Thursday, October 7, 2010

let's go in order (part 2)

I want to briefly comment on a comment left from Rick "you are going well on low mileage - high intensity training"...
in the past 3 months in average I run around 70k/week with very little speedwork/interval . I mainly run a good aerobic pace with some progression run and strides.

Now this raise 2 interesting (in my opinion) topics of discussion for a runner:

1) which are the effects of training in very hot weather.
I never found any serious article on the matter. The only research done indicated that training in hot weather increase the mass of blood because of the additional water needed, therefore it worked like a blood self-transfusion (hehe...without Clenbuterol...).
What I saw in these years is that 70k in tropical conditions could be much more demanding than 100-120k in ideal conditions: the HR during the workouts is always more elevated and therefore the "exertion" calculated with HR x duration reaches much higher values than a comparable workouts in ideal climate.
It is not uncommon to suffer from huge thermal HR drift during the workout, so after 40' the HR might climb to marathon effort even if you are just jogging.
So the issue is if this state of higher HR even at slow pace is really a more demanding workout or just the need of the body to dissipate the heat, without benefits at cellular level (eg: mytocondrial activity, etc).
Obviously I do not have a scientific answer, but from experience I would say that there is a factor of x1.5 o more on the mileage done in tropical weather versus temperate climate...
So even a meager 70k/wk would represent the same training effect of 100k+ in cool weather...

I do not know if any reader from HK or Singapore has view on the subject...
(by the way in the past 2 days in HK the weather was extraordinary cool/dry for the season and I was running 15-20"/k faster at any given HR than usual...)

2) the usual topic of "the best way to train".
I sometimes receive questions from friends on how they should train to improve and if there is any special workout, etc...
Well... also this training cycle of mine convinces me even more in the resolution that a runner can be 90% ready for racing at any given distance with a very basic training:
- consistant runs of 45'-50' every single day of the week
- some strides here and there
- some progression 2-3 times a week

Basically speaking, running 10k/day at aerobic pace for 7 days for 3 months in a row is already good enough to achieve 90% of your potential in any given race distance...the key is consistency and overall volume.
the remaining 10% involves giving a specialized cut to the main workouts to peak for the chosen race and distance...

2 comments:

RICK'S RUNNING said...

Thanks for putting me right about your training.
Do you think that a lot of runners overtrain and better results are obtained by never digging too deep and staying slightly undertrained?

by7 said...

Rick,

sometimes I feel that many "committed amateur" runners try to copy workouts of Pro runners but without putting it in a context...
so they pushed their body too hard for what they can really recover and for what is really productive.
In other terms, the marginal gain achieved by running huge mileage and huge workout one after the other very easily go lost in the lack of capacity of the body to take that much, together with other stress like work, family, etc...

So it seems that to get in good shape there are either ways for a amateur runner:
- or just run "easy with progression" every day at similar distance (let's say run 12k every day with progression, stride... but nothing tought), so that every day you can still recover
OR
- take the 2 big workouts way... only 2 big workouts every week (in distance and intensity) and then simply jog around the other days...

probably anything in between does not really give us the way to recover...

Lastly, If you read the blog of Andrew Lemoncello (life of a lemon), he is very detailed about his life and recovery, etc...
after each run, a good nap..then massage, etc.. and he runs mostly on soft surfaces
I mean... how can someone with my life style just think about performing half of his workouts ??