Run Faster

I just finished week 11 of my 24 week training plan for the New York Marathon. So far, I’m feeling pretty good about where I am in my training - I’m able to hit the paces I want to hit in the majority of my runs, and I’ve completed all my long runs reasonably easily, without feeling excessively tired afterward.

The plan I’m using - from Matt Fitzgerald’s book, Brain Training for Runners, has my taking a ‘recovery week’ every fourth week. Since next week is week 12 for me, it’ll be a recovery week.

Under this plan, recovery weeks aren’t rest weeks per se. They just involve a reduction in mileage while still doing interval work or other hard runs. On the schedule for me will be one 4.5 mile run at base pace, one shorter interval workout (the plan recommends 6 X 400, but I’ll do whatever workout the group is doing at my track workout on Wednesday), 1 longer interval workout (1 mile warmup, 3 x 1 mile @ 10K pace, 1 mile cooldown), and a 5K tune-up race or time trial + a 1 mile warmup and a 1 mile cooldown.

Why do a recovery week during your training? According to Pete Pfitzinger, a well-known Olympic marathoner, exercise physiologist, and coach:

Almost invariably, when runners break down in training they have violated the recommended training pattern of several weeks hard followed by a recovery week. After several hard weeks without proper recovery, some weak link breaks down and the runner misses one or more weeks of training with an injury or illness. This occurs even when you follow the hard-easy principle within each week because while an easy day or two is enough time to get your energy level back up for more hard training, it is not enough for the muscle tissue repair and adaptations required to improve to the next level.

(From the article Finding Your Optimal Work/Recovery Ratio)

Seems like some pretty good reasoning to me, and a nice, easy way for me to improve my running. And the bonus is that it’ll give me a little extra time during the week to pursue my other interests - or more likely, just get my life a little more organized.

So do you build recovery weeks into your training schedule? Why or why not?

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For those of you that aren’t already overwhelmed by all the social networking sites out there on the Internet, you might be interested in a new one that’s specifically geared toward runners, cyclists and triathletes. It’s called The Daily Mile. Although I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks so far, I’m enjoying the features and the interactions with other runners on the site.

The site allows you to post notes about what you’ve got going on as well as information about the workouts you’ve been doing. The workout posting is fairly basic compared with other true running log type sites: there are fields for the sport, the distance, the time, and comments, but little else. Although I’d like to see this expanded a bit, what’s nice about it is that your workouts are published as kind of a lifestream or mini-blog that other people can see and comment on. You can also see what your ‘friends’ have been up to and comment on their workouts and posts.

The site also has ‘Groups’ that you can join or start if you want to discuss a specific topic with others. For example, I’ve joined the Bicycling Commuting group and the Hundred Pushups group (for people who are doing the Hundred Pushups challenge, which I talked about in this post). The groups function works basically like mini-forums where people can post information or questions about anything pertinent that topic. You can also publish photos to the groups you join.

There are a couple of other interesting features that I haven’t checked out too much yet, but expect to in the coming weeks: an ‘Answers’ area where you can post a question for the community to respond to, a ‘Forums’ area (which seems to have a lot of overlap with the Groups functionality, but maybe I’m missing something), and an ‘Events’ area where you can search for a race to enter or view and write comments about various events. The Events feature is particularly intriguing to me, because although there are certainly a lot of sites out there that allow you to search for events, not to many of them have reviews of the events by ordinary folks that have done the race.

If you’re interested in exploring The Daily Mile, I’ve got several invites to give away. If you leave a comment on this post saying you want one, I’ll be happy to send one out to you - the first 22 people to comment will get my remaining invites.

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