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Here’s a link to a PDF file of the schedule.

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Personality-based habits form a feedback loop, as positive behavior garners satisfying results that reinforce right behavior. Habits are not about having something, but becoming someone: the person you want to be. New habits have the power to change your beliefs about yourself.

• A habit is an automatic, unconscious solution to a real-life problem. You don’t have to think about habitual behavior. The thinking only occurs as you are setting up and repeating the behavior you want to do automatically, without thinking about it.
• There are four steps to building a habit: declaring your intent, remembering in the moment, following through on your commitment, and reaping rewarding results. This program will suggest appropriate habits; you must provide the mental and physical work.
• The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning. Habit formation is the process by which behavior becomes progressively more automatic through many repetitions. Every meal and every workout becomes a health and fitness opportunity.

Habit 1. Exertion is not necessarily disagreeable, unless you make it so. In this program, Launchers operate within a narrow range of exertion that can be pleasant, enjoyable, and fun. Thus, exertion can be measured in two controllable dimensions: intensity and duration.

• In the Launcher program, intensity is confined to feeling comfortable. There is never a rationale for discomfort, including the pain of injury. Thus, our fundamental practice is to hold oneself back to the comfortable level, never rising to even tolerable discomfort.
• If you breathe a sigh of relief and act according to this dictum, you’ll have a long life in the sport of long distance walking, jogging, or running. But if you are vested in the outdated, no-pain, no-gain approach to fitness exercise, your path is fraught with peril.
• The other fundamental practice is to become aware of the things you tell yourself about the effort you exert. Moreover, all your attitudes have feelings attached to them which can negatively affect your training practice. Pay attention to those as well.

Habit 2. There is some social support built into this program. But Launchers are attempting a monumental change in identity: from beginner athlete (barely-on-the-path) to intermediate (confirmed-in-the-process). The audacity of that transformation requires more social support.

• Your facilitators and mentors are there to support you because they have trod this path before and they recognize your needs. But others in your work or family life may be less understanding of your fitness avocation, especially if it disrupts their life.
• The practice is to identify at least three people outside of the program who might be willing to support you in continuing with fitness exercise as a life endeavor. Talk those people into assisting you in this project. If one turns you down, always find another.
• Develop a habit of thinking of your fitness needs as necessary me-time that must be balanced with the needs of others in your life. Think through what has to happen for everyone to feel good about the accommodations you all may have to make.

Habit 3. Our program is inclusive of full-body fitness; we aren’t, say, a marathon training program that focuses exclusively and shortsightedly on long-distance running. We therefore, integrate resistance training (hill work, core strengthening, and weight lifting) into every workout.

• All resistance exercises build muscle strength (power). But the training discipline doesn’t require will power to drive adaptive processes. Athletes who employ will power to increase their fitness tend to over-train, thereby becoming sick, injured, or exhausted.
• We practice finding the relaxed level of exertion (gentle, held-back, relaxed, pressed, forced, strained), until it becomes automatic. Only relaxed exertion is sustainable in the long term of 5 years or more. Pressing, forcing, or straining yields short-term gains only.
• Flexibility is another aspect of full-body fitness where relaxation is crucial. Our goal is not to acquire greater range of motion, but to acquire a greater range of pain-free motion. Pushing into pain increases pain. Better to play with pain until it goes away.
  Habit 4. Launchers practice gradual, 5-minute increases in the duration of their workouts, from 40 minutes initially to 80 near the end of 12 weeks. In the process, they become skilled at discovering and inventing routes that get them back at the exact scheduled duration target.
• Those incremental increases in workout duration cause parallel increases in workout effort, from piece-of-cake easy in the early going to moderately difficult near the end. Moderating increases in duration moderates potentially harmful increases in effort.
• The entire process is complex at the beginner level, but becomes simpler with practice. Intermediates can closely estimate how a tour through a pleasant neighborhood would add just enough distance to meet a duration target within a couple of minutes. Kudos!
• Pace exertion is the other major factor in the training mix. Remember, high exertion drives fast pace, which may have been good when you needed to run away from lions in your evolutionary past. Today, a very-slow-to-slow pace is our practice constant.

