RINO:

"Trust but verify"

If you're getting sick, broken down, or following the process is causing you far more unnecessary/avoidable everyday problems than the old way, then you dump it once any of this becomes clear, whether you realize it the day of, three weeks in, 2 months in, etc.

Usually though, you're not following any new approach unless there are clear immediate signs that it's working, or you're being forced to for some reason.

What made me think of this was all the threads about people's experience with double threshold and something I often see repeated is how it "takes time" and to "trust the process." But obviously, not every training will work for everyone or not be the best fit for someone so it got me thinking about what people define as "enough" with a certain training system.

With Double T you never move on bc it’s a cult

If you increased mileage but didn't improve race time is the only way to know something didn't work

Or if you kept mileage the same for long period but changed methods other ways and still clearly improved shows that something worked.

It can be misleading because your training history can have long term bias to results, eg. if you had volume but switched to low volume method or other way around you can still "carry" the benefits from the previous phase for months and think that your new methods alone made you faster.

I improved HM after 6 wk of running full marathon with low volume but fast training, but it could be I still had the effect of "base" from marathon training and that why it worked

One full buildup to an A race. If you decide to do Daniels (or whatever), do a full cycle and then re-evaluate. That's what you need to know how a program works and if it works for you. The only exception is if you're breaking down in some way. In that case, bailing out is warranted.

Low heart rate training such as the “Maffetone method” is where I’ve seen the phrase “trust the process” invoked the most.

Until an event happens, injury, bad race or a string of bad races, etc. When you know its time to move on

It depends if it's a system with periodization.

If you're in a long base phase, there will obviously be a time when you aren't race sharp, but that's not to say it won't pay off later in the year/season. However, even under these types of systems people can still see improvements in different areas e.g. lower heart rates, faster easy or threshold paces, etc.

As a general rule, if you're seeing no improvements in any discernible metrics, then I'd probably change it up after 3 months.

What annoys me most is when people tell this to runners who definitely shouldn't be trusting their current process.

My Strava feed is full of people whose training process is rotten all the way down, and yet you'll still see people consoling them after their endless string of bad results with "trust the process".

You aren't helping anyone.

I ran big mileage for several marathon blocks without results. I cut my mileage significantly and ran great. At the surface level I thought I was onto something. I later learned that it was the years of mileage that made the difference.

In a Q sense, waiting for HRC to get arrested, along with the rest of the cabal.

73 days.

I had the same experience.

Pumped the miles up bigly for 4'ish years and had mixed results at best.

Went back to roughly the mileage I did before pumping the miles bigly for 4 years.

Best form of my life for a few years.

Was it worth it? Idk. I had more crappy runs on tired legs in those 4 years than the rest of my running career put together.

That's funny. I ran 2:37 at age 24 after not really running for 2 years. I immediately assumed that.I coukd be elite if I trained. I got up to 80 MPW a year later and was consistent for several years but never ran faster than 2:34. I wish now that I had stayed at 40 MPW to see what could have been.

I think you've got to give a new coach/training plan/program a year, or pretty close to a year. If you don't see big results in the first few months it might be because it's all geared towards actually peaking at a certain time of year.

But if things aren't going well, you also have to look at yourself. Are you taking care of your body? So many college kids start getting crap sleep, drinking too much, terrible nutrition, and then they blame it on the program they're in.

In my case, I trusted the process for too long. I was a 400/800 guy who was I told I could become a great 800/miler if I trained under a certain successful college coach. I took that coach on his offer and followed his training plan, yet that success never came and I wasted 4 years "trusting the process." The coach blamed me for my lack of success, so I left and trained on my own, where I was able to run faster than I had in years by training similarly to how I did in HS.

If you want to take anything from my experience, it's that you should give "the process" one season at most. If your new ways of training are making you worse, don't double down. In my case, I felt like I was dying at the end of my races because my lactic endurance system was totally untrained, whereas in HS I was known for my kick - a sudden and drastic change like that should be a huge red flag that things aren't working.