Michael Taylor begins his piece by reminding us that writing great history essays is hard. He compares the process to running a marathon, and his central thesis is that, just as the best training for running a marathon is not running marathons, so the way to encourage students to produce great essays is not writing more and more essays. Instead there are many other processes, from the securing of knowledge to the development of (in this case, causal) reasoning to go through first. Taylor then provides an insight into the philosophy used by his history department in combining a rigorous historical approach with Direct Instruction techniques and a love of knowledge about the past -- all to get their students over the line.