Recurring Running Niggles: Why Ambition Breaks Training and How to Build Load Tolerance

Recurring niggles as a runner can lead to doubts of, "Am I built for this?"

Worse than doubt is envy.

Envy of everyone else's uninterrupted training cycles while you're doomscrolling on the sofa.

Ambition is often the underlying problem.

The same ambition that built a successful career is tearing down the hopes of becoming a successful runner.

And it's the frustration in these cycles that is causing you to make impulsive choices.

It's not a problem with your shoes, and you do not need to keep jumping around plans.

What's needed is for you to step back and look at the problem through the same lens you likely use in your work.

Take managing a project and the friction between time, cost, and quality.

Ambitious teams can set deadlines that are too soon, leading to a breakdown in quality.

The cost, beyond money, is the stress the goal places on the system, the people.

Ambitious runners set time-oriented goals with little understanding of the cost to the system.

The cost is not allowing enough time for the system to adapt to the load being placed upon it.

Load spikes in training, when tissues are not given enough time to adapt, are often the result of poorly structured training progression.

In projects: unrealistic deadlines degrade quality. In training: unrealistic timelines degrade tissue integrity.

The most valuable skill an ambitious runner can learn to harness is patience.

Too often I'm having to reverse engineer programmes that have insisted clients progress week in and week out.

Ask many coaches how they build mileage, and they'll likely quote the 10% rule.

I have been very much guilty of this in the past. People do, after all, pay me for results and results come through progression.

But the truth is the 10% rule is a crude heuristic. What matters is avoiding spikes relative to the runner's recent training history.

Progression has to come through consistency, and staying consistent at a certain distance or speed in training for weeks, even months, will lead to results by giving the body time to adapt and settle in.

Stacking on 10% week in and week out will quickly overwhelm a system that is not prepared for that overload.

What we are really trying to develop is load tolerance.

The ability for your body to repeatedly handle the demands of running without breaking down.

That tolerance is built slowly, through consistent exposure to manageable training loads.

It's also important to not throw all the shade on coaches. Runners can get themselves into trouble when they have little understanding of the underlying principles.

When you ask the right questions you'll quickly find an ambitious runner who broke from the plan for two or three weeks and then returned to the mileage programmed for the current week, not where they left off.

Jumping from 10 miles to 13 miles in your long run because the plan says so can be the run that has you limping the next day.

And with only seven weeks until race day, what was a journey of achievement becomes one of disappointment.

So the question we need to finish on is this.

How do you balance quality and time when training for a race?

Firstly, increase the length of your runway.

When race planning, give yourself a minimum of six months to strengthen your body and build your running base before entering into your race specific training cycle.

Secondly, during that time, do not run close to your desired race pace.

This is where you can apply my RPOS RAG System.

Red = Hard effort (anything faster than race pace) Amber = Medium effort (race pace) Green = Easy effort (Z1/Z2)

During base building, intensity should drop significantly. Around 90 to 95% of the miles you run in a week should be easy.

This gives your body time to gently adapt to any increase in mileage while continuing to build a strong aerobic base.

For the remaining small portion of your running, you run a stride for every mile you've run that week.

Strides are essentially short bursts of running, around 10 to 30 seconds, that are quick but relaxed.

They allow you to keep your body primed for speed further down the line without adding large amounts of stress to your system.

Now, this is the key part.

You must label your working week Red, Amber or Green based on the energy required from you in the form of effort and stress.

If you have a couple of red weeks coming up, you don't add mileage. You stick with last week's total.

If you have green or amber weeks coming up, you can add 5 to 10% across your weekly runs.

"But every week is red at work!" I hear you gasp.

Well this is where we would need to ensure you have the tools to manage stress and then a plan to build your stress capacity, but that's a story for another day.

My final point is around peak weeks in training.

Too often you will hit a peak in training and then the following week deload, before starting to progress again.

This works well for many runners.

But there is also opportunity to experiment here.

Sometimes I might have my runners spend a few weeks at the mileage just before peaking, allowing the body to settle and adapt to that load.

Other times, after a peak week, we might stay around that accumulated mileage for a couple of weeks but distribute it differently.

For example, the 14 miler the following week might be split into two runs to allow for a little more recovery while maintaining the overall load.

This is where coaching becomes nuanced.

But underneath all of it are a few simple principles.

Avoid load spikes. Build chronic workload slowly. Prioritise low intensity training. Use small speed exposures like strides early. Adapt training to life stress. Extend the timeline for structural adaptation.

If you can stay patient long enough to follow those principles, your body will gradually develop the load tolerance required to handle bigger training and faster racing.

Even when that ambition of yours is twitching to push harder.