Most of my experience has been in running marathons. I have run 126 marathons including one in every state. I have qualified for Boston 50 times. However, I have also run a number of 5ks and 10ks. My specialty is long distance races and the distances can be anything from the 5k to the marathon.

My general philosophy for running is to continue to build up gradually from a starting point adding easy mileage first and as time goes on adding fartlek, tempo runs and intervals. I believe in a periodized approach were during the off-season the focus is more on easy miles and cross training and during the in season there is more of a focus on race preparation. I encourage runners to have a few A races and a number of B races during the course of the year. Training can be planned to be ready for the A races. In addition, there should be an on-going focus on correcting weaknesses and improving form. I think strength training and mobility training are key for all runners but especially for master and senior runners.

I have been coaching mostly informally for a number of years with a team out of Detroit, called the Stone Steppers. I have been the official coach for the Stone Steppers for over 25 years. There have been about 60 members over the years and the team is quite competitive. They compete in marathons, triathlons, multi-day events and the Michigan and National Senior Olympics. I run most of the training sessions and provide mostly informal training advice to all of the team members. I have also developed schedules and coached friends of team members who wanted to get involved in running. In addition to run coaching, I served as an assistant coach for a very competitive swim team called the Razor Aquatics.

Hello, My name is Mike Stone and I am a long time athlete, marathoner and runner. I have run over 100,000 miles including 126 marathons, 7 ironmen triathlon, and hundreds of other road and track races. I compete every other year or so in the Senior Olympics running the 1500, 800 and 400. I enjoy sports competition and I love helping other get better and get involved. My team, the Stone Stepper has a number of people that I helped to make very serious running competitors. I have also helped a number of team members get involved in triathlons. I grew up playing baseball, football, basketball and baseball. What I love about running is the fact that the more you train, the better you usually get and usually pretty quickly. That’s one reason I moved from baseball to running in the late 1970’s.

Two of the running philosophers that have influenced me the most are Arthur Lydiard and Jeff Galloway. Jeff Galloway has a distance training approach which is good for everyday runners. Galloway introduced the concept of the super long, long run and the idea of building up the long run first while holding the other days reasonable. Galloway also believed in the easy long run. He also introduced walking into the long run when the distance was long enough. Galloway built off of Lydiard partially just like so many coaches did. I like Lydiard’s emphasis on everyone building maximum conditioning before doing specialized training. Lydiard had all of his runners do a base build up with two medium long steady runs a week for 6-8 weeks then following that with hill training, then more individual work.

I have run the Boston Marathon 7 times though I qualified to run it 50 times. At Boston, I ran times from 3:05 to 4:40 over the years, not very fast because of the nature of the course and the timing of the race. But Boston was always fun. My most competitive races have been the Detroit Free Press marathons. I have run that race over 25 times, going under 3 hours about 12 times. One of the biggest races in Michigan is the Bobby Crim 10-miler. Several world records have been set on that course, many Kenyans compete, it is the most competitive race in Michigan. One year, I went up to run and there was a storm before the race. The race was delayed because of lighting. We waited and hour before starting. I heard lots of people saying they would just take it easy. I said, no, I’m going to run hard. I ran that race fast. I knew the hills and the flats and wherever I could pick up the pace I did. I ended up finishing 1st out of 140 people in my age group running 7:47 minute miles on a tough course at 67 years old.

• RRCA Level 1 Coaching Certificate
• Adult Learn to Swim Certification
• ACE Personal Fitness Training Certificate

• Marathon – 2:44:36
• Half Marathon – 1:18
• 10k – 36:16
• 5k – 17:16