"I feel like a failure," Denise said to me.

"I should be much farther along than this."

A runner in her 40s who I'll call Denise started working with me one-on-one a couple months ago. She's a talented athlete and has completed several half marathons on very little training, and got results most well-trained runners dream of.  She was often placing in her age group.

She came to me wanting to train for her first marathon.

After talking with her, I felt she was likely ready for an intermediate-level marathon plan. She was doing well for the first few weeks, but then she started mentioning how sore she was getting.

She was feeling sore after her long runs, the next day, and before and after speedwork. Soon it was at the point she was sore pretty much all the time.

Of course, there's always going to be some soreness when you are training for a marathon. But feeling sore all the time is not the goal. It’s a red flag.

Even though she had just run a half marathon and had strong legs from strength training, the mileage and frequency of her new running plan was simply too much too soon.

So I pulled her back.

I scratched the original plan, gave her a down week to recover some, and cut her long runs and weekly mileage through race day.

And she was not happy about that.

“This feels like I’m failing,” she told me on our next call. “I was so excited about marathon training and now I just feel defeated.”

As much as I’d love to say that my training plans are absolutely perfect for every runner all the time, I need to be completely honest with you.

Every training plan is an educated guess.

At this point, I’ve written thousands of training plans. And a big percentage of those runners went on to run personal bests at their goal races. My experience working with runners over the past decade has taught me what works and what doesn’t.

But no training plan can simply be blindly followed without taking into account how your unique body and lifestyle are adapting to the training.

Denise, a busy professional who’s also in school training for a new career on top of marathon training, wasn’t adapting to the plan in the timeframe she was expecting.

It’s not her fault and it’s not my fault either. This is a completely new experience for Denise and we had no idea how she’d be able to handle the load.

But this is where communication and coaching come in. Denise communicates with me on every run and every workout. She is honest about her good days and bad days so I knew pretty quickly that it was time to change course.

I have no doubt that a high-achiever like Denise would have just plowed through the plan as originally written had she not had coaching. And she very well may not have made it to the starting line.

But the hero of this story is not me as this amazingly intuitive coach that pulled a struggling runner back from overtraining. Denise is the real star because she communicated her experience and asked my opinion of what was normal and what wasn’t.

She had no idea that you shouldn’t feel sore all the time in marathon training.

Of course, she’s not a failure. It’s all just an experiment in training for a goal she’s never tried before. She needs to be flexible and not tie her worth to what she “should” be doing.

Denise’s hope is to simply finish her first marathon and I have no doubt that, even with reduced mileage, she will.

The lesson is not that you shouldn’t use training plans to guide you to your dream goal. You should!

But if you are doing it without help, be sure you understand that you might need to alter the plan to fit how you are adapting to the training, especially if you are new to endurance running.