I Gave Up Too Soon
Updated: 5 days ago
You’ve been training, making time for the gym and fitting sessions around work and family. Then you compete and the result is much the same as last time. Perhaps a bit worse. It’s fair to wonder what you’re getting out of all that effort, especially when you feel the years ticking over and don’t want to waste another season.
Before deciding the training isn’t working, though, I’d want to look at more than the latest result. One athlete I coach, Louise, ran faster at 60 than she did in her fifties and now competes regularly through full seasons. But if you’d looked at her results at certain points along the way, you might have thought her progress had stopped.
Louise started with me in July 2019, aged 54. She had a history of injuries and wasn’t managing to complete full competition seasons. Earlier that year she had run 16.42 for 100 metres, although she’d run 15.49 in 2017. There was ability there and plenty of willingness to work. We needed to build her strength and running in a way she could keep coming back to.
I coach her S&C entirely online and most of her track training online too. We catch up in person roughly once a month. Between those meetings, Louise has to do the sessions and tell me how she’s pulling up. That feedback is part of the coaching. It helps me decide whether the next session is appropriate, whether we can progress the work or whether something needs adjusting. She has put years of effort into this, alongside everything else in her life.
COVID restrictions disrupted training and competition in 2020 and 2021, so those years need a bit of context when you look at the results. By 2022 she had run 14.75. In February 2023 she ran 14.71. Only four hundredths faster than her best the year before, but a considerable improvement on where she had been when we started.
Then came a serious Achilles injury in May 2023. Her best recorded 100-metre time in 2024 was 15.05. Look at that time beside 14.71 and you could easily think she was going backwards. We had to look at what had happened to her preparation and what she could manage as she worked back towards competition. Asking her to chase the old time wouldn’t tell us what training she needed.
I worked closely with her physio and, through the physio, her sports medicine doctor. We could discuss the training alongside what they were seeing clinically and use Louise’s response to guide the next steps. That meant her gym and running programs could fit with the work being done on her injury.
We’ve also learnt a lot about the loads Louise can cope with. Her job and family life matter here. If she’s had a demanding week, that affects what we can reasonably ask of her in training and how much recovery she has available. I need to account for that when I write the program, rather than leave her trying to squeeze everything in because it’s on the app.
Louise trains with much lighter volume than many athletes. We’ve learnt that she can build strength with those loads and still manage her running. Pushing the weights up, or doing more of them because another athlete lifts more would make little sense. We still want the work to challenge her, and we still progress it, but the decision depends on what she can benefit from.
The gym work also changes through the preparation. There are periods when we put more emphasis on developing strength, and others when the amount needs to leave more room for power, quality running and competition. I’m looking at how the whole week fits together. Getting stronger is useful when it supports what she’s trying to do on the track; the gym numbers alone don’t tell me whether we’ve got that right.
She has become better at listening to her body and deciding which goals take priority. Sometimes that means missing a race because of a niggle. That’s a hard call when you enjoy competing and have put the work in to get ready. It can take more discipline to leave that race alone than to push through it. Louise’s focus has helped her recognise when a decision about this weekend needs to reflect what she wants to achieve later in the season.
She now competes regularly through full, demanding seasons. Given where she started, that is a major change. If we judged everything by whether she ran a personal best on Saturday, we’d miss how much her ability to sustain the sport has improved.
And the faster times did come. In 2025 she ran 14.31. In January 2026 she ran 14.24, aged 60 and turning 61 the following month. She was faster than before the Achilles injury and faster than she’d been in her fifties. Her next recorded races were 14.56 and 14.33. The personal best hadn’t suddenly become the slowest time she was allowed to run. But it was a great indicator of what was possible for her.
There’s no neat line through that progression. Louise got older, had an injury, dealt with restrictions and continued managing work and her life outside of running. Through it all, she kept working towards her goals while we adjusted the preparation. The strength work, running practice and better management of her workload had time to build on one another. Her physio and sports medicine doctor contributed to that process too.
If your results have stalled, I want to know whether anything has changed in your training or life, how you’re recovering and what the sessions are showing us. We may need to change the program. We may have good reasons to continue with the work already underway. Telling you to be patient isn’t much help unless I can explain those reasons.
When Louise was running slower in 2024, we didn’t have the later results to point to. We had her feedback, her training, the clinical advice and decisions to make about what came next. That’s why I’d encourage you to have the conversation before deciding you’ve reached your limit. Give yourself the chance to understand what is happening, so you don’t look back later and think, “I gave up too soon.”
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