From the Elite Training News Blog
Diego Estrada - usually 50 miles per week, max of 70
Diego Estrada
January 27, 2015
In this ESPN Endurance interview, Diego Estrada discusses some of his training under his coach, Joe Vigil, prior to his 60:51 win at the U.S. half marathon championships:
You teamed up with Vigil in the summer of 2013. Last year was a tough year on the track and you took some time off after the Payton Jordan Invitational in late April, so how’s the training finally coming together now?
I run about 50 miles per week. Even for this half-marathon, the highest I got up to was about 70 miles. At first the workouts were aggressive and now they’ve just become normal. Basically, when I got sick, I took a month off and I started building back up carefully. We started off with five-minute pace and got down as low as 4:25 pace for interval workouts. With mile repeats and tempos we would go about 4:35. My body weas reacting to the workouts differently. I could go out and do a tempo and not feel like it was taking too much out of me.
What’s the toughest set of workouts Vigil set for you leading up to this race?
Estrada: One of the weeks of training that I had — and there were multiple ones like this — started off with 7 x mile-repeats around 4:25-4:26. I would come back two days later with 12 x kilometer-repeats under 2:50. I could run the last kilometer in about 2:35. I could come back two days after that and run an 8-10 mile tempo run going under 4:40 pace comfortably. The next day I’d run a 15-mile long run and I’d have to hold myself back from running faster than 5:20 pace. Nothing crazy. I was running 70 miles a week. My slowest run was 5:50 to 6:00 pace. Everything was just quality and repetition at goal pace or faster. (Note: All of Estrada’s training was at altitude except for three weeks during the holiday season.)