Running a faster marathon isn't necessarily about improving the training.

I've known Judith for nearly 40 years, although I've only been coaching her for the last three or so, she’s 60 now and showing very little inclination to make life any easier for either of us.

She's run three marathons this year, Manchester, Sydney, and Chester. Three respectable performances, all within ten minutes of each other, plenty of running, and enough miles travelled to keep an airline loyalty programme interested.  Judith, however, isn't particularly satisfied.

We have Good for Age Qualification in mind that requires sub 4:23, I think it's achievable. More interestingly, I don't think getting there necessarily requires us to make her significantly fitter, that's not something I would have said with quite the same confidence three years ago.

The marathon that looked promising

Judith's preparation for Sydney was excellent, one of the best sustained periods of training we've managed together. She was consistent, her longer sessions were encouraging, and there was enough evidence in the work to suggest she was approaching the sort of fitness we'd been trying to develop, just as importantly, she was happy.

That's something I've come to appreciate about Judith. When she's training consistently and feeling well, life seems to work rather better. There's structure to the week, the reassurance of seeing progress, the social side of running, and the satisfaction that comes from doing something demanding and doing it well.  Training becomes a very happy place for her, unfortunately, there's a small matter of having to run the marathon at the end of it.

Sydney was a race Judith wanted to do, and I entirely understand why. It's a wonderful opportunity to experience a different city, a different running culture and one of the world's great marathon events.  As a choice of race for Judith to run her fastest marathon, though, it had rather less going for it.

She travelled via Hong Kong, spent time in temperatures around 40°C, lost three or four days of running during the final week, and then had to adjust to being on the other side of the world before racing in Sydney, where temperatures reached approximately 22°C, for many runners that might have been manageable, for Judith, who struggles with warmth at temperatures considerably below that, it was asking an awful lot, the result wasn’t what she’d hoped for.

I don't think the training had failed. I think we'd prepared an athlete rather well for a race that wasn't particularly well suited to her.

There is a difference, and I suspect we don't always give it enough consideration when assessing marathon performances.

Four weeks later

Chester wasn't part of the original plan, we decided to enter just two weeks before the race, which was only four weeks after Sydney. Judith had been back in the UK for less than three weeks and had managed about 13 or 14 days of light training.  Not exactly the sort of carefully constructed marathon preparation you'd find in a coaching manual.  She ran 4:41, which was her fastest race of the year.

I was genuinely pleased with this, I thought that, in the context of the preceding month, she'd run exceptionally well. My assessment was that she'd demonstrated something closer to 4:30 capability than the finishing time alone suggested, and had we prepared specifically for Chester rather than arriving there by way of Sydney, I think she could have been very close to her target.

Of course, I can't tell you precisely how much of the improvement came from the weather, the course, recovery, pacing or any number of other variables. Marathon running is far too complicated for that, and two race results don't establish a particularly compelling scientific argument.  But I can say that Judith hadn't suddenly become a substantially fitter athlete in those four weeks.  She'd simply run a faster marathon, that distinction interests me.

What the testing told us

I've done some physiological testing with Judith, partly to establish a better understanding of her capabilities and partly to see whether there were particular limitations we could address through training.  One thing that emerged was that she wasn't especially economical in her running.

Now, at 60, some decline in aspects of running economy and neuromuscular performance isn't entirely unexpected, although the extent and causes vary enormously between individuals, nevertheless, it gave us something to ponder.

We introduced more short hill repetitions, shorter intervals and some light plyometric work, looking to improve the qualities we thought might be limiting her.

The outcome wasn't particularly convincing, we didn't see the sort of improvement that would make me confident we'd identified a significant opportunity, and while I wouldn't dismiss the value of the work, I'm less certain than I was about how much it contributes to Judith's marathon performance, that's a funny old position to find yourself in as a coach.

We spend considerable time trying to understand athletes through measurement, identifying physiological limitations, prescribing interventions and subsequently looking for evidence of improvement. There's a good deal of value in that process, and I use it regularly.  But identifying something that could be improved doesn't necessarily mean improving it will have a meaningful effect on the outcome we're interested in, nor does it mean it's the most important thing to address.

In Judith's case, I increasingly wonder whether we might achieve more by getting some relatively straightforward decisions right than by searching for another physiological improvement.

The complication of coaching an actual person

It would be convenient if athletes simply followed their training plans, selected appropriate races, recovered sensibly and arranged their lives around the performance objectives we'd agreed, I’m yet to meet many who do.

