increase mileage or frequency? (Read 941 times)

I'd say run more frequently for about 1 month, keeping pace the same, or maybe reducing it a little, you'll end up increasing mileage a bit as well. Then focus on increasing mileage, maintaining the same pace or increasing it slightly if your body tells you that you'll be ok.

be careful on how much mileage you increase per week. Current thought is limit yourself to a 10%/week increase so you can avoid injury.

Taken from an Earlier Post: The intermediate training schedule from The Complete Book of Women's Running by Dagny Scott might be one to consider. It is a 16-week plan that starts with three 30-minute runs and one 35-minute run per week and builds to five runs per week, including a 60-minute long run. I guess it depends on whether you want to run more days. I don't want to put the schedule here because there may be copyright issues. I found it online by googling "intermediate training schedule" (in quotes) and dagny (outside the quotes). That only returned one result, which I selected and then scrolled to page 59. Good luck, whatever you decide and congrats on coming so far with your running This is what the DH and I are starting beginning next week once we complete the One Hour Runner. At first glance it does not seem like enough of a challenge, but if you read into the program it is adding additional days thus increasing your mileage at a safe rate. At the end of the program you are running 5 days a week and should have a pretty solid base to start training for bigger races such as that fantasy HM.... Good Luck!

I'm a Lydiard guy and pretty much all that I say here (except for some non-running stuff? ;o)) would be based on Lydiard principles. I get heavily criticized for that particularly at letsrun.com message board; some say it's old-fashion, some say it's a bunch of BS...most of them have NO idea what Lydiard principles are. Some say Lydiard is for elite--running 100 miles a week. Of course, he was behind the first ever organized jogging club in the world. He helped a group of 20 ex-heart attack patients--the youngest being 50-year-old and the oldest 74--to get up and start running from the point where they couldn't even run a half a lap around the local high school track (200m) to running 20 miles non-stop in mere 8-month. So first of all, KNOW that it's possible. I go back once in a while and read his first ever jogging book, "Run For Your Life", and see how they did it. They used basically a classic "interval" method of jogging a bit and walking a bit and repeat--pretty much what C25K program would say. And try to get to the point where you can run 15 minutes without having to stop. Once you get there, you need to start doing a long run once in a while but always go back to 15 minutes for recovery. Longer runs would develop muscular endurance; the longer you can go, the more muscular endurance you'd develop. This is basically your ability to go the distance. In other words, without training your body to go far, it'd be very difficult to go far! Once again, the important thing is to always go back to 15-minutes for recovery. Once you get to the point where you can run something like 15'-45'-15'-30'-15'... something like that (that would be 5-days-a-week program with a few days rest); then now you'll bring up those "recovery" days up to 20' or so... But the whole point is to go far one day; and take one or two or three days or whatever to recovery before you try this long run again... Doing 30' and then, for a long run, 35', to me, wouldn't make enough impact to actually push the envelope--I'd have 5 minutes difference from a good day to a bad day alone! Let's face it; without pushing the envelope, you're not going to improve much. Forget how many miles you're running. Forget how fast (minutes-per-mile) you're running. Just go out and run for time. I'd even say forget about following any particular so-many-weeks program. That would put undue pressure. Have those long runs only when you felt you can comfortably do so. Don't even put pressure on yourself of "increasing 10% every week". Listen to your "Inner Coach" and you'll do fine. Dreams stay dream if you don't do anything about it. And "just run" is fine but it wouldn't hurt to use your head...and heart! (instinct?)

The best results I ever got was when I adopted a program that called for runs at a given intensity for a given amount of time (mostly relatively low intensity). Distance was just the output of the equation time x intensity. I find that when I run for distance, at some point I get impatient and try to pick it up. To avoid that, I will set my fancy Garmin 305 to show heart rate and time only. I go out and back and look at the distance when I'm done. I found that my distance gradually increased.