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The BC Injury/Pain Scale. You can’t train effectively if you are injured, meaning you experience pain at the twinging level or higher on the following scale: tender, twinge, ache, sore, severe. See about using the following protocol every time you feel the sudden onset of unusual pain.
• Whenever you feel a sharp twinge of pain, back off on exertion immediately. Slow down until the pain goes away, whether in that workout or over a period of several weeks. Better to lose a few weeks of training than be saddled with an interminable debilitating injury.
• Whenever you experience pain, your highest priority should be to get rid of it through a concerted injury-freeing process. First, until the injury goes away, see about changing your mindset from training to rehabilitation. Train under pain, never through it. Tender only.
• Remember, all injuries go away if they are treated properly. The most important thing is to slow down so you experience the pain at no more than the tender level. The pain will go away gradually if you don’t continue hurting yourself with more painful exercise.
Injury Do’s and Don’ts. Never train with soreness that causes limping (even minor limping). Limping means you’re going too fast for rehabilitation purposes. Whatever your training purpose, it’s not as important as getting rid of the injury so you can train enjoyably and sustainably.
• The Don’ts of Injury. Don’t try shoe inserts or pain pills. Don’t stretch, unless you do it gently. Stretching feels good but often exacerbates an injury, as do strengthening and therapy exercises meant to work a damaged area that needs rehabilitation more than work.
• Begin with a regimen of active exercise at the gentle level. Use excruciatingly slow walk-ing to keep the pain at bay. Do very-short, 5-minute workouts to warm and loosen the area, relieving stiffness and poor circulation. Afterwards, cool it with 10 minutes of icing.
• The pain should go away from day to day, enabling you to go a little faster. Consult with a coach before going to a doctor. It’s a coach’s job to get you out of the injury. Medical consultation will be recommended if this protocol doesn’t result in rapid rehabilitation.
Solving the Injury Problem. Every pain has an antecedent problem, which must be uncovered and solved by active intervention. Most athletes can reflect on their circumstances and come up with several plausible hunches about causal factors. An expert, by contrast, ferrets the answer.
• It helps, therefore, to have the input of someone more experienced than yourself. Hunches can be straw dogs. Dead ends that lead nowhere. Plausible, but in the end they don’t reveal the real problem. Find someone who can strike through to comprehension.
• Someone who can reflect, for instance, on the circumstances surrounding the onset of an injury. Most injuries are caused by too much exertion and too little rest. If that’s been true for you, then resolve to do better. Build new habits that lower the risk of future injury.
• Otherwise, you’re doomed to cast about for solutions to non-existent problems, while an injury festers long enough to be wrongly accepted as normal. An injury is never normal. There is always a way to more natural forms of exercise. But can you accept the solution?
Shoes and Injury. Training-related issues, such as warming-up incorrectly, can cause injuries. But there could be other problems. Shoes, for instance, can be a major cause of recurring injury. It’s often good to cover the new-shoe base as one of your first steps in the rehabilitation process.
• Find expert advice before you invest in a new pair of shoes. Go to a reputable running shoe store where the salespeople know how to match your bone-and-muscle structure needs with a shoe’s intended function and features. And where they’ll let you try them out.
• Running shoes wear out and compress much more quickly than street shoes. Often the uppers can look brand new, but the compression is hidden in the mid-sole. Even minor wear and compression can cause significant injury. So, inspect your shoes frequently.
• A new shoe is as good as it will ever be the first time you take it out for a run. Once it starts to compress, it may feel broken-in and comfortable, but it’s less capable of protecting you from pounding-related injuries because the platform is no longer supple or level.
Changing Injury-related Attitudes. Thinking: I’m a bad person; this is the end of my running career; I’m so depressed; I have to train through this injury. These are all unnecessary and counter-productive mental/emotional aspects of the injury phenomenon.
• You must nurture a positive mental attitude because that will lead to the positive emotions that should drive your decision-making. The first step is to become aware of your injury-related mental conversation. What are you telling yourself about it and how does that feel?
• You are ultimately responsible for dealing with the injury in such a way that you return to enjoyable, injury-free training—your natural way of being in the world. Everything else should be rooted out, along with unbridled ambition.
• My wife used to wag a finger at my injured athletes and say, “All injuries are rooted in ambition.” She was right, of course, but only the bravest athletes are willing to examine their deep-seated motivations and the compulsions that drive excessive, injurious effort.
Insensitivity to your body can easily lead to injury. Pain is one way your body signals some-thing’s wrong. Yet many people will deny the pain is there, or simply overlook it as necessary or inevitable. Becoming aware of pain is the primary prerequisite for effective injury rehabilitation.
• You may think you are in charge of your body and that what you say goes. But your body operates according to rules and processes that can be foreign to your mind, which is thrown to intuitive, habitual, and often incorrect decisions, without thorough assessment.
• Your physical self doesn’t think with words or concepts, but with pain and other physical sensations. Your body governs these sensations with forces beyond your direct control. It has at least equal claim to agency with your thoughts, emotions, and perspectives.
• Thus, the most you can hope for during a workout is to control your body indirectly through scrupulously correct exertion, such as a proper warm-up. And by never over training. Our goal is to enjoy year-round, pain-free, and sustainable fitness exercise.
The Transition and the Warm-up. The “warm-up” doesn’t actually begin until about 10 minutes into a running workout. That’s how long it takes for the metabolic “transition” force to run its course. The transition decreases energy and increases the risk of injury.
• The “transition” phase of the workout-energy-cycle occurs between standing around before the workout and the warm-up phase, which begins once you’ve walked or jogged very slowly for 10 minutes. The transition takes the form of a physical shock to your body.
• As such, the transition is a tricky part of the workout. If you go too fast—especially if you can hear your breathing—you can easily injure yourself or become prematurely fatigued. The transition can reverberate throughout the workout, so it must be handled carefully.
• Your transition pace should be excruciatingly slow. Some have said “painfully” slow, but that is an incorrect term. If anything, it should be painlessly slow, meaning you feel no pain at all. Thus, your first training goal is to minimize the shock of each workout’s transition.
(Continued on the next page)
Recognizing Injury. Soccer champion, Lionel Messi, runs less during a match than his peers. But he scans the field 50 times a minute, far more than most. Similarly, great runners scan their body constantly and habitually for signs of distress—warnings that require their attention.
• Weird or unusual sharp-darting pain is the easiest to acknowledge, but not always the easiest to accept. The mind resists the obvious solution: to slow down and let the pain subside, especially when your energy is good and you want to go as fast as it will let you.
• Nonetheless, your highest priority is to run injury-free. Injury precludes joyful running and is ultimately unsustainable. To be injury-free requires freedom from whatever is driving you. Even novice athletes can be ambitious, about burning calories, if nothing else.
• Thus, body scanning is the prerequisite of injury-free running. Notice pain that lingers at such a low level that it hardly warrants consciousness. Tolerable pain is pain. And unsus-tainability develops from pain that isn’t treated seriously and expeditiously. So scan often.
Body Scanning. A full body scan only takes a moment, as you have broad and immediate access to your entire body from head to heels and from the skin to your deepest innards. All your bones and joints, but especially the working parts, should be regularly scrutinized for unusual pain.
• Think first in terms of your body’s painful messages? Does a pain require immediate adjustment to your pace or stride? How about your footfall? Are you compensating with limping or poor posture for some barely acknowledged painful discomfort?
• Where are the sensations coming from? And is location, pace, or posture the main precipitating factor of incipient pain? Remember, pain-free exercise is your highest priority. Abundant energy is nice to have, but high-level exercise is not always advisable.
• Physical sensations are only one aspect of how the body communicates with the thinking, observing mind. Pay attention to the affective side of your experience: the feelings that give rise to tension, anxiety, and fear. Strive to augment relaxation, wherever possible

