I have been running occasionally for quite some time, but I never did it with consistency and/or with a structured approach. While I was "successful" with my self-training approach (by successful I mean being satisfied with the race results given the invested effort), I had an achilles tendon issue in January 2025. After a good three months, when I finally believed the Achilles had healed, I got a shin splint due to the increased training load. Fortunately, the shin splint lasted only a few weeks, but since I wanted to run more seriously and recognized that I don't like getting injured, I decided to hire a coach around June.
Three months in and I am very happy about my collaboration with the coach. I was able to run on average five times per week without missing a single workout during the entire three months.
Sticking to the workout schedule definitely brought a very structured daily life. I always struggled to fall asleep before midnight and to wake up at “decent” hours. This is pretty much solved now. I think the main reason is that I try to avoid alcohol on weekends and have meals at regular times (I don’t eat very late anymore).
So far it’s going well, but that is also easy since I am not working right now. We will see how I deal with it when I have a full-time job (:
I will write more soon, for now I will keep running