Last week, we looked at the first three important points in increasing your mileage.
- When to increase
- The formula
- Use that fancy watch!
Today we dig into the final two points:
- Don’t be afraid to revert
- Taper weeks
So without further ado, let’s get on with it.
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Don’t be afraid to revert
Increasing mileage is not an exact science. Some athletes can build up faster than others. You can do all the correct planning and tracking of your running and still get injured.
It is important to listen to your body, and if you feel that burn-out is happening, or you start to pick up a couple of niggles, then make sure you adjust what you are doing accordingly and have more time to adapt to the training volume and that, conveniently, is where point 5 comes in.
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Taper weeks
Increasing mileage by 15% per week doesn’t sound a lot, but you could move from 10 miles a week to 40 miles a week in a matter of months. Just like the best marathon programmes, consider adding in a taper week every 4-6 weeks. This gives your body time to adapt to the increasing volume of training and limits the chance of injury.
It is naive of us as coaches to think that athletes will have the capacity to run more and more every week. As previously discussed, recovery is just as important as the training that you are doing, it’s about quality of training over quantity.
As runners, we love to run! If we didn’t enjoy it, we wouldn’t be investing the time and energy into doing it. Thinking about moving from 5k-10k, or 10k-1/2 marathon can be a daunting task. If you follow the above steps you are going to put yourself in the best position to take your training to the next level.
It certainly is a challenge, but why would we have it any other way, remember,
tough times don’t last, tough people do (Unknown)