Judith likes her Tuesday group training. It's an opportunity to run with people, enjoy some company and be part of a running community, all of which I consider valuable.  From a purely training perspective, group sessions aren't always ideal. The session might not fit what we're trying to achieve that week, particularly during a marathon build, and there are occasions when the practicalities of winter group training are less appealing than the social benefits.

We've developed a fairly straightforward arrangement, Judith gets the session in advance, we decide whether it's appropriate, and if it fits reasonably well she goes. If it doesn't, she does something else.  Neither of us considers that especially complicated.

There are also races that catch her eye, sometimes at points in a training block when another event isn't necessarily helpful. We discuss them, I offer my view, and Judith makes her decisions.  She listens carefully, generally accepts most of what I say, then explains which bits she thinks I've got wrong, we've known each other long enough for that to be a perfectly comfortable arrangement.

The difficulty isn't that Judith doesn't understand the implications of her choices. She's perfectly capable of recognising that an event might not be ideal preparation for a bigger objective, sometimes she simply wants to do it anyway, and why shouldn't she?

She's 60, she enjoys running, she wants to experience different events and places, and there's considerably more to participating in sport than producing the fastest possible time over a particular distance.

The challenge comes when those perfectly reasonable choices meet exacting expectations, and the rather inconvenient truth that our psychology may not have quite adjusted to accommodate them.

That, I think, is where coaching becomes rather more interesting than writing training sessions. It’s the triangulation of the science, the art, and the potential for disappointment.

An honest conversation

After Chester, Judith and I had a fairly candid conversation about her performances.  She'd seen another athlete I coach run particularly well and wanted to understand what was preventing her from achieving something similar relative to her own ambitions.

I told her I thought Chester had been a very good run, not a consolation prize, not a polite assessment designed to make her feel better, but a genuinely good performance given what had happened in the preceding weeks.

She asked what I thought was holding her back, I gave her three things.

First, race selection, we need to be more deliberate about choosing an event that gives her a realistic opportunity to perform well, particularly considering the effect of temperature on her running.

Second, we aren't always optimising the training as effectively as we might, some of that responsibility is mine and some belongs to Judith. There are decisions we can both make differently.

Third, we need to be more selective about the races that find their way into the programme along the way. An event can be enjoyable and worthwhile without necessarily helping us towards the principal objective, but we need to recognise the trade-off.

Judith listened, considered the points, agreed with much of what I'd said and offered a few qualifications of her own, a fairly typical conversation between us.  What I didn't tell her was that she needed to train considerably harder, increase her mileage or find another level of fitness that I wasn't convinced she possessed. I don't think those are necessarily the answers.

What are we actually trying to improve?

There's something else worth considering here.

Judith's three marathon performances this year sit just over ten minutes within of one another, despite very different circumstances, and the quickest came just four weeks after an international marathon with very limited training between the two.  That suggests a considerable degree of resilience and a reasonably dependable aerobic engine.

She's capable of training at a high level, we've seen encouraging evidence in her longer sessions, and when things are going well she enjoys the process enormously.  None of which guarantee that 4:23 marathon, of course. She's 60, time doesn't stand still, and performance becomes a little less predictable as we get older.  But I don't see an athlete who's exhausted her potential.

I see one who might benefit from giving the fitness she already possesses a better opportunity to produce the result she wants.  For Judith, that probably means a carefully chosen marathon, a consistent period of training without too many distractions, arriving at the start line healthy and well recovered, and ideally a cold, dank, drizzly morning.  Most people would consider that miserable weather, I might open a bottle of something if I saw it in the forecast.

Perhaps that's where my thinking has shifted most over these three years. There's an understandable temptation in coaching to respond to an athlete falling short of a target by looking for something else to improve, another session, a different training stimulus, an adjustment to the programme, some previously unidentified physiological limitation.  Sometimes those things are exactly what's needed.  But sometimes the athlete has already done a good deal of the work, and the more useful question is whether we're making sensible decisions about how that work is brought to the start line.

Judith and I still have some decisions to make, and I suspect we'll continue to disagree about a few of them, I wouldn't particularly want it any other way.  But I remain convinced there's a faster marathon in her, and I'm not sure we'll find it by asking her to train any harder.

Reading this back what comes across is an element of lament, that’s not what is intended.  Judith remains extraordinary, her light shies bright and her race is waiting for her.