006 - Beyond Paces, Splits, and Stopwatches
006 - Beyond Paces, Splits, and Stopwatches
Learning How to Build up the Full Spectrum of Athletic Performance in Amateur Runners
It's been a while since I wanted to write about going above and beyond sports watches.
In running, we know time matters.
Or in the words of Mariana Chavero: "El tiempo si importa"
Paces, splits, targets, and numbers all tell a story.
But they’re only an ingredient.
A lot of times, we put so much investment and authority into what the numbers on the clock say for a workout or a race that we forget to look beyond that and see how it manifests in reality.
In my role as a coach at BURS, I’ve lately been debriefing athletes after workouts and races, focusing more on the decisions they made throughout the event rather than the splits they ran.
Workouts can be executed with accuracy, and marathons can result in PRs. Those outcomes are good for what they are, but I’m more interested in seeing beyond the clock, beyond the time, and understanding the decisions the athlete made or didn’t make.
Where was their mind? How can I shape training based on that, not just in terms of getting faster for the sake of it.
How can I shape the athlete to make good decisions, the right decisions, or better decisions when race day comes?
How is the athlete moving? What does their movement pattern look like?
Arms, hips, tension, face, smile—how are they stepping, and how do their arms swing?
Getting more into the refinement of technical ability and mastery.
Focus is very important. It is when you’re concentrating on the right things, and right being or good being useful.
Focusing on the things that can be useful to the athlete in the heat of the race when things get difficult.
Not focusing on bad things or wrong things—bad and wrong mean unuseful, any thought or idea that distracts and takes the athletes out of the moment, away from the task at hand.
How can I prepare the athlete for one simple cue—winning, beating someone, enjoying, giving their best effort?
Because if you just tell the athlete, "Alright, you’re going to run these splits, and you will average this pace," that will be their only focus.
And if that doesn’t go as planned at some point in the race, they’re going to start getting anxious because they’re 2 seconds behind their strategy, which sometimes is not exactly in their control.
But what if I could prepare the athlete with an action, a mantra, an action plan to keep them focused and their thoughts on one task?
I understand that part of the narrative of distance running is time.
Time does matter.
Don't get me wrong.
But to get to the time, we have to move beyond the watch.
Because if the focus is crisp, if the focus is true, if we are centered on that, then the outcome will be favorable.
This is not just some ideal philosophy.
This is actually backed by a variety of coaches at various levels who have enjoyed success and failure, have seen it firsthand, and have said, "Okay, what's an underlying pattern?"
Winning athletes practice focusing on getting better at what they need to get better at, not getting better at everything.
Just getting better at what the athlete-coach team identifies as needing improvement.
If you solely judge a workout or a race by how fast you ran or if you ran to the prescribed pace of the workout or not, then that’s going to manifest when the race comes.
Because that is the skill you will be practicing: to hit splits on race day. If that happens, I think the athlete will not get as much out of the activity from a personal and cognitive development standpoint.
I don’t want my athletes to become Garmin or Strava Nazis…
I’ve put stickers on my athletes' watch screens during practice and told them to just go run, go do this, do it like this, focus 50 meters at a time, focus on this arm action, give them a very specific cue or element to center their mind on.
And the times I’ve done it, I’ve had amazing surprises: guys running their fastest mile ever, girls running seconds faster for 200s—I mean seconds, like 2 or 3, which, you know, women running 29 seconds versus 32.3.
It's a lot just by not seeing the watch. There's so much to think about regarding what time means—are you fast or not fast?
We are all very good at sharing workouts on Strava, and it's awesome. I do it, I love it, and I know it's important too, but I think it’s more about how fast an athlete is running and more about the construction of the session and the why of the session.
It’s always important to explain a little bit of the thought process that went into the architecture of a certain session, but sometimes I purposely don’t go into deep detail because I also want to leave it a little open-ended so athletes can interpret it for themselves and also to see how committed and curious they are in their training.
And here's the context of it. That's what matters, I think.
My true purpose and goal as a coach is to help athletes become better problem solvers, crisper thinkers.
Use what I’ve learned and how I think, not as the right way, but as a way to say, "Okay, these guys and girls think like this, but here in my situation, I need to apply this and that." And hopefully, you know, they use it as a springboard for their own thought and decision-making.
Use the watch as one feedback ingredient, not as the sole. It’s easy to do that, or it's very easy to use mileage or heart rate or these other biomarkers or numerical markers as the sole or only objective in training.
But there's a lot of subjectivity in building up and preparation because we are dealing with real human beings.
It's chaotic, there's friction, it's unpredictable, and we need to be able to have a healthy dosage of subjectivity and objectivity in order to thrive in this type of world.
