queen of headlamps
TL;DR: what modifications, if any, would you make to a running schedule if the bulk of your long runs were done on rocky trails?
Long version:
I ran my first half last September on a low mileage plan (~21mpw.) I'd been running for about ten months, and I finished just over two hours. (+07s.) Since then I've been doing one step forward, two steps back with respect to injury (piriformis) and illness (bronchitis/maybe post-viral asthma, anemia), so I'm trying to be a bit smarter to avoid injury and illness. I'm a lot slower than I was last year, which is frustrating. I am running more, and I've been good at running easy, but I think I'm lacking a bit of snap.
I have a half in 8 weeks, and I'm doing a version of the Hanson's Just Finish plan, the one aimed at complete newbies, with a few modifications. I've basically spent the last month doing weeks 8 and 9 of the program to build a base, and once a week I do some fartleks or hill repeats to shake things up a bit (not high mileage enough to bother with tempo runs yet.)
Basic shape of plan: run 6 days a week, long runs alternating between 8 and 10 miles. Some bodyweight strength training. I do about 75% of my mileage on trails, and most of that are on flattish service roads with a couple of hills. The past months I've gone up the mountain on my Saturday runs, which have been between 6-8 miles, so 90-120 minutes of power hiking/running.
I'm very slow on trails, but I prefer them -- easier on my body, and I have much better form. Just no taste at all for barreling down hills so imagine very good form but teeny tiny steps.
My worry is that on my long runs I almost never get to push the pace. Effort is there, as the workout turns into a long interval session, but I almost never get into a good rhythm. The Hanson plans suggest a slightly faster paced long run, and I don't know if the plan will prepare me if I don't hit the paces.
Is this totally going to screw me when I try to run a (fast, sleigh ride) half? I just want to shave those stupid seven seconds off my time. Any suggestions for developing speed for an injury-prone wheezy beginner who feels fit enough to run 15 miles as long as she doesn't have to do it quickly?
Hey, another running blog.
I am not familiar with this plan - does it include speedwork? I don't think it matters if your long/easy runs are slow if you are doing some quality runs on pavement...
No speedwork. Basic outline looks like this -- this is this week.
Sunday: 3 miles
Monday: 5 miles
Tuesday: OFF
Wednesday: 5 miles
Thursday: 3 miles
Friday: 4 miles
Saturday: 8 miles.
Total: 28
As the plan progresses, the Sunday and Thursday runs will get to 4 miles, the Friday miles 5-6, and the Saturday miles range from 8-10 (although I might push it to 12. I ran 15 in the last cycle and then caught the flu.) I'll be bouncing between 28-32 mpw.
On Wednesdays I sometimes make the middle miles fartleks or hills. Mondays sometimes I use an interval training podrunner mix to work on my cadence.
I can't comment intelligently on the trails/injury portion of your question, but on the half in general, here is what worked for me from my first half to my second.
1st HM - 15mpw avg for the 12 weeks before the race - ALL easy miles. Finished 1:59:52
2nd HM - 32mpw avg for the 12 weeks before the race - Normal schedule was Mon (4m ez), Tue (6m ez), Wed (8m w 3-4 @ goal pace), Thu (RD), Fri (5m ez), Sat (12-15m LR with 3-7m @ goal pace), Sun (off). Finished 1:42:25 in a brutal downpour/wind.
Now, I don't know how much of my improvement was due to doubling my mileage and how much was due to running lots of miles @ goal pace. Obviously, they both contributed. I do know that during the race, goal pace didn't seem nearly as hard as I thought it would be because I was very familiar with what it felt like.
PRs:
5k - 20:51 - 9/5/15
10k - 47:00 - 5/25/15
15k - 1:10:19 - 11/21/15
13.1 - 1:42:25- 4/25/15
26.2 - TBD (someday)
It's really impossible to say whether your slight increase in mileage / hills/ strides will get you the time you want. Especially because you say you are a lot slower now and the trail running is done at a much slower pace. But then you really are only wanting an 8 second improvement, so maybe. Personally, I would want to do some running at goal / race pace, on pavement. But you know best what you can handle with your injury history.
cjones, that's awesome improvement. I was trying a similar plan last time when I got ill, except 12-15 miles were mostly easy. I think if I'd stayed healthy I would have pulled below 1:55. The 2:04 I ran in March was run strongly, and I think I was heading in the right direction before my toddler nephew visited with a weaponized virus. I've had a hard time being consistent but I'm new at this whole running for sport thing so I guess it just takes a while.
From the Internet.
My training for my spring half was similar to cjones, except I didn't have an earlier half to compare. I was training with 1:50 in mind as a reach goal and ended up running 1:48:09. I agree that spending time getting comfortable with goal pace was key; even if you only do a couple miles each week as part of one of your shorter runs, that's better than nothing.
I averaged ~40 mpw in the few months leading up to the race, which was a fair amount more than I was able to run last year, with a lot of miles at goal pace (during my medium-long run - which I think is nice to have in the schedule for longer races even if you run it all easy, btw - I worked up to 11 miles total with 8 continuous miles at HM pace), over-distance long runs (3 14+, 3 15 milers), and a little bit of work faster than goal pace (intervals of some type or strides, whatever I was up for in a given week). I did my long runs mostly easy but often threw in a few miles at roughly MP effort in the middle or toward the end to get used to pushing just a bit on tired legs.
