Fitness Intuition offers articles about feeling-based training, a method which has been used by successful athletes, including 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist Frank Shorter and US 5000m record holder Bob Kennedy, as well as renowed coaches such as Arthur Lydiard and Bill Bowerman.

Science has given us a great deal of useful information that can help us plan our training. The experience of great athletes can also help . But when we’re out on the roads and trails, we’re on our own. Good training requires that we answer many questions as they arise, without assistance from books or coaches. We need to know how to “listen to our bodies.”

The problem is, athletes are notorious for doing it badly. Too often, they let themselves be misled by inner voices of desire and faulty reasoning that lure them into training too hard, too long, or too often.

What’s needed is a way to hear what the body is really saying. The body’s “still, small voice” is a wonderful guide to training. Trouble is, it’s easily overwhelmed by restless thoughts, personal desires and ambitions, and the attractive-sounding theories of others.

Fitness Intuition is a way to listen to what the body is actually saying - and really hear. The body talks to us continually through the feelings of the heart. Hearing that inner guidance requires that we filter out personal prejudices and pay careful attention.

The heart is a wonderful guide to training. It’s a built-in monitor that can tell us what the body needs. The heart is also the place where a higher wisdom can guide us, if we invite it to. All spiritual traditions teach that prayer is the “loudspeaker” through which we can talk to the universal intelligence of which we are a part, and that the heart is where we can hear its answers.

Fitness Intuition can help us fine-tune our training for better competitive results, and more enjoyable runs. The Fitness Intuition book offers essays and stories that in simple, easy-to-understand language, describe the science and experience of feeling-based training.

Fitness Intuition draws on the findings of the foremost sports physiologists, such as Timothy Noakes, MD (the author of Lore of Running) and David L. Costill, PhD (author of Inside Running and perhaps the world’s most respected sports scientist), as well as the personal “research” of great athletes and spiritual teachers and philosophers of many cultures.

George Beinhorn, the author of Fitness Intuition and the articles on this site, has been a distance runner since 1968. Now age 65, he lives in Mountain View, California, where he works as a freelance editor and writer for clients in technology, general business, publishing, and academia. For four years in the early 1970s, George was an assistant editor and staff photographer at Runner’s World. He has raced at distances from 100 yards to 100 kilometers (62.2 miles).