Summer of LetsRun - What was the best thing you ever did in summer training that led to a breakthrough?

I started running hilly easy run routes, doubling every day, and honoring the Sabbath. In the past, while I had a coach, he focused on a lot of longer, but still pretty hard workouts 3x a week in the summer. I changed that to a large base phase building up miles to a peak at about 110 and sustaining 95-105. That looked like a double M-F, an 18ish mile long run, sometimes with a progression if feeling well, and every Saturday, just an easy 40ish minute run and a ton of food. For workouts, just a progression/tempo in the middle of my Tuesday morning run and a fartlek of longer distance Friday. Even with vastly more mileage, the lack of truly hard workouts gave me enough time to recover and build a huge base. This worked absolute wonders and made me a beast for hilly XC courses.

However, this only worked in summers when I had a lot of recovery time and money for good nutrition. One summer, I was working 70+ hour weeks at 2 jobs and tried to do this, which resulted in a 15lb loss, fatigue, and constant injury throughout the XC season.

I race a fair amount

I stopped trying to win workouts. In summer it's hot enough to slow you down pretty much every day. The first year I embraced that and just focused on getting in a lot of miles and ignoring what the watch said, I entered the Fall racing season healthy and in great shape. That might be a good approach year round, but in other seasons you can actually chase times and watch yourself steadily get faster in training. In summer, the variability in temperature, sun, humidity makes it a fool's errand to try to compare paces week to week.

- went to a running camp

- added some cross training (biking)

I went from 60ish miles on 7 runs as a college freshmen to 100+ miles and doubling nearly every day. A typical day would be 4-6 miles before work and 10-12 after, mostly easy pace but with one hill workout each week.

I went from not being top seven at my high school with a 3 mile pr around 17 min on what was likely a short course to running under 26 min for 8k and being top 5 at a pretty good d3 school.

Getting ferritin levels checked. The silent killer of performance. Don’t just get a blood panel, specifically ask for ferritin!