Nailing the Basics
By Aubrey Aldy
I’ve heard this saying a lot lately when referring to how to be the best runner or endurance athlete you can be, but what does it really mean? To me, the first thought that comes to mind is to stop looking for shortcuts. Looking for every way to improve is a good thing, but this often leads us to obsess over the last 5% of improvement while overlooking the most important first 95%. One of the most basic things all runners need is consistency. How do we become more consistent over the course of let’s say a whole year?
Be as healthy as possible
Get enough sleep
Eat a healthy diet - Fuel your training appropriately every time
Staying well hydrated
Perform your activities to the intended purpose - not, "Well I felt good today so I ran faster” or sprinted to the finish because it was fun but can’t figure out how you tweaked your calf or got sick a week or two later.
Keeping your motivation - This is overlooked as purely a drive or motivation issue many times when the actual issue is incorrect training load, life stress, and the basics have been neglected for too long. There are only so many marbles in the jar to give each day. Then you start creating a deficit and eventually something breaks.
Intensity discipline Intensity discipline, I repeat, Intensity discipline - Not trying to be faster in training, but instead trying to be better! Nail the intent of the session as often as possible.
Miss fewer training sessions - How do you miss fewer sessions? Refer to above.
A few years ago I helped train 8 runners who met the Boston Marathon qualifying standard that year. I thought it would be interesting to dig into the data and see what similarities I could find, especially when compared to those who had just missed the standard. I stopped looking any further when I realized the answer was more simple than I thought, and that I was overlooking the basics in hopes of finding the top secret concoction of training application. The biggest difference was that those who hit the standard had missed far fewer days of training in the previous one year. Of course there was a lot of various training sessions and methods used for each, and this was individual to each athlete, but the fact that they missed fewer days was in my opinion the most important fact. It’s not quite as simple as just showing up though. The only way to accomplish that is to do the basics well repeatedly and ensure you are adapting and recovering well enough to be more consistent in your training than your competition.
Often when we have a bad training session we can trace it back to a basic principle being missed. It might be that we paced our run incorrectly on our easy runs, that our intervals were too fast, or that we are performing an inappropriate exercise because we saw somewhere it was the next best thing. It could be a missed meal a day or two earlier that seemed like no big deal until you tried pushing hard in that next interval session and just didn’t have any gas.
Like anything else habits are the key to nailing the basics. I highly recommend “Atomic Habits” by James Clear by the way if you have not read it already. One simple example is drinking a full glass of water first thing after waking up every day. Another might be having a heart rate limit for your easy runs. It doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective! Easy habits like these can add up to have a huge impact on your health and your running performance. So keep nailing the basics, and I hope to see many of you running even stronger all year long this coming year.