Here's the last piece of advice you'll ever need about running: Do what works for you.

Consider Alberto Salazar: In 1981, Salazar had a pastrami sandwich for lunch at New York City's Carnegie Deli (and it wasn't what you'd call a dainty little sandwich, either), a far cry from the conventional pre-race carbohydrate-loading pasta party. Two days later, he set a world record at the New York City Marathon, winning the second of three straight titles. Will a pastrami sandwich make you a winner, too? Who knows. Since everyone is different, runners will respond differently to changes in diet, clothing, form, speed, distance and terrain.

More advice on advice: "A lot of people giving advice aren't coaches," points out Mindy Solkin, owner of the Running Center in New York City. "They only see things from their perspective. The best advice comes from coaches who see what a lot of people at a variety of levels and paces go through." Whatever your approach, pay attention to how it affects you. "Be proactive; listen to your body and take care of it before something happens," Solkin says, referring to injuries.

A corollary to the "go your own way" training method is that the various things you've heard over the years can be useful in that they provide ideas for what might work better than what you've been doing. For example, experimenting with a different pair of shoes is one way you might improve your performance.

When's the best time to experiment? On your shortest runs. If those new low-cut socks you think are so cool are going to cause blisters on your Achilles tendons, better to find out on a quick two-mile hop than a 10-mile training run-and much better to discover this fact on a training run than during a race.

Kenyan marathon runner John Kagwe bought a new pair of shoes the day before the 1997 New York City Marathon and decided to break them in on race day. He had to stop to re-tie his laces three times. Of course, history shows that Kagwe managed to win anyway, and when you win the New York marathon, you, too, can wear new shoes on race day and flout the conventional wisdom in any other way you deem appropriate. Until then, play it safe: Change as little as possible before a race. Don't wear, eat or do anything you haven't done, trouble-free, dozens of times before.

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