Two a days (Read 217 times)

I don't do anything differently except make sure I don't eat anything that might upset my stomach between runs.  I'm doing 6 easy in the morning and 4 easy in the evening.  In previous training cycles, I've done the second run on Sunday early evening (5pm-ish).  This is the first training cycle when I'm doing my doubles on weekdays after work (Mondays and Fridays).  I'm finding that the second run (7:30-7:45ish) is keeping me up too late.  Even though mentally I know I'm tired, it's taking me until 11 or midnight to feel sleepy.  (It's so bad I found myself watching Beneath The Planet of the Apes late on Monday night.  That has to be one of the worst movies EVER).  Not good when I have to wake up at 6am for the next day's workout and work.  Next cycle, if I double, I'll do one on the weekend.

I'm a better runner in the morning.  When I do a day with two runs, my main run that is the fastest and or farthest will be the morning run.  Then whatever I do in the afternoon will be slow and easy.  I figure the point of the afternoon run is to learn to run on tired legs.  And tired legs just need to move, not to do speedwork or major hills.  But I'm not race training, so my theory might not make sense for serious runners.

I like the hard run early, but I also eat my vegetables first at dinner.

I'm hard in the morning, easy in the evening.

TMI

Doubles are quite rare for me (though I ironically did one yesterday), however, whenever I do them I ALWAYS make the 2nd run of the day a slow easy run.

Beginner runners often make a lot of stereotypical mistakes, and doing doubles lays some similar traps.

Beginners often get injured because they're stressing their bodies more than that for which they're prepared, and not easing into the stresses enough, or out of them.

Just like with your auto engine, stopping and starting are your greatest stresses, and the points most likely to incur engine and system failures.

Experienced runners warn-up and cooldown to reduce the stresses of these transitions.

Doubling can double the jagged transition stresses, so you must be more careful about managing your transitions.

A good rule of thunb, to minimize the stress and damage likelihood, is to warmup for at least half the time period of your main workout run, and warmdown for an equal period to your main workout run. You can see that this is where doubling is likely to interfere with healthy transition planning.

If you are a higher mileage runner, like X, and you have a good 15 mile workout planning, that's going to take you a good 90 minutes. For healthy transitions using the above rules of thumb, you want a 45 minute warmup, and a 90 minute warmdown. Now you've invested 225 minutes for your run. Trying to double that, is clearly likely to cost you more time than you're willing to invest, unless you're really committed to healthy transitions. So you'll be tempted to skimp on the transitions, putting your engine back into high risk exposure.

I dunno, if you're running doubles, you are basically always running on tired legs when you're in the thick of trainign. To me an easy 5 or 6 miles in the morning has the opposite effect of making my legs more tired if I'm doing a workout that evening--it gives me 12 more hours to recover from my last hard workout.

I rarely double anymore but when I do it's often on Thursdays. I tend to make Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday my quality days. I'll very often do a gnarly 12+ mile hill workout on Tuesday morning then some cruise intervals on Thursday. I usually try to do the Thursday workout in the evening if my schedule allows and on those days I'll often run an easy 6 in the morning. If I have to do my Thursday workout in the morning, I know I'll just be that much less recovered and it will not be as high a quality workout (sometimes this is a good thing.)

And sometimes its just a matter of a bird in the hand--I know that evening runs are much more likely to get befriggered by real life, so if there's a question, I'll sometimes just do my bigger workout in the morning to get r done. Regardless of what's "ideal" unless you're a professional runner you're probably trying to fit your running into the margins of a life worth living, in which case doing what's possible or practical makes more sense than what's ideal from a purely training perspective.