Okay, first things first, this was never intended to be a two part blog. You can probably tell that from the fact that I published a completely unrelated blog in between the two parts, and due to the fact that the first part wasn’t titled ‘Learning From The Past’ but rather Running Scared. However, today is the final day of October, and at the end of each month, I like to look at my Garmin statistics and take stock of how the month has gone. October pleasingly has gone very well. There have been signs of improvement in terms of my pace and I’ve also enjoyed running a lot more than I have at other stages this year. It was also a good month in terms of mileage, having covered 141km, making it my 4th best month of 2019 so far. Also, if you exclude the April to July period when I was injured in 2018, October was also the first month in which my mileage in 2019 exceeded my mileage in 2018, and by more than 20km too.
However, when comparing October 2019 to previous Octobers, I discovered that October 2017 was actually the month when I covered my record monthly distance of 193.9km. Looking at the stats for that month was very interesting and highlighted a few important lessons which I’ll be looking to apply to any extended training periods next year, by first a little context would be useful. 2017 was a year when I was essentially injury-free all year, and my only illness of note struck me down at Christmas. I started the year in shape to challenge any of my P.B.’s and just missed my Marathon P.B. at the Greater Manchester Marathon in April. However, I was pretty lax over the Summer, and whilst I was running regularly, many of those runs lacked focus. I also ate and drank rather too much across the Summer, putting on several pounds, and although I never had any intentions of chasing a time at the Delamere Half Marathon in September, my time of 1:45 highlighted the fact that my fitness had dropped off considerably since the Spring.
With the Tatton Park Half Marathon looming in November, I decided to make as much of October as I could in the hope to getting back to the type of shape to push for a fast time (I managed 1:30:40, which to date is my second fastest Half Marathon time, albeit a fair way off my P.B. of 1:25:40). Recording a record monthly mileage was never a target – had it been, I’d imagine I would have tried to squeeze in an extra 6.1km to hit 200km for the month, rather than falling tantilisingly short of that landmark. Mileage was important as I knew I had to build endurance and would also help me to lose weight, but I also wanted to work on my speed too, so quite a few of my runs were short and sharp rather than long and steady.
I feel like this context is important, because if you are simply looking to cover as many miles as possible over a given period, there are better ways to achieve that goal than the training programme I used. However, if your goals are focused more on performance than mileage, hopefully the lessons below.
1. It doesn’t have to be everyday
I’ve never been a fan of the concept of run streaks. From a performance perspective, there is a lot to be said for the occasional rest day, and I also think that a healthy lifestyle includes balance and variety, with time for different activities. I actually only ran on 15 of the 31 days of October, never ran on three consecutive days and only ran on consecutive days three times during the month. I had two consecutive days off in the middle of the month and three consecutive days off towards the end of the month. Running does need to become a regular activity if you want to see real progress, but quality over quantity is still an approach worth following.
2. Avoid peaks and troughs
With plenty of rest days fitted in within my month, you might expect that when I did run, I covered some very long distances. However, I surprised myself when I learnt that my longest run during October 2017 was actually 22.5km. My average distance across the days when I ran was 12.9km, meaning that a lot of my runs were across broadly similar distances (albeit, as I’ll cover in point 3, not necessarily run in the same way). If you are building up to a longer distance, you do need to be putting in those longer runs. However, if you feel comfortable over the distance you are preparing for, as I was over the Half Marathon distance at the time, you can adopt a much flatter schedule. The advantage of this is that although I gave myself plenty of rest days, I generally felt like I could run the next day if I chose to. That can be seen with my longest run, which was backed up with a total of 14.5km the following day. By not going too deep on any single run, I was able to go fairly deep on every run, allowing me to accumulate a record mileage by the end of the month.
3. Every little helps
One of the reasons why my average daily distance was so high was the fact that my short runs actually ended up being long runs. Let me explain that. Each Wednesday I was attending the Run Knutsford interval sessions, and the meeting point for those runs was 3km from my house. I therefore used the run over as an easy-paced warm up. We would then run to the place where we were doing the intervals that night, was normally at least 1km away (or, if not, I was forced to run a longer route to get there so that all of the runners arrived at roughly the same time) and at times could be up to 3km. So, I’d covered 4-6km before the intervals actually started, albeit all at an easy pace to save my energy for the intervals. During the intervals, distance became a secondary consideration behind pace and intensity, but invariably we would end up covering 3-5km across the various efforts. Once the intervals were complete, I would jog home slowly as my warm down. The distance would vary depending on the location of the intervals but could again be as much as 3km. This meant that almost every interval session actually involved more than 10km of running for me, though it never felt like a 10km+ run because of the varying intensities and the fact that the run was broken up into smaller chunks. Therefore don’t overlook those little runs to and from a particular section or your warm ups and warm downs, because whilst they might not seem like much at the time, over time they can build into something very significant.