Here are 5 common mistakes made by self-coached athletes, these from “The Self Coached Runner” by Al Lawrence. I’ll list his mistake and make it relevant to you:
1. Mixed Philosophies of Training– Lydiard? McMillan? Hadd? McLatchie? Lindgren? There are a lot of different programs out there, if you tend to pick one from column A, one from column B you will likely end up with mixed or less than desired results from your workouts.
2. Doing Other Runners’ Workouts– Reading what others do and trying to inject that into your schedule. Or worse, having a workout set and then being persuaded to hop into someone elses. If I’m at the track for 6 X 1 Mile and Shannon Stenger asks me to hop in with him for 20 X 200, I’d be much better off sticking to my plan.
3. Failure To Set A Schedule– from the book: “The reason you were so easily persuaded to run someone else’s workout was that you didn’t really believe you needed to run repeat miles anyway.” You’ve got to have a schedule you can trust and you must stick to it. If you don’t want, or have a coach guiding you, then you better be very self disciplined.
4. Doing the Workouts You Do Well– You need to work on the areas where you need improvement more than you need to feed your ego with easy (relative) workouts.
5. Doing Workouts That Impress Others– You were feeling good today so you added an extra 6 miles knowing that your friends will applaud your “toughness” and how amazing you are.
The USA Mile Championships are tonight in Minneapolis. We won’t have an entrant this year but look for some great racing and fast times.
We had a national class field at the 2008 Omaha Mile. Left to Right: Alice Schmidt, Ann Gaffigan, Casey Owens, Stacy Girard, Angee Henry. Also in the race but not visible: Anne Shadle and Rebecca Topham. Alice won in a Nebraska State all time best for a road mile in 4:38.52.
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