Well Done, Rachel!

I noticed that Rachel Busby had run in two open meetings at the Kelvin Hall but had not clocked that she had done the 60 metres as well. It is a pity that she was the only one from the club who took the opportunity. I remember a well-known Scottish coach saying that one of the difficult things in Scottish training was 'making the winter shorter. All the real work is done then and what with more dark afternoons, evenings and mornings and the usual winter weather, you can see what he meant. The indoor scene's effect on Scottish distance running for seniors has not yet been the subject of anybody's PhD that I know of but there is no guarantee that it would suit all adult endurance athletes. It does have a place I think in the training of younger athletes and I always put some into their programmes but the other side of it is that it adds variety to the training at a time when you desperately want some relief from the unremitting daily runs on slippery surfaces and often also in rain or snow. It's good to know that your foot will stay where you put it once it is on the ground!
That's in a normal year: this year is by anybody's standards abnormal - the bad weather has come much earlier and has stayed much longer. The coach and athlete have to look at ways of getting the same training effect by different methods. For instance, hill reps are a staple of winter training and almost all the top runners, without exception, do them. In this weather running on hills is difficult - so why not get the same effect in the gym? Hills are leg strengtheners, they work the heart and lungs and they are a kind of sprint running drill with high knee lift and good arm drive. You can do good specific leg work in the gym, with twelve exercises done 20 seconds on, twenty seconds off, you can work the heart and lungs, add in arm drives and knee lifts and you have duplicated the hill sesion indoors in comfort in half the time! The session is only effective if it does what you want it to do; you should know what effect any session you do is having and, given that, then it is possible to get the same effect in another way when the weather or work commitments say that's required.
The other thing you need in this weather is some variety - make the winter shorter. Do some indoor training: Scotstoun and Kelvin Hall are available most of the time so use them. No pain, no gain was always a doubtful philosophy but there comes a point where doing 100 miles a week on the road in this weather becomes stupidity rather than dedication!