The Importance of Running Specific Musculoskeletal Strength

  I was doing a bit of running 'research' this morning, ok I was wasting time reading about running on the internet because the wind chill is once again in the @#$%ing miserable level and I'm supposed to be starting a workout.  Anyway I came across a quote from Rob De Castella in an interview back in 1983 talking about how to that point in his running career he had only missed 10 total days of running due to injury.

Deek said, "You've got two levels- skeletal strength and physiological fitness.  If the latter surpasses the former it means you can push the body further than it is really able to sustain.  I think that's when you get injured." * This is something I have thought about through my long injury history and never been able to sum up nearly so concisely but it really drives home a simple point that I believe is largely missing from our current conversation about training.

  It is no secret I have had a long and extensive injury history.  I think that some of this can be simply attributed to my habit of always wanting to push harder and not listening to my body.  Still I think there is more to it than that.

  Separately I have long felt that my limiting factors in performance had become muscular more than aerobic.  This is part of why I felt I didn't have success in my short stint at altitude.  In fact I had the opposite. I think most americans, most first world runners, are undertrained aerobically and go to altitude where the stress on the aerobic system is inherently increased greatly and  they see a jump in performance as a result of this redistribution of effort.  Where as I went up there and put even more stress on the aerobic system and even less on the muscular system and saw a loss of fitness.  Now this isn't to say I or someone else like me couldn't find great success training at altitude just that it would take a well thought out plan to address this balance but that is for another blog.

   I think that most of your good training schedules have a good balance between muscular and aerobic development but I don't think that most coaches put enough specific thought and focus into creating this balance.  Most often I think the balance that is being thought about is aerobic and anaerobic work.  Further more I think too often we think of muscular and anaerobic work as the same thing.  I know when I started out I did.

  The problem with hard intervals lead to severe fatigue and under fatigue our form falls apart so instead of taxing our muscular system in a nice balanced way and teaching good strong muscular pathway our form falls apart and we build bad habits and imbalances.   Anaerobic workouts can be great muscular sessions but only for a very developed athlete who has spent years building great muscular strength so their form doesn't break down under stress.  For the rest of us the solution is to do work that is specifically targeting fast dynamic motion while maintaining relaxed control so that we are teaching good form and balanced muscular development.

  From the beginning of our running we should be doing daily work to build our muscular skeletal system to excel at the specific demands of running and running fast.  How?  Mostly with fast relaxed running.  This can be in the form of strides or short hills.  It can be fast relaxed tempo running.  This can be repeats at all sorts of distances AS LONG AS THE EFFORT IS CONTROLLED!  This is what is always missed.  Also you can do running specific drills, skipping, lunge walking and other dynamic running and core exercises to build a muscular skeletal system that can stay healthy and deliver on all the aerobic power you can build.

  I honestly believe that my biggest failure as an athlete was a failure to develop a strong dynamic muscular skeletal system from the beginning.  I believe if I had done more aerobic work sooner I could have been more successful at a younger age but that it would not have improved my overall development.  However if I had started out doing strides daily, controlling my effort in 99% of my workouts to maintain form and doing dynamic general strength work, like the type of stuff you see from  John Cook or Jay Johnson, I honestly believe I would never have had the injury problems I had in college nor do I think I would have developed my coordination problem.  I honestly believe my failure to do this work from the beginning of my running cost me a career as a at least high level national class marathoner.

  I do much more now to try and develop the muscular strength.  I do the yoga for general strength and when I'm not banged up I do strides daily or close to it.  I have also developed a lot of strength over the last couple decades so my workouts are now a means of building strength as well.  Still if there is one area that I need to do more for it is specific muscular strength and endurance.  So often in my training I am strong.  I can run miles on top of miles and feel fine I can run quickly, say 5:20 per mile or even faster and have it feel like walking but as soon as I need to get just a little bit more muscular sub 5:00 at time, sub 4:40 per mile most of the time, I struggle, sometimes to hold these paces for even a few hundred meters.  It may sound crazy but it is not uncommon for me to find myself in a place where I can run for an hour or more feeling relaxed at 5:20 per mile but I struggle to run even a kilometer at 4:40 mile pace.  In the stretches where I have been able to do all the muscular work I start to see huge improvements in my middle distance racing.  So often I find myself very fit but racing fairly slowly.  Where as if I was maintaining my muscular training better I could be running much much faster, if not quite national class certainly much closer.  Specifically I should often be running in the 23's for 8k instead of 24's and 29's for 10k instead of 30's. sub 14:40 for road 5k instead of sub 15:10.  Now you can sharpen up and run faster with anaerobic work but that isn't what I'm talking about in this instance.  I have run sub 30 for 10, sub 24 for 8k and sub 14:40 for a road 5k without doing much if any real anaerobic work.  I can run those times off good balanced aerobic and muscular training.  Too often I fail to do the muscular work to make running relaxed enough at those paces to hold them without good anaerobic fitness.  This slowed my overall development and means I have a lot of decent races in my history but few very good ones.