Can I ask you both a question? What were you averaging *before* you started the plan? Lauren, really, 40 mpw for months? Wow. That gives me hope that I may just need to run a lot more.
Six days a week instead of four seems to be working well for me, but getting above 30 miles a week consistently has been hard for me. I tried in the spring to run overdistance runs, and while the runs themselves went fine at an easy pace, I think I was very badly under-recovered most of the time. (Toddler. ~4 hours a sleep per night before illness. Not recommended, I hear. ) I decided this time to de-emphasize the long run a bit and work on total volume.
I definitely will try some goal pace runs. I don't have any running background to speak of, and I'm not great at pushing myself at all (hence why my best 5K time is the one *within* my HM race.)
I probably averaged around 20-25mpw for six months or so leading into my HM specific schedule.
I think you'll want to do some of your long runs on pavement, just to get your body used to the pounding and to make sure shoes, etc. work for you. Also you want to make sure you can control the pace. I am very slow on trails and on hilly routes. I like doing some runs on dirt because it keeps me slow. When I have a flat smooth place to run, I fly because it feels so easy. That's not bad on a short run, but it's not good on a long one. Especially in a long race, you don't really want to take off like a swallow. You need to be able to have some sort of control during those starting miles. (And I say this as someone who has no control over my pace, especially starting out on a race.) Maybe it would work for you to do one in three long runs on pavement or every other?
I was running 25ish mpw last summer/early fall with occasional weeks at 30, had surgery in October which threw a wrench in my plans, was mostly in the high 20s with some weeks up to mid-30s in the winter before I started HM training. I do best with down weeks so I'd do 3 weeks up/1 week down, and I peaked at 51 miles 2 weeks before my race.
MTA the mileage increases became easy after adding in that midweek medium-long run - suddenly 10+ miles for the long run was no big deal, and it became easier to extend my shorter runs too.
Ginny, that's a good idea. There's a nice paved path down the by the river that I run now and then -- out and back around the lake is nine miles. (I like that run a lot, just sort of addicted to the views from the mountainside. ) I actually can get to it from the trails, so that might be an option. One mile trail warm-up, six out and back, and one mile trail cooldown. It's a nice non-cambered path, too.
I'm probably overthinking this, but it's sort of maddening because I thought that a year later I'd be working up to assaulting a sub-1:50, not wondering if I'm up to sub-2. Last year I ran low mileage at 9:30-1-:30 and just went out way too fast and hung on during the actual race. I think I'm a smarter racer now (noob gainz) but now I'm totally terrified of figuring out pacing, strategies, etc.
I have been running for about 7 years now, and have always run on roads until this past fall. I started running trails with a very laid back "no runner left behind" group, and have fallen in love. I still run roads, but prefer the trails, only catch, I'm not running trails in the summer. My times on trails are way slower than roads, mostly because of the technical aspect of the trails, which is fine.
I have a goal half coming up in Sept than I want a strong effort in. I am not sure I will PR because the quality work outs are not quite there. In Oct, I'm doing my 2nd full, so my training plan is a hybrid of a 16 week full plan, but loaded the front 10 weeks with the Ryan Hall plan. The half plan has lots of interval speed work, and the full plan has the longer tempo runs. I have done pretty well doing the tempo runs, but not so good on the intervals.
I'm saying all of this, to give another thing for you to think about. If you want to run faster, you have to practice at doing it. The intervals should be at a faster pace than goal HM pace. The tempo runs should be just about 10-15 seconds slower than goal HM pace. So if you want to improve your time, your training paces should reflect this.
Are we there, yet?
With no speed work, the question may be how fast you get on some of those faster segments of your trail runs where you say it resembles a long interval session. When I was a grad student at UConn I used to run a lot of my longer runs on the same trails used for the Nipmuck Marathon. I was a lot more nimble then, so I could get a good pace going. That didn't substitute for speed work, which I ran on the track, but I seldom bothered with a scheduled pace or tempo run. I either raced frequently with no taper or ran a quicker pace when I felt good on my medium length runs. Except for my formal interval workouts I never bothered with pace; it was all perceived effort. As long as you are getting some faster running during those fartlek sessions and getting the distance and effort on the long runs, the only modification I would suggest is a slightly faster paced medium run once every two weeks. I'd suggest every week, but that may push the overall workload too high to be sustainable.
2024 Races:
03/09 - Livingston Oval Ultra 6-Hour, 22.88 miles
05/11 - D3 50K 05/25 - What the Duck 12-Hour
06/17 - 6 Days in the Dome 12-Hour.
Thank you all so much.
So I'd heard that it didn't make sense to do speedwork until one was running closer to 40mpw. What I'm hearing here is that I should do *something* that forces me to pick up the tempo, even if I'll be averaging 30-35 mpw.
Should I prioritize intervals or goal pace runs? I sometimes run intervals for time (e.g., 6 x 1 minute) as I don't have access to a track, but I've done a tempo run exactly once.
During my first training cycle for a half I was only running four days a week, and I definitely tried to race my training too much (like, literally, if I was on a treadmill, I'd make sure I beat my good friend's similar time by ten seconds just to tease her, and then she'd beat mine, so it was basically six weeks of three mile progression runs once a week.) but I think it might have helped with getting the feel for a pace. Once I was injured over the winter, I came back to running a bit early so had to run a) gently and b) in the mornings in the dark and cautiously, so I think I may have just accidentally taught myself to run slowly.