A Runner Must be Calloused to Their Distance
Bowerman's Training Principles
8. A runner must be calloused to their distance.
Some call it grit. Others name it determination, fortitude, or toughness.
However you choose to express it, effective training of competitive runners must harden not only the body, but also the mind.
Running for a given distance at your near-maximum is a difficult proposition. To successfully sustain this type of effort takes focus, clarity, and internal peace. These are characteristics that are hard earned only by regular exposure to tough training tasks.
The pursuit of these characteristics and the crucible one must pass through to realize them, I think, separates the recreationalist from the athlete.
In general, the recreationalist runs for enjoyment. The competitive athlete runs to test their limits.
While both have fun in their pursuits, they live in separate worlds.
The recreationalist is looking for a good time, the competitive athlete is looking to redline.
The recreationalist wants to feel pleasure while they’re running. The athlete waits to feel pleasure until after they finish running.
There is nothing inferior about the recreationalist’s approach, nor superior with the athlete’s. They’re just different.
When training a competitive athlete, coaches are wise to consider the callousing effect their program will have. This doesn’t mean overload the athlete to the point of exhaustion every session. It’s foolish to grind every day. The body improves during periods of rest following stress. But the catalyst to improvement is strategically employed exhaustive efforts that serve to harden the athlete’s constitution.
This is why workouts work:
frequent exposure to difficult situations signals adaption in the organism to meet the applied demands.
Easy runs don’t do this. By definition, they’re easy, absent of any difficulty. The purpose of easy runs is to facilitate the repair and recovery process needed to adapt from strenuous workouts. They’re the yin to the workout yang.
Bowmeran understood this balance with his Hard/Easy training philosophy. He recognized that linearly increasing an athlete’s overall training volume and difficulty of work would not equate to proportional gains in performance. In fact, doing so would more likely lead to burnout or injury.
To him, effective training was a pulse of highs and lows. Sometimes the athlete would perform “bear workouts” and run 20 - 30 miles in a day, most of it at moderate to high intensities. This would both substantially callous and breakdown the athlete.
To restore them from these tough efforts, the days following bear workouts would be no more than 20 - 30 minutes of very light jogging at slow speeds on the grass.
Intelligent application of Bowerman’s Hard/Easy method — later adopted by many successful Kenyan and Ethiopian runners — produces the following cause and effect: Train Hard, Win Easy.