One of my athletes asked me a question recently that he could not have asked two years ago. He had read that strength and VO2 max are among the strongest predictors of how long, and how well, you live. Had I read the same thing? And what did I make of it?
BLUF: I had, and I agree with it. It is also the reason his training has looked exactly the way it has for the past two years. I did not tell him that at the start, and telling him would have made it less likely to work.
What he actually asked for
When he joined, over two years ago, he wrote down what he wanted. Not a race. Not a time. This:
"I want a healthy BMI. At the moment I am obese. I want a health span that matches my life span. I want to live well as an older person in my 80s or 90s so I can enjoy my children and see them grow into adults. I want to be able to keep up with them as they grow into teenagers. They are currently 9 and 4. I would also like to find permanent changes that mean I am a healthy weight and in shape for the rest of my days, and deal with stress better."
Read that again, because almost none of it is about running.
Where he started
Bodyweight circuits at home. That was it, because that was what he would actually do.
He was resistant to strength training in a gym, and he did not enjoy running hard. Both of those are worth taking seriously rather than arguing with. A programme someone will not do is not a good programme, however correct it looks on paper.
By the time we got to running properly, he could not cover 10km in an hour.
Where he is now
This year he ran the Copenhagen Marathon in 3:08.
Home circuits, then 10km, then half marathons, then that. He has more energy for his family and his work than he has ever had, and he is not looking back.
What I could have said on day one
Here is the honest version of the conversation I did not have with him in his first week.
"Your goals are longevity goals. The two things that best predict how long and how well you live are your strength and your VO2 max. So we are going to spend the next two years building both. That means the gym, properly loaded, most weeks for the rest of your life. And it means running hard often enough to actually move your VO2 max, not just plodding."
Every word of that is true. It is also, said to a man who did not want to go to a gym and did not enjoy running hard, an excellent way to lose him before anything starts.
Not because he was not serious. He was completely serious, and he has proved it since. But there is a difference between agreeing with a plan and being ready to live inside it every week for two years. On day one he was ready for the first thing. He was not yet ready for the whole thing, and no amount of explaining would have changed that.
The marathon was the vehicle, not the destination
Plenty of people get round a marathon on steady running alone, with no strength work at all. If a marathon had been the goal, that would have been a perfectly legitimate way to do it.
But the marathon was never the goal. It was the thing that made the training make sense to him week to week, while the training itself was quietly pointed at what he had actually written down.
Strength work had a reason he could hold on to: it makes you a more durable runner, and durable runners get to the start line. Harder sessions had a reason he could hold on to: they make you faster, and he was starting to want to be faster. Both of those reasons are true. Both are also precisely what you would prescribe for a man whose real goal is to still be climbing hills with his sons in forty years.
Same training. Different sentence wrapped around it. The sentence is what made it survivable.
This is not the same as keeping secrets
Worth being clear, because there is a version of this that would be dishonest.
I never told him anything untrue. If he had asked me at any point why a session was in his week, I would have answered properly, the way I did a few weeks ago. He did not ask, and I did not volunteer a two year lecture on mortality data to a man who was, at that stage, just trying to get through a set of press-ups in his living room.
Sequencing information is not withholding it. A good coach is answering questions honestly and choosing which questions to raise unprompted. Those are different jobs.
What this asks of you
If you are being coached, you do not need to understand the full architecture of your programme to benefit from it. You are allowed to ask, and you should get a straight answer when you do. But needing to see the whole map before you will take the next step is a good way to never take it.
Most of what makes a plan work over years is invisible in any single week. A session that looks pointless in isolation, and there is a whole article in that, is usually load-bearing for something eighteen months out.
Your job is smaller than you think and harder than it sounds. Have patience for change that genuinely takes this long. Trust the person holding the map. Stay the course.
The bottom line
The skill in coaching is taking the high level thing you want, which is almost always about your life rather than your splits, and guiding you towards it over years, at a pace you can actually absorb.
He knows the whole rationale now. He asked, and he got it, and it landed well because he is a different athlete to the one who signed up. Two years ago it would have been noise. Now it is confirmation.
A healthy BMI. Energy for his kids. A marathon in 3:08 that he never set out to run. And the thing he actually asked for, which was more years of living well, quietly being built the whole time.