Tip

BETTER BALANCE IN YOUR MILEAGE PORTFOLIO

From Coach Benson's Wise Counsel...

For 5 days straight an investor works hard trying to figure out how to unload his toxic assets during a period of stock market uncertainty.  Then he takes Saturday and Sunday off to rest and recharge his creative batteries. Being a runner, he goes for his long run on Saturday.  However, it was probably much slower than it should have been due to the accumulated emotional, mental and physical fatigue of 5 straight hard days at work.  Now he really needs an easy day.  So, on Sunday he rests up by going to church and praying for a government bailout.  

If, by Friday noon he had just said, “The heck with it, I’m toast” and taken the afternoon off from work, it might have been a perfect example of how to apply the Hard/Easy Principle to both his life and his running.  He would have reduced his stress load and been better rested for his Saturday long run.  

For high school XC runners, with the high emotional and mental stresses of being student and athletes, the above short example of the hard/easy pattern must be applied to the rest of the week as well.  As serious runners, you hammer a workout one day and then recover the next day. You take it easy on Friday and then race at an ALL-OUT, 100% effort on Saturday.  Then, you  go to church on Sunday praying for fresh legs by Monday.  During the peaking season, you may even ask The Great Coach in the Sky for two straight recovery days as the best application of The Stress/Adaptation Law.

Whatever your pattern of daily workouts, over the course of a week you must offset your hard, high intensity work with easy, low intensity mileage.  Anaerobic effort requires aerobic recovery.  Like realtors who know that the 3 secrets to selling property are location, location, and location, smart runners know that success requires balance, balance and balance.  

Finding that mileage balance requires two things: first, what  percentage of that all-out, 100% racing effort separates  hard anaerobic and easy aerobic workouts,  and second, what is the ratio between them. 

The answer to that first question is what we call your “anaerobic threshold” (AT).  It is important that you appreciate that your AT can be somewhat fluid depending on your level of fitness.  After a summer of high aerobic mileage, your AT typically begins working upward from the mid 70’s% at the start of the racing season.  However, with the introduction of higher intensity workouts and the frequent races, you should have improved your AT to around 85%.  By the peaking season, it might be closer to 90% by the last race. 

At this point let’s dodge the need to work with percentages and just go with the wisdom of perceived effort in order to define what your AT feels like.  You will be at your AT when you can’t suck in enough air fast enough to avoid going into oxygen debt.  Crossing over that respiratory threshold (if you will permit me some literary license as I over-simplify the bio-chemistry) causes that tightening- up feeling as you accumulate lactic acid in your muscles.  You don’t want to waste a single breath by trying to utter even a very short sentence.  Once over that line, you must slow down just a bit in order to re-pay that O2 debt if you want to keep going.  As you manage that feat, along comes the Fabled Second Wind and you can continue to finesse your way to the finish line.  This usually occurs at a pace that you feel is uncomfortable, but sustainable for a couple of miles. 

Now, all you need is a little math to find how much of your weekly mileage should be hard, high intensity anaerobic vs easy, low intensity aerobic.  The answer for 5k training, thanks to research by Dr. Paul Gastin that updated earlier work by Jess Jarver, is 16%  anaerobic mileage  to 84% aerobic mileage. So let’s look at a typical week of a serious upper classman runner to see how this applies. 

Let’s say that as she enters this peaking part of her season, she is tapering her mileage from 45 per week that she has been averaging since  the meets started.  Up til now, when rounding off the above ratio, she should have included 7 miles, roughly two workouts worth of hard, interval type and/or hill training, above her AT.  The other 38 miles should have been below her AT.  Each week she plans to cut back her mileage as she sharpens for the championships til she is down to 25 for the last race.  This means, if she wants to avoid over-training, that her hard, high intensity workouts should be limited to just 4 miles worth of speed work.   She can do that by cutting down the volume of the repeats or the number of hard days.  The rest of the week’s total should be easy jogging. 

My guess, as a wise old veteran coach with 56 years experience, is that we are probably more prone to over-doing it than under-doing it.  Like Goldilocks’ porridge, if too much of your training is too hot, you’ll get burned(out) by the end of the season.  Tapering is the secret to peaking, especially by cutting back on the hard stuff.  So, to paraphrase NIKE, “Just do the math."