Chasing Miles and Paces

This week past week has gone by without any real headaches or hiccups for once 😉 I mentioned last week that due to the peroneal tendon injury I’ve been dealing with I was advised to keep my runs to 40 mins or less. Initially I was quite frustrated with this and decided to take the positives out of this and that I can still get a worthwhile training week in. So I ran 6 out of the 7 days taking a rest day yesterday (still did a mobility session) and included a number of strength and mobility sessions. 2 of the 6 days I ran at a faster pace running a progression run on these days, any of my runners reading this will know that I’m a big proponent of this type of a session especially in the base building period. Surprised myself on these sessions and started to realise I’m not as unfit as maybe I thought I was! This 6 days of running added up to a grand to total of 34 miles and when you consider back in the period from April to July I was hitting 60 – 70 miles week in week out I’m a long way away from perceived peak fitness.

This got me thinking about how we as runners obsess with numbers and targets. I was somebody who used to really obsess with hitting a certain number of miles each week as I thought if I want to run a certain time all I need to do is run X number of miles each week and that will get me the time I want, it doesn’t work like that. You need to consider what sessions did you do, did you sleep well, what was your nutrition like, how did you feel running these miles, what was your rate of exertion? Don’t get me wrong I do believe to become a better runner you do need to run a lot to improve but this needs to be done in a smart way and build up to this point. If a runner is only running 2 days a week and then they suddenly increase to 6 days a week straight away this will likely lead to breakdown, injury and burn out! However, if they do this in a consistent and gradual way, they will eventually build-up towards this. We all want to see results now as opposed to looking at the big picture. I have done this before and to my detriment. When I was progressing through to the Senior ranks I was improving rapidly each year off relatively low mileage and started running fast times and winning races that I wouldn’t of expected in the past however instead of continuing on this trajectory slightly increasing the miles I got greedy and wanted to see more improvement and I wanted it now so started to increase my mileage dramatically from 60 to 90 miles a week running twice a day every day. I found my sessions deteriorated as I was wiped out from all the miles and very quickly broke down and had to deal with a long term hip injury. It still annoys me that I fell into this trap, I may have eventually built up to 90 miles a week gradually but even if I didn’t not everyone is built biomechanically to run a huge number of miles. I’ve started to realise 60 -70 miles is the sweet spot for me, even during a marathon block I won’t go much over this. The point I’m trying to make and this is just my opinion don’t get bogged down when you hear other runners or your competitors are doing this huge amount of miles, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you. There is a phrase I like to constantly remind myself when structuring training programs for myself and my runners and its “Diminishing Returns”. It essentially means investing huge and extra amounts for very little return. In running terms, it can mean running faster and longer but this may actually yield very little in terms of improving fitness and may just be effective at tiring you out. This is a good thing to remember when looking at your own training.

Another area I wanted to touch upon is your speed or pace during your training runs. I think the advent of the likes of Strava has been for the most part really good as it allows people to share their training and their approach and I’m a big advocate of sharing and learning different training approaches, as not one approach is the best approach and I love learning from other coaches and runners. However I do think the likes of Strava makes runners look at others training sessions and their weekly/ monthly mileage and obsess over their own training thinking well if their doing that I need to start doing that also, as I mentioned already this is not how it works. I think it also has led to people doing all their runs much faster than they should. Average mile/km pace is something that I never would of focused on years ago but it has crept into running consciousness over the last few years and is a good metric to base or plan your sessions however I have noticed many runners obsessing over this and if they hit 7 mins per mile yesterday they need to at least hit that or beat that today and tomorrow! That won’t lead to tangible improvement it will help to a certain point but it will lead you to plateauing eventually. I’m a big believer in running your hard days hard and your easy days easy. The easy days are there to allow you to recover from the hard stuff and believe me it’s the best approach to adopt. For this reason I like doing my easy runs on my own as I get to dictate the pace. I have joined for the last few weeks Ciaran O’Lionaird’s Zoom Lockdown call and he gives a great insight on how he approaches his training week. Ciaran is an Irish Olympian based in the states and has run 3.52 for the mile and despite being one of Irelands best ever middle distance runners runs some of his recovery runs close to 8 min mile pace. Ciaran runs his hard days really hard but to recover from this he needs to run his easy days really easy. Another factor I wanted to mention briefly is your rate of exertion in training sessions. I mentioned above that due to the likes of Strava many are obsessed with their overall average pace for each run and will run their warm up and cool down faster than they need. This can also lead to many running the recovery reps in their interval sessions faster than they need but all this leads to is not being able to hit the faster reps at the desired pace just to get a faster overall pace, and look we’ve all done this but its something to be aware of and try to keep improving upon!

Thanks for reading folks, have a good training week and keep it smart 😉

Oh If there’s any suggestions for Blog topics over the next few weeks they are more than welcome so just give me a shout 😊

Noel