Training to Achieve Peak Running Performance by Jon Sinclair and Kent Oglesby with Claudia Piepenburg "is about the fundamental ideas and concepts that are the cornerstone of excellent coaching. By applying these principles and tenants to your own running, you'll discover how to "break through" and achieve your own PEAK PERFORMANCE."

Excerpt from the book:

Anyone who has run for more than a few years and has made an effort to achieve more than simple fitness goals, knows that a set of tables describing a sure fire method to faster racing or formulas that are designed to yield proper training efforts just don't quite deliver the goods. No matter how hard we try to fit individuals into a "system," each runner is an amalgam of such variable characteristics that no one fits perfectly. Even the heart rate monitor, always held in such great esteem, will record data that still needs to be filtered through the informed knowledge of both the athlete and coach. The information a monitor records can be ambiguous at best. A runner must understand the nuances of their own heart's characteristics.

Additionally, the athlete must be able to interpret the effects of cardiac drift and the vagaries of specific and systemic fatigue. The former will give a low heart rate reading even though the effort seems to indicate a higher reading, while systemic fatigue will cause the heart rate to rise dramatically even though the pace of the workout seems very slow. The art of digesting information, evaluating the data in terms of specific individuals and then prescribing workouts that safely advance the athlete's fitness is the job description of a coach.

Nothing can replace the experience, knowledge, and intuition of a coach, not even if it appears in computer format. Coaching is an art and at present there is no machine, book, or system that can adequately replace the human mind in negotiating the numerous pitfalls of training or in developing individual programs that allow for human variability. Nevertheless, excellent coaching must combine science and experience with the equally important human skills: communication, empathy, creativity, and ability to motivate.

Certainly, coaching encompasses formulas, conversions, tables and objective data but at its base level coaching is really about "shades" of training, subtle adjustments, variable conditions, and patient development. This book is about those fundamental ideas and concepts that are the beginnings of excellent coaching. We hope to identify and explain the process of coaching and present a philosophy that any runner can use to improve his/her program. Athletes we have coached will be profiled to illustrate how we applied our philosophy and principles.

While, as coaches, we occasionally get credit for the Olympic qualifier or even an Olympic participant, our satisfaction resides more often with a life-changing discovery of running and fitness. Consequently, the chapters of this book will draw upon our experiences in coaching both the elite athlete and the recreational runner. We hope to provide an illustration of the roadmap used to deliver "life-changing" fitness and competitive success. The basic principles are essentially applicable for both with the only differences being matters of degree and the intensity of focus.

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