I love sharing the blog posts that my coach writes! He always has great insight, which is probably good, since that’s his job. Almost always, I feel like he’s writing directly to me!

How much training do I need to reach my potential is one of the most fundamental questions that come to the mind of anyone struck with the inspiration to be their best.  Your optimal training level is where your maximum training load intersects with how much training your body can actually absorb.  How close, how consistently, and how long you can train at this level is the biggest controllable factor in your distance running success.

If we think of this intersection as the ideal training level as a line, anything below is undertraining and anything over is, you guessed it, overtraining.  The tricky thing about it is that it is hard to know exactly where that optimal training line lies.  It is a moving target and one that needs to be constantly monitored.  There is a complicated list of factors that contribute to how well we adapt to stress.  Non-running, real life stress leads that list.*

Read the full piece on his site.

* This is the line where I assume he’s staring directly at me, given that he said these same words to me exactly three days before that post went up.