Short Races Between Marathons

On today’s Extra Kick, Coach Dylan explains the benefits of running shorter races in between your marathons!


Audio Transcript

Coach Dylan: Hi there Runners Connect fans and friends. As always, today I will be answering your running and training questions so that you can train smarter, stay healthy, and achieve your goals.

Today we have a great question from Nathan.

Nathan: I’m in the middle of some decent mileage training and I have a two-mile race coming up next weekend.

My current thought has always been to lay off a little on the mileage and intensity of workouts for approximately five days before the shorter races.

I’ve read that others don’t do that. This isn’t a huge goal race coming up but at the same time, I would like to do well in it.

My current plan is to do a shorter faster interval workout next week and to cut out my medium long run at marathon pace and replace it with an easy run instead. Any thoughts?

Dylan: Hi Nathan. I just want to say I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to submit this question to us.

I think this will be very informal to our listeners who like you are training for many races throughout the year and prepped for their goal race.

We all want to run our best at every race and put ourselves in the best position as possible to run as fast or to the best of our abilities. The truth is we don’t always have to employ a strict taper for each race, especially for a tune up.

It’s important that we understand our goal when approaching these races. We have to ask ourselves if this is the race that we want to be at peak for? If the answer is No, then we can often approach this race with a different goal in mind.

Training leading up to these races should always be directed towards the bigger picture or the overarching goal.

Ideally, we keep or work out like if we didn’t have a race and we would only back off in mileage one to two days before the race and even then, we would only cut back to 10-15%

There is a cumulative effect in training and our body responds to how our training is laid out. If someone races quite often, we may be sacrificing key workouts and volume needed to prepare ourselves in the long term by cutting back so often.

We want to and implement good rest certainly but it’s important to know that our performance, whether we cut back or not, doesn’t change as much as we may think.

Some of us may even be faster. We’re not cutting back. This is certainly the case for me as I often do not do well with any sort of sharp taper.

It really throws a wrench in my schedule and it works better for me mentally to visualize the race as a test rather than a final indication.

It puts a lot of less stress on my shoulders and I think of it less in terms of higher anxiety and more towards what I can do with a good week of training under me and going into this race. I often remove the stress before it can even happen.

I would also like to highlight that when we cut back and perform tune up races such as a two mile, we may want to think about adding in more quality or more volume post-race.

If you are training for the marathon, we know how important the long run is and how important it is to get quality workouts in, week in and week out.

A smaller race such as this, is a wonderful tool to practice strategy or to even get your body to respond to a different stimulus.

More than likely, your race is much harder than you would have been able to give in a solo attempt. We’ll be much more fatigued afterwards.

One of my favorite additional tools to a short race is to add a small fartlek in afterwards. Maybe an additional 20-30 minutes of one on one off, two minutes hard, one minutes easy, or three minutes hard, one minute easy. Then add in some easy mild runs.

Race, workout, long run, boxes, checked.

In other races where we may have entered the reserves, it’s smart to get in the miles afterwards.

This is to practice on tired legs may be even to practice being glycogen depleted or practicing bottle or nutritional aspects that may help you in your races.

Say you do a warm up and a cool down and say you get roughly four to six miles in, well that isn’t going to necessarily help you if you’re training for 26.2.

It’s important to get in a good effort but also get in some volume as well. We don’t want to skip that weekly long run.

I think a lot of people would agree that the long run may be the most important run that we do in preparation for the marathon.

I believe it’s intelligent to begin thinking about this on our training and racing effects. Asking ourselves questions, analyzing and understanding the macro goal will allow us to understand what we must do on the micro level.

There are so many things to test and to manipulate when it comes to training and of course finding balance is important, but keeping your mind focused on what matters most is going to be key to long-term success.

I don’t think you’re going to lose much if you do come down in volume or I don’t think you’re going to lose much if you decide not to comedown in volume.

However, we can certainly miss a lot of training opportunities by including many taper periods throughout the year or throughout our plan.

I think it would be good for you to rethink this and think about how you can get a further effort in during your race and maybe try and test and see how you feel and how the outcome of the race is when you do not provide a five-day taper.

Check it out and try it. A lot of our Runners Connect users don’t come down too much in their training plans.

A lot of times they come out very well on top and it also includes many of the professional athletes that I’ve trained with, have many races where they put in long grinding, weeks in and week out and they still race on those weekends.

A lot of them are getting big long runs especially if they’re training for the marathon.

I hope this is all great things to consider for you and maybe this changes something and maybe it just brings a little bit more thought in creative processes when you’re approaching our next training or your next train race.

Finally, if you get value and enjoyment from the show and believe in what we’re doing here, please consider joining our awesome community of Patreons.

Not only will your support help us keep the show going and cover the production costs needed to make it the best show possible, but it will also allow us to completely do away with advertisements that cut into your valuable time. A win-win, right?

With your support, you also get access to amazing bonus content with new stuff added all the time this includes access to our weekly live coach chats, a 30-day weight loss program, marathon nutrition program, new and old summits, discounts on essential running products, and much more.

Basically, you can think of our pledge as a much-appreciated financial support to keep the show afloat, an all access behind the scenes pass for tons of bonus content, and a chance to shape the future of the show.

If you’re interested in joining our incredible team of Patreons, check it out runnersconnect.net/pledge.

Your support goes a long way and we can’t thank you enough.

Thanks again guys for listening up and thank you so much for submitting your question today I hope you all enjoyed it.

Enjoyed this question and answer? Consider subscribing to our daily podcast where we answer your questions.

By subscribing, you get to learn every day while you run or while at the gym. Plus, you can always skip over questions you already know the answer to.

Have your own question? Ask our coaches!

You May Also Enjoy...

Running downhills

How do you get better at downhill running? Are there any tweaks you can make to your form or things you can do in training

What to do at stop lights

How should you handle unplanned breaks in your run for things like stoplights, etc? Should you jog in place, walk, or stop? Does it even

When to replace your shoes

When should you replace your shoes? Many of us have heard every 400-500 miles, but what if they were all treadmill miles, or still look