The Best Thing for Beginner Endurance Athletes to Do

It can feel overwhelming - to say the least - when beginner endurance athletes are trying to decipher what they should do in their training.  What is the best thing for beginner endurance athletes to do?  The answer is simple, but it’s not easy.

Read this Coach Tip Tuesday: 

https://www.fullcircleendurance.com/blog/coach-tip-tuesday-the-best-thing-for-beginner-endurance-athletes-to-do 

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Disclaimer: The information shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health goals. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast. Reliance on any information provided is solely at your own risk.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening
• 0:16 “Where Do I Begin?”
• 0:57 Trust the Plan
• 2:38 Why Trusting the Plan Can Be Difficult
• 7:53 As Always, Consistency is Everything
• 9:56 Why Coaching is Effective for Endurance Athletes
• 13:43 The Bottom Line
• 14:30 Closing

Transcript

(0:04 - 0:20)
Hello, and welcome to the Full Circle Podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host, Coach Laura Henry. Today is Coach Tip Tuesday.

(0:21 - 0:37)
Where do I begin? This is probably the most basic and the most common question I hear from athletes. The reason why they ask this question is simple. It's tough to know where to begin, but it's also the best question someone can ask because everyone is a beginner at some point.

(0:37 - 1:02)
Every single endurance athlete there has ever been has started with no knowledge about endurance sports, and they learned about their sport along the way. So it's not shameful to admit that you don't know what you don't know, and it's very okay to say that you're a beginner. But that being said, what is the best advice for beginner endurance athletes? If I could give just one piece of advice to beginner endurance athletes, it would be this.

(1:03 - 1:25)
Trust the plan. When I say the plan, I mean training that has been thoughtfully planned and laid out by someone with experience, for example, an endurance coach, in order to help you accomplish the goals that you have stated are important to you. This training could be a plan that is the result of one-on-one coaching, a custom-built training plan, or a more general training plan.

(1:25 - 1:46)
The plan is training that is the result of forethought and planning, not training that comes as a result of spur-of-the-moment decisions based on what the weather is doing, what sounds good on a given day, or what you might feel like doing. It's easy to say, trust the plan. It's much harder to actually listen to and live that advice out, especially for beginners.

(1:46 - 2:21)
I have observed that this advice falls into the simple but not easy bucket because the truth of the matter is that just because something is simple does not mean that it is easy. However, even if it's not easy advice for a lot of athletes to follow, trust the plan is the best advice I have to give to new athletes. Truly trusting the plan helps beginner athletes avoid common mistakes such as doing too much too soon, doing too much volume or intensity, mismanaging the sequence of workouts, mismanaging the schedule of workouts on a weekly basis, not doing enough specificity, and more.

(2:21 - 2:45)
While many, if not all, of these things may seem innocent enough and not like a big deal, I can tell you that they all snowball, either acutely or over time, into being a problem, resulting in missed goals and or they lead to an athlete's worst nightmare, an injury. I know firsthand how challenging trusting the plan can be. When I was a new athlete, I worked with coaches who provided a plan for me.

(2:45 - 3:04)
I first worked with coaches Fred Joslin and Kenny Hammond at Fleet Feet Syracuse as part of a 5K group program. For the record, it's really easy not to trust and follow the plan in a group setting since attentive oversight by the coach is not always possible in that setting. They can't see you all the time during the workout and you have to do your homework workouts on your own.

(3:04 - 3:31)
So in a group setting, when you're not having your training individualized for you, it's much easier to not follow the plan and to not trust the plan because it's kind of a one-size-fits-all t-shirt approach to the entire group. After about six months of doing group programming with Fleet Feet Syracuse, where I semi-followed the plan that was laid out, I hired a one-on-one coach, the great Karen Allen Turner. I only trusted the plan so much when I was first working with her.

(3:31 - 3:55)
I followed a lot of her recommendations, but if I'm being honest, I did not follow enough of them. It took me a full four years, that's not an exaggeration, four years of working with Karen to finally really trust the plan. My light bulb moment came when I fully acknowledged that Karen had been coaching for over 25 years and she had been an athlete longer than that.

(3:55 - 4:29)
By not following the plan and instead doing what I wanted to or what I thought was best, aka doing something that I thought was better than what Karen was recommending or planning, I realized that I had been acting like I knew more than she did about endurance sports and training. How could I, someone who was brand new to athletics, possibly know more than her? When I embraced the truth that I didn't know more than her, it became easier for me to trust the plan. This did require me to set my ego aside and put my pride aside, if I'm being honest.