   I cannot encourage you enough to plan for muscular development as specifically as you do aerobic development.  These two things are the foundations of all running success.  You can always do race specific and anaerobic work later but if you don't build a great foundation of muscular strength and aerobic endurance all the race work in the world won't be worth a bucket of piss.






* P.S. a bit of an aside but the article the quote comes from is in the August of 1983 Runners World.  It is mind blowing to me that they would run an article like this complete with discussion of his racing career, a sample training week and intelligent conversation about his thoughts on his current training and where he would like to take it in the future.  I just can't imagine coming across the same type of article with one of the Geoff Mutia's in this August's Runners World. link to article http://www.juanjosemartinez.com.mx/files/deek_training_log.pdf

Tempo Tuesday; Moderate Progression Runs

  This week Tempo Tuesday is about moderate progression runs.  I have been using these more this cycle but historically I haven't done a ton of these.  I tend to like to hammer my progression runs but that said these sessions are a awesome way to build great relaxation at a quick pace and great aerobic strength.

  These are not a killer session, it is right in the name, moderate.  You might even do this session the day before or after a harder track session if you are a very quick recover and have a long history of heavy training.

  I think for most people however it is a great stand alone workout.  I see a lot of folks who go hard once or twice a week because they are trying to build their miles and they can't go more than that.  This is fine but why just do all regular pace runs?  If you do and run 10 times a week with 2 hard efforts that means 80% of your runs are the same. That simply doesn't bode well for a well balanced training cycle.  Instead mix in some moderate efforts that don't take much more out of you than a regular training run but do target systems a bit differently.  The two big things I would suggest are a session for speed, i.e. diagonals, 100's session or short hill reps and second a session for aerobic endurance.

  The moderate progression is a perfect run for aerobic endurance.  Basically this should be a run that is as long or slightly longer than your normal training run, should start at about the fast end of your normal training pace and should progress steadily over the run to about 20 to 30 seconds per mile faster than you started.  For me this means a 10 to 15 mile run starting at 5:50 to 6:00 per mile.  I generally average 6:00 to 6:20 per mile for a regular training run and finish with my last few miles in the 5:50 to 6:00 range.   In order to start my run at this pace I need to do a mile or two warm up and some drills but I have a lot of miles under my belt so you may not need that warm up.   Over the course of the run I work down to about 5:20 pace.  In a marathon phase I will often run the last mile at goal marathon pace which is a bit faster but this is pushing the envelope on keeping the session moderate and I wouldn't suggest doing it most of the time as you really don't want this session to get to hard and have them take away from more important sessions.

  What it does.  This will build your aerobic endurance and your muscular endurance.  The first few times you do this you may be pretty sore or heavy the day after and your stomach may be upset in the hours after the session but with time you will soon find that you feel fine the next day and your going to find yourself running along on this session feeling VERY easy and you will find your other endurance workouts improving greatly and when you fall apart in races and workouts you will find you can salvage better and stay much closer to pace.

  Where in your training to do it?  This is a session that can be fit in throughout your training cycles.  As a complimentary session it works great in the earliest training to start dipping your toes into faster running.  Then in the early base it is a great workout to supplement the heavier tempo work you are doing in the special and specific phase it is a great light session that can be used to maintain aerobic fitness while not taking too much out of you.

  Hope you enjoy it!

Fartlek Friday the 6/1

 The 6/1 fartlek is a moderate effort.  Really it can be a 5/1, 6/1, 7/1, 8/1 whatever.  The idea is that you run 1minute hard every mile or so.  In order to make things easier, i.e. you don't need to keep track of mile marks etc.. you simply do a hard minute on every 6th minute, or whatever whole number is nearest to your regular pace.

  So on a half hour or so run you would go hard starting at the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th, 30th minute marks.  In between you run at the fast end of your normal training pace.  This is a GREAT way to mix in faster running when you don't have a lot of time or motivation for regular workouts.  It is great for early in a season or when coming back from injury and your not quite ready for full workouts.  To be honest you can do this run every day if you want and just get a touch of speed all the time.

