Hello! At this point in the season your kids are racing AND doing hard workouts. Point number nine from Consistency Is Key is Do Your Easy Days Easy and Your Hard Days Hard. Simple enough. And something so many athletes fail to do. Below is one of the most popular newsletters from last fall that explains the importance of easy days. Enjoy! Why Is An Easy Day Necessary? I’ll make this quick: the detailed answer is in the book. The short answer is rooted in Dr. Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Principle, which says that the body can adapt to a stressor—in our case, a workout or race—so long as the body is given enough recovery. So, the stressor, followed by rest/recovery, leads to “supercompensation.” You may be familiar with the Stress + Rest = Growth equation that Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg shared in their book Peak Performance. Same thing – and probably easier to remember. Again, if you want more detail check out my book. Prioritize Strides, Posture and Mechanics, and SAM You likely know that your athletes need to be doing strides on their easy days. And you’d like your athletes to run with good mechanics on their easy days. As Joan Hunter said in her interview for the Consistency Is Key Coaches Course, “I want my athletes to look like Olympians on their easy runs.” Athletes need to do SAM (or similar) after each easy day. When you combine these three elements, you can now organize the day. First, figure out the volume of strides you want them to run, and figure out the intensity. If you want 6 x 150m In-n-Outs, that’s at least moderately challenging. Doing 10 x 100m is always a challenge, especially if the strides get faster as you go. The Oregon Drill, which is clearly described by the legendary Pat Tyson in this article, is another way to get in some faster running. (Note: I didn’t know what the drill was until last night. Thanks to the coach in Michigan for taking the time to send the article!) Key Point: Figure out the volume of the strides you want first. Next, figure out how much SAM work (or similar) you want them to do today and figure out how much time you need for this. When you’ve done those two things, you simply need to explain to them that on an easy day they need to be able to speak in paragraphs. I received several questions about the pace of easy days and how to know if you’re running easy enough, and as long as they're speaking in paragraphs they're fine. Or, said another way, athletes should be able to tell jokes and stories on these runs. If they’re talking in paragraphs, then there is no reason they can’t check in a few times during the run and ask themselves: “Am I running with good posture?” or “Am I running up tall?’” You’ll need to teach them what it feels like to run with good mechanics, and a good place to start is with the Oregon Drill I linked to above. Can They Run Too Easy? Sure, there is a way to run with great mechanics and run 10-minute pace. But that’s item Z on your list of things to focus on. You likely have kids who want to be excellent runners, some of whom are Type A. This simple concept – that you need to run your easy days easy – is going to be a hard one to grasp. They're wired to want to run at least a medium/moderate pace. Elite athletes and some collegiate athletes have such a high work capacity (due to their greater training age) that they may need to do that, but your kids simply need easy days where they are talking in paragraphs. Now, let me share some quick answers to the questions I received. What pace should I run? Don’t worry about pace; just run at a pace you can speak in paragraphs. And if you’re alone, talk to yourself for 30 seconds as a check-in. What’s the point of doing easy days? It’s in the book, but again, Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome is the underlying physiological principle. How do you know what is your easy pace? Any tips? It's not a pace, and what’s interesting is that even if you did track the pace of properly executed easy days over the course of a few months, you’d see wide differences in pace. A topic for another day (and another point in the book) is the crucial skill of running by feel. When you run by feel on easy days when you’re extremely fatigued, you’ll likely be running slower – but with good posture! – then your normal easy day. I hope your team is off to a good start. If you have a topic you’d like me to cover in the coming weeks feel free to respond to this email. Take good care. Jay | 
