Two Week Cycles wrote:
Think about doing a two week cycle instead of a weekly cycle. Then you could use the variability of your schedule to your advantage and schedule some lower mileage (but perhaps faster paced) workouts for when you travel, and the higher mileage workouts and long run for when you're home. Or is the issue that you can't run at all when you travel?
Thanks for these thoughts. When I travel it's normally 4 to 6 flights into a given week. For example imagine a redeye from NY to Europe, then meetings all day, then dinner. Can't really do anything productive on that day except a short treadmill run at night, or late 11pm jog outside.
Next morning you can typically run more, but that means cutting on sleep that's already short, and that gets you injured. So during a week like that when moving around a lot, I can run either very early or very late, but typically that's 3-6 miles on either hotel treadmill or in a new city (which means jogging is great for sight seeing, but workouts not so much). And you find yourself in suit and tie within 30 min after that workout, hence can't be too intense.
So usually these weeks are okay-ish, I run a bit every day but not productively, I then do back to back hard on Sat-Sun (e.g. 10 miles trail run Sat and 16 miles with most of it at MP on the next) when training for a marathon. But once back, I do tend to have more time and can double etc.
So in my case, 25 in the 5 weekdays when traveling sounds possible, so I can see myself running at most 45 mpw when on the road (sometimes less) and perhaps up to 75 miles when back. Was just wondering if variable = bad.
The most I've even run in a month in 230 miles last August when I had more time. Over the next few months, I want to build mileage (easy slow) to a new base of 60+ (have been doing 40-50 at most consistently) and try to take my 3:18 marathon towards 3. I recently have run 1:24 half, so I need more volume now.