Stuck Chasing the Same Time Goal? These 7 Coach-Backed Fixes Can Finally Lead to a Performance Breakthrough
Many athletes have gone through the same progress cycle after a few race builds: initial success, PR in everything, and then stall out when trying to shave just a few more minutes off your time.
That’s where a coach can come in to break down the barriers that may be blocking your next big milestone. But for those who don’t have a coach, figuring out what’s missing from your training and the small adjustments you can make to lead to a faster finish time can prove difficult.
So we asked seven coaches to reveal the training tweaks that helped their athletes reach the next level, including what helped runners finally score a PR or BQ after years of missed attempts. These simple tips can lead you to your best performance, too.
1. Take a Season Off from the Marathon
In a world where professional and recreational marathoners alike regularly do a fall and spring race, and some influencers seem to do even more, it can be hard to avoid falling into a comparison trap and feeling the need to keep up. But if someone has a time goal or qualifying standard they’re aiming to hit, running 26.2 miles every single season can derail the process, says Kim Conley, a two-time U.S. Olympian in the 5,000 meters and a Flagstaff-based running coach.
For example, one of her athletes, who was in her 40s, hadn’t PR’d the marathon in 10 years, often running more than two 26.2-milers a year, sometimes with both an “A-race” and “fun run” in the same season. Conley convinced her to take one season off to focus on her speed, racing several 5Ks and 10Ks, as well as a half marathon at peak effort. She ended up setting a PR in the half with a 1:37 finish, before returning to the marathon as her main goal.
“She really wanted to PR the marathon, but we were stuck, consistently running a few minutes shy of it,” Conley says. “When she came back to the marathon the following season, she finally got the breakthrough she’d been looking for and PR’d, running 3:28.”
Carly Larios, a Boulder, Colorado-based run coach, has also had her athletes take a break from the marathon to focus on bringing down their shorter distance times.
“I also find that with this shift, many athletes go ‘back’ to the 5K or mile, and start racing more, and then racing becomes less scary. And they get faster! And then marathon training feels better, too,” Larios says.
2. Work With a Dietitian
If you think you’ve got your race-day nutrition plan dialed in and have found gels that taste good, it can be a hard sell to change things up. But sometimes the nutritional makeup and frequency with which you’re taking in fuel could offer the ticket to preventing a crash. And working with a dietitian can help you nail down your individual needs.
One of Conley’s clients, who was eager to break three hours in the marathon, kept fading at the end of his races. This runner had been taking a gel every 20 to 30 minutes, which is typically the standard recommendation to get enough carbs in during 26.2, she says.
“After consulting with a sports dietitian, we learned that for someone his size (he was a bigger dude), you burn through carbs faster than the average runner, so he needed to increase his carbs per hour,” Conley says. “He did this by taking higher-carb gels at the same time intervals, doubling his carbs per hour, which led to him finally cracking the three-hour barrier.”
Conley had another client with the same time goal, but his downfall was not consuming enough sodium.
“After a tough run in a warm Boston Marathon year, we noticed he was covered in salt residue, so we referred him to the sports dietitian we work with,” Conley says. “She had him get his sodium tested, and subsequently increased his sodium intake when hydrating for runs and in the marathon. That same year in Chicago, he broke three hours.”
3. Slow Down Your Easy Runs
For many newer runners, one of the biggest downfalls is doing the majority of your training at or close to marathon goal pace. But recovery is also key for making adaptations and showing up fresh and ready to race.
For an example, look to Sarah King Cherington, a Houston-based RRCA-certified running coach. She had a runner who had been stuck in the 4:15 to 4:20 range for her marathons, despite training at 8:30 to 8:45 pace six days a week, including her long runs.
“She was trapped in the ‘grey zone’—too fast to recover, but too slow to spark new breakthroughs,” Cherington tells Runner’s World. “To break that cycle, I switched her from mileage to time-based training. Runners often rush easy days to hit specific mileage (or make it to work on time), so shifting her to a set duration—such as 45 or 60 minutes—eliminated the need to hurry.”
Cherington also had this athlete remove pace and distance from her watch screen to keep the focus strictly on the clock and intentionally slowing down. She also tweaked her athlete’s training plan so that her quality work was faster, targeting a 7:30 to 8:15 pace, but capped it at 20 to 30 percent of her training. She ran the rest of her mileage strictly at a recovery pace of 9:30 to 10:00.
This polarization allowed the athlete to smash her goal, running a nearly 40-minute PR and Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:36 in their first training cycle together.
“By slowing down her easy days, she finally had the energy to hit those hard paces, and in time, the fatigue from the intensity naturally forced her to slow down on recovery days,” Cherington says. “I joke with athletes that if they aren’t tired enough to naturally run slow recovery runs, I’m not working them hard enough on workout days.”
