Training Methods

Listening to Martin talk about his training methods got me to thinking more about my own. He was telling me about doing speed work on Tuesdays, a tempo run on Thursdays, and a long run on the week ends.

Martin and I are roughly the same age so I am left wondering how he finds the energy. Maintaining an every other day hard effort requires the body to recovery fast. When I was younger, I could tolerate it, but now that I have topped 50, I do just one of those workouts, and it seems to take days before I recover.

Now, we didn't get into specifics so he might well have been describing one of his heaver workout weeks.

I know my own training methods have changed. I no longer use the track for my intervals. I stick to ½ mile hill repeats. I just couldn't take the stress of the turns on my hamstrings any more. Instead of tempo runs, I do fartlek runs on the trails. Yes, this may raise a few eye brows for some of you but I am not doing this on some silly difficult technical trail. I'll do it on something like the Thread trail or the Lake Loop trails at the White Water Center. I found that trail running consist of a lot of speeding up and slowing down. Fartlek running more closely simulates the efforts during a trail race. As for long runs, in the year and half, I done exactly 2 long runs on the roads. The rest have been on the dirt.

So far, the results for me have been positive. I have seen no discernible drop off in my marathon times and my 5k times have held study. More if not most importantly, I have been injury free.

May be the wisdom of the years is finally settling in for me, but I found fewer and fewer reasons to push up to the edge. At some point which is more important chasing fast times or staying injury free.

The Cool Down Runner