Coaching

Brendan Malone

Head Coach

Brendan Malone founded MQTC in 2022 after coaching himself for multiple years. After finding initial success with crafting his own training plans Malone become more interested in the coaching side of the sport while still competing. His interest led him to read multiple running books (can be found in the resources section). Malone is a Software Engineer so by combining his interest in running as well as his skills in software, he created a training plan generator to use as a template for his athletes. While being able to create the plans in code Malone believes that the true value of coaching does not come from the plan but in the interaction of athlete and coach as they work to bring out the best performance in each other.

Malone is currently not a registed RRCA certified coach, but is planning on taking the certification this upcoming year.

Philosophy

My coahing philosophy is mainly based on the principals Jack Daniel’s Running Formula. What that means in practice is that I use the VDOT race predictions and training paces heavily in my plans to plan and track progress. In addition I use the “types” of workouts heavily in my training plan: Repeats, Intervals, Threshold, Marathon. However, I do enjoy reading other running resources and like to pull from those and adapt my plans where I can.

To avoid monotony I try to break up training into 4 week cycles. From this I generally structure my seasons like so:

• 4 weeks = 1 microcycle (~ 1 month)
• 3 microcycles = 1 macrocycle (~3 months)
• 2 macro cycles = 1 mesocycle (~6 months)

When creating a season plan I assign a “theme” to the different microcycles. These are general things such as base building, speed, race specifics, taper etc. I find it breaks up the build up to the race to make things more interesting as well as helps to guide the weekly plans to build to that specific theme.

Within the microcycle I generally try to keep the mileage/intensity the same for the first two weeks, increase it in the 3rd week, and then decrease it in the final week. This builds in a down week to let the body adapt to the training. That way at the start of the next microcycle the weekly mileage/intensity starts at the same volume as the 3rd week in the previous cycle. Things don’t usually fit nicely into perfect blocks so things get moved around based on races, personal or professional commitments etc but I generally try to keep this structure.

Services

Depending on athlete preference I usually talk with them about their training once a week in a dedicated session, but will check in more informally during the week to make sure everything is going well. I try to be flexiable to meet the needs of my athletes and will defer to their prefered method of communication and frequency of communication.

If my athletes use Strava I use it to track progress against the plan.