What We're Running for Tuesday, August 25

4 miles today + 5 miles tomorrow + 4 miles Thursday

A quick photo I snapped earlier this week along the Chattahoochee River, near where I live in Atlanta.

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Good Tuesday morning, my friends! ☀️ I’m back! I hope each of you guys are well, had a great weekend, and got some good runs in. How did your 8-mile run go over the weekend?

In case you missed my email from last Thursday, I took a two-day coaching certification course offered by the Road Runners Club of America over the weekend, during which we did a deep dive into the thinking behind the right ways to train, how to get ready for races, and lots more.

The training helped me in a big way, not least by helping me put lots of little strands and bits of running info I’ve collected over the years into conceptual “buckets,” for lack of a better word.

I’ll share more with you about it in the coming days (and weeks, I’m sure), but the ideas that stuck out to me the most from the weekend include:

‘It's not one magical workout. It’s consistency over time.’

If there was one thing our instructors stressed, it was that there is no single training plan or workout that everyone can use. In fact, it’s not the plan that makes the magic — that comes from the person who implements the plan, by sticking to it over time.

Volume + intensity (but not at the same time)

If you want to run longer distances and feel strong doing it, you’ll want to plan out your training so that in some weeks you run lots of miles. Other weeks, you intentionally run faster than you think you can. But you don’t do those at the same time — you give yourself time to adapt to one, before trying the other.

Every athlete is unique

It’s a cliché to say so, but each of us is different. Each of our bodies is unique, with a different age and history — of the things we’ve put into it through our diets and of the ways we’ve pushed it through exercise in the past.

So, each of us needs to figure out what success looks like for ourselves, what are appropriate goals, and do we even need goals at all? (Maybe we just love to go run, and that’s enough for us!)

I promise we’ll dig more into what I learned in the next few weeks, as I have so much to share with you — and, to adapt the class teaching for our needs in this group.

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Our training miles this week

Here’s our mileage for each day this week, based on our 20-week training plan. As you’ll probably remember, we’re running five days this week:

• Tuesday, Aug. 25 — 4 miles

• Wednesday, Aug. 26 — 5 miles

• Thursday, Aug. 27 — 4 miles

• Saturday, Aug. 29 — 8 miles

• Sunday, Aug. 30 — 2-3 miles

These are the same miles we ran last week, you’ll notice. After this week, we’ll gradually start raising those mileage numbers over the next several weeks (as well as the long run), all to get you ready to run 13.1 miles in November.

Remember: I know not everyone is proceeding at the same pace. So, feel free to adjust these distances as you need to. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you plan that out, too! 🙌

Hope you all have an awesome, awesome day and get out there for your 4 miles today — check back in later in the comments and let us all know how it goes. 👍

— Terrell

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A song to run to today

“Back in the U.S.S.R.” from the album The Beatles by the Beatles.

Want to hear all the songs we include in our newsletters? Listen to our full playlist on Spotify, with 8 hours, 8 minutes of music to run to.

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Words to run by

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”

— Mark Twain

“I like adventures, and I’m going to find some.”

— Louisa May Alcott