Coach Croft

Your training plan is not a loan shark. It will not come looking for those 8 miles you missed last Tuesday.

Life load went ⬆️. Training load went ⬇️. We adjust accordingly and carry on with our extracurricular activities.

You do not owe your training plan back pay.

Life is gonna life, whether it checked VDOT (or Final Surge or TrainingPeaks) first or not.

Running gets to be the thing that adds something to our lives, not another obligation demanding something from us.

If you read nothing else, here’s your reminder: The race is one expression of the work. It was never the whole damn point.

August, apparently. No plot, questionable continuity, several side quests, and somehow we’ve almost made it to the credits.

I was going to turn this into a big, beefy carousel about capacity. Ironically, I do not currently possess the full capacity for that.

So instead, you get a Garmin snapshot and a reminder that capacity and available capacity are not the same thing.

We tend to talk about capacity like it’s a fixed ceiling. You built the capacity for 30 miles a week, so you should be able to run 30 miles this week. You’ve handled this workout before, so you should be able to handle it today.

But, unfortch, bodies don’t work like that. Heart rate fluctuates… Blood pressure fluctuates. Hormones fluctuate. Cortisol fluctuates. Energy, sleep, performance and training load fluctuate. Sometimes day to day, sometimes hour to hour, sometimes moment to moment.

Anddddd Capacity fluctuates too.

Built capacity is what you’ve developed over time through training and experience.

Available capacity is how much of that you can actually access under the conditions that exist right now.

And your workout doesn’t enter an empty system.

Your body may already be managing poor sleep, emotional stress, cognitive load, work, caregiving, relationships, heat, hormones, fueling, recovery from previous training and the general nonsense involved in being a human before you ask it to run a single mile.

Training doesn’t get first dibs on your resources. That’s why the same mileage can feel completely manageable one week and wildly expensive the next. It’s why a workout you’ve done before can suddenly feel much harder without your fitness having mysteriously disappeared.

The amount of capacity available to meet the demand changed. Being able to complete the training doesn’t necessarily mean you had enough available capacity to absorb it, recover from it and adapt to it.

Sometimes we push. Sometimes we maintain. Sometimes we reduce the demand to protect the capacity we’ve already built.

Capacity isn’t a fixed ceiling. It’s a range we’re constantly moving within.

So, no big beefy carousel today. Apparently we’re practicing the lesson instead 🫠

The internet has enough hot takes. So I decided to bring the temperature down a little.

Welcome to Cold Takes, where the advice may be significantly less dramatic, but it comes with a little context, some nuance, and the deeply inconvenient truth that athletes are actual human beings.

No universal protocols. No pretending one study settled the matter forever. No turning protein intake, Zone 2, strength training, menopause, mileage, recovery, or whatever we’re yelling about this week into a personality trait.

Just some things I’ve learned from years of coaching runners, training myself, paying attention, changing my mind when the evidence warrants it, and refusing to pretend there’s one magical way to build a strong athlete.

Here’s the first batch.

They probably won’t make the algorithm as happy as “EVERY WOMAN OVER 40 MUST DO THIS.”

I can live with that.