Base building in anticipation of a hard training cycle.
This is the last part in a multi-part series on how to get ready for a harder training cycle. Previous articles have looked at developing good form, balance and flexibility, and core strength.
This week we’ll look at base building.
Why do you care? First of all you can’t be race training all the time if you want to stay healthy and get your best performances. Second, you will have opportunities between race campaigns that you can take advantage of to do some base building.
Instead of ‘just doing some easy runs’ or not doing much at all you can use these between-campaign times to build resiliency and capacity. In this way when and if you decide to turn up the volume and intensity you’ll be ready. Worst case you’ll have more general fitness to race right out of the gate by following some fairly simple base building guidelines.
A step back…
All modern training methodologies use the concept of periodization. This means you devote chunks of time to building specific attributes, like speed or strength or base fitness. The base building period or phase is akin to building the foundation for the training. A good base becomes a strong foundation for the more race-specific training.
You might be surprised to hear that the concept of base building is a modern development. Until Arthur Lydiard’s athletes kicked everyone’s tails in the distance events of the Olympics in 1960 and 64 no one base trained. Before this most runners just did lots of speedwork. They were primarily track athletes at track events so they just trained hard and fast all the time.
Speedwork defined:
When I refer to speedwork here I mean basically running at your V02Max or anaerobically or way beyond your threshold. Speedwork for me is a 4 and ½ on a scale of 1-5. It’s a pace I could maybe hold for a mile repeat.
What modern coaches have discovered is that speedwork gives you diminishing returns. After 6-8 weeks of consistent speedwork, you just don’t get any faster. Modern, elite runners will first do a base building period then escalate this into race-specific speed and strength towards the end of the overall training cycle.
Speedwork is great for building strength and, well, speed. But, like Lydiard discovered it has diminishing returns. Speedwork built on a poor base will either break you or keep you from reaching your highest race peak.
Think of it as a pyramid. The base building is the broad foundation at the bottom. The race specific speed and strength is the small bit on the top that comes to a point on race day.
What is base building then? How do you do that? Why is it important?
First, what base building is not: It’s not a bunch of slow, easy runs with no purpose. Base building is a valid part of your training, even if you’re between races, and you should treat it as such. If you’re just logging a bunch of inconsistent slow miles you’re not base training; you’re jogging.
My point is that like any other training your base building phase should be consistent and planned.
What’s the goal of base building?
First you want to develop your aerobic capacity. What does that mean?
Aerobic vs anaerobic:
Aerobic activities burn oxygen and can be maintained over a long period of time. Anaerobic means that the activity’s oxygen consumption is not sufficient to supply all the energy. When you ‘go anaerobic’ your muscles have to scrounge fuel by breaking down other resources. Anaerobic is not sustainable for long efforts.
Based on that admittedly low-fi definition, we’ll pause here for a quick quiz. When you run long distance, a marathon for instance, how much do you think is aerobic and how much is anaerobic?
The majority of it is aerobic, right? Very little is anaerobic. It makes sense that we would train aerobically for a primarily aerobic event.
For training when we say our goal is to develop aerobic capacity what we mean is we want to be able to go longer and harder before our muscles are forced to switch to the anaerobic system. This aerobic capacity manifest at the cellular level by creating more mitochondria and other physical adaptations.
You only get these adaptations if you execute your base building with planned consistency.
Back to the question at hand. What is base building then?
Base building is a consistent level of miles or time most of them in the aerobic zone with some moderate effort pace runs and moderate pace episodes.
An example of time spent in the aerobic training zone would be an hour at zone 2. An example of ‘moderate pace’ would be a bit slower than your current marathon pace. An example of an episodic run would be a fartlek.
How many miles?
The elites go over 100 miles a week in their base training. Not just the pros. Most college cross country programs have a base building phases with this kind of volume.
You and I, we are not elites. We don’t want or need 100 mile weeks – even if we could survive it. Typically when I’m in a base building phase I’ll run 4 – 5 days a week and hit 25-30 miles.
A specific example of a base-building training week:
If we take the example of 5 days a week this might mean 3 more targeted or prescriptive workouts and 2 easy runs. Your weekly structure might be:
Monday – Cross Train
Tuesday – Fartlek
Wednesday – Easy Zone 2
Thursday – Pace run
Friday – Zone 2 Run
Saturday – Rest or cross train
Sunday – Longish Zone 2 run
A base building phase could be as long as a year because the physical aerobic adaptations take a bit of time. But, that being said, you can benefit from a month or 2 or 3 as well, and you can work base building strategies into your regular training. It does take some time to see benefits and you do have to be consistent.