  So often we get in a rut of just running and not getting some faster running in.  This workout is a great  way of sneaking in a little speed when you aren't physically or emotionally up for a bigger effort.  I use this sometimes after a crazy day at work when I am whimping out on a scheduled workout but rather than just slogging along at normal pace I can do one of these and the effort isn't that much different from a regular run but at the end of my regular 20k run I have done 12minutes of fast running so between 2 and 3 miles of quality work.  Doing it once isn't a big deal but over time it can make a big difference.

  I also love this one when I am traveling because you don't need to know how long the loop your doing is or how far you are going, or even where you are going.  Just set the timer on your watch and start running.

  The last great thing about this session is that if you are having a good day you can start hammering the  rest minutes and it becomes a tempo with hammer intervals.  Often I set out doing this because I'm lacking motivation and before you know it I'm running 5:20 to 5:30 pace on the recovery stretches and a salvage day becomes a great day.

  So the next time you find yourself heading out for a run instead of the workout you should be doing try the 6/1 and you will at worst be a bit better off and at best save the day!

Threshold Run

  The threshold run is what is most commonly thought of when you talk about tempo runs.  The name refers to the idea that you are running very close to or right at your anaerobic threshold.  That is the point at which your body begins to produce more lactic acid than it can use as fuel and the PH of the blood begins to rise sharply.  It is a bit of a false hood in that the exact pace will change as you tire but essentially the idea is to run at this pace.

  There are a number of ways to determine this pace for yourself ranging from blood tests during activity and VO2max testing to calculators and charts based on workouts and race performances.  The best guideline I have found is that it is roughly the pace you would expect to RACE for a 1 hour race.  For me I use half marathon pace, All my halves have been in the 1:04 to 1:08 range.  For someone else this might be 10mile race pace or 10k.  The thing to remember is the pace varies a good bit with level of exhaustion as well as changes in weather or terrain so always trust feel over the watch.

  These runs should be run steady or with a slightly negative split, but if your last mile is more than 5 or 10 second faster than your first mile than you are doing a progression run and that is fine but it is a slightly different stimulus.  The threshold tempo is about the steady pressure on the cardiovascular system.  These runs can vary in distance greatly.  It largely depends on what kind of an effort you can get out of yourself in a non-racing situation.  I myself can almost never go more than half an hour like this.  In contrast a few years back Ritz ran a 10 mile tempo run at his half marathon pace a few weeks out from running 3rd at the World half marathon championships in 1:00:00.  So he was doing 45mins.  That is about the max you see and most people cannot produce an effort like that in a workout without a taper, race day adrenalin etc..

  The most important thing with these workouts is that you are better off going too easy than too hard.  If you push too hard and go into anaerobic running your body does not receive the message that the aerobic threshold failed.  The idea is to lock in at a steady effort just below the threshold and exhaust that system.  As to 'embarrass' it so your body will make growths there to address the problem.  If you are a bit too slow this will mean you run a bit longer in the workout to accomplish this but it will be accomplished.  If you are too fast than you simply won't see much improvement.

  Like all tempo runs I suggest you improve the workout by increase the volume before the pace.  I would suggest starting with about a 20minute effort and building up by 5 to 10 minutes each time until you are running 30 to 40 minutes.  Than return to the original distance and increase the pace by 5 seconds per mile or so.  You should find the effort is the same.

   These tempos are most specific to 10 mile to half marathon racing for most athletes but the anaerobic threshold is the single most important marker of fitness for all distances from 3k to the marathon.  In all those events your race specific fitness can be thought of as being built off of the anaerobic threshold.  These workouts should be done throughout the training cycle and they should be a main focus of the pre- specific phase, or early season period of your training.

  This workout builds the ability to run on the edge of disaster, pain, acid, oxygen debt while maintaining control.  Effective distance running boils down to the ability to run fast without falling into those things so it doesn't take much imagination to see how key a session like this can be to your reaching your full potential.

Strides

 I love strides!  Love them, love them, love them.  Is this clear. I am seriously the worlds biggest fan of strides.  There are a few reasons for this not the least of which is that strides are awesome and that they are more awesome if you lack much natural speed and therefore need to keep working the speed you have in order to run anything at a decent pace.

  For the uninitiated strides are simply short sprints of 10 to 20 seconds on flat ground.  You tend to accelerate up into them a bit slower than you would a max out sprint and to slow down more gradually.  Very often people do not get up to their top speed in strides.  I assume they have been around as long as running competitively has existed.  I imagine in the mid 19th century when kids first played Hare and Hounds some of those kids were doing short acceleration and sprints before the actually game started to get ready.  They are a ubiquitous part of almost all warm ups and have been a part of almost every major coaches program since before Paavo Nurmi started tearing up the track and trails.

