Thursday, October 2, 2008

Three Consecutive Days

When Kevin Setnes coached me for two seasons, the training week was broken into two parts. There was the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday (TWR) portion of the week and then the weekend.

When getting ready for an ultra, the TWR portion of the week would start at 8-10-8, then go to 10-12-10, then 12-15-12, and finally peak at 15-18-15. As training progressed, the Tuesday and Thursday workouts would include tempo work as well.

I was looking through my training log for this season, and saw that I hadn't done even an 8-10-8 three day progression all year. When I look at every 3-day series from this entire calendar year, the best I've done for a minimum value over a 3-day period is 6.1 miles. That was in May, when I ran 6.1, 11.2, and 8.0 miles in 3 consecutive days.

Clearly, I did not train this year the way that Kevin trained me, and I had a lot of success working with Kevin, running a PR at AR50, finishing Laurel Highlands, Wasatch, and Hardrock over two seasons. And yet, I seem to have abandoned that style of training.

Tonight after work, I'm planning to run an easy 8 to 10 miler. Assuming I do that, my mileage for the past 3 days would be 8-7.8-8+. October is not the time to start putting together my first decent 3-day streaks of the year, but perhaps now is better than never.

I noticed last night in Ultrarunning magazne that the Maine Track Club 50K and 50 Miler is on 10/18. That's a race I've run multiple times (the 50K) and I even won my age group in the 50K when I was 39. OK, I was the only runner under 40 that day, but my plaque says "Open Division Winner". Another year, I was leading the 40+ division all day until my "alleged" friend Gilly dropped from the 50 miler to the 50K on short notice, and I couldn't quite catch him in the last mile.

Anyway, on 10/18, my training plan is a 24 miler on relatively easy terrain, where the first 18 miles will be done at a moderate pace, and the next 6 will be done hard. It seems kind of crazy to drive to Maine for a deliberate DNF, but a number of my friends will be there, and the course is perfect for my training. So, I think I'm going to enter this one. That means just one more solo long run, a 22 miler 9 days from now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Currently I'm doing hard MWF and long Saturday, which gives me two hard days in a row.

The idea of regularly doing THREE hard days in a row I find quite scary :)

Damon said...

They weren't all hard days. They were just days beyond my standard "jog for an hour" training run. Even at the highest mileages working with Kevin, the miles on Wednesday were always easy.

This week, Tuesday and today are easy and yesterday was hard.