What should pop out at you is that base building is not all ‘easy stuff’. There are episodes of ‘moderately challenging’ running as well. And this is where I have to take a side passage into heart rate training.
When Lydiard was coaching in the 60’s they ‘ran by feel’. They didn’t have sports watches. Inconceivable! Right? Seriously, there are still some of us old guys that spent enough time training without technology who can run by feel, but you don’t have to. Today you can run by measured effort level and we do this using heart rate training.
Heart rate training allows us to base build based on data instead of feel. This is important because most of us run our easy runs too hard and our fast runs too fast when we do it ‘by feel’.
Most runners use a 5 zone heart rate method. Zone 1 is walking effort, zone 2 is conversational, full sentences, zone 3 is breathing hard but still talking, like when you go out running with your buddies, zone 4 is tempo or in between your 10k and marathon paces, you’re working hard and can only squeeze out a word here and there, zone 5 is 5k race pace and you aren’t wasting breath on talking.
Most people, when they run by feel, will run their easy runs at a low zone 3 effort. This is too fast to get the full aerobic capacity benefits. In base building you have to teach yourself to run easy, aerobically, in a zone 2 effort level.
This can be a learning curve. It may take 2 – 3 weeks for you to figure out how to run zone 2 consistently. It may be a much slower pace than you are used to, but after a couple weeks your body will figure it out and you’ll be back at the old pace at a lower effort. This is aerobic capacity.
The same is true when you do a fartlek episode or a pace run. Your natural response will be to run these at race pace and you’ll drop into zone 4 and 5. Which is too fast. You want to run these at mid-to-high zone 3. What you are trying to build is your capacity to run right at the aerobic threshold without going over it. That is aerobic capacity as well.
With a heart rate monitor you can exactly nail these workouts in the correct zones and squeeze all the benefits of base building.
If you are interested in heart rate training you need to find your own zones. Everyone’s zones are different. The formulas you’ll find online based on age and resting heart rate are gross approximations and typically give you entirely wrong answers. I would recommend having a Lydiard-style coach help you set your zones.
Back to practical workouts in a base building phase.
Understanding effort levels now you see that the ‘easy zone 2’ runs are just that. 40 – 60 minutes of running in that aerobic base building zone. If you really want to ramp it up you can scale these runs up to 90 minutes. You can do more volume at this effort level without really hurting yourself.
What’s a fartlek example? A fartlek would be, let’s say a 45 minute run with a 10 minute warm up, 10 minute cool down. That leaves you with 25 minutes in the middle and you would do 3-5 pickups for 2-3 minutes each up into mid-to-high zone 3, and fully recover (i.e. drop back to zone 2) between each pickup.
Other versions of the fartlek are ‘telephone poles’ where you do a zone 3 pickup between telephone poles. Or short hill repeats where you do some quick 20-30 second uphill surges. Or fast finish runs, and step up runs where you warm up, run in zone 2 then finish the last part of the run in zone 3. I like to do my fartlek runs on the trails for extra balance and strength.
For the Sunday long run, when I’m base building I’ll typically shoot for 2 hours of running at zone 2 effort with some surges thrown in every 20 minutes or so just to keep the legs honest.
If you execute the base building phase consistently with these types of runs you’ll be in an excellent position to increase your intensity and volume going into a hard cycle preparing for a specific race. In this way your base building gives you the capacity, a deep well to draw from where you will be able to run farther and faster at your aerobic threshold.
Base Building summary:
It may sounds over nuanced but there is a big difference between ‘running a bunch of easy stuff’ and base building. There are specific effort levels and workouts that will help you develop a deep reservoir of aerobic fitness that will pay off in your racing.
If you want to run well you have to train well. Base building is a specific, intentional phase of training that will enable your running goals.
Getting ready for a hard race training cycle summary:
Of the four aspects of preparation we have discussed all of them can help you reach your goals but base-building is probably the least understood.
Now that we’ve talked through form, balance and flexibility, core strength and base building you have everything you need to prepare for a hard training cycle.
Everyone is different. Everyone has unique abilities and likewise unique opportunities for improvement. I would suggest that you either get a coach to help you or do some self-assessment as to what your running strengths and weaknesses are. Apply the appropriate aspect of preparation we have discussed.
If you really don’t know what to do, experiment. Pick one. Do a core strengthening phase or a form building phase and see what you learn. That’s how I taught myself all this stuff. Eventually you’ll settle on the appropriate balance of activities and the appropriate cycles of activity that works for you.