Weekend Workouts

Tempted to increase your mileage?
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If you have consolidated your training volume at a particular level, and you've been there for a few weeks or even months, it might be time to add some more to your workload. Here are some considerations when you have that conversation with yourself, with your training partners or with your coach:

1. Are you racing goals changing? If so, if you are racing further, you might feel as though additional miles/kms will be of benefit. This could help your overall aerobic base.

2. Additional miles should be included carefully. Make the increments sensible and include easy/easier miles before turning the extra into hard miles/kms. Using easy morning runs on a double-day, or doing gentle off-road/sports pitches miles would help the adjustment.

3. If your workload is challenging you, it is common to feel more tired than you used to feel on lower volume. Be ready for this but remember that your body takes time to adapt and to adjust before it feels comfortable. Once the additional stress has been accommodated you will feel the benefit and begin to make progress. This won't happen immediately, so don't lose heart.

4. A graded progression from week to week or month to month can not carry on indefinitely. We must build up, reach a peak, and then taper in order to feel the benefits of the heightened workload. Ultimately, whilst some improved fitness will be seen throughout the progressive training programme, the athlete's true fitness will typically reveal itself once the taper has taken place - the taper being the period where we allow the body to recover, recharge the batteries, conduct confirmatory short/sharp sessions that give us confidence before proving our form in the target race.

5. We only learn about our capacity for increased volume by trying it out. Some runners thrive on more, some on less. The litmus test is whether you can perform successful sessions when you are at each successive level. Therefore, if your hard sessions fail when you are at 100 mpw (for e.g) and they continue to fail, consider that you are too fatigued and drop the mileage. Don't do too much that your key sessions become void, too much that you invite illness, or too much that you invite injury.

6. Increasing your overall volume first should then allow you to increase the weight of effort in your long run or your big track sessions. Ideally, your long run should be a small proportion of your week. If you are only doing 50 mpw, a 25-mile run would be 50% of your work and could potentially invite injury. If you are already up to 100mpw, a 25-mile only represents 25% of your workload; your conditioning will be so much better. Aim to keep your long run at about 20-25% of overall weekly training, or lower if you can.

7. Don't do more miles for the sake of it and don't bury yourself just because you've seen your training partners do it. This is an individual pursuit and one size really doesn't fit all.

8. A weekly increment of 5-10% tends to be fine but if you've done 6 months at 50mpw, then had a week at 25, your body will tolerate going straight back to 50. So, use common sense.

If you really aren't sure, just ask. Many of us have lots of experience and can give good pointers if doubts creep in. Have fun and let us know how you're getting on!!

No goals at the moment?

It is a common conversation with non-runners or even novice runners to discuss the merits of training when you have no current racing goals. It's not imperative to have races in the calendar, despite what you might think, but it is absolutely important to maintain a decent level if fitness regardless, if your future intentions will include some serious racing.

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Have you ever bumped into someone when you're mid-run or have just finished a run and they say, 'What are you training for?', and you say, 'Oh, nothing at the moment!'. The reaction you get can often be to question your sanity or your purpose and to suggest that you can't/shouldn't/ought not to train without a specified target. It's as if training is futile if you don't have a specific goal.

Well, that's one take. Sure, if you don't know whether you're going to do a 3,000m track race or a road marathon next, how could you possibly know what training volume to generate and what sessions to do every week, or create a progressive and periodised plan? I get that. And with no timeline to work against, being so specific in your training will be difficult to set out meaningful building blocks or to chart progression. But, that lack of clarity in terms of racing goals should not be an excuse to let fitness deteriorate and for motivation or focus to wane.

The instinct to potentially do nothing of value in your aerobic and anaerobic systems is folly. It will see you come unstuck or at best it will see you waste time when a target race materialises in your diary and a medium or long-term plan crystalises.

Imagine doing nothing but a 5 mile jog every couple of days and then several months later you decide to aim at a race. You will have let your fitness platform degenerate and your starting level for overall fitness will be so poor that you will require months of development work to get back to reasonable fitness.

If you know that the winter will include half and full marathons, for instance, you owe it to yourself to maintain a base level of fitness, so that you can elevate your weekly training volume from 50 miles per week to 60 then 70 within a short period. From there you can kick on with sessions that are fit for purpose and specific to your end goals. If you are loitering down near 25/30 miles per week, it will likely cost you at least a couple of months getting up to serious weekly/monthly volume.

The ideal scenario is to maintain decent volume, with a session every week or some shorter efforts and also a longer run, so that you easily progress to a tailored race-specific programme within a short period of time.

Please don't let all your hard work drop off just because you're not 100% sure about which race is up next. Knowing what the next race will be is not the moment to re-fire the training engines!!