  Why are they so common and so wide spread?  Two simple reasons. Simplicity and effectiveness.  They are so basic and yet they can be used in so many ways to have so many positive impacts on our training outcomes.

  You probably already do strides before your workouts and races.  You should continue to do this. They are an integral part of a good warm up.  Many of you probably do a few in the days before a major race, this too is good.  I would simply suggest that you need to do them even MORE often.

  In his seminal article "Anatomy of a Medal", where he discusses the training that brought Deena Kastor (Drossin) from a solid but not super start All American runner to an Olympic podium, Joe Vigil talks about how they did something for speed basically every single day for years. See the article here: http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_1/the-anatomy-of-a-medal.shtml  Strides were a big part of how they did that.  Recently after winning the Boston marathon Meb Keflezghi said in multiple interviews that one of the things he was doing now that he was older was making sure he did strides EVERY day as he couldn't do some of the speed workouts he used to without getting hurt or robbing himself of some of the longer workouts he needed for marathon success. Meb is coached by Bob Larson who is one of the finest distance coaches in American history.  He is the quintessential "nobody's fool"  If Bob has his athletes do something it is because it works.  Flat out.

  So when should you do strides.  I would suggest that if you are really trying to get the best out of yourself as a middle or long distance runner you should be doing strides in one form or an other every single day if you can.  Now we all have days when we are banged up or when the goal to get something done doesn't happen but that should be the goal.  It is also wise to point out at this point that if you currently do about 5 strides a week and you go out and do 5 to 10 every day next week you are going to be very very sore and if you keep that up another week you are likely going to be very hurt.  Use some common sense whenever adding something into your training program and build up sensibly.

  How to use strides.  First after your regular runs trying to mix in 2 to 10 strides is a great idea.  They may not all be great efforts but they really go a long way in preventing injury.  Improving and maintaining basic speed and building great muscular endurance and efficiency.  I am for 'at least 4' after every regular run.  Which means I do exactly 4 like 99% of the time.  Don't judge I'm very tired before I start the run, never mind after!

  Next up you can use strides as a muscular workout.  30x100m at 800m to mile pace with full recovery or near full recovery is an easy session that can help in a big way.  When I set my 1500m PB I had not done any intervals or hard repeats.  I had done some tempos and I had been consistently running 30x100m in 15 seconds each week and I got in a 1500 and was SHOCKED to run that time.  It was a season opener and I was far from in the best shape but here was a PR and a time that compared well with my mile best. Thing is though out the race I felt strong and mechanically in control. Why?  I had specifically trained the muscles through strides.

  Another famous session is diagonals which are very similar and another great way to build up the speed.  If you focus on a short event 800m to 3k or if you are a young runner making sure you are doing a session like one of the two above year round pretty much every week is going to be one of the best things you can ever do for your running.

  Strides two most important contributions to your training are first that they teach the single most important skill in effective distance racing.  Relaxed fast running.  If you aren't relaxed you won't be going to long and you will always get beat by anyone who is relaxed who has built a similar sized engine.  It is like if two people build car engines that have the same horsepower and one of them burns more gas than the other.  That one will lose in any sort of longer race because it will run out of fuel.  Second strides are a great way to sneak in a large volume of quick to very fast running over the course of a week and this builds muscular strength that helps you hold your form together and stay efficient in the later stages of races when you are getting fatigued.

  Strides have some other side benefits, increased stroke volume from your heart, better access to energy stored in the alatic system, improved form, to name a few but they two above are the ones that you will notice the most.  Best part is they are so simply you almost can't screw them up and as long as you do them often and in decent volume you will get all the benefits including the ones you aren't even targeting!

  So suck it up and do your strides.  Like brushing your teeth once they are part of the routine they are easy enough and man do they make life.. err running better!

Traditional Fartlek

 Around 1937 swedish coach Gosta Holmer, a retired decathlete who had won bronze at the 1912 Olympics in that event, invented a new type of workouts for his charges. Fartlek. Roughly translated it means speed play.  This simple yet profound type of training would become the mainstay of his most famous proteges, Gunder Hagg and Arne Andersson, who would shatter dozens of world records and bring the mile world record from the mid 4:06's down to 4:01.  Hagg would also become the first man ever to run under 14:00 for 5k producing a 13:58.2 in 1942.  All this with the insanity of World War 2 roaring around them.  Though 4:01and 13:58 are not nearly world class times today they are still, seventy years later, extremely exceptional times and when one considers they were achieved in the days before mondo tracks, before running shoes, heck before sneakers! It is really remarkable that two athletes could have reached the level they did.

