Monitoring & Evaluating Sessions

Monitoring and evaluating the success of your sessions and programmes is critical for feeding into your next plans. When a session has gone well, you are likely to want to build upon it for the next session but if you haven’t achieved what you intended to, you may want to repeat the session or even take a step back.

To reflect on how well (or not) the session has gone, you will need to set time aside to reflect and by doing so you will gain a better understanding of your runners’ strengths and weaknesses, where they need more work and what you can build on.

Realistic performance evaluation is important for supporting the development of runners aspiring for personal best times or achieving target distances.

At the end of each session:

It is important to record the training and progress. You should note:

• Duration of your training session

• Distance covered

• Intensity

• Recovery

• Feedback from the runners

The Duration and the Intensity multiplied together will give you the overall training load. (Intensity + Volume = Training Load)

To arrive at a figure for the volume could be relatively straight forward, such as the number of minutes they were running for. If it was a long, continuous run this may be, for example, 40 (minutes). To arrive at a figure for intensity could need more thought. You could use the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) and give a number 1 – 10: 1 being a very slow and easy recovery pace and 10 being hard and flat out on a short effort. Or you may use a heart rate monitor and devise a formula from there, for example, 80% of maximum heart rate = 8 or 50% of maximum heart rate = 5.

If you were to use RPE to measure intensity you may record training load as:

• A long run of 40 minutes at an intensity of 5 = 200

• 30 minutes of interval work, intensity 9 = 270

If you were to use heart rate it may look like this:

• A long run of 40 minutes at an intensity of 6 = 240

• 30 minutes of interval work, intensity  9 = 270

You can keep a check of how you increase your training load over the weeks by adding the numbers together for the overall weekly load.

At the end of each block:

Here, we aim to provide a model for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your runners over a block of training. This will allow you to see which elements of training need priority as you move forward.

The model is really quite simple and consists of four steps:

1. Write down the successes achieved in the session or in the block and what you want them to achieve in the next one. For example, do they want to complete a certain distance or a certain time over a distance?

2. Write down what will be needed to achieve this goal and, if there are more than one factor, prioritise them. You should consider both physical and psychological elements and so you may want to make two lists. The fitness factor or psychological skill at the top of the list should be given the number 1.

3. Mark out of 5 against each.

4. Multiply the two numbers together (How important the factor/skill is times your ranking). Those with the lowest numbers need work and so should feature heavily in your next block of training.

Here is an example of someone who is aiming to get round a 10k:

Here is an example of someone who is aiming to run faster over 5k: