Training Times

We train every Tuesday night at Marinecraft during the summer months. Meeting at 18:15 for an 18:30 start and finishing about 19:30ish. This training session normally consists of a speed session which could be either 600 - 800 mtr, 1k or 1 mile reps or a Fartleck session.

We also train on a Thursday evening either at the Meadow Centre for a 5.5 mile Tempo run, or Balloch Park for a 6 to 8 mile Pack run. Your choice as to what session you wish to do. We normally meet at 18:15 for an 18:30 start.

We also get together on a Saturday or Sunday either at Balloch or Dumbarton for a long slow pack run or Trail run. This will normally be a 10:00 start. Locations and times will be confirmed on the Tue or Thu sessions.

During the winter months we meet at the Meadowcentre in Dumbarton at 18:15 for a speed session around the common.

Big thanks to Jim Waters for this route.

Would like to know what people think of it. If it is ok we will go out and find routes within the local area that we can use as a weekend training session.

There is tons of training advice out there, some very good, some not so good. Here I have tried to keep it to the very basics.

Your ‘fitness’ increases as the cells in your muscles and organs adapt to the stresses that you place on them during training. Therefore what actually makes you fitter are these adaptations rather than the training you do. So in order to get maximal fitness you need to maximise these adaptations. How?

STRESS/RECOVERY CYCLE.

You have to stress the body by exercising, that’s actually quite easy, then you have to allow the body to recover so that you get the gains. Any amount of stress coupled with adequate recovery will produce fitness gains. What you are trying to do though is maximise your gains and this is done by doing the maximum amount of training that you can recover from. For each person the amount you can recover from is going to be different, depending on current fitness level, type of training, other stresses (work etc), and nutrition etc, and will vary as your fitness increases.

DONT OVERTRAIN!

Overtraining severely is not that common, but is more common among endurance athletes. This is where you do so much training that your fitness decreases! What’s a lot more common is over reaching with your training. Here your fitness still increases, but increases less than it would if you did less training. E.g. if you are running 60 miles per week then your running will improve, but you could actually improve more by cutting back to 40. Why? Because your body is able to adapt more to this lesser workload, and it’s the adaptations that make you fitter, not the training, so hence the better gains.

How to work out your maximum training load? Basically it’s trial and error. Increase your training load until you get to the stage that you are feeling tired before you do hard training, then back off a bit until you adapt. Your training should be in a cycle (see below) so you will then steadily increase the load, but back off again if you start feeling too tired.

CYCLICAL TRAINING.

In order to maximise your training it is necessary to alternate hard and easy sessions/weeks. You should have a maximum of 2-3 hard sessions a week and add 2-3 easy/recovery sessions to these as you can cope with, with at least 1 day complete rest. If you are finding this too easy then increase the intensity of the hard sessions, not the easy ones (e.g. add a 5mile jog before a speed session). You should also have an easier (same intensity, 60% of the volume) week every 3-4 weeks. This may (probably will) result in you doing less training than you had planned, but the advantage is that you can fully recover from this and will therefore get faster gains.

HARD TRAINING.

This shouldn’t be a near death experience. You will get the same gains from a good ‘enjoyably’ hard session as you will from an all out maximum effort one, but the benefit is that you will recover quicker and will therefore be able to manage more training in total that week. A hard session should finish with you thinking you could carry on for a bit longer, i.e. not giving quite 100%.

Easy sessions should be just that. You are aiming to feel fresher after them than you did before you started.

RECOVERY.

This is at least as important as your training. Make sure you keep the easy sessions easy. Alternate your training if you are doing multi sports, but remember that you still need 1 day complete rest, and that hard training is hard training regardless if it’s on a different muscle group. Treat rest as an actual training component and pencil in dedicated rest times (where you do nothing) for after hard sessions.

Try to eat well generally, but make sure that even if you are eating/drinking rubbish that you get in the good nutrition as well i.e. don’t have the jam doughnut instead of the banana, have it in addition to it, at least that way you’ll get the goodness. Also, try to eat within 30min of finishing training, even if it’s just a nutritious snack.

Get as much sleep as possible. Again, treat it like a training component as it’s just as important.

TAPERING BEFORE A RACE/EVENT.

You want to turn up to a race as fit as possible but with minimal fatigue. It takes at least 5 days to fully recover from a hard session. It takes 10 days to get any fitness gains from a session. Therefore if it’s a really important race you may as well take it easy for 10 days prior as you can’t get any fitter before it (see easy weeks above, aim for about 50% of volume).

Finally, don’t take my word for any of the above, check it out for yourself. Also, don’t think that just because you or others got very fit through just doing loads of miles that it makes it a valid way of training. Yes it may have worked, but how much fitter could you/they have been if a well balanced training programme was follwed?

Example training week for advanced runner, with hard sessions highlighted.