Run Focus

As the season creeps closer for me I am starting to work in more rides and will hopefully be doing some rides with my wife as well this Spring. However my focus is still with running and I hope it pays off. Having lost almost 30lbs since last season (combo of taking weight training from 3-4x/week to once per week and going full vegan as opposed to just no dairy) I am excited to see my run times come down this year. This is an unintentional weight (and muscle loss, I was a BB in the past so I put on muscle VERY easy) and know if I took out the ankle injury they would come down on weight-loss alone just continuing to run 2-3x/week. I really want a strong run base and have witnessed that this is the way to long term success and injury prevention. Not to mention focusing on the run will help to drastically lower overall tri times where last season I was weak on the run.

I have adopted what is referred to as the 1:2:3 approach to run training. You can start no matter what level you are at but what you need to be successful with this is patience and more patience.

You can use time or distance for this system. I used distance and I wish I had used time but at this point I am so far into the program and starting to add longer runs for 13.1 training. The 1:2:3 represents your six runs per week. 1= your one long run 2= moderate runs 3= recovery runs. All of the runs should be done at your training pace which is WAYYYY slower than you probably think. Your training pace can be found using your best and most recent race time at the McMillan calculator.

Your moderate runs should be twice as long as your recovery runs and your long run twice as long as your moderate runs. (EXAMPLE):

• 1mi easy runs
• 2mi moderate runs
• 4mi long run

Doing 1mile runs can be boring but follow the system to a T and it works! Another piece of advice I pulled from this philosophy, you should never be too sore to run the next day. If you are you need to lower your distances. The final 'rule' is not to increase distance by more than 10% per week. This is where patience really kicks in. There were so many instances where I was rehabbing back from the ankle injury knowing that I need to stick with the program and build a proper run base but after a 1-2mi jaunt I felt great and just wanted to keep on trucking. You have to stop, follow your cool down procedure no matter what the distance. I like to walk for at least a mile after any run and then do some hip stretches.

As you can tell starting at one mile it can take months to get up to longer distances. If you are running only 2-3x/week but are say running 4-5 or even 6 miles but having aches and pains and want to try a new strategy then you can hop in further up the program but you need to be honest with yourself and realize your body needs weeks and even months to make most physiological changes that will result in witness gains. There will also come a time when you start getting up there in mileage and that is when you can alter the long runs to focus on a certain event and use one of the mod days for a tempo run/track workout etc.

This comes with time, but I wanted to briefly touch upon how I have been scheduling and determining my run training since Jan 1 because I often get questions on why am I running almost everyday and how have a taken almost a full five min off my 5k in basically 3-4 months.