PM - 3.5 miles with Jake, half on the grass. Didn't feel as great today.
Vern Gambetta:
Without risk there is no return. Certainly no truer words have been spoken. As coaches in preparing our athletes for competition one of our big jobs is to manage risk. Each training session contains an element of risk and to optimize the training benefit the risk must be calculated. In order to achieve adaption we must push the envelope of function, therefore higher risk. The question is how hard and how often? Obviously it is highly individual, sport and event specific. There is no way to have the athletes on the edge all the time. Something will eventually breakdown.
As I have mentioned many times in this blog Bill Bowerman was a huge influence on my coaching. His mantra was a very strict adherence to a hard day of training followed by an easy day. Without sophisticated monitoring technology he was able to achieve great success following this principle. His simple hard easy sequence was his method of managing risk. We know that training is cumulative. Every workout does not have to be at the edge of the envelope of function. The key is to stay healthy and allow the training effects to accumulate. Find out how much and how often you can push it to expand the adaptive horizon, but be sure to balance that with adequate easier work that allows time to adapt.
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