To succeed, you want a B+
Feel like your running isn't hitting the heights you’d like?
Perhaps you’re looking at it wrong.
In my experience, setting achievable training and process goals across all aspects of your running, and consistently hitting them is the secret to success.
Instead of focussing on nailing that one killer workout.
BTW it’s great to have a wild goal you’re training for - as long as it raises you up, not drags you down!
Looking for perfection is the road to misery.
And trust me, I’ve travelled down that one quite a few times.
If there’s one truth about running, it’s that to improve, you need to be consistent (says anything written about running EVER).
David and Megan Roche may not be everyone’s cup of tea but their book, The Happy Runner, has my absolute favourite quote on consistency; “consistent beats epic because epic is not consistent”.
Set the bar too high and you’ll get yourself injured.
And failing to achieve will leave you disappointed.
As someone once told me, “the trouble with perfection is that it's easy to imagine but impossible to attain.” While on the face of it this seems like the usual vacuous Instagram statement, it actually neatly sums up how easy it is to set yourself up for failure.
Think of Kelvin Kiptum, who ran the fastest marathon in history (2:00:35) in October 2023 at Chicago. Amazing… but those 35 seconds?! OUCH!
You don’t need to be a perfectionist to fall into this trap; I’m certainly not. But I have perfectionist tendencies - I’m definitely in the “if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” camp.
My problem is that the “doing well” benchmark I set myself is usually unrealistically high, and my failure to reach this unreasonable benchmark feeds my anxiety.
Some say the answer’s in prioritising.
In other words, you accept trade-offs - to be good at one thing you need to accept being less good at other things.
The most famous example of this is David Sedaris’s Four Burners Theory. In this, we think of life as a gas stove (weird analogy but bear with me) where each burner represents an important part of our life; our family, our friends, our work, and our health.
The Four Burners Theory says that “in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
This theory is something I’ve thought about for a while. In our house, it’s called the George Williams theory after a friend who divided life into work, love-life, and friends and family. They believed things could only go well with two at any one time. We were younger then, so probably took the health bit for granted.
But to excel in one area, do you really need to compromise in the others?
And in any case, it doesn’t address the underlying problem of unrealistic expectations in a particular area, like your running.
You’re still left chasing perfection - with all the mental health problems that eventually brings, just in fewer areas.
Instead, why not start by lowering the bar?
Work out what your good enough looks like and measure your success based on that.
There are two key parts to this:
You need to be reasonable when defining good enough. Don’t let it become another stick to beat yourself with. Good enough should be a 7 or 8 out of 10, something you’re satisfied with but is reasonably achievable.
Define it in advance. If you don’t, you run the risk of raising the bar once you look like you’re achieving it and that’s not the aim.
Bringing this back to running, I really like this article by elite coach Mark Coogan, who coined the phrase B+ workouts.
In a nutshell, he states that very hard training (A+ workouts) leads to underperformance in races, injury from running at your limit, and disappointment when you don’t hit overly-challenging goals.
He’s found that consistent improvement is achieved via workouts where you know you worked hard, but you could have done a little more; eg: the B+ workout.
You’re more likely to feel a sense of achievement when you meet your goals for the session; you don’t feel sore the next day and the consistent work you do, having avoided injury, will pay off when you race.
The photo that goes with the blog is an example of this; my scoring 7th for Ranelagh Harriers ahead of teammates who are faster in training.
So you can (sort of..) have it all?
Oh, but it goes further than that…
Stuart Macmillan, the philosopher king of elite sprint coaches expands on this. By the way, the linked podcast is very much worth a listen.
Stuart believes that the Four Burner Model Theory leads to an overly perfectionist focus on one or two things, and that life doesn’t have to be (and in truth isn’t) like that.
He states that instead of thinking about a component in isolation, you need to think about the wider system where that component is only one part and how the various components interact.
He calls this ‘systems thinking’.
Bringing this back to running (again), he breaks down the components like this:
Physical training
Nutrition
Recovery, and
Mental & Emotional resilience
He later added Education and Environment, and Social / Ethical alignment but I won’t touch on these here.
It’s doesn’t take much to see that being a brilliant 10 out of 10 at two of these WON’T make you a great runner, especially if it’s at the expense of the other two. His experience is that elite performance comes from being just good enough, a more realistic 8 out of 10 (or a B+), at all four.
So where does that leave us?
With a list! 😉
Take an integrated approach to your running. Look at your nutrition, recovery and resilience. NOT just your training.
Set yourself achievable goals. You should have to work hard to achieve them but you shouldn’t have to go all out.
Look to incrementally improve the weaker areas. It’s far easier and more realistic to increase from a 5 to a 6 out of 10, than turn an 8 into a 9. Aim to get more sleep rather than push yourself harder in a workout.
Improvement comes from being kind to yourself. Treat yourself like you’d treat your best friend. Being good enough across the board is what will make you great.
Oh, and yes, this goes way beyond running.