July 13, 2016
Jason Chao’s Success Story
Here’s runner, Jason Chao’s, story about how Coached changed his training and improved his running times.
This post was written by Jason Chao about his experience training with Coached.
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Having been bitten by the running bug over six years ago, I have clocked many miles and run many races. My goal has always been to push personal boundaries aiming for continuous improvement in race times.
While the achievement of new Personal Best (PB) timings during the first couple of years came relatively easily, I found my performance reaching a plateau thereafter, making new PBs less likely and achieving only marginal improvements when hitting new records – this was despite the fact that I trained harder and longer during race preparation. Given my recent entry to the Master’s category age group, I began to wonder if the days of performance improvement might be behind me.
The old saying insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results rang true and I decided that I needed to better understand the science of endurance running in order to improve performance.
Cut Race Times, Not Corners.
Racing at your potential and enjoying training is easy when you’re following the right programme.
This is when I discovered Coached with their focus on sports science and how to use this in training to train smarter and not harder. After Lactate and Fat Burn testing at the Coached Lab, I signed up to Coached to commence a structured training programme specific to my fitness level and focused around time and heart rate zones. This training was very low intensity compared to my previously unstructured training where I’d generally run hard over a given distance.
After three months of training, I re-tested my lactate threshold and was pleasantly surprised that it had improved by ~0.7km/h and 5 beats per min. A week later I ran a half marathon and achieved a PB shaving over 4 minutes of my previous best time. Since then, I’ve used Coached to qualify for the Boston Marathon!
Not only has Coached introduced me to a whole new way of training, but it has also introduced me to a community of like-minded athletes looking to reach new performance levels, complete their first triathlon or marathon, or just to improve their fitness levels.
Ben Pulham