To 1 decimal place, I am 63.6 years old, so doing the run in 63.3 minutes counts as a success!Originally Posted by noel
To 1 decimal place, I am 63.6 years old, so doing the run in 63.3 minutes counts as a success!
In his lifetime he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen.
Jorge Luis Borges
65 miles this week.
Next week i'm hoping to do a midweek club session, then the mighty Long Mynd Valleys next sunday.
Hoping for a pb at LMV, i've got the miles in the legs, but turning up fresh on the start line is of more importance than knocking out big mileage this week.
Also a slight nagging feeling in my head that i might suffer over the final torrid hour at LMV... having concentrated on XC and road miles the past few months, my climbing felt flat (pardon the pun) at Callow in December, and the last hour at LMV can see you throwing minutes away if you're not fully ready for it.
Also taking a clubmate to LMV... he's done a few races... Lee Mill Relay, Cardington Cracker, Cardingmill Canter... but this will be a big step up in terms of difficulty.
Club night last night... a rare single-session day for me yesterday, having no time to run AM as i had to go to the office (the cheek of it!)
12 x 450mtr-ish loops on gravel/pavement, with 1 minute rest periods. A tough session, dropping the rest periods down to a minute really makes a difference from 90secs/2mins, and pacing is key.
Managed to keep all reps within 3 seconds of each other, which considering i was fairly isolated within the group, wasn't too bad. Although still don't feel i'm running at full flying pace at the moment.
8.5 miles in total. Tempted to sneak in another hard session on thursday, but in order to preserve the legs before sunday's race, i might opt for doing it on the treadmill.
Gee. That's why I was never a contender - only running once a day. But probably too late now to change my ways.
Although one time I ran leg two (8.5 miles?) of the Calderdale Relay, flat out as you do in a relay, and then one of the leg five runners failed to show. Being the club captain I did the honourable thing but told my younger, very fast, new partner that I had already done a leg so start off easy.
Of course all hyped up he set off like a rocket and when after half a mile I eventually caught him up and remonstrated he said "well I wanted us to get to the stile before the other teams".
Maybe we did but the rest of the leg (7.5 miles?) was damn hard going
"...as dry as the Atacama desert".
Once a day? That's still too much.
Something I remember reading in the Fellrunner magazine a long time ago was a piece by Del Davies, who was winning the M40 category in every race he ran in Wales in the late 1980's and early 90's. He said that because of his working patterns, he only found it convenient to train three times a week; but that he reckoned doing three quality sessions each week was better for his performance than when he had been training more frequently. When I was at my best, I was typically doing four sessions a week, but trying to make sure that they were all good quality sessions.
In his lifetime he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen.
Jorge Luis Borges
I was talking mileage/sessions with a vet70 clubmate this week, who was around a 2:15 marathon runner. His opinion is that high mileage is only worth it if you are consistent... absolutely no point in doing 85 miles one week, then 30 the next.
His best period of running came after 2 solid years of 100 mile weeks (this was when Cov Godiva was a real force on the national scene and had a high number of runners doing this).
I'm hoping that my consistent 70 mile weeks are going to start to pay off come the longer summer races, and hopefully i'm still knocking off pb's. Whether its my body still adjusting to higher mileage, i don't particularly feel in pb form at the moment.
We'll see on sunday at Long Mynd Valleys...!
I'm impressed you've kept it up. 70 m/w is a lot. But you're right, you need consistency.
I'm intrigued to see how much difference it'll make. I'm sure you'll see the benefits, it's just a question of how much. Good luck at Long Mynd.
When I switched to running, at 28, I quickly found that if I exceeded a certain average mileage I got injured. The magic figure was 21 miles a week. I didn't understand it at the time, and no one in the club or any physios had a clue, but with the benefit of hindsight (and major surgery) I now know it was because I was born with a serious biomechanical problem.
What I found then, and continued through my traverse from road running to fell, via x country and track, was that three sessions a week, of 6-8 miles, worked for me. The sessions were fierce, but then I didn't run again for at least 48 hours. As this meant I didn't get a long run, I used to run Monday-Wednesday-Friday and then strap my heart rate monitor watch onto my bike bars and cycle outside for 2 hours at the weekend at 130bpm, plus or minus 2bpm (this took a lot of concentration.)
Whilst I am a great defender of 'each to their own' and 'what works for one person won't necessarily work for someone else', whenever I've talked to athletes who run big mileages, and run every day, about tapering they've never been able to give me a coherent answer as to how they manage to do it when they are racing once a week in their main season.
My ex-coach was of the opinion (and i tend to agree), that its quite fine to run every day, even when racing weekly. But the trouble comes when you try to pack in the hard work in midweek as well.
When i'm racing weekly i can do a maximum of one good session in a week, and sometimes i have to give that up and just run easy.
Of course my coach would say (and i also tend to agree on this!!) that you won't get your best performance if you're racing weekly, as you can't commit to the necessary quality training.
I think i mentioned this earlier in this thread, or on another thread... but i discussed this with a good level steeplechaser and fellracer, who is now a coach.... he was of the opinion that when you've got a load of races coming up and you want to maximise performance, all you can plan to do is peak for the first one, and you just have to take it from there.
I am committed to improving... but am i so committed that i'll sacrifice my favourite races and just race six times a year....? not a chance. I guess if you're at the sharp end of the championships that's the sacrifice you've got to make.
For me, there's a lot of fitting training around life. If I were to plan to run three times a week and then something were to get in the way of one of the those sessions, I'd be playing catch-up.
My approach when I'm training well is to try to get out every day. Some of these are little dog-walk runs, and some are 3 mile recovery runs the day after a race. Given that life typically does get in the way, I probably average 5 runs a week, or sessions (if I'm doing any biking).
I find this takes the pressure off, and there's flex in the system. So when I'm feeling well, I can add in a hard session. But when I'm feeling tired, I can do a little easy run, or skip it altogether without feeling I'm slipping behind my training schedule.
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