If anyone wants to join next week's sessions, the schedule of my 3 key workouts is below:
Wednesday: Uphill Sprints (Ticknock carpark, 5pm-7pm). I'll be doing 8x30sec steep uphill sprints with 1:30 recovery walk downhill
Friday: Structured fartlek (Marlay Park 5:30-7pm). 8x30sec sprints with 1:30 recovery. Warmup will consist of 10min base run, dynamic stretching. Cooldown will be a 20min base run.
Sunday: Marathon-pace run (Marlay Park, around Noon). 36min marathon-pace run. 10min base run warm-up and 5min cooldown. I'll be running at 4:46min/km pace and will cover about 10k in the 51min including warmup and cooldown.
This is the "peak" week of my first 4-week cycle of Base Training (volume approx. 51km total).
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2 comments:
It's clear to an outside viewer why you keep picking up injuries, your training is backwards. 30 second hill reps in October with 90second recovery... what on earth is that about?
Fartlek traing without building a base first, again a backwards way to do things.
Train for distance, then for speed.
I'm afraid this old dictum is a little simplified in light of the most recent findings on science.
But let me first clear up the injury-theory by the anonymous poster. Both my injuries have been established by my physiotherapist to be trauma-injuries: that means both were caused after an area of my leg (heelbone and kneecap respectively) suffered a blunt shock. While these injuries do occur as overuse injuries, they did not occur for that reason in my. This is supported by the observation that my injuries occured during periods of relatively low running volume, and not during periods of much higher volumes.
On the other paradigm, "first distance, then speed". This is one of Noakes' "Laws of Running" and as a stand-alone observation it is true.
There is no contradiction between this law and the new methodology I employ. My methodology is based on the latest scientific research and the proposed training week of Matt Fitzgerald, a prominent coach in the field of running worldwide.
This does seem "backwards" to people who work within the old paradigm, and Fitzgerald states as much in his book "Brain Training for Runners". However, I'll explain what we now know about how the human body "learns to run" and how these session tie into that:
1. There is a Central Governor in the brain that controls how many motor units can be safely recruited to create speed without putting the heart at risk. This is the main constraint for running speed and the primary cause of fatigue
2. To push back this "wall", you still need to do the base training that has always been done (long slow runs), however, you also need to teach the brain to recruit greater number of motor units in order to "convince it" that its safe. The base training itself helps with this as it pushes back other physiological constraints that would put the heart at risk, but this is not enough in itself.
3. The fartleks employed in base training serve to simply train motor unit recruitment. It has no other function than that, and due to long recoveries, injury risk is minimal. Also these are not performed at max effort (like some of the sessions in the Intensity phase would be), but at a "relaxed sprinting speed".
4. The hill rep session with 30 sec up and 90 sec down is a creation of Sleamaker's SERIOUS programme. In the base phase, the secondary focus is on building muscle strength and resilience. This is the purpose of the short hill reps. Again, there is no cardiovascular purpose behind this session, it serves only to train the brain to recruit many motor units going up a steep incline fast and to build muscle mass (the session can be compared to a light plyometric session, something advocated by my physiotherapist John Murphy even in the Base phase).
I'm sorry to sound blunt, but I find the need to put down spurious correlations made about any connection between my injuries and training methodologies based on faulty conjecture (and it should be mentioned that I suffered my plantar while employing the old training paradigm, I do not draw any correlation between these two facts, as any statistician knows, correlation is not equal to causation).
As for the training methodology, I welcome a healthy debate, but in order to evaluate the merits of the Brain Training methodology and the SERIOUS programmes components, I recommend having a full read of the books first. Its worth noting that both are heavily endorsed by Tim Noakes, a significant authority in this field.
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