4. Adapt Your Paces for the Conditions
If you’re training for a fall marathon in a hot and humid climate, it can be discouraging to see your paces getting slower, whether that’s your easy runs or your workouts, especially if you’re putting in the same effort. But intentionally making these modifications can still lead to a successful race, and can help athletes avoid burnout, says Conley.
“My athletes all get a chart now that shows how to modify their normal paces for summer training based on the temperature and dew point when they start the workout,” she says. “This has led to less burnout over the summer. It takes some trust that it will lead to the performance they want in the fall, but it works.”
5. Add an Extra Rest Day
No matter your experience level, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that straying from the plan could undo the hard work you’ve put in. But sometimes your body might be begging for it, whether that’s due to general fatigue or a niggle that you’re hoping doesn’t turn into a full-blown injury.
Sometimes less is more from the beginning, which is why Andrew Simmons, a Denver, Colorado-based USATF level 2-certified coach, usually programs an additional rest day into the start of his athletes’ training cycles, especially when they’re coming back from another big race.
“Athletes tend to want to jump back to the same effort level and fitness level they left at, and I often see athletes get little injuries or pain points when they try to escalate training back to the same intensities and volumes as they left,” Simmons tells Runner’s World. “It often requires them to take unplanned days off, and that tends to erode the mind versus being the brakes as their coach. If I purposefully force rest, they tend to progress more smoothly and don’t get their confidence rocked as they build toward their next goal.”
According to Francis Pardo, a Bogota, Colombia-based UESCA-certified run coach, an unplanned rest day (or a few) isn’t bad, though; it can mean the difference between derailed training and a successful cycle. That turned out to be the case for one of his athletes who was dealing with stress due to an illness in her family.
“I recommended that she prioritize the health of her family member over her training and simply go out for a walk if she felt like it instead of completing their scheduled run for that day,” Pardo tells Runner’s World. “Although running itself is a form of stress release, she also felt the pressure of completing each workout as prescribed for an upcoming race, and I felt that this small change had a very positive impact and allowed the athlete to continue her training plan over the following weeks.”
6. Reduce Your Total Volume
Many athletes get caught up in the mindset that more mileage and higher volume is a must in order to get faster over long distances. While this does prove to be effective for a lot of athletes, it doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, and it is possible to still make gains by focusing on quality over quantity. In fact, one of Erica Kirkwood’s athletes was averaging nearly 100 miles per week before she reviewed and adjusted his training.
“When I reviewed his training logs, one thing stood out immediately: Every run looked the same. His easy runs were typically between 7:45 and 8:30 pace, and when he attempted speed workouts, they were often only slightly faster, around 7:20 to 7:30 pace,” Kirkwood, a San Antonio, Texas-based UESCA-certified run coach, tells Runner’s World. “He didn’t feel exhausted or overtrained; he just felt flat. Many runners normalize fatigue because they’ve lived in that state for so long.”
Rather than adding more work, Kirkwood reduced his volume to around 70 to 75 miles per week and focused on creating more variety in training, making his easy days truly easy and his hard days purposefully hard, while also introducing more recovery.
“Almost immediately, he began running paces he’d been unable to access before, consistently dipping under 7:00 pace during workouts and races, something that had eluded him despite years of high mileage,” Kirkwood says. “The lesson wasn’t that high mileage is bad; it was that he had reached his point of diminishing returns. Sometimes the biggest coaching breakthrough is identifying an athlete’s sweet spot rather than continuing to pile on more training.”
7. Lean Hard Into the Taper
Roberto Mandje, a former Olympic middle-distance athlete and New York City-based coach, has worked with both beginner amateur runners and Olympic Trials Marathon hopefuls. He also coached YouTube personality Casey Neistat to his longtime goal of running a sub-three-hour marathon, which he achieved at age 42, after 24 marathons.
Neistat narrowly missed the three-hour mark with a 3:01:27 at the 2023 New York City Marathon before achieving it just a month later at the 2023 Tucson Marathon, running 2:57:34. However, Mandje notes that Neistat’s biggest downfall was often not trusting the process and doing too much in the taper period leading up to his race, meaning he wasn’t showing up to the starting line totally fresh.
“With [Neistat], I had to get him to not only bring it down from 80 miles a week to around 60, while also slowing down the runs and lessening the intensity even with his gym work to really make sure we were focusing on rest and recovery with days off and lower mileage,” Mandje tells Runner’s World. “That turned out to be a big, crucial missing piece that he hadn’t really done before. It made it so that he could show up to the start line with a tank closer to full versus before, when the fitness was there, but he couldn’t fully access it because he was absolutely fried.”
Neistat’s taper, specifically, emphasized three lower-mileage weeks leading up to race day, with just easy runs, additional rest days, and one marathon goal pace workout four days before the race.
Emilia Benton is a Houston-based freelance writer and editor. In addition to Runner's World, she has contributed health, fitness and wellness content to Women's Health, SELF, Prevention, Healthline, and the Houston Chronicle, among other publications. She is also an 11-time marathoner, a USATF Level 1-certified running coach, and an avid traveler.