Week 3

HOUSEKEEPING

• Changes to the Macro: Occasionally, I make minor adjustments to the program based on what is going on in the context of the program & how athletes are responding to the current work, how I am feeling about the workouts I wrote now, as opposed to when I wrote them originally. For you long term planners who may already have printed out the macro, I may make changes so be sure to check the website. 

QUALITY 

5/3/1 Fartlek for a timed 3 miles (vs initially indicated 4M)

So this session is half workout/half time trial. I have learned over the years that time trials are absolutely dreaded & frequently skipped in a program. I hope you will be open to this session but if you aren’t that is OK. While there is not a real need for knowing your specific paces in this program, since so much of the work is based on efforts & feel, I find that many people want to test their beginning & ending fitness in a program. This workout is designed to allow you to do so. Or you can disregard getting a 3M total time & just do the session. I am cool with it either way. Our final workout of this Basecamp wil be the same session, so you can test your improved fitness (or improved ability to know HOW to do the session). 

Fartlek is a Swedish word for “speed play”. In the history of distance running, the Swedes & Finnish marked a huge transition in the training theory. Prior to the use of fartlek, most runner either ran easy, or walked even, to develop fitness. The Scandanavians upended this continuous running at one speed with fluctuations & pace changes in the context of a single run. In this way they made varying paces a part of training theory. Eventually, this led to breaking up training runs into intervals (shorter faster running balanced with rest periods. There are two basic types of fartleks traditional, free-form fartlek & structured fartlek. The traditional version is a kid of play, where accelerations of varying paces & distances are included in a run. Typically, runners choose natural landmarks (trees, hills, telephone poles, etc) as they run to accelerate to & then run easy after. Individual fartleks are truly free-form & completely up to the runner to implement. When run in groups, they are still free-form but one runner decides where they are running to & at what pace. This can be alternated between runners in the pack or one runner can be the determiner throughout. Also, if done in a park or the like, a coach can blow a whistle to control the distance run & the athletes can choose the pace. These are examples of traditional fartlek. A structured farle is what we are doing. A predetermined time is designated to run at a faster pace & slower pace & the athlete still determines the pace they choose to run for both the faster & slower sections. 

In our case, we are alternating 5 min of faster running with 3 min of easier running; 3 min of faster running with 3 min of easier running; 1 min of faster running with 3 min of easier running. This is written as 5/3/1 w/ 3 min easy jog. Once you complete one set of 5/3/1 you continue until you reach 3 miles of running. You can vary the intention, difficulty & benefits from a fartlek in a wide array to encourage different training stimulus. For our purposes, we want to pick a pace for the faster sections that we feel we can sustain for that timeframe at a hard effort. Hard is not all out. It is a challenging pace or effort that you feel you can sustain for 5, 3 & 1 minutes with the rest being 3 min.  Don’t worry so much about the pace of the faster running...this is “speed play”! Have fun with it. If you go too fast, adjust & run easier on the rests or the faster section to ensure you can run the whole 3 miles with the changing paces. I appreciate it will feel a little willy nilly. That is understood & expected. This is about learning to determine you efforts & paces & how to sustain them in a structured time/distance framework but with a very loose pace or effort framework. Relax! You cannot do this wrong. No matter what you will be getting a good stimulus from this workout. This is the training session. If you want to use it as a time trial, you do the workout EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. You just keep a record of the overall time it takes to do 3M of fartlek. When we do this again in Week 12 you can compare your result. 

SPEED ECONOMY

4-6 x FLAT STRIDES. This is the same session as Week 1’s SE workout, with the  option to go 6 strides.  Now that you have done it once, you should have a better idea of how to modulate your paces/efforts on the strides. Again, see below for the basics:
Strides are similar to pickups but are implemented in this program differently. After you finish your easy 4M run, you want to find a flat, even surface (track or road) that is approximately 60-80 meters long. You can also jusde these on time & it will be about 10-12 seconds long. A stride is a fast run of very short duration. You want to be quick & sprightly but still very relaxed in the face, neck, shoulders & arms. THIS IS NOT A SPRINT. If a sprint were 100% effort (all out), a stride would be 85-90% effort. Fast but relaxed. Concentrate on beautiful form. How will you know what beautiful form is? Just picture a galloping horse & hold that in your mind. Strong, fast & relaxed. The  walk back after you 80 meters or 10-12 seconds to start the next stride. 

LONG RUN

• 30-40 mpw: 6 miles
• 40-50 mpw: 6-8 miles
• 50-60 mpw: 8 miles

With these Long Runs beginning to be extended, be sure to pay attention to your body’s signals. You want to keep the Long Runs. The training stimulus is coming from extending the distance run, not the paces you run. Expect there to be a variety of aches & pains crop up during & after the runs. These are natural & normal. As long as you are paying attention to these signals, & what your body signals is not sharp or drastic, you should run through it.  Your body is not sure what the hell is going on & it wants to predict what you are doing & control what it can control. We are evolutionarily designed to run. Your body knows what to do. But it wants to regulate the effort to ensure you are safe. We have to press the edge a little, get outside our comfort zone a bit, to get the benefits of our hard work. That is how the body responds: work hard, recover; work hard, recover. 

FUNDAMENTALS TOPIC: BALANCE

As I noted in the first two weeks, mindset & consistency are very important to any running program. When I speak of these two things folks tend to nod in agreement, understanding that this “makes sense”. This week’s topic tends to make folks furrow their brow or raise an eyebrow as to how balance could or should pay a role in a running program. Where is the main point: runners are people first. I know, shocker! But so little attention is paid to the idea of balance in a running program. When I work with intermediate & advanced runners, I find the balance is one of the hardest aspects of their training to fix & it plays a HUGE role in their improvement & enjoyment. So I am imploring you to begin to look at your running from the perspective of whole life balance. To that end I have some notes below:

• Healthy running is balanced running. While we see great benefits from training “to the edges” (see the fartlek session this week) it must be balanced. The pendulum needs to swing to encourage greater fitness & training benefits: hard days hard, easy days easy has the end result of balancing each other.