As a young coach, I’ve spent a lot of time in the objective world initially writing these meticulous data-driven workouts with exact distances and recoveries, intervals, and paces, expecting athletes to hit these exact kilometers per week, but only because I used to find security in laying out that specificity of numerical prescription. It gave me certainty that what I was doing was correct.
And that might be in the athlete's best interest, of course.
But I’m realizing that it may be incorrect.
It reminded me of people all the time, of the human condition.
We want certainty; however, we must start from a place of uncertainty, and that's actually something I want to focus on.
Every build-up kickoff, every athlete, especially every new athlete, starts from a place of uncertainty.
I don't necessarily know what each athlete is capable of, but every data point, every interaction, every workout, every B-range run, every prescription met or not met is actually another feedback point to move us from an uncertain environment to a more certain one.
So it's the inverse.
We start from uncertainty and gravitate toward certainty as we get more evidence versus saying, "I have the certain number one guaranteed way to make you run the fastest ever, peaking on this day exactly, running this exact number of kilometers or pace ranges," which is nothing more than a template—that’s crappy salesman BS, it's not real.
I’m trying to gather more evidence through building up, more evidence through racing, more evidence from an athlete's feedback, more evidence from an athlete's body language, more evidence through their affect, more evidence through their response to certain types of workloads.
The more evidence we get, the closer we move to better certainty.
For the athletes I’ve coached for 2-3 years, I have a lot more dynamic and quicker decision-making because the relationship and certainty are already there. We are practically connected; I know them on and off the track, the road, etc., versus a brand new athlete who just applied, a runner I don't know.
Sure, I can access their past history of the workouts they’ve done or the coach and structure they came from before, but I’m still navigating an uncertain environment because the relationship is uncertain.
This is where the watch can be an aid, without a doubt.
I try to keep track of the splits they do at the track with meticulous precision as best I can, but it's only an ingredient because I try to focus more on observing them, how they're moving under stress, how they’re in an interval or a rep toward the end of it, how they're moving after a certain recovery period.
If they cash out on a sprint session 60 meters from the finish line and start to decelerate with increasing magnitude… or the other way around.
Or how fast is too fast, right?
That's why I really love being at workouts because I'm learning every day about the athlete.
I'm also processing and using the models I've discovered and the models I've researched, then applying new models through study that I'm being exposed to as well. This is my passion!
But move me on… the stopwatch is the key here.
Use it as one tool, not the tool.
Very, very important.
If we can use it in harmony with other elements of our practice—the relationship side, the psychological side—we can create this continuum where athletes feel really prepared versus you going into a race and saying, "Well, you're supposed to run this because you've done all this work like this, and you've run these many kilometers, and this is your threshold," and just giving them deep analytics of the time and volume and heartbeats.
Emotionally, I don’t think that hits the chord.
Emotionally, it doesn't say, "Hey, you're ready to compete at the highest level. Here's the evidence why."
And yes, I’m trying my best to infuse athletes with confidence based on hard, objective evidence from a numerical perspective.
But you also have to layer in the psychological and emotional components in training and getting them ready.
Here's an example: let's say we're doing 8x1000m at T effort with an athlete training for a marathon. Then you tell the athlete on the 5th rep, "Once I yell to you now, I want you to hit the hammer. I want you to go, you just go at 400-meter speed!"
Just like Scott Simmons states in his book “Take the Lead,” there is a strategy he did with his athletes called the hammer rep, where out of the blue, he asks the athlete to go at a faster tempo or speed than what was prescribed.
Then they go back for the 6th and 8th reps in that highly fatigued state, running that race pace goal, right.
But it’s the motion gained by the athlete that gets them ready for what happens when someone makes a big move or charge, understanding and talking through why you want them to go a little bit faster, impromptu on the spot, because you're trying to elevate and get them ready to be able to shoulder the unpredictability of a race, and be able to make a quick response to go, “Yeah, I've felt this before, I've done this before.”
"I've had to accelerate quickly during a workout. I have confidence; I can do that and still be competitive."
If I do this in the middle of a marathon or at the end of it, I know how it feels.
This is where we start to encourage the maximum competitiveness of the athlete, because let’s not forget: our goal as coaches is to maximize the competitiveness of every athlete, elevate them to the highest competitive performance profile they can have on race day.
Racing matters most.
That's what performance is about, right?
It's not just about all these preparations of workouts and impressive Strava logs.
What matters most is how the athlete deals with complex decisions in the moment, in the competitive environment, and if they are able to make good decisions.
Are they making better decisions?
Are they making the best decision they can?
Usually, when I have an after-race chat with my athletes, we talk about what decisions were made, whether they were good or bad, and how those connected with a favorable outcome.
It has never been a dialogue about how many kilometers they ran or how fast their splits were in training.
That’s it! When the athlete’s decisions connect with the outcome, that has nothing to do with their watch.
Thank you for reading!
Luis