Running Around 3-6-06 (Week #9)

We're now in our 4th week of work on running economy and strength. Hopefully by now, you're feeling a little more comfortable with the fast stuff. This week we go back to the hills.

I gave a detailed description of the hill route and the warmup route two weeks ago. See the 2/19 posting on the website (http://trackworkouts.blogspot.com/) if you need a refresher. If you want a longer warmup, you can run the greenway out to Sequoyah Hills instead. That's about 2.8 miles. See the route here: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=50927

I'll be doing 6 or 7 on the roads, so I'll either run with the recovering Whitestone runners or out to Sequoyah with the hill runners.

Now for the workouts ... Week #9 in the training cycle and 12 weeks to Expo:

If you ran Whitestone, you might want to put this workout off until Thursday.

1a. 6-10 x hills @R intensity.
1b. or 8-12 x400m @R pace with equal distance rest if you don't want to run hills.
For both, volume should be about 5% of your weekly mileage. Count only the hard running, not the rest. So, 30 miles per week would run 6 hills or 6 x400m on the track.

2. Striders TWO times this week following an easy run. 6x100.

3. Optional second workout: 40 minutes continuous run @T pace + 15 sec per mile. So, if your T pace is 7:00, run this workout at 7:15 pace.

Get your paces here ... http://www.panix.com/%7Eelflord/vdot.html

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Marathoners ... 20 days to go before the Knoxville Marathon.

Let the taper begin!

Tapering is about 2 things: reduced mileage and added quality. Simply reducing your mileage will likely leave you sluggish instead of sharp. To sharpen, you have add some quality to replace the reduced mileage. Not counting striders, you should run some MP or faster 3 times per week. Simply add 1 or 2 miles @MP during 2 of your regular runs.

It's hard for me to give general advice on tapering since it is more art than science. You have to experiment to see what works best for you. Plus, your taper depends a lot on what you've done in training and how it has gone. Here are some guidelines to get you started. This is what I've done in my last 2 marathons. If you have specific questions, let me know.

Mileage: If you've put in the miles during training, I believe in doing an aggressive taper. Drop your mileage 20% each week. So, you might do something like 55 (last week), 45 (this week), 30(next week), 15-20 + marathon. Another example might be 55, 44, 33, 22 + marathon. This probably won't work for you if you've been running low mileage.

Long run: If you've been running 60 or less per week, keep your longest run/workout to 13 miles or less this week. If you didn't run Whitestone, you may be able to get away with 15, but listen to your body and be prepared to cut it short if you need to. Next week's long run should be 10.

Workouts:
1a. (Raced Whitestone) Road run on Tuesday. No hard running until Thursday. Thursday or later, you can do 2 miles @MP + 400m jog + 2x1600 @T with 2 min rest.
1b. (No Whitestone) 3x3200 @T pace with 2 min rest.
2. Add some MP miles during 2 of your runs.
3. Striders. Following two runs this week. 6x100.

Get your paces here ... http://www.panix.com/%7Eelflord/vdot.html