Over the past 6 race seasons, I have struggled to put together and follow my own training plan.  Sure, I found marathon, triathlon, and ultramarathon training plans online, but they were always very general, and not tailored to my specific strengths and weaknesses.  I also struggled with a major lack of accountability.  Besides writing training updates on here and recording workouts in my ridiculously long-running excel training log, I had no one to answer to but myself.  And I’m really good at talking myself out of things.  REALLY, really good.

So this year, I decided I was sick of squeaking my way through my races on the bare minimum of training.  It was time to get a coach.

But who?

There is certainly no shortage of coaches out there, so I had a lot of options.  After doing some research, and talking with some local runner friends, I decided to work with Michele Yates, from Rugged Running.  I like Michele’s coaching philosophy of “quality, not quantity,” as I have often struggled to carve out large chunks of time for training – especially now that I’m back in school again.  I also heard great things about her from other local ultrarunners who work with her.  Plus, Michele’s familiarity with the Run Rabbit Run 100 miler (she won it in 2013 – not too shabby) was great, since that’s the one I’m working towards again this year.

I’m super stoked to start working with Michele this week!  I got my training plan from her a couple days ago, and am excited to dive in and see how it goes.  I won’t be posting the nitty gritty details of the plan on here, since that’s Michele’s proprietary information, but I will continue to write weekly training recaps (general things and how stuff felt) and race reports.