Training Week 22 Recap

Afternoon all,

I have to apologise for the lack of material here on this blog! The past few weeks have been mainly training recaps and hardly anything else, and I feel that I've let my reading audience down here. I hate reeling off excuses; all I can say is that I've been really busy of late not just with training but with life as well. Hopefully you'll still find them useful.

Here is the recap for week 22. Another solid week, but I will need to up the ante very very soon!

Tuesday

Type: Continuous Hills

Time and Distance: 81 mins, 15.9 km.

Detail: 5.2 km warm up. 2 sets of 6 hill reps (400m up, 400m down) with 3 mins recovery. First set was 19:53, second set was 20:38. 1.1 km cool down.

Thursday

Type: Intervals

Time and Distance: 45 mins, 8.47 km.

Detail: 15 mins warm up at 10.5 km/h pace. 4 x 800m at 15.0, 15.5, 15.7, 16.0 km/h pace with 3 mins recovery at 8.0 km/h pace. 5 mins cool down at 10.5 km/h pace.

Saturday

Type: Long

Time and Distance: 135 mins 15 secs, 25.6 km.

Detail: Kept it easy and conversational. First half 69 mins, second half 66 mins 15 secs.

Total Weekly Distance: 49.97 km.

Comments: I've had a pretty hard week this week. Even though they're not meant to be easy, I'm finding the continuous hills a little more manageable now, but the intervals and long run have been rather difficult because I haven't done these for a wee while now. These have been a big shock to the system, so hopefully I can adapt and improve on this.

Improvements: Having looked at my training diary for the past few weeks, I noted that most of my weekend long runs have been less than 20 km! I think that must be why my recent long run was a little on the difficult side. Despite trying to keep it easy and conversational, the legs were starting to ache a bit. From now on, all my long runs have to be at least 25 km long (obviously I can take it easy on my easier weeks!). Apart from that, just focus on the quality of my threshold runs and continuous hills. After this week's interval session, I'm tempted to resume doing treadmill interval work. However this week was a one-off as the local athletics track was unavailable to the public so I wasn't able to do any threshold running this week. If I can help it, I'll keep the intervals on the shelf for now.

This week, I read an enlightening blog post written by George Anderson on The Secrets of Faster Running. Most of these secrets were known to me, but it's amazing how much of it I actually apply in my training. In fact, when I trained for the Berlin Marathon last year and set my personal best, I neglected all of those secrets. If I knew how to apply them better at the time, imagine how much better I would have done. Let me go into more detail.

Secret # 1: Elite athletes TRAIN SLOW

Sure, I know how to run slow, but when doing my long runs and especially closer to the marathon, I was running them just slower than race pace, instead of 1-2 minutes per mile slower than was prescribed. In fact, two weeks before Berlin, my long run of 37 km was around the same pace as my actual race pace! Imagine if I didn't go that fast in training I would have arrived at the start line probably with more energy, and finished probably with a better race time.

Secret # 2: Elite athletes run fast

Throughout my "marathon career", I've learnt to increase the pace of my runs. However, I also become obsessed with pace so much that I tended to run at a particular "fast pace", then bettering it a little in the next training session. I didn't really know that by pushing the pace so often I wasn't allowing myself to get used to the pace I was running at. To compound this further, most of my fast running was done on the treadmill, which, surprise surprise, doesn't translate to fast running on the road!

Secret # 3: Elite runners don't just run

Yeah I also knew about this, but I didn't exactly know what they did outside of running. But now I know. Drills, stretches, body conditioning, mobility, stability and strength exercises. How much of this stuff did I actually do when training for Berlin last year? Absolutely none, apart from the odd bit of stretching after a run. How much of this stuff do I do now? Well, not a lot I'm afraid. I'm hoping to address this now! As an aside, before I took up marathon running, I was into strength training heavily, and no doubt this has helped in the transition to becoming a marathon runner. However, for me, doing strength training and marathon running at the same time is almost near impossible to do, so unfortunately I've had to ditch all the heavy weights. The result: I'm thinner, lighter, a better runner no doubt, but also not as strong as before. I'm not saying you have to include a full-blown strength training routine on top of your marathon training, but doing a few simple strength exercises can go a long way.

Secret # 4: Elite runners train on hills

I know about hill work. Do I actually do it? I looked at my training schedule for Berlin last year, and was quite surprised to see that I only did ONE hill session in my 24 weeks of preparing for Berlin. That session was a hard sprint up until my muscles were about to shut down, and then a walk/jog down while trying to repay my oxygen debt. Just doing it on its own isn't going to pay big dividends to my training. Actually this wasn't the only hill I ran; I did do a variety of hilly routes in my training runs but to be frank I only did one specific hill session. So far this year, I've done four quality hill sessions - four times more than last year! And still many more to come!

Secret # 5: It's not just what you run, but how you run that really matters

I've watched a lot of marathon coverage on TV and YouTube, and even seen the very best runners run in the London Marathon. And they run so effortlessly. Technique and form have been driven home to me only recently after watching George Anderson's video on YouTube, so much so that every training run I've been doing I've been paying very close attention to my running form. It hasn't been very pretty so far, especially with regards to my breathing. At times I'm trying very hard to monitor my breathing, but then I sometimes trail off into my own little world before realising that I don't remember taking any breaths for the past five minutes or so! It's because breathing is such a sub-conscious activity. Oh well, I'll get there someday!

Train hard, but also smart!

Aaron