Stop Saving It For The Weekend
How to get more out of the training hours you already have
Most athletes I coach start stuck in the same pattern.
Skip Tuesday. Plan for Wednesday. Work goes crazy. Wednesday is skipped.
Tell themselves Saturday will be a big one.
Saturday comes. Kids have a game. Family plans appeared from nowhere. The big run doesn’t happen.
Sunday is church, groceries, and by the time a free window opens up, you’re exhausted — or you default to clearing the pileup of work emails before Monday.
Meanwhile the guy doing 3 miles on Tuesday, a 35-minute ride Thursday, and not snoozing the alarm on Saturday just put in three weeks of consistent training while you were waiting for the perfect window.
This is the core mistake.
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The long run isn’t the engine. It’s the reward.
You earn the long run by showing up Tuesday and Thursday.
Without that frequency, Saturday’s 90 minutes isn’t training — it’s damage control.
Your body spends the first 45 minutes remembering how to run and the last 45 breaking down.
Frequency is the prerequisite. The long run is what frequency earns you.
The math most athletes get wrong.
One 12-mile run per week feels like serious training.
Three 4-mile runs per week feels like not enough.
Same total volume. Completely different stimulus.
The athlete doing three short runs is building the habit, adapting to frequency, getting form reps, and sending consistent signals to their aerobic system.
The athlete doing one long run is doing an event every weekend, breaking down by mile 6, going dark for six days, and spending the rest of the week thinking he needs to run longer.
My two-year-old’s survival swim plan.
When my son turned two, my wife and I put him into survival swim lessons.
My assumption was that he’d be spending a lot of time in the pool.
But his program looked very different.
His lessons were just 10 minutes long. Three times per week.
I asked the swim instructor to explain the philosophy and she laid it out simply:
“When kids are in the water longer than 10 minutes, they default to and ingrain bad habits.
Their practice becomes sloppy. And pretty soon, they dread getting in the water.
When the lessons are just 10 minutes, the lessons are higher quality — we do it more frequently so the skills get practiced more often.
And the kids end up enjoying it much more.”
The same is true for beginner endurance athletes.
Running and running long are two separate skills.
For the average dad who was competitive athletically as a kid but hasn’t followed structured training in years, the lowest hanging fruit in endurance is getting better at the movements and leaving the session feeling solid — not going further with sloppy form and limping into the kitchen.
