Training without a Goal

Audio Transcript

Sinead: Hi everyone and welcome to the Runners Connect extra kick podcast. Today, we have a great question from Liard on how to train without a goal race.

Liard: Hello! My name is Liard, and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about maintaining the fitness level after a target race.

For example, after a mountain race, if I do not have a new target within four to six months, and I want to keep my fitness level, to what weekly mileage should I aim?

Should I keep 50 kilometers per week, 60 kilometers or more? Also, should I continue with tempo workouts and long runs? Thanks for the help and the great podcast.

Sinead: This is a fantastic question from Liard and it’s one that runners tend to ask themselves often following a big goal race.

After a marathon, sometimes you wind up in a little bit of a limbo phase and you don’t really know how to train without any goals in mind.

Today, we’ll talk about what to do to recover after your big goal race, and then we’ll talk about how to train when you don’t have a goal race in mind, but you do want to maintain fitness.

To start it off, the first thing you want to do after a big goal race like a marathon, is to take a break.

If you don’t give yourself the time to recover, efficiently after a marathon build up and a marathon, you are setting yourself up for a world of hurt later on.

This is because you need this break to recharge, both physically and mentally. You need it to recover, to eliminate on going soreness, avoid overuse injuries and even avoid burning out mentally.

The damage from your training and the race itself goes way beyond muscle soreness.

You actually fatigue your endocrine system, which is responsible for proper hormonal balance and you also fatigue your central nervous system, which is responsible for the communication between your brain and muscles.

You can see where this is going to set you up for a world of hurt later on, and it’s best to be more on the conservative side and take more time off rather than not enough.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to taking a break. The first school of thought is widely followed; it’s that you should take about one day for every mile of the race.

If you want to be exact, that’s about 26 days, or you can take 21 days or 28 days just to feel it out, see how you’re feeling when you get to three weeks.

If you feel ready to go at that point, you feel rejuvenated and excited to tackle training again, then by all means go ahead and go.

If you’re still feeling lethargic, and feeling like you need a little more time, then by all means take another week.

It’s not going to kill you; it’s going to do you a lot of good in the long run.

The other school of thought is that how much time off a person needs is unique to everybody.

Those that follow this concept on average take about 14 days off, and then after that, they just work back into it really, slowly.

Again, it’s very individual to everybody, so if you get two weeks off and you’re feeling like you haven’t recovered sufficiently, then you want to take a little bit more time off.

The common misconception, when it comes to taking a break is that, you have to start from scratch when you get back that you’ve lost all your fitness and you’re just back to square one.

That is not the case at all. You only lose about three to four percent of your fitness. When you take about two weeks off, this is really insignificant and it is nothing to be worried about.

When you’re taking a break, you need to enjoy your break, so don’t worry about losing any sort of fitness. That will all come back within a few weeks’ time after your break.

My advice to you Liard would be to take two weeks off and see how you feel from there. If you feel like you’re ready to get rolling again, and you want to go for some light jogging, then you can start incorporating some short runs into your week again.

You can do this every other day or even every two days, depending on how you feel. If you’re not quite ready, take a little more time off. Again, it’s always good to play it safe when it comes to time off.

That said, there are a few things you can do to maximize your time off and help facilitate recovery.

Some of these will come as no surprise to our listeners.

The first is take ice baths and these are great for reducing swelling and inflammation, and they help to allow your body to repair itself.

Something else great for recovery is, catching up on your sleep, and you want to try and get even a little bit more than usual, so if you usually get about seven to eight hours, hopefully you get more like eight, you want to be getting nine to ten hours during your time off.

This is going to allow all those different recovery processes to take place while you’re getting some run cycles in, so doing those two things is really going to prompt recovery and help quicken the process.

Another thing that you don’t want to do is to replace running with high intensity exercise, like for instance CrossFit or high intensity interval training.

You want to avoid these because they are going to defeat the purpose of recovery. You can do some different activities that you’re too tired to do when you are in the thick of your training; things that you enjoy doing, but you don’t usually have the energy to do them.

For instance, you can go hiking, you can swim; these are also going to boost your circulation and again get that recovery process going.

Kind of killing two birds with one stone there. Going for some nice leisurely walks is a good way to get that blood flow going and really help to facilitate recovery.

Now that we’ve covered the break, the time off, let’s talk about the ramp back into training.

After taking a lengthier break, like one after a marathon, you want to do this gradually. The first few days back into running are not going to feel great.

You might feel like a fish out of water, and that’s fine. It’s not a reflection of your actual fitness; it’s more that you’ve lost some running coordination, because you haven’t been practicing that movement that you so often practice in training.

