At present I am writing on the tale end of my triathlon race season after one month off of unstructured active recovery. The latter part of this time as been spent constructing and planning my next training block, a sort of come back and base phase. This block will carry me from the first of September to my annual New Year's Day Marathon I do at home every year, to start the year on a good note (at least thats the excuse I tell myself for doing it).
Run Volume Planning
The previous year distributed my weekly run volume with a constant steady 10% increase in volume every week. Although the increase was steady, this allowed no period of time for any real recovery to take place, instead I learnt that it is better to have the steady increase over the course of three separate types of weeks that increase as time. An easy/recovery week, a medium week, and a hard week, then repeat. This allows your body to absorb the work and repair on the easy week following the hard week. As well as the medium week to act as a logical stepping stone between the two.
A general illustration of how your weekly volume should be distributed. A series of easy, medium and hard weeks steadily progressing in volume.
The Individual Training Week
Once you've distributed your weekly training volume (this could of course be distance or time depending on your own preference) you need to then decide and allocate how this volume will be distributed throughout the week and what kind of individual workouts they will make up. Initially last year virtually all of my training runs were spent in a low tempo zone 3, where my heart rate would average around 160 BPM for the entire session. This was pretty much the same across all my runs varying in distance from 8 km to up to 28 km. The thinking at the time was I would stimulate my body to be efficient in this zone, so I would gradually get faster, whilst maintaining the same heart rate or effort level.
Although this was true to an extent, I seriously limited myself on the level of variety I had across my running week. Thinking I could make up for the lack of variety by cross training as a triathlete with cycling and swimming. Although this worked to an extent, I've learnt this year from experience each discipline should be treated as an individual.
One of the biggest psychological limiters to this lack of variety was my lack of long runs, which I always found to be hugely intimidating. I'd worry I'd under perform on them, not be able to finish, bonk, or be slower than I'd like to be. This of course led me to doing very few of them, unsurprisingly not helping in my performance of them all together, only reaffirming my anxieties about them making me do even less.
However... after my performance at Ironman Hamburg this year, I concluded that these anxieties are trash. So you have to slow down in one of your training runs? WHO CARES?! That is why it is called training, training is the place to make the mistakes so you don't have to make those mistakes on race day. Its far better to screw up in training than during a race. Its not worth getting grouchy over the odd training session that didn't go well, as long as you gave it your everything, you are blameless and should not be discouraged.
So instead this year I plan to focus on there being much more variety across my run training as a whole. This will also add further much needed mental stimulation.
Despite feeling horrifically unfit one month after my main event this year, I am still fitter than I was this time last year, and God willing will continue to get fitter still. which I very much hope for the rest of you with athletic goals for the future.