Discussion: no speedwork? its started, ...

no speedwork? its started, you know.

i do really like the social part of BRRTNSW, but the ability to run a fast 5k isn't going to help me much in 24hr races. so, probably not.

disclaimer - i dont know what i m talkin about - but at the end of the race, you have this last 5k of gravel road to run in to the finish, neck and neck w bushnali and trekkygoo - there is a full moon - and one of the teams has been doing speedwork - who wins?

My fastest 100-mile run came shortly after my fastest post-40-year-old 5K. Fitness is fitness; it helps at any distance. That said, when you're trying to train 15-20 hours a week (as you should for endurance stuff) and work a regular job, it's very difficult to schedule in fixed workouts. I do quality sessions, but I do them alone.

i agree that fitness is a good thing. i think the last 5k on gravel scenario could be applied to just about any type of workout, honestly at that point in a 24(+?) hr race, maybe a bunch of long run training would give your body the durability it needs to hammer out a win. but i'm most concerned about increasing aerobic efficiency (hence all the the slow EZ stuff in my log). i feel that my strength/lifting work, plus racing, gives me plenty anaerobic load.

when i was being coached by Sonja she sent me an article w this quote in it. the article has since been stored behind a paywall but i was lucky i saved it then.

"In an endurance workout lactate content must not rise too high ... if it does then lactate tolerance is trained instead of endurance capacity ... Intensive workouts going together with high lactate values may be damaging to endurance capacity ... Endurance capacity may deteriorate by this kind of training."
Peter Janssen

(the article was TNSTAAFL by Mark Twight and it's the basis for pretty much everything i do)

Absolutely agree that base miles should be easy - almost ridiculously so. Otherwise, you'll just be tired all the time and never do the quality stuff, which I think is what the above author is really concerned about. It's not that you can't inject 2x20:00Tempo into a 3-hour run and still get the benefit of the 3 hours; I do it and it pays big dividends both in physical adaptation and mental toughness. But, if you do that every week, you never have the legs for anything else. If you're training for a marathon, you probably don't need much else, but we race all sorts of distances, so there needs to be room for the 6-hour workout and, yes, the really fast stuff, too.

we all have different goals, and i think we are partly set up by what our bodies are suited for. Long distances are so difficult for me I might as well burn myself out on short stuff, whereas Eric can do both. I wasn't trying to subvert your training plan, which obviously works great for you, just remembering that you were at BRRTNSPW once, and thinking that variety is the spice of life. It does bring up an interesting point, though, since you do so very well at shorter races with mainly base miles in your legs...do you wonder what would happen to those times if you did do the speedwork - hypothetically only, of course?

hey, i'm sorry. I didn't mean to go against your most awesome mantra. Just an old guy maybe hoping to get a few words of encouragement, maybe even my own mantra, or wildest dream a pacer for Macklin Mile from a very talented runner.

McMillan (and others) believes that you can race just fine off base miles as long as your training is sufficiently varied. He only recommends one buildup cycle per year. That's pretty much what I've been doing the last five years, though I would like to try to bring back a little speed one of these years. Depending on how well I come back from surgery, I may do an 8-week speed cycle this summer before starting my next marathon cycle in the late fall.

no need to apologize matzah! im just doing what's been working for me in the past. when that quits working, i'll need to find some other stimulus to keep making fitness gains. i did some faster stuff last fall that i think really helped at PMETR. so just gonna keep on truckin!