 There are now dozens of different structures of fartlek that have become famous.  It is a type of training that has been part of nearly all the great coaches, from Lydiard and Bowermann to Canova and Salazar, recommended schedules.  I will do many posts on fartlek but for this one we will focus on it in its most pure and simple state.  The original speed play.

  Fartlek done in its most basic and pure form needs no timing, no measurement, no plan and no specific surface, though I would suggest the most beautiful you can find and some decent footing for fast running. You do not need a watch. Heck if you really want to get in touch with your forerunners and be a full purist you can go without shoes.  I often would do this on rainy days sneaking on a golf course for a barefoot fartlek on the grass.

 Effort? The name tells it all, speed play, it is a game!  You can play hard or play easy.  Go how you feel.  I have heard fartlek referred to as running animal style it could just as easily be called running like a child.  Lydiard and Canova both like it as a light workout to transition into harder more specific sessions but for others, Steve Monaghetti comes to mind, it was a serous part of their hardest training.  I suggest you use it in three different ways.

 First Very light. Need to get in some strides and loosen up after a hard effort or in the days prior to a major race. Just let it rip a few times on a light run on soft surfaces. Open up and fly along but when it starts to get hard simply let up and recover fully before moving fast again.  Your jogs between the efforts on these days should be light and slow.

Second moderate. Perhaps you want to mix in one more workout in a week but know if it is a real killer you won't be able to do your more important focus sessions for the week.  Perhaps you are early in a cycle of training or you are returning from a layoff. Fartlek is perfect.  You can vary the speeds and distances as well as the total time running.  Easily stopping long before you are fully exhausted.  Best of all you have no watch to tell you you aren't running fast enough or long enough.  Your breaks between the fast efforts on these days should be at the pace of a fast training run. Not super fast but not shuffling along either.

Finally Hard.  Go get it run short savage bursts.  Long killing drives.  Attack every uphill you see. Imagine yourself a cross country god or an ancient man hunting deer on foot.  Whatever inspires you and push each effort until your lungs sear and your legs quiver. Then settle back into a jog until you are back in control enough to attack again.  Go on like this until you can't go no more.  Much like the moderate your pace between fast efforts on these days should be rather quick about as fast as you go on your fastest regular training runs.

 How long? Until you FEEL you are finished.  In future blogs we'll get into all sorts of structured fartleks but for this the pure fartlek you should not be wearing a watch or checking your distance.  You are trying to communicate with your body. To tests its limits and to let it tell you how much is just right.  How fast is fast, how long is long enough.

How fast? I do have a bit more direction for you here. DO NOT do just one speed!  Mix it up. Your efforts should be all sorts of different distances and speeds. Vary from full out mad blitzes to just quick floating efforts, from short sprints to the next tree to long killing drives over significant distance. Really mix it up. Variety is the name of the game.  Okay fartlek is really the name of the game but you know what I mean!

The fartlek in its pure wild form is not for everyone but it can be an amazing workout.  You can never get the pace or effort wrong and you can develop a powerful connection with your body which is one thing you need to push it to great performances.

Why do Short Hills

Why do I do short hill repeats if I'm training for a marathon and not a mile?
I do short hill repeats for 2 reasons the first goal, and most obvious, is to gain physical strength. Since strength is in our sport is often interchangeable with speed I see why it seems strange for a marathoner to be doing this type of a workout especially with such frequency. I mean why try to get a faster top end speed when even to run a world record I only need to run 4:45 or 4:46 a mile. The first reason is that every race is a race of speed, meaning that no matter how long the race is the fastest person over the distance wins. But that alone doesn't justify hill repeats one to three times a week. The real reason is strength and speed over the short distance equal efficiency. By doing these hills and getting stronger and faster in the maxim. I teach my body to consume less glycogen, and less oxygen when moving at sub maximal speeds. The less of these "fuels" the body consumes at a given pace the longer I can hold that pace.
the 2nd reason I do short hills is that they drive my heart rate way up in an extremely short period of time, to within 10 beats of max or higher in 10 seconds or less and then because my heart rate hasn't been up that long and no acid needs to be flushed out of my system (it takes 15 seconds of an exercise to begin to produce any lactic acid) my heart rate basically plummets back down to a relatively rested level, 120 to 130 beats per minute, in a short time 20seconds to a minute. This exercise on the heart teaches the heart efficiency as well meaning it takes less energy to pump more blood.
Now if I was training for the mile I would still do short hill repeats for the same reasons I have listed above but I would probably try to go a little longer (say 13 to 15 seconds rather then my usual 8 to 12) and I would try to do it on a slightly less steep hill and with better footing. Why? Because a miler would want to improve there efficiency, muscular as well as heart but he/she would also want to work more specifically on there top end speed and running uphill but with your form closer to that which you use to run over flat ground is a spectacular way of doing that.

