That wasn’t how Mr. Valvano was built. A few days after Jim told his dad about his plans for the future, his dad called him into his bedroom.

“See that suitcase?” he asked, pointing to a suitcase in the corner of the room.

Confused, Jim replied, “Yeah, what’s that all about?”

“I’m packed,” his dad explained. “When you play and win that National Champi

“Running is real and relatively simple… but it ain’t easy.”

Mark Will-Weber

RULE #6: PRACTICE STEP CYCLES Step cycles take the hard-easy principle to a broader time scale. Also known as mesocycles, step cycles are multiweek training blocks in which the running workload is intentionally varied from week to week. In a step cycle, each week of training is slightly more challenging than the preceding, until the last week of th

Your Why

This should be something that brings you joy, but it also has a deeper, often long-term purpose. You want to be a patient and present partner, so you meditate. Or you want to land your dream job right out of university, so you study on the weekends if you have to. "Your why is highly correlated with happiness", says Lewis, because

If your ultimate goal is to become the best runner you can possibly be, then you’ll want to continue to increase your running volume until your current limit merges with your final genetic limit. This is the point beyond which there is no possibility for further improvement by means of additional running.

“There’s not one body type that equates to success. Accept the body you have and be the best you can be with it.” – Mary Cullen

FAST FINISH RUNS A fast finish run tacks a relatively short effort in Zone 3 onto the end of a foundation run. Fast finish runs are particularly useful as a way to infuse a little moderate-intensity running into your training during the base phase,

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Christopher McDougall

“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”

Haruki Murakami