I find it surprisingly hard to just go for a run.
Not because I don’t like running. I do. But if you tell me to run for 50 minutes at an easy pace because it fits into a training plan I believe in, I’m perfectly happy.
Tell me to just go jogging for a bit, with no particular reason, and somehow that becomes much harder.
I like doing things properly.
That probably explains quite a lot about why Stride Protocol exists.
I like looking through training data, comparing intervals, reading about different training philosophies, listening to coaches and professional runners talk about what they do, and trying to understand why something works.
A lot of that comes down to wanting to understand what I’m doing.
If I understand why a training method makes sense, or why a session is supposed to look a certain way, I find it much easier to trust the process and actually follow it.
Maybe that’s part curiosity and part reassurance. I like having a reason for what I’m doing.
I used to program a lot, so naturally I also enjoy building tools for things that probably already have a perfectly acceptable spreadsheet solution. And now there is AI, which makes it possible to build some of the tools I wished existed years ago.
None of this means I always train intelligently.
Quite the opposite, actually.
Somewhere between jogging and being a professional athlete
There are people who run because it’s a nice way to spend an hour outside.
An easy loop along the river, some exercise, maybe a coffee afterwards.
That is completely fine.
Then there are professional runners.
Their job is to run fast. Training, recovery, nutrition and everything around it can, to some degree, be organised around that goal.
For a surprisingly long time, I looked at what those people were doing and thought I could do something similar if I just wanted it badly enough.
Turns out there is a small logistical problem with that idea.
I have a job. I am building a house, mostly myself. There are relationships, responsibilities and all the normal things that continue to exist regardless of whether TrainingPeaks says you have intervals today.
That middle ground is what interests me.
What happens if you are not a professional athlete, but you also don’t want to treat running as something you casually fit in when nothing else is happening?
How ambitious can you reasonably be?
How much of professional training can you borrow before it stops making sense in the context of a normal life?
And what does “optimal training” even mean if running isn’t the only thing your body has to recover from?
I want to get as close to the good parts of professional training as is reasonably possible, while keeping the whole thing compatible with the rest of my life.
The “reasonably” part is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.
I wasn’t always very good at that part
A while ago I had two weeks off work.
That did not mean two weeks of recovery.
My dad and I were working on the house, often for more than twelve hours a day. Physical work, all day.
And afterwards I still did my running sessions.
I remember finishing one of those days and getting onto a small treadmill I had put into a shed to do intervals alone in the evening.
Because they were on the plan.
Because I had a new coach.
And, if I’m being completely honest, because I wanted to be a good athlete for him. I wanted to show that I could handle the training.
At the time, this somehow made sense to me.
Looking back, doing intervals after twelve hours of construction work because you don’t want to disappoint your running coach is a fairly good example of the problem.
The running session wasn’t happening in isolation.
My body did not particularly care which physical stress had an official workout title.
I did.
For quite a while, I was convinced that I could fit everything in if I was disciplined enough.
Forty-plus hours of work. Building a house. Training seriously. Everything else.
Just organise it better. Try harder.
That is probably one of the ideas I want to examine here.
Sometimes discipline is useful.
And sometimes discipline is just a very organised way of ignoring obvious information.
So this is a notebook
Stride Protocol isn’t me teaching people how to train.
I’m not a coach, and I’m definitely not a guru.
There are people who understand endurance training far better than I do, and I’d rather learn from them than pretend otherwise.
What I can do is document the process.
The training I do. The decisions behind it. The data. The experiments. The tools I build. The things that seem to work. The things that absolutely do not.
Sometimes that means looking at lactate data or reading about a training method.
Sometimes it means writing code because an existing tool annoys me.
Sometimes it means realising that the sophisticated explanation for a bad training week is that I spent half of it carrying building materials around.
I want to be clear about the difference between those things.
What happened is one thing.
What the data shows is another.
My interpretation of it is another.
And occasionally I will have a theory that turns out to be nonsense.
That’s part of the point.
Why make it public?
Partly because I want the record for myself.
Training has a strange way of compressing in your memory. A few months later, you remember that you were “training pretty well” or “a bit tired”, while all the interesting details disappear.
Writing forces me to make those details explicit.
What was I trying to achieve?
Why did I change something?
Did it actually work?
Would I make the same decision again?
But I also suspect there are other runners somewhere in this same awkward middle ground.
People who are ambitious. People who enjoy the details. People who look at professional training and think, “I want some of that”, while also having a calendar containing things that are unfortunately not running.
Maybe you’re faster than me. Maybe you’re slower. That isn’t really the interesting part.
The interesting part is trying to approach the whole thing seriously without pretending the rest of life doesn’t exist.
That’s what I want Stride Protocol to be about.
Not a guide to the perfect training system.
More like a public notebook from someone trying to build one that works for him.
I’d like to look back at this in a year or two and see two things.
First, that I became a better runner.
Second, that I understand much better why.
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