Finally the greatest advantage of short hills is that you can reap huge long term benefits without having to sacrifice much of anything. They are very easy on the body and mind. Sure you run all out but only for a few seconds so they really are not hard and because little or no acid is accumulated in the system they take little recovery at all. This is why if I had one thing I would recommend to all runners to add to there program right now short hills would be it. They improve your basic speed, improve your efficiency and strengthen your heart and if you do them once or twice a week your body won't be any more tired or worse for the wear. It’s a win win situation. I am convinced that these, progression runs and the use of circuit training are the biggest reasons the Kenyans are so far beyond us here in the US. That said I believe we are starting to look to their training and we are closing the gap rapidly. So add progression runs and short hills to your routine and join the charge for world class running in the US, or at least a new pr.

10k training Blog

I’m doing a bit of a 10k training block and someone suggested in a comment that I put up a post about training for the 5k and 10k so I thought now would be a good time to do that. To be honest because I spent my winter focused on getting ready for a marathon my schedule over the next couple of months is not an ideal example of 10k training but it can give you something to compare this idealized schedule and ideas I’ll put in here. You can see sort of both ends of a spectrum in the same type of program.

First you should start with a fundamental/base phase. Like if you were getting ready for any distance races this is focused on getting into great all around shape and getting ready to do the specific training that will sharpen and focus your fitness on its target distance (5k/10k). So it is pretty similar to what you would do for any distance but just with slightly different stresses. For example training for the 5 and 10k you are going to do more work to develop your muscular power and in turn your speed then you would getting ready for a marathon where you are much more worried about endurance both muscular and aerobic. The general focus of this phase is strength endurance basically referring to muscular strength and aerobic endurance. Now lastly a bit of disclaimer, I have been very focused on the marathon and I have only put together two small 10k seasons for myself, this one coming up off of a marathon phase with no race and certain limitations placed on it because I don’t want to do any workouts that bother the hamstring and one last spring that was much more focused on racing back into shape to get ready to train seriously for the trials after losing massive fitness to a 10 week layoff do to mono. So this is mostly theory and based on what I have scene others do. I have used aspects of this myself but never the full cycle and if I did I’m sure I would find things that worked differently then I expected and would make changes. At some point in the next couple of years I will have to do a full 10k season and I’ll have to redo this blog at that point. But it’s a start anyway.

Introductory phase; real quickly if you have taken more then 2 weeks off since your last season or just are not real fit for whatever reason you should do a intro phase to get fit enough to train. It should basically just be a build up of mileage with strides and some easy drills and bounding ect.. Just basically preparing your body to handle the stresses of the fundamental phase. Depending on your fitness level it could be anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks. Longer then that would become redundant and counter productive.

Fundamental phase; this should be 6 to 10 weeks long. Depending on the time available and how well you handle blocks of training for different periods of time. Dave Bedford, who set the world 10k record in the 70’s thrived off of a program of 12 hard weeks but wanted to make sure he won at the 72 olympics so he followed the same program for 16 weeks and ran awfully at the Olympics, he was simple flat. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Mileage is very much a personal thing, "the magic is in the man not the miles" as Bowerman said, but there are some guidelines if you can’t run 70 or 80 a week you probably shouldn’t be focused on the 5k/10k, probably the 3k/5k at the longest. Also running much over 120 a week serves no purpose unless you are training for a marathon or see one in your relatively near future and want to prepare your body for that training. The real focus of this program is the quality. Now very quickly far too often in this country people here quality and think instantly of anaerobic intervals. We need to stop this. I simply mean the workouts, the vast majority of which are aerobic quality or muscular development focused should be the focus of your program. Miles are nice but if too many miles are causing your workouts to suffer then they are counter productive, but more importantly if the pace of your easy runs is too fast and is causeing you to have to drop your mileage or affecting the quality of your hard days then you need to slow it down. Too many guys run 6 min pace and say oh its easy. But they are run down and underperforming in races particularly and workouts often. I was one of these guys in college and in slowed my progress, and that of many of my teammates. If you are running at 70% of your 10k pace or faster then you are not running easy enough period and often you should really be running more along the lines of 50 or 60% If that means you run with the freshman girls on your team then so be it. You will be amazed how much this will help your running. Plus no matter how slow you go you won’t be able to go as slow as most of the Kenyans go on there easy runs. 10 to 12 minute miles are quite normal.

