Forums >Running 101>Long Run Question
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away...(unkown) • Go With The Flow • Thyroid Support Group
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Getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to
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Runners run
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I'm running somewhere tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait.
Poor baby
Heeey Mikey So you actually do longer than 100m strides within your long long runs? Hmm I never heard of that. Interesting. Is this for any purpose other than breaking up the run into more interesting components? A 15 miler with mile repeats and recoveries sounds exhilarating and torturous at the same time. Something to consider for 07' fo sho'.... hmmmm
I would generally run steady for the 1st hour and then slowly ^ the pace every mile to the "finish".
Well I do lots of things within my long runs but I generally consider strides to mean short (20-30 second) bursts of speeed with full recoveries. So I do some strides in my long runs but usually at the end when I've already finished the "workout" part of the run.
One example of this would be a 13 miler with the first 5 miles easy to medium, then 8 x 2 minutes @ CV (a pace somewhere between 10K and 10 mile pace) with 1 minute recoveries, then 5 minutes easy, then 3 x 20 seconds fast with 45-60 second recoveries, then an easy mile or so to finish. I did this one a lot last summer/fall as I was trying to rapidly get back into some semblance of shape for a Half Marathon after a long layoff from racing.
A bigger workout might be to run 2.5 miles easy to the track, then run 4 x 2 miles at Half Marathon pace with 400m recoveries, then 3 x 200m fast with 200m jog recovery, then 2.5 miles easy home ~ 15 miles or so total. This is a continuous run. I did this one a couple times last summer/fall as well.
A big mid-week workout might be 9 or 10 miles with 3 x 8 min @ LT, or a 4 mile tempo run, or a 3 mile "easy tempo" run +4 x a 2 minute hill. Those will get bigger later in the year as I start amping my overall mileage. At this point I'm just trying to survive winter.
After years of trial and error, a long layoff during which I had time to process all that I had done right and wrong in the past, as well as a lot of reading and comparing notes with a lot of other runners, I've adopted this "Two Big Workouts" philosophy. I've only been doing it this way since June of last year, but so far so good. I've been able to get back into respectable shape pretty quickly and I feel like I'm set up well for 07. We'll see how it goes.
by two big workouts you mean that you load a whole bunch of training stimuli onto a long or medium long run 2x per week and then just do general base mileage the rest of the week?
Tougher than most, dumber than the rest. "You can not count the miles until you feel them" TVZ