AUTUMN 2007 - Serpentine

TRAINING
SERPENTINE RUNNING CLUB
I think of the cutback week as the time to bank your training earnings.
I think it’s useful and motivating to use the cutback week as a minitaper
and take part in a race to monitor your progress over the long
winter period. So once you’ve planned your macrocycles, start putting
some races into your plan, checking out the Serpie event planner for
ideas for suitable events. But be prepared to be a bit flexible: the
length of your macrocycle should be determined by you and how
your body is responding to the increase in training volume. People
respond to training differently, so don’t worry about what others are
doing – make your plan personal to you. Experience tells me that a
3 or 4 week macrocycle is as long as I can cope with: that is 2 or 3
weeks of increasing volume of training, before I need to scale back
again, but you might need 5 or 6 weeks per macrocycle.
Microcycles
Within each macrocycle you can now start to plan your first
microcycles (training blocks of about a week, but could be 5-10 days).
Most of your training over the winter will be building endurance and
your aerobic capacity and recovering from that. This is the training
which enables you to go longer with less fatigue, brings down your
resting heart-rate and the speed of your recovery from hard sessions,
and develops mental toughness. Most of your running therefore
should be at 65%-75% effort (or % of max heart rate) and you should
be able to chat to your friends while doing it. But you need to mix
in other types of training at the same time, partly to relieve the
tedium of running always at the same pace, and partly to develop
your cruising speed, strength and running technique.
Winter microcycles
Given everything I’ve said so far, the table below shows how you
might structure your winter training week, making maximum use of
Serpentine training sessions. More experienced runners with a
higher endurance base should undertake more of these sessions –
e.g. extra recovery runs. These sessions are optional for those with
a lower endurance base and can be substituted with aerobic
Karen races ahead
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
cross-training (biking, elliptical cross-trainer, swimming) for the
injury-prone. But all will need to do the highest-priority sessions: the
long run, the tempo run and the semi-long run. I haven’t specified
the lengths of runs because they will depend on your target event
and your current level of fitness. But in general, the longer your
target event, the more mileage you should be clocking up.
I’ve suggested including core stability work and weights training: both
of the these types of training will make you a more efficient (i.e.
faster), less injury-prone runner, but only if your technique is correct.
I strongly advise seeking specialist advice for these exercises.
Progression
Long, slow run at 65%-75% effort or under-distance race in a cutback week.
Vary routes and terrain and even company. Gradually increase distance by a
few miles each microcycle. You should find your pace at any given heart rate
or perceived effort level increases as the winter draws on.
Weights session (upper body and mid-section) + (30-50 mins recovery run).
Technical drills + threshold session or tempo run – e.g. 2-3 x 1.5 miles @
85% effort/max HR with 2-3 mins recovery on a footpath.
(am) Core stability work.
(pm) semi-long run of about 2/3 Sunday’s distance at 75% effort – club runs
are good for these. Conversation is more sporadic at this pace.
(30-50 mins recovery run) + core stability work.
(am) Weights session (leg-strength).
(pm) Steady run of 30-60 mins at 70-80% effort or easy run + 6-8 x 100m
strides with walk/jog recovery if racing on Sunday.
(am) core stability work + hills or fartlek session or cross-country race.
Whatever you manage in week one of your winter training (logged
of course in your training diary), you should be looking to make
progress as the days get shorter. Long runs should get longer of
course. Tempo runs might get faster, or you might aim to spend
longer in the 85% zone by lengthening the repetitions or reducing
the recoveries. In hills sessions, you might aim to do more repeats
or do them on a longer or steeper hill. Use your imagination to
change the parameters of a training session to increase the degree
of challenge to your body and keep you interested and motivated.
Expect the unexpected
Don’t be over-rigid with your plan and be a little bit opportunistic.
Learn to monitor yourself for signs that you haven’t recovered from
your previous session sufficiently to attack another tough one (e.g.
through a raised resting heart rate, or extra-sore or stiff leg muscles).
So do an easy run instead or some cross-training even if it means
swapping the days around in your plan. And if you have to miss a
day altogether – even a whole week because say you had a cold or
for some other reason, don’t panic: it’s not the training you do on
a given day or week that makes a difference to your performance,
it’s the accumulated effect of months, even years of fairly consistent
effort. It’s part of distance running lore that it takes something of
the order of 7-10 years of consistent effort to reach your athletic
peak, so one day – even one week – won’t change very much.
I hope what I’ve said here is enough to enable you to start to design
a winter training programme that will be personal to you, your
athletic history, your physical and mental propensities, your goals
and your lifestyle. A personalised programme is the one that is most
likely to work. And come the New Year, when you start to wonder
whether you will ever be able to train without tights, gloves and hat
ever again, you can to start to plan the next phase of your training:
specific preparation for your chosen event when the daffodils are
blooming again in the spring.
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