Why Train When You Can Maintain‪?‬ Running Life: A Fitness Protection Production

*PDF Download Included in Bonus Material*
 
Inspired by professional Jenga-players (YES THAT EXISTS!), Maintain was created to keep you fit enough year-round so you have #alltheoptions and none of the burnout. Make no mistake - with Maintain you will have ALL the options: you ramp up to run a marathon in 10 weeks, or ramp down when your badassery is needed elsewhere. In this podcast, you will meet 5 runners who are enjoying these ramps as much as their running.
 
The way we present these programs and talk about participants MATTERS: the transition between Maintain, ReBuild, and Runner, Interrupted is presented AS A LATERAL MOVE, a function of time. You will be in one of these three boxes throughout the course of your life as a runner, so all three products are accessible to all subscribers at all times. Life doesn’t always synch nicely with calendars, we want you to have what you need when you need it.
 
Did we mention that our marathon training plans are free to subscribers? Because our marathon training plans are free to our subscribers, and you get fresh ones every summer.
 
SHOW NOTES
There is no one who says it quite like Viola Askey from Oregon in the morning to this podcast: this is MY START LINE. (and by the way, that Olympic-distance duathlon she’s talking about? She started, she finished, and she crushed it - we featured her finish photo in the Coached and Loved newsletter a couple of weeks ago!)
 
We love what Viola had to say because it represents the great gifts of Fitness Protection so beautifully. The people in Maintain are doing WHAT THEY WANT TO DO...and they are all different people who want to do different things! Anna Sorenson from Wisconsin was once upon a time so injured she couldn’t walk, but she’s slowly and steadily built her fitness back up to the point where she has a rock-solid base and she can pick what she wants to do in any given season and pivot in that direction. This season, she is shoring up her strength in our Slow Burn strength beta, which will be opening to the public in 2020!
 
Cara Gerard from Quebec is a completely different runner who has similarly found her happy place amidst all the options Maintain presents. All she ever wants to do is be a person who can YOLO half marathons at the drop of a hat, she says, and Maintain gives her that. She runs through the freezing winters (you’ll see her outside down to -25 degrees Celsius!) and she loves being fit enough to do exactly what she wants all the time.
 
And that is the intent of Maintain - keep you perpetually fit enough that you have CHOICES, without burning you out. And make no mistake - having choices means ALL the choices, and that includes the choice to do less if less is what you need right now. You can choose to listen to your body and decide that Maintain is too much, and that that’s not a reflection on you or your worth or your morality but just where you are right now. Some runners like Alison Melley from Maryland choose to shift into Runner, Interrupted or ReBuild (make sure to listen to our ReBuild podcast) for a time while they focus on other things. Alison knows herself well enough to know that being able to do most of the work on the training plan matters to her, and when she shifted to ReBuild, her TrainingPeaks workout boxes were turning green again and that feeling of checking everything off the list was motivating and empowering to her. Meanwhile, Karen Sutton from Leicester, UK recently shifted from ReBuild to Maintain after recovering from a bout of plantar fasciitis. She has slowly worked up to a point where she can complete all the Maintain workouts, with the help of lots of patience and hard work. Karen runs because it keeps her blood pressure down without the need for medication, and with a family history of heart health problems, that is a HUGE success.
 
Whatever your definition of success - turning boxes green in TrainingPeaks or eliminating the need for blood pressure