Types of workouts

Aerobic Quality- these are your bread and butter of the fundamental phase and you should do one or two a week. They can be hard or medium. The goal is to improve your blood oxygen levels(there is a real term for that but I’m not thinking of it right now) improve the capillary beds in your muscle, both in size and scope but also in number. To increase the number of mitochondria (the energy producers) in your cells and the power and efficiency of those mitochondria.

Examples

hard

Progression runs of 30 mins to 1 hr

8 to 12k steady runs at 95% 10k pace

4k to 7k steady runs at 10k pace

Tempo intervals with short rest at 95% 10k pace 1k to 3k 10k to 12k total volume rest of 45 seconds to 3 minutes

Long runs of greater then 2 hours at 70to 75% 10k pace (traditional Sunday long run)

8k to 16k runs (5 to 10miles) at 90% 10k pace (long tempo)

15k to 30k runs at 80 to 85% 10k pace (very hard medium long run or very long tempo)

6k to 12k uphill running at 95% 10k effort (pace obviously slower)

Medium

4k to 6k at 95% 10k pace

3k/2 miles at 10k pace

10k to 20k runs at 80 to 85% 10k

20 to 30k runs at 70 to 75% 10k pace (traditional medium long run)

Muscular development- hard effort should be done at least once every other week but can be done as often as weekly. Easy efforts should be done close to every other day and certainly at least a couple of times a week. Goal is to build muscular skeletal strength to run fast in relaxed manner and efficiently in terms of fuel(oxygen mostly in this case) used at fast paces. Also to develop the ability to run very close to top speed for the last 200 to 400 meters of a hard race.

Examples

Hard

Circuits- start with an aerobic interval 800m to 1 mile at 10k pace then without stopping go into a series of sprints and exercises, best if done on a hill. For example 1k at 10k pace into 100m all out uphill sprint into 50m uphill bounding, into 50m uphill springing, into 100m uphill sprint into 10 jump squats. (there are tons of examples better then this online, just search through Canova schedules on lets run and you’ll find a bunch.

Hill bounding and Springing (Lydiard style) Mix these two exercises done for 600 to 800m with jog down rest for 1 hr to 90 minutes, ie 600m bounding into 600m springing jog down and repeat or 600m bounding jog down 600m springing jog down and repeat

Easy (can be done as a recovery run once you are used to performing them)

Short hill sprints 60 to 100m 8 to 14 seconds, alatic work with jog down full recovery (heart rate down to close to 120 for most people) this is great muscular exercise but also because it drives the heart rate up very fast and down very fast again it increases the hearts stroke volume which is very important and so these should be done at least once a week. You can do anywhere from 10 to 30 plus of these in a set, start low build up.

Butt kicks 8 to 14x30m

Continues warm up drills

High knees

Skipping

Bounding on the flat

Straight leg bounds

Short hill bounding and springing

Strides

Jump squats

Laying out a fundamental schedule

This is where your fitness level will dictate the specifics of your training the most. I love to work on a hard easy hard easy type cycle. To do that I may have to make my easy day very easy, in my present schedule its at 6 and 6 double and I take it very easy on both easy days. But you may not be able to go hard again after 1 easy day no matter how easy you make it. I know I couldn’t when I first started training like this. Now there are a few different ways to approach this you may just want to go hard easy easy hard or you could go hard easy medium, easy hard. Or you may find you can go hard easy hard but then need to go two easy days. One nice way is to have a hard week and a medium week. So maybe in week one you have two hard efforts and a medium effort then in week two you have three medium efforts. Something like that. Also you may find that some of the hard efforts are particularly hard for you and some are easier. Now first if that is so you want to get in some of those really hard ones because they obviously address a weakness in your fitness. That is not to say you should ignore completely the workouts you tend to do with more ease just that they should be less of a focus in your training and can be done much less. But also they are something you can squeeze into a medium week so you get two mediums and a hard but the hard isn’t that hard. I’m sure if that was totally clear but I hope it was.

Racing in the fundamental phase- Races are good workouts and as such are fine in this phase but with a couple of caveats. First you need to be prepared that you going to be tired and that backing off for a race is a bad idea so you must train though. (in a long 10 to 12 week phase you could back off for one race midway) as such you will most likely race poorly and often race very poorly. Think your in 30 min 10k shape you may well struggle to crack 31 or a runner targeting 36:00 may struggle to slip under 40:00. Second races are harder then workouts, they just are, so they take more time to recover from so in the interest of staying healthy and not getting your self into a pit of exhaustion where you don’t recover you need to give yourself extra time to recover after these efforts. Also because of this you simply don’t want to race a whole lot but a couple of races are not a bad idea at all.

