How to invest in training that will pay off down the road.
I went for a run with my club Sunday. Ollie the Border Collie and I joined for a slow 7 miles on the back roads of Groton where I grew up.
I got to talking with one of the guys in my club who is starting to train for a 50K in the spring. I found myself giving advice on what he could do in the next few weeks to build some new capabilities.
It is this time of year that we find the opportunity to work on sharpening the saw. Building some new capabilities and learning some new things that will make us better athletes.
- The first thing I would recommend is to work on your aerobic base. This is a great fit when you have some non-specific training time. Because it requires you to step back in order to build the capacity to move forward.
I would guess most runners have no idea how to heart rate train. I bet most don’t know what their max heart rate is or what their zones are. Heart rate training is a set of skills that you can use throughout your running lifetime to increase fitness. This set of knowledge, and the skills that go with it, are great additions to your assets.
What makes heart rate training a great fit with these non-specific training periods is that you most likely need to slow down to take advantage. First you need to find your heart rate zones – and I would recommend working with a coach who is familiar with Lydiard type training to find these zones. If you follow the rules of thumb, based on age and averages you can be way off. You need to set them correctly for the base aerobic training to add value.
What most new heart rate runners find is that their current easy run pace is a low-to-mid zone 3. To build aerobic fitness you need to find a zone 2. Typically, this means slowing way down and it takes a couple weeks to build back up to the pace you were at before.
If you have a month or so with no specific race in the immediate future some longer zone 2 training is a great solution. Think of this as 3 runs a week for an hour or more in your zone 2 heart rate. This will build aerobic capacity that will make you fitter and faster at all distance races and teach you a new skill.
- The second thing I told my friend was to experiment with fat adaption.
Like most runners he uses a lot of sugary nutrition to race. Gatorade, shot blocks, Gu gels – there’s nothing wrong with these things, but it is extremely valuable to learn to run without them.
This fits well into a non-specific period of training because there is no performance risk. So what if you have a bit less energy in a couple runs? Start to experiment with not taking any sugar for your training runs. Listen to your body and see what that feels like. You may get a bit of a withdrawal initially with low energy but in the long run your body figures out how to burn other sources of energy.
Our bodies, even the skinny among us, have enough body fat to burn for most runs. Most of the sports nutrition stuff is psychological. Try running your long, low-effort, zone 2 runs with just water. See where the power loss happens. Feel what it feels like for your body to make that shift to an alternate fuel source.
Especially if you’re training for ultra-distances. There is not enough sugar in the world to keep the beast at bay. Experiment with fruit or nut-butters or other low-sugar, complex carbs. This is also a great opportunity to practice having your stomach digest real food on the go. Again, there’s no risk. If you get a bit of rumbly in the tumbly on the trail, you learn from it without risking your race or your training cycle.
I could throw in core building and flexibility and so many other things but I’m going to leave there for simplicity.
If you’ve never learned how to run in zone 2 now is a great time to learn and you’ll drop into your spring training with a big fitness base. It only takes a month or so for your body to figure it out.
If you’re dependent on sugary sports nutrition now is a great time to wean yourself off of that stuff and teach you body how to burn fat for energy. It only takes a month or so to make that transition too.
You can see that these non-specific training times are excellent opportunities to learn new skills. So instead of just wasting this time get out and make yourself better.