Your Bits And Pieces

When I played soccer in Ireland, on the way home from practice one day, an assistant coach commented that the key to training is to “do your fucking bits and pieces”. [it helps if you imagine a thick Irish accent] What he meant was that there are no shortcuts and that you hurt yourself and the team by trying to take shortcuts.

Your training program has bits and pieces. Do them. You don’t gain anything remarkable by making it more complex and you lose a lot by trying to find hacks or shortcuts. And, often, complexity sows the seeds of doubt in the plan. The more you question the details the more likely you are to lose sight of the overall picture and the most important factors.

So what are those factors?

Many people have less time to run each week than their body could actually handle. One question I’m often asked is, can fast sessions or hill running compensate for fewer total miles when the desired performance outcome is building endurance? The answer is: somewhat, but not completely. You need to learn to be okay with that.

Here are the bits and pieces you should be considering.

You’ll get all the high intensity work you can probably tolerate and sustain for weeks on months on years if you devote one or two sessions per week to workouts with intervals at a high intensity (varying within the range of 10K to half-marathon race effort) and accumulate 2/3rds of the total time you could sustain that intensity if you did it in a continuous bout. For example, if you can run 10K in 40 minutes, then plan one or two sessions where you accumulate 26 minutes at 10K pace in intervals. The duration of each bout doesn’t seem to matter much and the recovery time doesn’t matter as long as you are fully recovered (able to complete all the bouts without slowing or red-lining). Add a few days with 20-30 second strides, some on inclines, and run as much as you have time for. Add some shorter races or some longer hard efforts every once in a while, maybe every 4-6 weeks, and you’ll have a pretty good program for early season base training.