(4:29 - 4:52)
Very unsurprisingly, my performance and my results skyrocketed, literally skyrocketed once I did fully trust the plan. So much so that Karen even questioned me about it when it happened. In addition to having to admit that we don't know as much as we'd like to, trust the plan is hard advice to follow because all too often, beginner athletes expect to see radical changes in very condensed timelines.

(4:53 - 5:11)
Sometimes athletes do see changes in progress quickly, but more commonly, they do not. And when they don't see those quick results, I've observed that many beginner athletes get impatient and or they become anxious about their so-called lack of progress. This is actually a common trend in the wider world of fitness and exercise.

(5:11 - 5:32)
When people start a new exercise program, they will often enthusiastically participate in it for one to two weeks, but when they don't see any changes after those one to two weeks, they get frustrated and they give up. This is actually why so many people will give up on their fitness and health-related New Year's resolutions by Valentine's Day. The perhaps hard truth that all beginner athletes need to hear is this.

(5:32 - 6:00)
It can take weeks, months, or even years for endurance training to be fully effective. It is important to resist the urge to add in more, to change things, or to give up when you don't see the results you expected in the arbitrary timelines that you've set for yourself. So, when you're following structured training and embarking on an endurance sports goal for the first time, it's important to be aware that it will take time, probably more time than you want and or you expect to accomplish the goal that you've set for yourself.

(6:00 - 6:32)
All training is effectively a manifestation of the scientific method. You develop a hypothesis, which is what you think will be the best path to get to your goal, and then you test the hypothesis by doing the training for a substantial amount of time, and then you go from there, re-evaluating as necessary. Obviously, you want to and will change things more quickly if they are very obviously not working well or if they're not working at all, but on the whole, you need to give things time to see how they are working before you re-evaluate, let alone significantly adjust your training.

(6:32 - 6:54)
This principle is why I require athletes signing up for coaching to remain on coaching and commit to coaching for a minimum of 90 days. All coaching is a relationship between me, the coach, and the athlete. It takes at least 90 days to see if an athlete and I are a good match, how well we work together, and if the plan we are developing from our collaboration is working for the athlete and getting them to where they want to go.

(6:54 - 7:23)
Even when I write a custom-built training plan for an athlete, which is a service that is a bit more independent on the athlete's part than full-on coaching, I write three months at a time because I found that that's the minimum amount of time an athlete needs to be doing something consistently before they really know if it's working or not. When I started in endurance sports, social media and the internet as a whole was not what it now is today. I have seen how the growth of both the internet and social media has made it more challenging for athletes to trust any plan that they are trying to follow.

(7:24 - 7:53)
As I've talked about before, there are an infinite number of answers out there for any athlete who Googles a question they have about endurance sports. Between reading what other people recommend, hearing what their friends recommend, listening to what other athletes say, it can get overwhelming for athletes, especially beginner athletes. And thus, it can be challenging for athletes, and again, especially beginner athletes, to determine which advice is relevant, which advice to listen to, and to stick with one thing for a substantial enough amount of time to discover whether or not it's actually working.

(7:53 - 8:11)
As I've said repeatedly over the years, consistency is everything. In fact, consistency is one of the three best things endurance athletes, no matter their experience level, can do to help their training and performance. You need to have consistency over time, and you need to adhere to the training that you're following for a sufficient amount of time to give it a chance to work.

(8:11 - 8:34)
By consistency, I mean that you need to chip away at the path to your goals by completing workouts on a regular basis, aka most days. You cannot skip workouts for several days and then try to double up to make up or to do a workout with more intensity to try to make up, quote-unquote, what you missed. You need to stoke the fire a little bit each day and have the patience to allow the process to unfold.

(8:34 - 8:47)
While consistency and adherence to your training are incredibly important, it's actually equally as important to not completely obsess about the plan. There is balance here. Everything doesn't need to go perfectly all the time in order for your training to be effective.

(8:47 - 9:01)
It's okay if an individual workout doesn't go as expected, or if you have a bad workout. One bad workout or one missed workout doesn't mean that your entire path to your goals is derailed. More often than not, if it's a bad workout, there is a reason why the workout didn't go as expected.

(9:02 - 9:21)
Though bad days do sometimes just happen, it's incredibly rare for a workout to be a poor one without a cause or explanation. It's also okay if you completely miss a workout, as long as it's not something that happens with regularity, aka more than one to two times per week. Life happens, and for most of us, endurance sports is not our full-time profession.

(9:21 - 9:34)
It is something that we are doing in our recreational time for enjoyment, health, and social reasons. As age group athletes, it's important to understand that we are planning training around what is going on in our lives. We are not planning our lives around our training.