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Base-building. The goal is to establish three short injury-free workouts a week, without increasing pain during or between the workouts. Rather, as you repeat those base workouts, there should be a gradual but noticeable diminishing of pain. Otherwise, the injury will persist.

• At this base level, workout pace, frequency, and duration should depend entirely on what the injury allows, without returning to your full training load. Start with, say, 5- minute walks at a very-slow pace and build to several 30-minute, slow jogging workouts.
• The key is to never allow the pain to rise above the tender level during a workout and, similarly, never allow the pain between workouts to increase. This can be a trial-and- error process; it’s best to proceed cautiously with constant awareness of the pain issue.
• The sole purpose of base workouts is to increase warmth, circulation, and flexibility in the injured area, and thereby eventually restore its normal function and pain-free condition. A week at this basic level is barely long enough to confirm sustainability.

Transitioning to Normal Fitness Training. Starting with a recently established base regimen, there should be a gradual, incremental increase in workout pace and/or duration, as injury pain subsides. Beware, however. Increased effort is not the same as a return to regular training.

• You are still in rehabilitation mode until you have completed phase three: return to fitness. Meanwhile, this phase (two) is a transition between building a sustainable base (in phase 1) and progressing to a normal, injury-free training load (in phase three).
• Phase two is still part of the rehabilitation process as opposed to actual “training.” Pain is the final arbiter of when to increase your workout load, not your usual training schedule. Your body will tell you how much pain it feels; your role is listener.
• The key is to never increase the workout load unless you are 90% sure the current rehab regimen isn’t threatened by a sudden return to debilitating injury. Remember, your energy will probably run ahead of your ability to ward off renewed injury.

Return to Fitness. In phases one and two, you established a rehabilitation regimen at the “passable” level of proficiency (see below). In phase three, the goal is to feel progressively more injury-free and able to train at your usual fitness level, rising from passable to fully able.

• Throughout this process, there is a constant risk of slipping back into injury at the ineffective or unable proficiency levels. You must become aware of whatever is driving your excessive effort in the way of emotion, ambition, and anxiety—all important “tells.”
• It’s important, therefore, to linger a while at the effectively-able level to allow the body time to adapt to the heavier training load—but more importantly—to continue reducing the underlying feeling of vulnerability to renewed injury. Tightness,tenderness,etc.
• In other words, resist the urgent desire to get back to the way training was before the injury. It could be that it was too hard, anyway, and that objective reassessment of the training load is necessary, along with considerations of how to enjoy your training more.

The Proficiency Scale
(Measuring your ability to do a workout)
Fully Able (to do it)
Effectively Able
Passably Able
Ineffective
Unable

Steven Mark wrote this article and Craig Kojima took the photos.  Craig has worked as a professional news photographer for more than 50 years.  Steven did an excellent job of describing Brian’s ideas.   Article 01 Article 02

Here is a link to the item on Amazon.  It is the more expensive version.  Here’s another link for the $80 version.  Well worth the investment!  You can even use them for private phone calls.

Here’s a link to a pre-race checklist you can use to guide your preparations.

(Audio only) One-touch number:  +13462487799,,87875359367# (use the Pause key for comas on an iPhone).

1. On your cell phone, copy the one-touch number above into a new contact named BC Endurance Workout dial-up meeting.
2. On your smartphone, tap your contact dial-up meeting number.
3. To rejoin a meeting, tap the meeting in your phone’s Recent calls list.