How to avoid perilous training tendencies that lead to diminishing returns

Here are two perilous tendencies that are causing you not to consistently turn in the great race performances that you are capable of:

1. You are falling into a familiar, safe training pattern for months, or even, years

2. Or, you are hyper focusing your efforts on a single race distance for many training cycles

When you fall into patterns like this, you are only continually honing your existing skills.

Mastery of your skills can offer tremendous benefits at the onset of your journey.

However, there is always a point of diminishing returns.

You stop getting equal output for the work you put in.

Disappointment sets in, so you decide to double down on your efforts.

Progress reappears briefly.

Then, you are back to barely moving the needle forward on your training again.

That point is usually a blaring alarm that you need to change your focus to something else.

However, that alarm is too often ignored or not noticed by runners.

So, they just keep grinding away to only maintain their current fitness or, maybe, get a few percent better every year.

This is why it is so important to keep a detailed, in-depth log of your fitness.

You need to know when you have reached that point of diminishing returns.

At that point, you need to switch your training target so you can experience regular improvements again (and keep your sanity).

If you want to track your running fitness, I recommend Stryd.

Is Stryd the only way to track your fitness?

No, of course not.

However, Stryd offers some key benefits that you don't get from other tracking solutions like a GPS watch.

Stryd tells you:

A) How your run fitness is changing independent of external factors like hills, wind, and fatigue (so, you can cut through factors that only muddy up your analysis)

B) A method to measuring mechanical & metabolic improvements so you know which areas of your fitness are surging/lagging (Mechanical via metrics like Leg Spring Stiffness, and metabolic improvements via running power)

C) A consistent source of tracking for both indoor/outdoor training (Stryd sits on your foot for all activities for consistent tracking. Compare this to using a GPS watch: GPS can be used outdoors, but wrist-based movement need to be used indoors, which results in incomparable metrics for pace/distance)

You can get Stryd here: https://store.stryd.com/

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