Brian Clarke

Aloha, I’m Brian Clarke. I’ve been a full-time, professional fitness trainer and marathon program director since 1979. Now, in my early eighties, I still enjoy helping endurance athletes improve their game.

When I first began my coaching career, nobody had had the audacity to charge money for coaching runners. These were the early days of America’s recreational running boom, and I decided to buck the trend by charging a fee for my coaching services. Many people I encountered at the time were incredulous. “What’s so hard about running?” they wanted to know.

To justify charging a fee, I developed an “advanced” marathon training system to distinguish it from the two beginner programs in town at the time. My first three years of coaching were, to say the least, not lucrative. But I got by living frugally and by receiving a small grant from the Honolulu Marathon Association.

By 1982, I’d developed a following and a reputation for training athletes better than they could train themselves. Many found marathon training to be more challenging than they’d expected, and I stayed in business by knowing how to slow athletes down and, also demonstrating the efficacy of my mission, which is still the same as it was back then: that I could get them through the marathon safely, competently, and enjoyably, with a proven training program and friendly group support.

I saw clearly in the early days that accomplishing my mission would require a thorough understanding of the training process. Otherwise, I’d be labeled as incompetent and thereby doomed as a fitness trainer. My initial goal was to understand the way my college coach, Bill Bowerman, had trained me while I was on the track team at the University of Oregon in the mid-1960s.

His method was eventually known as the Oregon System. But I call it the Hard-Easy System. It’s the best system yet devised for training endurance athletes. When I first got to Oregon in 1964, however, Bowerman’s system was controversial. Some of his athletes snuck in mileage on the days when they were supposed to run short and slow. They complained that Bill’s “easy days” were too easy. But they were often sick or injured and they rarely performed well on race days.

I saw what was happening and I bought in, following Bill’s schedule assiduously. The highlight of my running career was the 4:06 mile I ran in my junior year. That year was seminal for me because, as I reflected on it later, the Oregon System made so much sense.

I eventually wrote three books on the subject to better understand the adaptive training process.  The course I currently teach on the Hard-Easy System has been in development since the early 1980s; it represents my most advanced thinking about the endurance training process.

Using the Hard-Easy System over the 45 years of my coaching career has proven invaluable. It forms the underlying conceptual framework I used to train more than a hundred marathoners a year. Under my guidance, virtually all my athletes completed the Honolulu Marathon, few were ever injured, and many improved on prior performances.

When the pandemic hit Hawai‘i in March of 2020, my business was shuttered by the new pandemic rules. Chagrined by my vulnerability, I decided to create a new, pandemic-proof, training and education program for adult, recreational distance runners. I’m currently in the fourth year of that developmental process, and the work is going well. We have a new website, we teach courses on a variety of health and fitness-related topics, and we are building a year-round training program.

Moreover, if we were hit by another pandemic, we currently have the means of training hundreds of athletes remotely, using Zoom-audio. Of course, most of our athletes prefer to train face-to-face, with their buddies in a group. And granted, in-person training with a coach is the best way we’ve found to sustain a socially-enhanced training discipline. In a pinch though, we believe it’s better to continue training consistently, than to stop entirely. We’ve also seen the educational benefits that accrue from being connected with a workout facilitator and a group of like-minded athletes, as we can discuss training-related topics that teach and enlighten everyone on a workout conference call.

Although I’ve been around for longer than most coaches, I survive by always looking for new ways to innovate and improve my teaching and coaching. I love what I do and firmly believe in the transformative power of discovering our inner athlete.  This is what I try to convey to my clients and the humble way I strive to create a healthier world for all of us.