How To Safely Increase Mileage And Stay Motivated

Audio Transcript

Tina Muir: Today’s question is from Jane. She says, “My weekly run totals have been 30 to 35 miles.”

She wants to know how she can increase her mileage in a way that ensures minimal injuries. She wants to remain healthy and motivated. She wants to keep moving forward with her training and wants some experience or any feedback.

Jane, thanks for your question. The biggest thing, as you mentioned, is you want to avoid injury. The number one way you can do that is by not increasing your training too fast.

I’m not sure how many days a week you run, but there is two ways of increasing your mileage. If you want to avoid injury, you should only do one of this at a time. The first is, add a day and the second is, to add a few miles to the other days but spread out.

Let me go over the first one on its own first. If you want to add a day, let’s say you’re currently running three to five days per week, I would start with a very short run, about half of your usual recovery run distance on an additional day each week.

If you’re running four days a week, you will add an additional day to make it five. If your regular easy runs are six miles, then you want to make this a three mile day. Each week after this, you want to add another mile to that three mile. Let’s say you run four days a week, week one, you would run four days a week with a three mile day.

Week two, you would run four days a week with a full mile day. Week three, you would run four days a week with a five mile run. You want to keep doing that with until you get up to your usual recovery run distance.

Once you’ve done that, you can start using the other method, which is to add a little volume to your other days. You can also do this method instead, if you are more comfortable with that.

Let’s say you are already running six days a week and you don’t want to go up to seven, this can be the other option. If this is the case, you want to pick a few days per week to add additional miles. You only really want to add another mile to each day.

You can choose whether you do that as workout days, long run days, or easy days. I would start with three days a week where you add one mile to your training. If you aren’t going to do it on a workout day, I would do it in either your warm up or your cool down, just to make sure your body can handle it.

When it comes to increasing it, you want to make sure that you increase those mileage numbers, for about three weeks and then you consider dropping it down five to 10 miles, because you don’t want to just keep increasing every week.

You want to give your body some time to adjust and to kind of reassess. After three weeks, I would consider taking your volume down by five to 10 miles. Depending on your total mile volume, you might need to do more or less, but this is a good idea to help your body prepare for the future.

One thing that’s really important to mention, if you are going to increase your mileage, is to make sure you are keeping 80% of your running easy. We actually have a great article on the Runners Connect blog about how to keep 80% of your running easy.

Most people in the survey run 23% faster and they were at a lower risk of injury. If you are going to add additional mileage, all of this mileage you are adding should be nice and easy.

I know this was a very specific question and I just want you to know that the same rules apply. You need to make sure that you increase slowly at a half volume added run initially, additional miles two other days, maybe three to four days is another option that you could do. You want to make sure you have a down week every fourth week. Most importantly, all this additional mileage should be nice and easy.

I hope I’ve answered this question. I know I threw a lot of numbers at you so you might need to listen to it again. Hopefully, this was helpful for you. I want to thank you for listening today. This is my last question for a little while.

Hopefully, you will enjoy the other questions from Shenade next week. Thank you so much for listening. If you could leave us a rating and review on iTunes, that would be fantastic. Hope you have a great week and I will talk to you soon.