Are hard strides during base phase ok to do?

Woops, meant to put rest for friday, sorry

Why would you care when you peak?

folks do strides for two different reasons and you really need to understand why you are doing them.

1. in plans like Daniels he gives strides as a gentle way of introducing faster paced work. so after several weeks of base phase, low speed mileage, with a little bit of tempo and easy fartlek, you start adding strides to the ends of sessions as a way of helping you transition to faster paced work. these strides are done starting at around 5km pace and over a number of weeks you increase the pace to around 1500m pace as you add hill work and then transition to track sessions.

2. in plans like Tinman's he has runners do strides at the end of sessions to aid recovery and to help prepare the runner for the next session. they are the fancy modern version of foam rolling and stretching as part of your cool down. these strides are done at around 3000m - 5000m pace and over time the pace of them does not change.

now look at your strides. on Tue you do strides at 600m - 800m effort, which means they are not strides, they are short intervals. this is interval training which has no place in your base phase. similarly, on Sat you do strides at 400m - 800m effort, and these are again not strides but repetition training, which is not normally done in base phase.

the main consequences of doing your strides at this pace in this phase of your training are that you have not laid the ground work by doing them correctly so you increase the risk of injury, and your training has very little room for improvement.

I would suggest replacing Tue with: 20 minutes easy to warm up, 6 x 2:00 at 5000m pace with 1:00 recovery jog, followed by 10 - 15 minutes cool down. on Sat replace these strides with some fartlek work over parkland or a golf course or through a wood or similar and put some Tinman style recovery strides on the end for a total of around 30:00. after a month or two replace this with a session of hill sprints.

cheers.

I. Disagree.

Quick alactic strides at 600-800 effort during base training are fine. Just make sure to keep them around 10-20 seconds max, and take a longer recover between them. Some of these could be run uphill as well.

I'd also suggest that you get in some AT-LT paced running 1-2 times/week during base phase once you get your mileage up to where you'd like.

Finally, Tinman was misrepresented above. He definitely includes short quick "striders" at 800 pace even for mile-2 milers during base phase.

coachrc said: Finally, Tinman was misrepresented above. He definitely includes short quick "striders" at 800 pace even for mile-2 milers during base phase.

Ironically, I think i have been misrepresented by your comment. I did not say that Tinman does not do any other types of striders.

what I emphasised is that Tinman (I think exclusively, but I might be wrong about that) does striders at a different pace for an entirely different reason. and the point was that the OP cannot just put some generic "striders" in his program but needs to think about what he is trying to achieve and which of the different types of striders are most suitable for his needs.

cheers.