A few bad days aren't anything to worry about, I guess. After a few questionable workouts and one very bad one, I was still left wondering why things weren't improving. After yesterday's run - which went well - I realize my mistake was thinking like an ultrarunner (which is fine, if you're running ultramarathons).
I got into the "I need to run x miles in y minutes this week" frame of mind, when that's not terribly important for what I'm planning to do. As an example of this kind of thinking, imagine a runner wanting to do her first marathon, running 40-50 miles per week and with a longest run of 13 miles; how fast do you think she could finish it? Dos your answer change if I mention she recently ran a 31:30 10K? That's what happened with Grete Waitz setting a world record with her first marathon.
I haven't been running many miles and the miles I've done haven't been fast. I'd think of what my weekly average was, calculate what kind of a mile race that corresponds to, then look at the individual workouts to see if they were too hard or too easy. That only works when dealing with races that require a lot of endurance, not the mile.
I'd been doing my hill repeats, letting the Garmin Forerunner measure my miles and record my mile splits, then figure out how fast I must have been going on the up and on the down sections. I wondered if I was getting good numbers. Yesterday, I decided to run repeats, but do them slowly (as I felt I'd been training too hard) and record the actual times of the repeats. I thought I'd been going up in about 5:10-5:15 in the previous week. This time, running easy, I was doing them in 4:40. I was way off!
The hard workouts I've done recently point to a mile in 5:50, rather than the weekly mileage and pace measurements, which are stuck at 6:25. That may not sound like much, but it's like the difference between a marathon in 3:15 and one in 3:35. Improving by almost a minute per mile in a marathon on a few weeks of training would be impressive.
What I'd overlooked was that I only need to be able to run hard for a few minutes, so how far I run in an hour isn't important. My body seems to respond faster to hard fast running than it does to long and slow runs; the endurance takes forever for me to build [I know the opposite is true for almost everyone who reads this], but the short distance speed is coming along nicely. And that's what I'm working on.
The bad days? Well, the weather was bad, I'd been doing things I wasn't used to when not running and I wasn't in the best of moods.
Back to work I go.
First big snow
2 days ago
5 comments:
I'm glad you're back at it :) Being injured and/or frustrated sucks.
I believe you are one of those runners who thrive with low mileage (30-50 miles per week), with most done at a hard intensity. Thinking of Seb Coe, he was putting in 35 mile weeks in his olympic year. Hard 5 milers, 400/800 intervals, a long run of 10 every 9-12 days - that will get you to sub 5, and give you good odds to avoid injury - Do it!
Steve, how do you think weekly mileage and intensity should change when moving from the marathon to the mile. I know a true miler would be doing a lot of speedwork. Personally I don't think I could run more than 50 miles a week a lot of those miles are going to be fast
@Anonymous: In my best years, I ran 80-90 miles per week, with a lot of two-a-days, but cut back dramatically when training for short races.
@Ben: I should answer that in upcoming posts. I like to average 75 minutes per day when marathon training, but only 40 for the mile, with long runs of only 60-80 minutes. The actual pace of easy runs becomes variable because easy days end up being recovery, rather than actual training.
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