Part 1: Overview and Easy Miles

Welcome to the first official post of my series about the training philosophy I follow.  Today I'll discuss the overall thinking/structure of what I do, and how easy recovery mileage fits into the picture.

Overview

There are probably hundreds of different approaches to training out there, but the majority of them share several things in common.  They all advocate certain levels of mileage for a given race.  All have opinions on the merits of the long run.  Most offer advice on the benefits (or lack thereof) of running above, at, or below your lactic threshold/anaerobic threshold/specific race pace.  I've tried to dig into many of these by reading and researching, looking for things that made sense, discarding those that didn't.  My conclusion is that I need to train the following to improve:

Buildup - start building mileage, establishing a weekly long run as part of my routine, and use fartlek runs as my hard workouts
Tempo phase - sustained effort at slower than race pace, typically for longer than race pace
Interval phase - repeated efforts at faster than race pace
Alternate use of tempo and interval phases, with each building off of the other

All of this is guided by an underlying principle of simplicity in workout design, which will become evident as I discuss each topic.  I am a big advocate of program flexibility, some days are just bad days.  A hard workout doesn't give you the same benefits if you aren't able to give it 100%, so if I need to swap workouts around, I do.  I take days off when I need them, and regardless of phase, my easy miles are present to fill out my running log.


Easy Miles

Often called junk miles, these are those days that you run just because you should be running.  They're stuck in between hard days or long days, when you need to recover, but can't just take a day off.  When I run easy miles, they are EASY.  I used to go full tilt, full time - almost every day was an effort.  It's hard to stay healthy and make improvements that way.  Now, my easy days are little more than a trot, typically for 4 or 6 miles.  I picked this up reading about Kenyan training philosophies (sorry, no link, lost it).  One of the reasons that they can train at higher volumes than we do is that they are better at recovery than we are.  I don't quite buy into them having a better philosophy than anybody else out there (regardless of the evidence on the track), but as I said before, I set out to pick and choose the things I want from various training theories, and ignore the rest.  It's like a buffet, but instead of enjoying tasty, lower quality cuisine, I spend time that would otherwise be wasted on TV reading articles about sports science research.  Mmm, yum.  Since adjusting my easy mileage intensity, however, I haven't had any injuries to speak of.

These junk miles typically fill out 1/3 or more of my weekly mileage.  I never do hard runs on back-to-back days, and I never do my long run the day after a hard run.  Some days, it's nice to just relax and take in the scenery.


Yesterday (Thursday) should have been a hard workout, but instead became a day off - flexible program scheduling!  I moved my workout of 16x200m to this morning to accommodate not feeling well, and an anticipated upswing in the weather, meaning I got another February run in shorts!  Low 50s, a little rainy, not too bad.  The 40 mph wind gusts didn't do me any favors though.  I ended up much faster than my target times, confirming a need to move to 400m reps next week.

Have a good weekend all - Part 2:  Long Runs and Recovery, coming soon!