I was struggling with my motivation early the other morning, and my normal 15 minutes from getting out of bed to getting out of the house had increased to 30 minutes. I stood outside the house, having planned to do a long (30-40km) session the night before, and was weighing up a quick run up the local mountain (as the easy option) or a hills session instead. The longer session was not even a consideration!
During these 5 minutes of mental deliberation I did manage to have a moment of clarity. Basically the run up the mountain would have contributed very little to my training, especially as I’m only 4 weeks out from my next 100mile race (actually 174kms) – the Great North Walk 100. Also I felt I needed to do something worthwhile given that I had had a two rest days as my wife had been away for the weekend and I couldn’t tempt my 6 and 8 year olds to come and join me for a few hours running!
Junk miles!
I opted to do a hill session, where I knew I was going to get a genuine benefit, and could probably have squeezed the effort of the 30-40km session into a much shorter period.To have taken the easy option would have been to run “junk miles”. They can be detrimental using up energy reserves, risking injury and offering little in strength (or running form improvement), without actually progressing your training.
All too often runners, and especially ultrarunners when training for a specific event, find themselves watching and pushing their weekly mileage to fall in line with a training plan. Now I am very much in favour of having a plan, but that should be centred on the output and performance benefit, not just on the distance you run.
This doesn’t mean you should be out there killing yourself in every session, finishing completely spent and needing days to recover. You should still go out and run for the pure pleasure or being out in the environment, feeling the blood pumping and endorphins rushing, but not every time. There should always be flexibility in any training schedule, but I would suggest keeping true to it about 80% of the time, sort of the inverse of Pareto’s principle.
Just keep in mind that there is a limit to how much you can improve your running performance in a short space of time, or with intermittent training sessions. Always train with a goal in mind and whatever that specific goal is, it should be for some performance enhancement, be it in speed, strength, running economy, or even psychological enjoyment.
So train hard, become a better runner and have fun.
Happy running,
Andy
“It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with less” – Occam’s Razor
Training 16-10-2010 (30km Hill session on trails)
Training 19-10-2010 (Hill repeats on trails)
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