ARTICLE 29: RECOVERY - HOW TO BE YOUR OWN COACH

Coaches are great for team sports - organizing and motivating a group of athletes to achieve a common goal. For individual athletes, a coach often serves as a prime motivator and disciplinarian, crucial factors for many an Olympic gold medalist. But what about the amateur endurance athlete, who competes for fun, doesn't need a drill sergeant to get him out of bed, and isn't in line for an Olympic gold medal in the near future?

You probably don't have a coach and couldn't find one even if you wanted one. Maybe you don't need one, for no one knows you better than yourself.

Training properly is a matter of interpreting what your body needs to excel. To become proficient at a certain activity, you have to stress the body in that activity, then rest so you can become stronger. An effective training schedule thus becomes a matter of balancing stress and rest. Sounds simple, and it is! You just have to filter through an avalanche of information, advice and behavioral factors to find your own personal winning formula.

There are great coaches, experts, books, magazine articles, and videos to provide you with relevant, valuable information about your training. The next step is the hard part - applying it to your unique situation. This is easy to do when the article discusses stroke drills to improve your swimming or a great interval workout to improve your running. You simply carry out the recommended workout, without considering the dozens of other variables involved in a successful training program.

Consider Your Unique Variables

The problem with training advice and instruction is that they assume numerous human variables are constant when of course they are not. A long run every Sunday might be a great aspect of many training schedules, but not if your kid has a little league game that morning, or if your knee is still hurting, or if you are really wasted after a Saturday ride.

It's impossible to read a training article that applies to your unique situation at a particular point in time. Instead, you have to absorb some of the huge amount of training information available and apply it to your unique situation, using trial and error to arrive at what works best for you. You have to be your own coach!

The major difficulty here is not picking the best speed workout or 10-week training cycle, but being able to respond physically to whatever training schedule you choose so that you can absorb your training and benefit from it on an ongoing basis. The key variable in the equation is obviously your physical condition - whether you're injured, exhausted, undertrained, or in peak condition - and what to do about it every day.

Find Your Own Balance

Thus, it becomes crucial to emphasize the element of balance between stress and rest for your training to work. This means paying attention to common sense, like your body's overtraining warning signs, as well as to the numbers in your training log.

A common misconception in endurance sports is that getting faster simply involves putting in more training mileage and hard workouts in the respective sports. Yeah, that's why all the pros are faster - because they have all day to train! If this were true, the best athlete would be a person with a very small brain who could train all day and never think about it being boring or difficult!

Sports are not that simple. Top triathlete Mark Allen summed it up perfectly in his book Total Triathlete when he said that "the key to training is to do as much as you possibly can absorb, which differs from as much as you possibly can."

If your body can't absorb the stress you give it, you will not improve from training. Rather, you will become unhealthy, injured, or suffer from chronic fatigue. The hard part is to figure out where that elusive line is: the line which you must train at but not cross over.

Look At Your Past Results

One positive step an athlete can take is to truly learn and adjust his training based on past successes and failures. If something works for you, be true to it, even if it's not what your training partners or conventional wisdom agrees with.

Striving to learn from your mistakes can be a tremendous challenge. We all get overtrained from time to time, catch colds, develop injuries, etc. This is an inevitable side effect of training for endurance sports. The trick is to realize the mistakes and alter your behavior patterns that caused them, lessening the chances of it happening again.

Let's look at overtraining. This condition often leads to more serious illnesses and injuries. After digging yourself into the proverbial hole, look back and see why you went way over your head. Was it peer pressure? Ego demands? Or just plain stupidity?

For the future, establish a system that allows you to monitor warning signs more carefully and adjust your training schedule accordingly when they appear. The body is very good at telling you that it's working overtime and needs a break - better than any coach.

It takes discipline to make the brain follow suit and to turn off the faucet from which those competitive instincts and compulsive tendencies flow. It also takes discipline to stick with what works. You don't have to leave these important and very personal factors in the hands of someone else - no one knows you like you. (Excerpted from Brad Kearns' "Team Champion Training Tips")