If I coached me now

I've occasionally wondered what I'd do if I could travel back 35 years, find the young middle-distance runner I used to be, and offer to coach him with everything I've learned in the years since.

Whether he'd listen is another matter entirely.

I've been running since I was twelve, but my pomp, I guess, was from 1988 to early 1993, when I was competing over 800m and 1500m, with a mile best of 4:04, Welsh Championship titles, university championship medals, senior cross-country titles and appearances at national championships and Olympic Trials. I was a reasonably accomplished athlete, although like most young runners at that level, I was considerably more interested in what I hadn't achieved than what I had.

I trained hard, competed frequently, enjoyed most of it enormously, and had the benefit of some very good coaches and people around me. I've now spent around 25 years coaching other athletes, and I occasionally find myself wondering what I'd do differently, not because I believe we got things wrong back then, but because so much has changed in our understanding of training, adaptation and the things that influence performance.

What would I retain, what would I change, and would any of it have made much difference? There's also the rather inconvenient matter of what consuming at least ten pints of beer a week during this period actually did for me.

What we actually did

My winter training was relatively straightforward, and looking back, reasonably sophisticated. The following was a fairly typical week, although the precise sessions and the amount of running varied throughout the season.

There wasn't much unnecessary complication, although we were certainly getting through the work, and by the time summer arrived the emphasis would shift quite considerably. Mileage reduced, the track became the centre of things, and three sessions each week concentrated on 1500m, 800m and 400m race paces, with recoveries generally designed to maintain the quality of the faster running.

The principal objective was clear enough: run quickly, learn to tolerate running quickly, and arrive at the track capable of doing it when someone fired the gun. There were circuits, easier runs and steady running between the demanding sessions, but nothing that would look especially unfamiliar to a contemporary middle-distance coach.

Much of the running outside the structured sessions was governed by feel, and a steady hour might cover ten miles on a good day and little more than eight on another. We didn't always need a device to tell us when we were tired, and there was something rather liberating about going out for a run without being presented with an assessment of your readiness to undertake it. Looking back, I wouldn't necessarily change that.

What I'd do differently

The first change would be the distribution of training. Three demanding running sessions each week, winter and summer, now looks rather more than I'd choose to prescribe for the athlete I was, and I'd probably reduce that to two principal sessions, increase overall aerobic volume and make a greater proportion of the running genuinely easy.

The objective wouldn't be to work less, but to create a better balance between the work that stimulates adaptation and the opportunity to absorb it. I'd retain threshold training through the summer, rather than allowing almost everything to become race-specific, and I'd consider double-threshold sessions at appropriate points during winter, although not simply because the approach has become fashionable.

There's plenty of good reasoning behind the training we did, and I wouldn't want to lose its specificity or the physical and psychological confidence that came from regularly running at race pace. I'd just be more selective about how frequently we asked the athlete to do it, recognising that the quality of the work and the ability to recover from it are rather more important than simply accumulating another demanding session.

The considerably bigger differences, however, would probably be found away from the track.

Everything around the running

Strength and conditioning would be a priority, not an afterthought. Our auxiliary work consisted largely of circuits, hills, sit-ups and press-ups, all of which had some value, but there was little of the progressive, individualised strength development that I'd now consider an important part of preparing a middle-distance runner.

I'd introduce complex multi-joint movements, isometrics, posterior-chain work and plyometrics, organised around the requirements of the running programme rather than simply added to it. Perhaps two sessions weekly during winter, concentrating on establishing and developing useful physical qualities, with relatively light plyometric work in the form of line-jump variations and other uncomplicated movements.

In summer, I'd move towards more demanding plyometric movements and heavier lifting where appropriate, perhaps two or three sessions in a normal training week, reducing the load around important races. That might appear counterintuitive to anyone accustomed to doing the heavy lifting in winter and abandoning it when the track season begins, but I'd want the physical qualities we were developing to have a meaningful relationship with the demands of competition.

Of course, there's an obvious complication. The additional work carries its own fatigue and recovery requirements, and we'd need to make room for it rather than pretending the athlete had an unlimited capacity to absorb training. Then there's mobility, something I'd approach much more deliberately now, attending to individual restrictions and movement requirements rather than assuming that running itself provided everything necessary.

Nutrition would probably be an even greater departure.

I ate reasonably well in terms of quantity, perhaps rather too well on occasion, but the diet was unsophisticated, heavily carbohydrate-based, relatively low in protein, and almost entirely disconnected from the training I was doing. Nowadays I'd be paying much closer attention to carbohydrate availability around demanding sessions, protein intake and distribution, recovery between workouts and how nutrition supported the work planned for the following day.

We planned the running. We didn't really plan the fuelling.

None of that means the food I ate was inherently dreadful, or that I'd necessarily have needed more of it. The greater change would have been understanding what I was asking my body to do and supporting those demands accordingly, rather than treating eating and training as two largely unrelated activities.

And yes, I'd probably have something to say about my alcohol consumption. I suspect that particular conversation between the 58-year-old coach and his younger athlete might have become a little animated.

