find your niche

This is a good topic for both coaches and athletes. Somewhere along the way we need to find our niche. Not all of us are going to be top 5 finishers and we don’t need to train that way. For many adult recreational athletes, the goals are getting in shape and having some enjoyment of the sport. My experience is that many of my students take up running/cycling/etc. for this reason. A few of them will progress to the level of being competitive in local events and actually train for PRs (personal records).

A good coach and a client with good, honest appraisal of their skill level should discuss this issue at some point in their training program. Trying to turn someone into a competitive athlete, who is better off as a casual jogger, is a big mistake. Eventually both the coach and client will become frustrated or worse-injured from overtraining.

And, in the same line of thought as my prior blog on running for a lifetime, I believe that people will move in and out of these brackets. I started out in the competitive world of triathlons and then moved into the relaxed world of Ultramarathons. Now I only train for my own reasons and can bump up or down in intensity level. This is much more fun, then training at competition level and being a slave to stopwatch and all the trivia.

So, part of training smart is knowing your niche, what you want out of your program and then achieving it in a sensible way.