The January 2016 Running Challenge

snha wrote: »

I was totally inspired by @Stoshew71 's post and blogs: http://therunningstan.blogspot.com/2016/01/reverse-taper-base-building.html and http://therunningstan.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-new-year-of-training.html also the videos he posted! Thanks @Stoshew71

I wanted so bad to work on base building. Am not sure Stan will support my choice today because of the rush (too long a run for too long a time and without proper preparation?) but I decided to run far at a slow pace. I did and it's a PR for longest run: 10.2 miles at 11:45 pace.

Congratulations. If you hurt as a result, then rest. If not then you have a new standard to go by. Your body should tell you if you made a mistake or not. Also, make sure that your longest runs aren't ill-balanced with comparison to your overall weekly mileage. Any single run that represents more than 35% of your weekly mileage requires you to increase the miles in your other runs or add more weekly runs.

rune1990 wrote: »

I do have a question about training. At what point can I run everyday? I'm 44, and on week 4 of zombies 5k and run every other day. I can run for about 5-8 min(OMG I RAN FOR 8 MIN!). I was thinking about just adding in c25k starting at the beginning of training on one off day.

This is best answered by understanding the basis of training and understanding the basic principles to training.

1) You don't get better by exercise stress. You get better by the recovery or rest after that stress.
This means you have to understand the balance between work and rest. You work out hard enough to induce a training stress. This training stress actually causes temporarily damage that requires healing. During the recovery phase, your body heals in a way that the body actually get's stronger. If you do more training than resting, you don't give your body time to heal and get stronger. Instead, you slowly make the damage worse and worse until you suffer from a major over use injury.

2) When you repeat the same training stress, it no longer becomes a stress.
Eventually your body adapts to the training you are doing and the body becomes stronger to the point that running the same way no longer causes this damage. Therefore rest is no longer needed. But no more improvements will be made either. If you want to keep improving, then you have to make the training stress stronger. You can run a little more intense, you can run a little further at the same intensity, or you can run more often with fewer rest period. How to make the workout harder is a little more advanced question to answer.


To put it in more prospective, let me describe a little more of my story. When I first started this running stuff in October 2013 (mind you that I was an youth athlete growing up and kept kind of active in my adult years) I started by running on the treadmill for 3 miles which took me about a half hour. I did this for 3 or 4 days a week with some other cross training (non running) on most of my off days. I did this for a while. I then increased my miles from 3 miles to 3.5, then 4 miles and eventually 4.5 miles on the treadmill 3x a week and a longer 6 mile run Saturday mornings out on the greenway. My legs were very sore and I knew that I needed my rest days. Eventually, I knew I needed to run more outside during the week and I couldn't add the miles on treadmill alone (mental thing). So I stopped going on the treadmill and ran more outside and was able to keep increasing my mileage in the 4 days that I did run.

I soon went from ~30 miles a week to about 40 and wanted to go even further. Eventually I added in what are called recovery run days. So not every day was a hard run for me. Some days I was running 8-9 min miles and eventually built up to where I would run 8-10 miles during the week day and 15+ miles on my Saturdays. On my recovery days however, I was running much slower 12 min miles and limited it to 6 miles with no hills.

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So I hope you can tell from my explanation that I first saturated my training time when I did run through a process where I slowly made my training stress harder and harder. This allowed me to also make use of my rest time. When my training got more advanced, I was making use of different types of training stresses and recovery methods that I was able to take advantage of once my body adapted to a certain level.

My suggestion to you is to continue plan where you are training every other day. If the days you are running are no longer creating a stress, then you have to consider harder training for those days. But it takes a lot of consistent dedicated training over a long time. Patience. I know you may be bored on your rest days, but those rest days for you are still important. I would suggest looking into cross training on your off days at this point.