Leading into Boston this year, I’ve increased my weekly mileage once again.
The plot above is weekly mileage, with the X-axis indicating the week number of training. We are currently in week 13, where I’ll hit 100 miles again. I’ll then start my taper. Previous to this training cycle, the most miles I had ever run in a week was 90, and the most weekly miles I had ever averaged was probably in the low 80s.
You’ll notice a few things looking at this plot. First, there are substantial dips in weekly mileage every 3/4 weeks. These are planned cutback weeks where I run substantially less in an effort to recover from cycles of increasing mileage. Second, at week 8-9 there are two dips. This was an injury that I was working through.
Now to my point. During my healthy, non-cutback weeks, I’ve succeeded at running more miles per week than I ever have before. The way that I’ve done this is running a lot of easy miles. I had to be told repeatedly by the coach of my running club that I needed to focus on making the majority of my runs lower intensity, “easy runs” if I wanted to succeed in dramatically increasing mileage up into the 100s and beyond. I didn’t listen at first. I tried to continue my approach of challenging myself on every workout, and just doing more of that. I got hurt several times as a result. Bad IT band injury. Terrible achilles tendinitis. I also would frequently fail to hit goal times during track/tempo work.
I’m now more methodical in my weekly training. I try to be as rigorous about challenging myself to run easy on days when I’m supposed to run easy as I would about challenging myself to hit times during a hard workout. I find that this approach has had noticeable benefits. On the days when I run hard (Tuesday track workouts, Thursday tempo workouts, and sometimes tempo sections of weekend long runs), I find that I have better performances and I’m more consistently able to hit goal times because I have fresher legs. I also don’t feel as beat up on the rest of my runs, and I have managed to avoid major injury during my last two training cycles.
I’m now a big believer in limiting hard workouts to just a few per week, and surviving in between those workouts by running easier.
