Clocks fall back Sunday. A former heptathlete's 4-week jump rope workout at home: 10 minutes a night, the right rope, floor and shoes, plus the research.
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Friday morning, October 16, and the group text has already started. Someone’s cousin found a turkey trot. Someone else promised to “just jog it.” Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26. That is forty-one days. Enough to arrive at a 5K feeling like a person who meant to be there. Not enough to invent a new athlete, and nowhere near enough to break in shoes you panic-buy on November 24. I hand this briefing to clients every October, and the people who help me build training weeks have stopped arguing with the first line. Sign the bib before you buy anything. A…
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October has a way of ambushing my evening runners. Three weeks ago they were cruising home from work in golden six-o’clock light, shorts on, sunglasses shoved into their waistbands. Now that same six o’clock rush is pitch black, the crosswalks are crowded with headlights, and the shoulder they’ve trusted all summer has become a place where cars simply do not expect to find a human being. I learned this lesson the hard way a few years back, when one of my Tuesday-night group regulars came in shaking. A driver had turned across her path in a parking lot, stopped six…
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Every October, the same text hits my phone from a different client. This year it was Dana, a school counselor who logged 9,000 steps a day all summer without ever thinking about it. “I haven’t cracked 5,000 in a week,” she wrote. “It’s dark when I get home and I just… don’t go back out.” I’ve heard some version of this so many times that my coaching team now treats the first week of October as its own unofficial season — the one where step averages quietly collapse while nobody’s watching. Two years ago I stopped fighting it head-on. Instead…
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Every October, my coaching inbox fills up with the same confession, just in different words. “I’m gassed.” “My legs feel like they belong to someone else.” “The hill that was easy in July is ruining me now.” My clients aren’t lazy and they aren’t slacking — most of them are training harder than ever for fall races. But when three women in one week mention they’ve started chewing ice like it’s potato chips, I stop guessing and start talking about low iron. I lived this story before I ever coached it. During my heptathlon years, I spent an entire winter…
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Every year, right around the last week of October, my group texts go quiet. The 6 a.m. crew that spent all of September hammering out tempo work on the river path suddenly develops elaborate excuses. My favorite this season came from a client named Dana, who wrote, verbatim, “it is 38 degrees and I am one woman, not a furnace.” She was joking, but she was also gone for three weeks. Here is the thing I have learned after two decades of coaching people through the cold: the problem is almost never the cold. It is the wardrobe. Most people…
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There is a moment every September when my walking group looks at me with the same question in their eyes. This year it arrived early, courtesy of a viral clip of someone power-walking through a park with what looked like a small sandbag strapped to their chest. Ten texts later, I had my answer ready: yes, the weighted vest is having a moment, and yes, I would find out exactly what it does before any of you buy one. So I did what I always ask my clients to do before they chase a trend: I built a little experiment…
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Every September, my inbox fills up with the same panicked question. It is never “what’s my pace target” or “how do I carb load.” It is “I need new shoes and my marathon is in five weeks — what do I buy?” And every September, I give the same answer that makes runners look at me like I just told them to skip their long run: buy last year’s colorway. Right now, in the middle of fall race season, the running shoe market is doing something quietly beautiful. The 2026 versions of the big trainers have landed at full price,…