Brian’s Blog
Reflections on a wide range of topics related to endurance training.
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The Visualization Run
One of our staple BC Endurance workouts is the visualization run. In part, its purpose is to see the layout of a racecourse: its hills, turns, and quirks so there are no surprises on race day. Even if you’ve run the race many times, the visualization process is...
Introducing the Hard-Easy System
I’ve written three books on the Hard-Easy System. Each was like a doctoral thesis of my understanding of the system at the time: How to Read Your Body (1986), Running by Feeling (1996), and 5K and 10K Training (2006). The recently completed video version presents the...
Exertion Builds Ability
The Hard-Easy System is the most effective system for training endurance athletes. Of course, no system can describe the training process completely because systems reflect a collection of ideas, rather than the training reality. In the final analysis, the efficacy of...
Optimizing Workout Effort
The Hard-Easy System (HES) is especially useful in addressing how to exert optimal workout efforts. The solution is the Holy Grail of endurance training. When I began writing How to Read Your Body in 1985, I knew that a workout was essentially effort and energy. Thus,...
Establish New Ability-Building Workouts
In my opinion, the most difficult training problem occurs whenever one attempts to establish a new workout regimen. It’s a process of progressive adaptation that terminates a set of workouts that no longer build ability while substituting a new set which will build...
Maximum Sustainable Race Exertion
What do you think the following Hard-Easy System truism means? The way you train will be the way you race. Sparing you the hunches others have offered; it refers to the harmonious way disciplined athletes handle training and racing effort.You exert an effort whenever...
Improve Running Form to Avoid Injury
A few years ago, I studied how many steps my marathoners took per minute when running at marathon pace. The answer was 170 steps per minute, which trans-lates to 10,000 steps per hour or forty thousand steps for a four-hour marathon.
How to Run, Jog, or Walk with Efficiency and Power
In this article, I’m going to explain how to play with the motion of your body to create an efficient and powerful stride. Efficiency will enable you to sustain a racing cadence (steps per minute); power will enable you to run relaxed at race pace. Power and efficiency are both functions of the way you control your body’s moving parts.
How Running Posture Increases Power and Efficiency
Running methodology consists of power, form, and balance. These ideas overlap with the elements of style described in previous articles. But methodology is not the same as style. Style pertains to the way you control your body to develop a powerful and efficient stride; methodology refers to the way you control your mind to develop an ideal style.
Reduce Soreness with Gentle Movement Stretching
The fundamental mistake in stretching is thinking you will gain something from it. You might in fact have something to gain from stretching, but your thinking obscures the actual stretching experience, the clarity of which is essential to proper practice. A gaining...
Increase Racing Energy through Meditation
Psychological balance is necessary for making right decisions under pressure. A big race can be hugely stressful, with the mind bouncing obsessively between thoughts of achieving one’s ambition and blowing it in some embarrassing way. Psychological balance is...
How to Begin a Meditation Practice
This article will give you some guidelines for developing preliminary meditation habits. Some initial commitment is necessary, but once you accept these preliminaries, you’ll realize meditation’s efficacy, and its habitual aspects will develop on their own.The most...
Meditation Reduces Anxiety and Increases Peace of Mind
In our course on the seven effectiveness habits, I’ve used the terms “inner” and “outer” without defining what I mean. The outer world is delimited by the five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. The inner world is delimited by the mind. The mind is...
The 30-Minute Meditation Challenge
The 30-minute meditation challenge is a way to estimate the time optimally needed to integrate the events of our day, using the meditative process. Few of us have time to cram more activity into our busy days. So, the question of how much time to spend meditating is...
Why Meditate?
I addressed this question in a previous article (see The 30-Minute MeditationChallenge). Indeed, one of the primary reasons to meditate is to integrate your inner and outer experiences. But if my case wasn’t strong enough to induce commitment, let’s consider the...
Achieve a Joyful Peaceful Life Through Meditation
The Religious Society of Friends believe in a divine Light that’s within everyone. They never clearly say what they mean by this Light. But they give us a clue by referring to it as being “within.” I take that to mean residing in an inner, meditative space.
Brian Clarke’s Coaching Background
Here are my written responses to the questions Connie Comiso put to a panel of coaches at the Mid-Pacific Road Runners Club annual membership dinner on April 11, 2025. I viewed the panel discussion partly as an exercise in listening to Connie, the other coaches, and...
The New BC Endurance Enterprise
The Covid-19 pandemic put me out of business in March 2020. But I now believe it was the best thing that could have happened to me and my BC Endurance training enterprise. I still had a large following in 2020, but I was losing the faster athletes, the program had stagnated, and my revival efforts were being spurned by some of my veteran leaders. Most significantly, I wasn’t enjoying my work.
How to Buy the Right Running Shoes for You
How to Buy Shoes. People always ask me what shoes they should buy. What they should ask is how should I go about buying shoes? Go to a reputable running shoe store. Take your old shoes with you. Knowledgeable sales people will start with your feet and your old...