From Running Director Heidi Caldwell.

We runners are creatures of habit. A runner’s habits are often the positive, grounding forces behind productive and consistent training. Yet our habits and routines can also get stale, leading us to feel flat, uninspired, or just plain burnt out. Yes, habits and routine hold an important place in training, but successful training also calls for us to, from time to time, switch it up.  

Variety is the spice of life, and the spice of training too. Our bodies want us to mix and vary exercise stresses. In training, we regularly emphasize the day to day need for variety; mixing up training terrain, running surface, supplemental exercises, and the overall session stimulus. This emphasis on training diversity extends beyond the daily to the bigger picture. Just as running the same pace and the same distance every day is limiting to fitness growth and potential, following one training methodology season after season, year after year, is also limiting. For instance, the half marathon may be your favorite event, but building in a training cycle focused on running a fast 3k or 5k from time to time is not only refreshing but also beneficial to your half marathon fitness.

Perhaps even more important than the physical reboot of switching it up is the mental reset. Just as our bodies crave variety, our minds also thrive off of new experiences and challenges. In an often singularly focused sport like running, it’s easy to get burnt out or bored. And if your head isn’t in it, what’s the point? There’s no use forcing something that you aren’t excited about. The mind-body connection is real, and shouldn’t be underemphasized. When we start feeling tired or overtrained physically, chances are that we started feeling mentally flat or tapped out first. 

It’s easy to talk about the importance of adopting new routines, but not so easy to make it happen. Letting go of the need to track weekly milage or nail your weekly tempo workout can be tough, and sometimes even a little scary. We get so used to our bodies feeling a certain way and being able to do certain things. We find such satisfaction in acing certain paces on our progressive long runs or hitting those high mileage weeks. 

Case in point: I spent much of the summer of 2019 through the winter of 2020 marathon training. I ran a marathon in October to qualify for the Olympic Trials, and then ran the Trials at the end of February. By February, I was ready and excited to take a break from training. My body was tired and my mind was zapped. I felt like I was good for one thing: running far at a decent clip. Yes, I was in prime marathon shape, but my agility, speed, and strength felt neglected and out of touch. After my two week break from running post-Trials, I had every intention of finding a new exercise routine that looked and felt notably different.

Yet since March it’s been surprisingly difficult to fully let go of the volume and intensity of marathon training. Over the past year, I got used to cranking out daily miles and getting a high quality long workout in week to week. This became so routine that it felt weird and wrong to not be hitting these training markers each week. I found myself trying to still get a tempo or fartlek workout in each week and doing a long run every weekend. Some days this was for the genuine fun or thrill of a hard effort or adventure, but other days it was out of some sort of need to stick to this training regimen. I increasingly found myself out doing a self-prescribed hard workout, feeling heavy-legged and tired, and wondering why I was out there. My head wasn’t jazzed, my legs weren’t feeling it, and my heart clearly wasn’t in it. So why was I forcing it?  

Admittedly, part of my tight grip on clocking miles and pushing through workouts was driven by a fear of losing my hard earned marathon fitness. I trained hard through the cold snowy winter months and didn’t want those efforts to “go to waste”. But guess what? They weren’t a waste, and that’s also not how it works. That training will always be there, and there’s no use slogging through training out of fear of “losing fitness”. Our fitness is meant to go through peaks and valleys - in fact, this is a purposeful part of effective training plans. Simply taking a two week break and then diving back into the same routine isn’t enough; we need that change of pace to add some zip to our running body and mind. 

So, what does this look like? For me post-marathon racing, this means re-learning how to listen to my body and run just as far as I want to on a given day. It means running with friends at whatever pace allows for everyone to chat and catch up. It means doing a workout because I want to run fast and feel powerful in my body, not because I feel like I need to. It means opting for more 5k strength and speed focused workouts instead of long threshold runs. It means doing more core and agility work because I tend to put these sessions off in favor of more running, yet they are crucial to long term health. It means feeling good about running five days a week or not running at all. Most importantly, it means running for the simple joy of doing something that brings me peace, fills my happiness cup, and fuels my fire. 

I’m not saying you should throw out everything you know and love about training to start from scratch. But I do encourage you to intentionally switch up your training focus every so often, and to mix in workouts, cross training days, and full training cycles that are outside of your comfort zone. When something is challenging or uncomfortable - either physically or mentally - it often means we can grow and gain the most from leaning in and giving that unfamiliar something a try. With no major races on the horizon, now is a great time to experiment with new training modalities, to make more time for slow social (and properly distanced) runs with friends, and to approach your running routine from a different, fresh mindset.