The things we couldn't measure

Heart-rate monitors were beginning to appear in training, but much of what we now take for granted simply wasn't available. There was no continuous sleep tracking, no routine HRV monitoring, no GPS record of every run and none of the increasingly sophisticated tools we use to understand training load, recovery and adaptation.

We had watches, training diaries, race results and a reasonably good understanding of how we felt. Would I use more technology today? Absolutely. Would every additional measurement improve the decisions we made? Almost certainly not.

I've learned enough through coaching to recognise that obtaining more information and making better decisions aren't necessarily the same thing, and while testing can be enormously useful, it needs to answer a question that matters, with the results subsequently influencing what we actually do.

Equally, I wouldn't dismiss the athlete's ability to regulate training by feel, particularly when that judgement had developed through years of experience. I sense some of this is missing today generally, and I'd be keen to keep the younger me in tune with it, retaining that understanding of effort that served us reasonably well while using modern measurement where it genuinely added something.

And then there are the shoes

It's difficult to look back at running in the late 1980s and early 1990s without considering the extraordinary changes in footwear. We've become accustomed to discussing modern foams and plated shoes in terms of racing performance, sometimes reducing the whole conversation to how many seconds or minutes a particular shoe might save.

I'm interested in their influence on training, too. The development of modern foam technologies has changed the experience of running, potentially allowing athletes to tolerate certain workloads differently, manage some of the muscular demands of training and recover more comfortably between sessions.

That doesn't mean every athlete benefits equally, or that the shoes remove the physiological cost of the work, and they certainly don't eliminate the need for intelligent load management. But the possibilities are interesting, particularly when we consider how much of a middle-distance runner's development depends on consistently absorbing training over months and years rather than simply running a little faster on race day.

I suspect the younger me would have been rather enthusiastic about some of the footwear available today, although whether he'd have been equally enthusiastic about the price is another matter.

Would I even be running the same events?

This is something I hadn't properly considered when I first started thinking about the exercise.

I became a middle-distance runner partly because that was where the competitive pathway took me. I was good at it as a schoolboy, progressed through county schools competition, regional and national representation, university athletics and eventually senior championships, and there was always another standard to reach, another competition to qualify for, and another reason to continue pursuing the 800m and 1500m.

The track was where much of my ambition lived.

In that period, when people discovered you were a runner, they were quite likely to ask about your mile or 1500m time, whereas today the conversation is often about the 5km, 10km, half marathon or marathon. The culture around running has changed enormously, and the opportunities to participate in road racing and endurance events have developed alongside it.

I've raced hundreds of 800m and 1500m races, scores of cross-country events, but only a handful of 5km and 10km road races and two half marathons. I never really explored that side of running in the same way, and if I were growing up in today's running culture, I suspect my interests might take me towards the roads, perhaps progressing from 5km and 10km through the half marathon and eventually the marathon.

Would I have been better at those events? I haven't the faintest idea.

I was successful at middle distance, and I wouldn't assume that a different competitive pathway would necessarily have made me a better athlete, but it might have produced a rather different athletic experience, and that's an interesting thought in itself.

What have I learned?

I've been coaching for around 25 years now, and one thing I've never particularly identified with is the idea of living my athletic life again through someone else. I've had my turn, enjoyed it enormously, and have no particular desire to make another athlete responsible for finishing something I didn't.

What keeps me interested is the whole complicated business of understanding why things work, why sometimes they don't, and why two apparently similar athletes can respond so differently to much the same training. The more experience I accumulate, the more I find myself questioning things I once considered relatively straightforward, and when you're genuinely invested in the people you're coaching, the experience can be extraordinary or occasionally pretty bloody miserable.

Sometimes months of work come together in a performance that neither athlete nor coach will forget. Sometimes the preparation has been excellent, the decisions have been sensible and the result is still disappointing, without there necessarily being a satisfying explanation for any of it.

Perhaps that's why I remain interested.

The younger athlete was principally concerned with how quickly he could cover two or four laps of a track, whereas these days I'm rather more interested in understanding everything that contributes to an athlete's ability to do it, and that brings me back to the question.

Would I have been faster if the coach I am now had been responsible for the athlete I was 35 years ago?

It's tempting to say of course I would, armed with better information, better nutrition, more sophisticated strength work, different training distribution and modern footwear.

The truth is, I don't know.

The training I did was good training, provided by good people, and it produced a reasonably good athlete. We weren't getting it wrong simply because we didn't know everything that would become available over the following three decades, and while there are things I'd change, certainly, I suspect the entire experience of training and competing would look quite different.

But better supported doesn't necessarily mean faster, and knowing more doesn't automatically mean making better decisions. Perhaps in another 35 years someone will look back at what we're doing now and wonder how on earth we managed with so little information.

I rather hope they do.

In the meantime, I suspect I'd quite enjoy coaching that young runner. Whether we'd agree on everything is doubtful, and I imagine the conversation about his social life might prove considerably more difficult than deciding between two or three track sessions a week.

But I'd be interested to see what we could do together.

And isn't that rather the point of coaching?