The Way I Coach Running - And Why It Works

There's a version of running coaching that looks like this: a spreadsheet handed to an athlete, weekly mileage climbing relentlessly upward, and a race on the calendar that everything else is built around. I understand the appeal. It's tidy. It looks scientific. And it works, until it doesn't.

I've spent enough time on the other side of that approach, both as an athlete and as someone who's worked with runners across a wide spectrum, to know that what breaks people isn't usually a lack of discipline. It's programs designed for a theoretical runner, one who doesn't have a demanding job, a disrupted night's sleep, a niggling Achilles, or a week where life simply didn't cooperate.

Real running coaching must start somewhere more honest than that.

The Person Comes First

Before I care what your 5km PB is or how many kilometres you ran last week, I want to understand who you are. What's your relationship with running been like? Why are you here now? What does a normal Tuesday actually look like for you?

This isn't small talk. It's foundational. A training program is only as good as the context it's built inside. Stress, sleep, work demands, family life, these aren't obstacles to a good training block. They are the training block. They determine what's actually available to you on any given day and a coach who ignores them is building on sand.

When I understand a person, I can write a program that fits their life, not one that requires their life to bend around it. That's the difference between an athlete who makes consistent progress for years and one who cycles through motivation and burnout every few months.

More Is Rarely The Answer

There's a pull in running, especially for self-motivated athletes, toward accumulation. More kilometres, harder sessions, shorter rest. And sometimes, more is the right call. But the body doesn't improve because you trained hard, it improves because you recovered from training hard. That distinction matters enormously.

Progressive overload, done well, is methodical and almost boring. It's small, deliberate increases in stress over time, layered on top of a foundation that's been properly built. It means resisting the urge to jump because a training block is going well. It means reducing load when recovery demands it, not because something's broken but because that's how adaptation works.

Some of the best weeks I've seen from athletes have come after deliberate pull-backs in volume. The body, given room, responds. The athletes who make the most long-term progress are usually the ones who've learned to be comfortable with weeks that feel almost too easy, because they've seen what those weeks produce.

Running Is Not The Only Thin

Elite or recreational, the athletes who improve most reliably are rarely the ones who only run. Strength work, mobility, sleep quality, nutrition, these aren't supplementary. They sit right at the centre of what allows a body to absorb training and stay healthy through it.

For runners specifically, strength work is often the piece that's most resisted and most needed. Not gym sessions designed around aesthetics, but targeted work that addresses the demands of running, force absorption, single-leg stability, hip and trunk control. Done consistently, it doesn't just reduce injury risk. It makes you a faster, more economical runner.

Programming that accounts for all of this, that sees an athlete as a whole person rather than a set of cardiovascular outputs, is more complex to build, but it's the only kind that reliably produces durable results.

The Goal Is A Running Life, Not A Single Race

I want the athletes I work with to still be running well in ten years. That orientation changes almost everything about how I coach.

It means I'm not interested in extracting maximum performance from a single season at the expense of what comes after. It means I take injuries seriously, even minor ones, not because I'm conservative about training, but because the athletes who manage setbacks intelligently lose far less than those who push through everything. It means I'm thinking about building an athlete who understands their own body, reads their own signals and makes good decisions with or without me.

That's the real work. Not just delivering a program, but building the capacity in a person to train smart for the long haul. When that happens, the race results take care of themselves.

What Good Running Coaching Really Looks Like

Running is a sport that rewards patience more than almost anything else. The athletes who figure that out, who commit to the process, train consistently across years, and stay honest about what they need, almost always end up somewhere they didn't think was possible when they started.

That's what coaching is for.

Work with Kate Avery at Run2PB

If you’re looking for personalised running coaching built around your goals, lifestyle and long term development, Kate Avery coaches athletes through Run2PB.

Whether your goal is a 5km PB, a half marathon, your next marathon, a trail event or an ultra trail event, personalised coaching can help you train smarter and perform better.

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