3-Day Training Cycle For Long Distances

yes except i've thought of it as a 9 day cycle, but with 3 hard days spaced as you describe, that's pretty much the same thing. I probably do more periodization than you favor, though.

i switched from 7 day week to 9 day cycle a couple years ago because:

(a) as i got older [now 45] i found I could work out just as hard on hard days as before, but needed more recovery time, both to manage/prevent injuries and to be able to hit target times in next hard workout. 3 hard days a week just wasn't doable for me anymore.

(b) i kept seeing knowledgeable people say [example: pfitzinger and douglas in Advanced Marathoning] that something like an 8 to 10 day cycle might be ideal, "but we know the rest of your life runs on a weekly schedule so that's what we've used here", but that doesn't really apply to me. I'm a college teacher and have a very flexible schedule, so if i want to run long wednesday afternoon, intervals saturday morning, then tempo tuesday morning, next long run to work friday morning and so forth, it's generally no problem. If anything, it is easier for me to fit in long runs during the week than on weekend when i'm trying to max family time.

I've found this to work well. i've been gradually improving, and now in the last year have beaten my college era PRs in 5k, 10k, 10 miles, half marathon and marathon.

Dave Haaga wrote:

I've found this to work well. i've been gradually improving, and now in the last year have beaten my college era PRs in 5k, 10k, 10 miles, half marathon and marathon.

Sweet! I'd say its working pretty darn well for you.

Like you I've seen the same thing as I get older (38 now). I can still hammer the hard days like I could in college (even better now that I'm smarter about it) but I need 2 recovery days rather than 1.

There are many people and some coaches that use 8-11 day cycles. What you do is simply write down all the workouts you need to race well, and specifically, how many workout days you need per cycle (you don't always have to do every workout every cycle). Then you put down the number of days you need to recover. When you add it all up, that's how long your training cycle is.

There are also a certain number of elites that use the 20 day cycle (10 days hard/10 days recovery) discovered by the East Germans. Often, 2 training cycles are combined to last exactly 3 weeks.

A guy like Shorter has 3 hard workouts (2 interval sessions and a long run). One main difference between elite and non-e;ite is to do Frank's schedule in a week and still recover. For sub-elite runners, extra recovery days need to be added to a schedule over what you would need if you were, say, Meb.

Right. I've even considering making it 10 days rather than 9 days by lengthening my marathon workout and adding an extra easy day to the recovery.

But given the fact that I get in over 100 miles a week pretty consistently I have not found the need to lengthen the marathon workout (yet). The shear volume of my schedule gives me the little extra I need for the final miles of the marathon even thou I don't get in over 20 miles in a single workout but once every 27 days.

But I think if I was a 70-80 mile a week runner then I'd need to move to the 10 day schedule to get in the longer marathon workouts.