What is Endurance Explained?

I want Endurance Explained to be the running website that I couldn’t find when I was an eager young running nerd looking to learn everything I could about how to become a better runner. There were a ton of sites that I grew up with that influenced me and how I developed within the sport: Flotrack, Milesplit, LetsRun, Serpentine.org, Running Times and Runner’s World, RunnerSpace, and probably countless more. 

All of them along with dozens of training books helped shape how I looked at the sport. But while they all contributed some piece to the puzzle, none of them quite landed on what I was looking for; A place where I could learn about real training from real coaches that weren’t trying to appeal to the masses or sell advertising space. I think that’s why I gravitated toward training books like those from Daniels, Lydiard, Hudson, Noakes or the classics like Running with the Buffaloes or textbooks like Physiology of Sport and Exercise.
 

The Goal

I want anyone who reads through this website to be able to walk away a better coach or better prepared to help themselves as a runner. I can’t promise that everyone that comes by will agree with everything, but at very least I can hold myself to a high enough standard that even if you vehemently disagree with everything I say, you’ll at least get a chance to challenge your own beliefs and reflect on different aspects of your program. 

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About Me

I began coaching when I was in college. First with my high school team during college breaks then eventually as a volunteer assistant at the University that I ran for, Stony Brook. 

My first head coaching job came in 2016 when I was 23 at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Make no mistake, I was a moron back then. I’m slightly less of a moron now. My head track coach, Mike Heimerman, gave me plenty of room to make mistakes and learn from them without holding my hand the whole way. After my first year I probably threw out half of the training we did because it was that bad. But through my 3 years there I got to try different styles, I made mistakes and learned from them and I found my voice as a coach. 

In that time, we scored more points from distance events than the entire decade before it and broke three school records along the way. We never got to where I wanted, but I am really proud of my time there and think it was genuinely the best position I could have landed even if my pay scale was that of a GA for my first two years.

Since 2019, I have been the Head Cross Country Coach at Long Island University in Brookville, NY. I inherited a team with 1 male and 6 women. We didn’t have a single athlete that could break 4:30 in the mile and none of the women had run under 5:30. It was previously a DII school that had just become DI the summer that I arrived. Since then we’ve:

  • Broken 28 School Records
  • Went from 10th in the NEC to 2nd in our first three years
  • Set 103 Top-10 Program Marks
  • Increased our points scored from distance events by 482%
  • Had the #38 steeplechaser in the nation
  • Seen our first two NCAA Regional Qualifiers ever for the distance events
  • Was awarded the 2021 NEC Coach of the Year for Women’s Cross Country

Every year I have coached training has looked a little different than the year before, but every year changes a little bit less, and every year we get a little closer to figuring out the puzzle of how to develop athletes.