How to stay motivated to train on your own

How to stay motivated to train on your own

Running alone when training for any race is tough. Coach Parry provides some insights into what you can do to keep motivated if you do not have a running club / group to train with and most of your training runs are done on your own.

What is the best way to keep things interesting and hold yourself accountable without negatively affecting training load and intensity in the build up to your race.

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How to stay motivated when training by yourself

 

BRAD
Today's question is a fantastic one and I can relate to this, because when I first got involved, when I first started running, this was something that I really struggled with a lot because I didn't have that support structure. It comes to us from Darryl who says there are no running clubs where he lives, there's no regular running groups. All of his runs are done alone and he's really battling for motivation and inspiration, what can he do to mix things up, to keep it interesting? It's a great question, and what advice would you have for Darryl?

LINDSEY
Look, it's a tough one, because invariably and spicing up the physical running, it creates an issue around is that the best way to train? If you're training in varying intensities, and doing lots of intervals, that implies that you're probably doing too much hard running. So look, as far as possible, obviously, I would try and vary route, that would be one way of breaking up that monotony, there are some online running communities where you can literally compare your runs to other people's runs.

Again, these are all things that are a double edged sword, you know, if you get onto Strava, you suddenly get into a competition with everyone around you about who can run the most kilometres in a week. But on the other side, it does give you access to a community where you can have a bit of a competition with people, even if it's not a competition, you know, you wake up in the morning, and you don't feel like running the same route again but you know that when you log on to your computer, and you get to work in the morning and grab your first cup of coffee, you're going to check and you're going to see everybody went out for a run this morning except me.

So those are the kind of things that you can do is join up to those online challenges to help a little bit with the motivation, but in terms of shaking up the programme, I'd be cautious of providing too much variety, especially if that brings in a lot of intensity, because you don't want to be doing more than 10, 15, maximum 20% of your training volume in interval style, or hill work or those kind of things. 10 to 15% is more appropriate. So that's a tough one. It is difficult to get out there.

BRAD
Let me jump in here, Lindsey, in a case like this for Darryl, would some one on one coaching, I understand that he lives in a place where there aren't too many runners, but maybe like an online coaching, and I'm using sort of our business as an example, getting a coach who can you can be accountable to so that you've got ongoing sort of back and forth, but also mixing things up under the guidance of someone who knows what's best for you, as opposed to you trying to figure out yourself. Would that be something that that would really work for someone like Darryl?

LINDSEY
Absolutely. I think the most value always comes out of coaching when you are in a non ideal situation. So you will always get value out of the coach purely because you get very objective advice on what intensities you should be doing now based on your current ability, but I think as soon as you move out of the ideal situation, where you are either somebody with very limited time to train, or in this scenario where you don't really have people around you to benchmark yourself or if you don't have people around you to get you out on the road and to meet and to chat to but what you do have in this scenario is that you know somebody's looking over your shoulder checking your runs out, and you've got someone to bounce your frustrations, ideas, good runs, bad runs off of. That engagement itself can create the excitement that you need around your training programme in the short term and beyond because obviously your goals as you improve and things get better your goals will shift. So each race and preparing for each race becomes a slightly unique experience.

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