03/10/2026
5 WEEKS OUT 📝
A somewhat lower-intensity week following the 10km hit-out, with the main focus being recovery while still keeping a little quality stimuli in the program.
The achilles gave me a little bit of awareness through the week, which made this a good reminder that sometimes the best training decision is not adding more training.
🔑 TRAINING DECISION
Stick with me here, but one way to think of the training week is as a burger 🍔 the hard days are the tasty fillings, but you need the bun (the easy days) around them to hold everything together.
The easy days give you the opportunity to recover, absorb the previous session and arrive at the next hard day ready to actually get something out of it. Without them (i.e going hard too often) you’re just piling more stress on top of stress which won’t improve performance.
The Tuesday recovery run, Wednesday easy running and Friday rest gave me enough space between the harder sessions to actually absorb the work. The goal isn’t to cram as much quality as possible into a week, it’s to create enough contrast between stress and recovery that the quality sessions actually do their job and lead to improved performance.
💡 COACHING TAKEAWAY
One of the harder parts of training is knowing when to push through a niggle and when to pull back.
It’s rarely as simple as “pain = stop” or “it’s nothing = keep going.” There’s a constant risk vs reward calculation. How important is today’s session, how significant is the symptom, what has happened recently, and what are the consequences if it gets worse?
This week, the potential reward of squeezing in extra work or intensity wasn’t worth the potential cost of turning a small warning sign into a bigger problem.
4 weeks to go 🏁
