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• BLOG # 92 Nov 7, 2021 at 9:35:04 AM

How Slowing Down Helped Marathoner Molly Seidel Speed Up

The American runner says she owes her Olympic bronze medal to her coach, Jon Green, who turned her training approach upside down. New York’s 26.2 miles could be her toughest challenge yet.

Not long after she left her Boston-based training group in late 2019, Seidel heard from Green, a friend and former training partner, who wanted to know if she needed help planning her workouts. As someone who was trying to keep his own professional running career alive, Green was familiar with the challenges of striking out on your own.

So they met one afternoon at a coffee shop, where Green spent nearly three hours asking Seidel about her goals and studying her training logs. He wanted to know the types of workouts she enjoyed and the types of workouts that bothered her. She was coming off a long series of injuries, and Green knew they would need to address those problems, too.

As they began to work together, one of the first things that Green did was eliminate the speedier workouts that had led to injuries for Seidel. The idea, Green said, was to avoid any training that was faster than 5-kilometer race pace. High volume, though, had never been an issue for her, and that was their primary focus ahead of the U.S. Olympic marathon trials in February 2020.

Yet Green also encouraged Seidel to be honest with him about her aches and pains. She is almost too tough for her own good, he said.

So they met one afternoon at a coffee shop, where Green spent nearly three hours asking Seidel about her goals and studying her training logs. He wanted to know the types of workouts she enjoyed and the types of workouts that bothered her. She was coming off a long series of injuries, and Green knew they would need to address those problems, too.

As they began to work together, one of the first things that Green did was eliminate the speedier workouts that had led to injuries for Seidel. The idea, Green said, was to avoid any training that was faster than 5-kilometer race pace. High volume, though, had never been an issue for her, and that was their primary focus ahead of the U.S. Olympic marathon trials in February 2020.

Yet Green also encouraged Seidel to be honest with him about her aches and pains. She is almost too tough for her own good, he said.

“Molly will not tell me something is hurting unless it’s getting to the point where she feels I need to know,” Green said. “Her ‘3’ on the pain scale is like a ‘9’ for everybody else.”

Opinión
Going faster is not necessarily better, specially in sports. Let’s see if Mr. Green’s advice translates into Molly’s winning performance today in the NYC Running Marathon.

Ir más rápido no es necesariamente mejor, especialmente en los deportes. Veamos si el consejo del Sr. Green se traduce en la actuación ganadora de Molly hoy en el NYC Running Marathon.