The Specific phase

 Now is when you want to start to really focus your training on getting ready for the rigors of your event. So now you need to start doing your aneorbic intervals and your more race specific intervals. Also you want to do a number of what I call shift intervals or shift time trials. These are efforts of 1 to 6k where you run the first part pretty easy generally at about 90% 10k pace and then shift gears and run all out. You will be surprised how fast you can go in these often much faster then you are able to run in a single time trial or all out interval. The focus of these is to prepare your body for tactical races that may finish in a long drive to the finish and to practice running fast paces when you are tired. Also during this phase you should not completely abandon your aerobic quality and muscular development work. This things should just take a back seat to some of this more race specific work.

Specific work

800m to 2 mile intervals at 10k goal pace with short rest (over the course of phase you should shorten the rest or increase the distance of the reps not increase the pace)

Short progression runs 15 to 30 mins

10k runs with the first 6k to 8k at 85 to 90% 10k pace and the remaining 2 to 4k at 10k pace

5k to 6k runs with 2k to 5k at 90% 10k pace rest at 105% of 10k pace

Alternations, 6miles or 10k total distance with the "on" reps at 10k pace and the "recovery" part at marathon pace or a bit slower. Start with 400/1200 try to get to 1200fast/400 recovery

Alternations of 2miles to 5k with "on" at 5k pace (5%faster than 10k pace) and recovery at 5% slower than 10k pace about half marathon pace.  The idea is to try and average 10k pace for 2 to 3 miles.

Anaerobic work

600m to 2k intervals at 105% 10k pace with short rest (same as 10k short rest not increase pace)

4 to 6k time trials at 10k pace

2k to 2 mile time trials at 105% 10k pace

Traditional all out hill repeats 200m to 1k run all out with jog down rest

12x400m at 5k pace with 100 jog rest

Combination aerobic anaerobic work

Aussie Quarters

Moneghetti Fartlek

Shift intervals/time trials 3x2k 1k 95% 10k 1k all out, 2x3k 1500/1500 split, long rest on these 5 mins or so, time trials of 4k to 4 miles again split down the middle same paces

10 to 14 miles at 70% 10k pace into 4k to 6k at 90% 10k into sets of short intervals 300m to 500m at 105% of 10k pace w/ short rest ie a minute between intervals 3 mins between sets, only do 2 to 4 reps in each set only do 2 or 3 sets. For example 3x3x400m

Muscular and aerobic work options stay about the same but avoid the short aerobic options instead use some of the combo work above and the circuits change slightly instead of starting with an aerobic interval you should start with an all out what I call high school style interval, super anaerobic. Which is to say you go out too hard and get yourself in as much anaerobic pain as you can as quickly as you can. So you do an interval of 800m to 1k and just hammer out sub 30 for the first 200 and go as hard as you can. Sure you will run slower then you could have if you ran smart and you’ll be more tired too but that’s the point. You want to start the exercises with your body in an absolute state of crises. Just like the last 400m of a hard race. These Kenyans and Ethiopians you see dropping 50 to 53 second last laps on the track in Europe aren’t 45 second 400m men they are just able to run within a fraction of there top speed for 400m when their body is very near collapse. You want to be able to do the same.

Laying out your specific phase

 You are more worried during this time with the specific out put of your workouts versus really only worrying about the effort during the fundamental phase so recovery is even more important. So drop your miles a bit, say 5 or 10  per week, and put in an extra easy day here or there and go a bit easier even on your easy days.

You want to do one or two anaerobic or combo workouts a week and at least one circuit, one aerobic workout in each two week cycle. I really think one effort/run should be at least 15 miles in length, but there are some very successful runners who don’t do this so its not a absolute.

You should also race at least a couple of times, under distance is best. I wouldn’t want you racing every week but once for every 3 weeks or so is good. Again races are harder then workouts and you need to respect that and recover more from them.

You still want to be doing short hill repeats and the other easy muscular workout but cut the volume back to where you started the fundamental phase at. At this point it is just maintenance work.

As you get into your goal racing season so you need to back off and focus simply on racing mileage should be cut back to 50 to 60% you can last about 4 to 6 weeks without getting back to a little work and without loosing fitness, you should race every week you should do strides a couple of times a week and one or two real easy workouts like 6 laps of the track of sprint float sprint, or some light intervals at race pace or a hard mile or two mile time trial ect… I purposely don’t go into a ton of detail of how to do this part because it is so personal and so much based on the specifics of your racing season. Also there are so many example available out there.