Fitness Level One:  Transitioners.

The Profile.  Transitioners are in transit from being unfit and unhealthy to something approaching rudimentary fitness and a healthier lifestyle.

• • • Are you someone who rarely gets out the door to exercise?
    • Is your Me-Time spent in sedentary mode (TV and snacking)?
    • Do you need social support to develop new exercise habits?
    • Do you find it difficult to imagine enjoying a fitness regimen?

• • • Do you work long hours that afford you little time and energy for exercise?
    • Are you often too tired and depressed after work to consider exercise?
    • Is your home life characterized by harmful sedentary and nutritional habits?
    • Do you find excuses to stop an exercise regimen at the first possible moment?
    • Are you discouraged and shamed by your limited and deteriorating physical ability?

The Prerequisite Commitments.  As a Transitioner, you are attempting a fundamental transformation from non-athlete to novice athlete, where being “athletic” is an emerging awareness that fitness exercise can be pleasant, rewarding, and fun.

Prerequisites attitudes include:

• • • Develop a loving, nurturing, and respectful relationship with your body.  Being infirmed and unable to perform is not your body’s fault; you have made it that way with years of dissolute behavior.  You must commit to giving your body what it wants and needs.
    • Becoming a novice athlete also means accepting your scary health and fitness circumstances.  You should at least be willing to reverse years of sedentary living by starting exercise with non-injurious levels of exertion for short bouts several times a week.
    • As important as your work or family is to you or others, you will be relatively ineffectual without first taking care of physical fitness: body composition, flexibility, strength, and stamina.  You must balance passive-sedentary Me-Time with active-exercise Me-Time.

Fitness Level Two:  Launchers

Launchers past the age of 30 are on a downward fitness slide.  A dearth of exercise has put them on the brink of chronic illness.  Yet their aversion to exertion, along with time and energy considerations, can easily preclude immediate commitment to a regular exercise regimen.

• • • Do you have little or no recent fitness exercise background?
    • Would you call yourself a beginner athlete (walker, jogger)?
    • Are you afraid of being too slow or not fast enough to keep up?
    • Are you okay with walking slowly for 15-20 minutes several times a week?
    • Is the prospect of going beyond 30 minutes daunting?
    • Do you suffer from insomnia, lack of energy, muscle pain and stiffness?
    • Are you skeptical of your potential to develop significant fitness?
    • Are you afraid you can’t adopt the discipline of recreational athleticism?

Prerequisites.  Launching fitness activity from scratch requires attention to a number of basic factors until they are accepted as normal and necessary.  It would be difficult to succeed in this program without careful consideration of the following from the outset.

• • • Reconfirming priorities so one manages to train several times a week, as well as eating sensibly for the sake of personal health and fitness.
    • Nurturing a sense of empowerment that evolves when exerting one’s self deliberately and non-injuriously for the sake of personal health and fitness.
    • Creating an enjoyable and sustainable fitness exercise routine so one looks forward to all aspects of the workout activity—before, during, and after.
    • Nurturing a visceral sense of being individually fit, with others.  Even the experience of the most individually motivated can be enhanced in a group.

Fitness Level Three:  Practitioners

Practitioner Profile Issues.  As beginners-becoming-intermediate athletes, practitioners need support to take on the discipline of regular fitness training for the sake of nascent competitive goals.

• • • Do you train on a catch-as-catch-can basis, at odd hours?
    • Do you usually feel that your workouts are too short, rushed, or compressed?
    • Are you bothered by frequent, nagging injuries you must train through?
    • Do you train three times a week sometimes, but often only once or twice?
    • Do you believe in a no-pain, no-gain approach to fitness training?
    • Do you wish you had time for stretching or strengthening, but can seldom find it?
    • Is regular training relegated to a low-priority item compared to work and family?

Prerequisites.  Practitioners will practice the skills and habits necessary to become full-fledged intermediate athletes.  This will be an arduous road to follow, including the following prerequisite commitments.

• • • A commitment to the discipline of regular training: workouts in scheduled time slots, with rational and non-injurious ability-building exertion structures.
    • A determined focus during workouts to practice running skills, from the rudimentary to the advanced, until they become habitual (see 8 skills below).
    • A commitment to recognizing, reducing, and ultimately eliminating pain during the fitness training and racing processes.  The new mantra is no pain brings gain.
    • The realization that training can be shared in a support group that shows up regularly and enjoys the fitness training process in one another’s company.

Fitness Level Four:  Advanced Racers

Intermediate racers want to do a specific race but they aren’t clear about how to train for it effectively.  Their training is fraught with pitfalls based on limited experience, incorrect ideas, and haphazard planning, all of which prevents them from becoming fully racing fit.

• • • Are you sometimes in a quandary about how to answer the perennial training questions?
    • How can I structure the exertion of my workouts to build my racing ability?  Mild, light, steady state, threshold, ragged-edge, and maximum?
    • How hard should I train to optimize my workout efforts?  Very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard, all-out?
    • How long should my workouts be (in minutes)?
    • How many times a week should I train?
    • How do I know when I’m adequately recovered?
    • What role does fatigue play in the training process?
    • How can I get rid of a chronic injury?
    • How can I achieve psychological balance in my training and racing?
    • How can I have my best energy for every race?
    • Advanced racers are interested in the way the hard-easy system answers these questions.  As such, their racing goals are a work in progress, as the more they learn about the training process, the more their goals evolve, along with the means to achieve them.

Prerequisites.  Intermediate racers are becoming racing fit—a transformation from mere practitioner to advanced competitive racer.  It helps to already possess a predisposition to becoming more competitive.  Hard training is, by definition, difficult.  The road there challenges like a part-time job.

• • • It helps to focus on doing certain race events while practicing the means to develop a full complement of racing abilities for them.
    • It helps to start at a modest workout effort level for the sake of gradually and incrementally approaching a harder and more optimal level.
    • It helps to take the 11-session course on the hard-easy system.
    • It helps to have the time to train on a strict time-table, with three major workouts scheduled in regular weekly time slots, and with 2 or 3 recovery runs in between.
    • It helps to review and practice the skills of running, already made habitual at the Practitioner level, where the eight basic skills are a major training focus.