(9:34 - 10:03)
In fact, this is the best way to plan training in the first place, and thus, it's the way I plan training for athletes that I work with. So perhaps paradoxically, it's expected that things will pop up that we didn't expect or plan for when we initially planned out our training, and we will need to either modify or miss workouts entirely to accommodate for the unexpected things that do happen in our lives. A very common misconception in the world of endurance sports is that coaching is only for quote-unquote certain athletes.

(10:03 - 10:22)
Some advanced athletes think that they know everything. They don't, and that they don't need a coach to be successful, and that coaching is just for beginners. Some beginner athletes think that coaching is only for quote-unquote real athletes, athletes who are faster, athletes who are doing quote-unquote big events such as marathons or Ironmans, or for athletes who have advanced level goals.

(10:22 - 10:42)
Newsflash, no matter what your experience level, goals, and pace are, if you do athletic things, you are an athlete, which means you are a real athlete. The idea that coaching is only for certain people is a myth, a big one. The truth of the matter is that coaching is appropriate for all endurance athletes, regardless of whether they are beginners or experienced athletes.

(10:42 - 11:04)
A coach has the education and experience to marry the concepts of this is my goal and this is the best path to achieve that goal. Most athletes can tell you what their goal is because it's really easy to state this is my goal. However, when asked what is the path to get to the goal that you've set, I've observed that many, if not most, athletes cannot adequately and articulately answer that question.

(11:05 - 11:25)
I don't know is the most common answer I've heard when I've asked athletes that question. It is much harder to know how to safely and effectively map out the path to a goal, and it takes a long time, years, to learn how to do this properly. I have seen time and time again that it is very difficult, if not downright impossible, for athletes to map out a plan for themselves.

(11:25 - 11:45)
This is because it is impossible to be unbiased when we are thinking about or considering our own selves. Even for experienced coaches, this is challenging to do, and I can say that from experience. It has taken me over 10 years of coaching hundreds of athletes and over 15 years as an endurance athlete myself to feel that I am somewhat proficient at coaching myself.

(11:46 - 12:08)
I can honestly say that I only started to feel truly competent and capable when it comes to coaching myself in the last two to three years. Even now, I still make really stupid, really stupid mistakes when I am managing my own training. That might seem ironic since I generally don't make really stupid mistakes when I'm managing training for other athletes, but it's different when I have to consider my own self.

(12:09 - 12:27)
Just last year, I made the rookie mistake of doing too much too soon, and I caused an overuse injury for myself. This is because I am not immune to this bias that I am talking about. It's impossible for me to be unbiased when I am considering myself, my training, and what the best path to my goals is, and this is true for any athlete.

(12:27 - 12:38)
It is impossible to get away from this bias. It's impossible to shed it, so it's really difficult to manage your own training and to really chart a successful path to your own goals. It's not impossible.

(12:38 - 12:53)
You might do it okay, but the best plan, in my experience, does come from working with a coach. And so as a result, I actually, a coach myself, greatly prefer to work with another coach when it comes to my own goals. Truly, every coach does need a coach.

(12:53 - 13:13)
In any event, I've learned over the years that it's easier to trust a plan when an athlete, including me, is working with a coach. A coach can become a trusted source for an athlete. Instead of relying on Instagram reels, Google searches, or Facebook comment threads, athletes can trust that the experienced coach that they're working with has their best interests at heart and will be planning what is best for them.

(13:13 - 13:29)
Also, in addition to being accessible to answer questions and provide reassurance to an athlete, a coach can help rein an athlete in and effectively save them from themselves. More times than not, my primary function as a coach is to rein athletes in. Most athletes do have the drive to work hard or the desire to do a lot.

(13:29 - 13:45)
In fact, that drive is what leads many athletes to making the common mistake, the most common mistake, of too much too soon and to getting injured. Reining athletes in, keeping them on the right path, and helping them to learn to trust the plan is a huge part of my job. Doing something new can be scary.

(13:45 - 14:05)
It requires a significant amount of bravery and trust to embark on something new and unknown. For beginner endurance athletes, their lack of knowledge and experience in endurance sports and an overabundance of inputs from so many different sources can make it challenging to trust the plan that they're following. However, trust the plan is the best advice I can give to any beginner endurance athlete.

(14:05 - 14:19)
If you are a beginner athlete, exercise patience and take the time to see what works, what doesn't and therefore what your best path to reach your goals is. Yes, it may take longer than you want or you expect. In fact, it probably will.

(14:19 - 14:39)
But like almost all things in life, the end result will be better and more fulfilling if you are patient with the process and if you give yourself a chance to see what you are fully capable of. That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

(14:39 - 14:55)
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(14:55 - 15:15)
Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast to find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. Thanks for listening.