The Performance Margin 

Most runners don't have a speed problem in the marathon. They have a pacing problem. I see it regularly with athletes I coach - and I've made the mistake myself. The first 15 kilometres feel easy. The pace feels generous. The crowd is loud, the legs are fresh, and the effort feels well within range. So the pace creeps slightly. Then a little more. By 28 or 30 kilometres, something starts to unravel, and the final 10 becomes a very different race from the one that was planned.

If you have just started running, or you are returning to running after a break, you may have come across training plans that prescribe sessions by pace, by heart rate zone, or by something called RPE. Pace and heart rate both require a watch. RPE does not. It requires something you already have and use constantly without thinking about it: your own judgement of how hard you are working. This post explains what RPE is, how the scale works, and how to use it to train effective

If there is one pattern that connects almost every recreational endurance runner I work with, it is this: their easy runs are too fast, and their hard sessions are not hard enough. It sounds like a contradiction. Athletes who are motivated, who train consistently, who care about their performance - running too hard on recovery days and not hard enough on quality sessions. But it is one of the most common and most damaging training habits in amateur endurance sport, and it has

February is always a nice month. January feels like a year in its own right, then we’re graced with a 28 day month to skip us straight into Spring. The weather also turns, generally, as we move away from the consistent rainy days and find some breaks with some sun. But February hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows in my world. My almost one year old has been having an amazing time at nursery, so much so that he’s decided to collect every illness possible and share with us at

Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya holds the male world record for the marathon. His time? 2:00:35. He can run 42.2km (26.2 miles) in seconds over 2 hours. That’s running 2:51 per km (or 4:36 per mile) for 2 hours. Not only was he the first person to get under 2:01 for the marathon, but he also ran the second half faster than the first half (called a negative split). While training for this feat, Kelvin would have put his body through progressive stress, time and time again. Breaking dow