Build, Don't Borrow
The Distance Coach's Guide to Training Architecture
by Shawn Siemers
Not a training plan — the thinking that produces training plans. Build a coaching system that's yours, from 23 questions every distance coach should be able to answer.
From the Author
This book started as a list of questions I couldn't answer.
I'd been coaching long enough to look like a coach — I had a whistle, a clipboard, and enough vocabulary to sound like I knew what I was doing. But I didn't have a system. I had workouts I'd borrowed from other coaches, results I couldn't explain, and a growing suspicion that my program's ceiling was determined by which kids happened to show up, not by anything I actually did.
I was reading everything I could find. Clinics, books, blog posts, other coaches' plans. I was working hard. But the harder I worked, the more confused I got — because none of it connected. I could fill a whiteboard with a week of training that looked right, but I couldn't tell you why any of it was there.
So in my second year, out of pure frustration, I wrote down every question I couldn't answer. How long is each training cycle? What order should the systems be progressed? How do you balance training? What does a sample week actually look like?
Twenty-three questions. I didn't have answers to any of them.
Answering those questions — not with what I'd read in other coaches' books, but with what I actually believed and could defend — changed everything. The consecutive State qualifications, the State champions, the program that stopped resetting every season — all of it traces back to that list.
This book is those 23 questions and what I found on the other side of them. It's not a training plan. It's the thinking that produces training plans.
If you finish it and engage with the questions honestly, you'll have something most coaches never build: a training architecture that's yours — not borrowed, not copied, and not dependent on luck.
I wrote it for the coach I was when I started that list.
If that's where you are right now, you're in the right place.
What's Inside
Twenty-seven chapters across five parts — the full architecture, start to finish.
Introduction
- 1Distance Training Has an Architecture
Part 1: The Impossible Goal
- 2What Are We Building Toward?
Part 2: The Training Architect
- 3The Coach-Architect
Part 3: The Training Model
- 4How Do You Define Each System? What is Their Relationship to Other Systems?
- 5Why Are Some Paces Given Using Physiological Terms and Others With Race Paces? How Do They Relate?
- 6Is There an 800, 1600, 3200, 5K Profile of a Successful Runner?
- 7How Long is Each Training Cycle?
- 8What Order Should Systems be Progressed?
- 9How Do You Know Which Combination of Systems to Use? And When?
- 10How Do You Balance Training?
- 11Is There a Methodology?
- 12Are There Training Patterns to Follow?
- 13How Do You Manage Progressions Within a Cycle? From Cycle to Cycle?
- 14How Much Recovery For Each System?
- 15How Long Should Each Work Unit Be?
- 16How Do You Choose a Starting Point? A Goal Point?
- 17Is There a Menu of Workouts For Each System? And a Planned Progression?
- 18How Many Iterations? What is the Goal of Each Iteration?
- 19Do You Plan by Pace or by System?
- 20How Long for Each Pace? What Pace Do You Emphasize in Which Cycle?
- 21What Does a Sample 1-Week or 2-Week Pattern Look Like?
- 22How Do You Coach Tactics for Each Type of Race?
- 23What Do You Do for Strength Training?
- 24How Do You Taper?
Part 4: The Athlete Development Pipeline
- 25How Do You Start New Runners?
Part 5: The Feedback System
- 26The Architecture Must Be Built Before You Can Measure It
- 27If It's Yours and It Breaks, You Learn. If It's Borrowed and It Breaks, You're Lost.
About the Author
Shawn Siemers has coached high school cross country and track for 19 years, qualifying athletes for the Texas State meet 9 consecutive seasons and producing 2 State champions.
Before coaching, he spent 13 years at Rational Software teaching Object-Oriented Analysis and Design — a background that shaped how he thinks about training: as architecture, not accident.
Training Architecture is the framework he built after realizing that copying other coaches' plans would never produce consistent results, and that the coach — not the plan — is the system.
Build, Don't Borrow is coming soon.
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