Nothing to worry about there. That will come back within a few days’ time, but you want to start on gradually, and this is because you can increase your running load in three different ways.

One of them is to run further; you can increase your mileage. One of them is to run harder; you can increase your speed or even your incline, and the last one is, you can run more often, so you can increase the frequency at which you run.

The golden rule for avoiding overuse injuries and exceeding your stress threshold in the early stages of building up mileage, is to avoid any sudden increases, and any of these different running load methods.

The second rule is to avoid increasing two or more of these factors at the same time. In other words, as you begin increasing your weekly mileage, you do not want to suddenly throw hill workouts and speed workouts on top of increasing your mileage.

This is a recipe for disaster. This is where overuse injuries come from, and you’re going to see more success later on down the road if you are patient and take it gradually when you are just starting your build up.

As you begin your build up, what you want to do is, start back really slow. You want to do some light jogging in the first week you’re back, maybe run three times that week and nothing extraordinary here; just some slow runs, maybe three to four miles.

After that, you want to start building up gradually, and once you’re back to running about every day, you can start adding in some strides at the end of your runs, to help get that to nap back in your legs and get your running coordination back a little bit quicker.

Once you are running almost every day, you might be taking a day or two off by this point; you want to start increasing your mileage by about 10%.
Liard, in your case, say you’re doing 25 k a week at this point, which for those of us that aren’t on the metrics system, that’s about 15 miles.

After that, you want to increase by another 10% each week. You’ll go from 25 k to 27.5 k and then you’ll go from there.

Next week you’ll go, it’s about 30 and a half k and then after that you want to decrease your mileage by about 10%.

This is the rule we follow at Runners Connect and that is to increase by 10% for three weeks, and then come back 10% on the fourth week.

Again, this is to ensure that you are never exceeding your stress threshold; it’s to help you avoid overuse injuries and make sure that your body has time to catch up with you basically.

After the down week, you are going to have your legs back under you. You can start increasing again, and so you’ll increase from the 27 k.

You’ll go back to increasing gradually and you’ll go from 30 and a half k to about 33 and a half k and continue increasing in that way.

You want to increase by 10% every three weeks, and then decrease by 10% for a week. Again, this is going to help you increase your mileage in a healthy manner.

You want to do that until you get up to the 50 or 60 kilometers that you mentioned, and that is the perfect mileage for training for general fitness.

This is when you don’t have a goal race in mind, but you’re just trying to maintain fitness and get back into a position where you could easily start a marathon build up, without completely starting from square one.

Once you get up to 50 or 60 kilometers, either is fine. You can play around with it and see how you’re feeling doing one or the other; you can always do 55 k.

Again for our non-metric users, that’s about 31 to 37 miles a week. Once you reach about 50 k, this is where you can start incorporating some long runs into your weeks.

I would recommend you to do some long runs because this will give you a good foundation for any race that you chose to do later on.

Whether it be a 5 k or a marathon, long runs are pretty beneficial all around. You want to incorporate a long run a week and it doesn’t have to be anything too crazy.

These are not marathon specific long runs, so just a little bit more than your average run each week. Again by doing this, you are adhering to the golden rules, by avoiding increasing too much at once, but by also not increasing both your intensity and your mileage at the same time.

At this point, if you want to do some light workouts, like tempo runs and fartlek’s, you are free to do that.

That’s going to be a nice way to break up the monotony of training. Let’s be honest, sometimes it’s just hard to do the same thing day after day, so a nice tempo run can be a good way to break up the monotony.

It also makes it a little easier for yourself when you choose a goal race. You start building up for that race, because what this is going to do is, it’s going to start touching on those systems that you will obviously be working in your build up.

It’s not going to be as much of a shock to the system if you already are doing some light workouts.

During these 46 months where you do not have a goal race, you’re not targeting anything in particular and you’re just trying to maintain fitness, so a great thing to do there is to do some light workout.

As you are continuing on with your mileage, you want to follow the same rule I talked about earlier.

At this point, you’re not increasing your mileage; you want to be pretty consistent at this point, but you can say you are doing 60 kilometers a week.

What you want to do is do, 60 kilometers, 60 kilometers, another 60 and then do that for three weeks and then what you’ll do is decrease by 10%.

I then recommend having a good down week that is going to allow your body to recharge, catch back up with you, and help accommodate for all these different things that you might be adding in, including your long runs and your tempo runs.

You want to keep to the three weeks up, one week down approach.

Thank you so much again for the question Liard.

If you have a question that you would like one of our coaches to answer, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

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That’s all for today and have a great day.