For those with more experience and training time, can a person make progress w/out burning out by running an Interval day at faster than race pace, only to be followed up with a hard tempo run 2 days after ? Is this feasible for long-term progress and development, or is it too much to handle in that time frame?
I personally have done this and been able to improve. However in lots of searching I have noticed a trend for many runners to say, run a Tue Interval, but not hit a tempo run until 3 days later on a Friday, or perhaps hard workouts on Mon/Thur.
I was just more curious as to whether or not this is just out of pure personal scheduling reasons or whether it was because of recovery issues and ability to come back and train harder. Essentially I was wondering if this was perhaps better and if my training would be that much more enhanced. This might seem overanalytical but I know from experience that as a whole I don't do well on more than 2 hard sessions a week.
The Tu/Thu quality days, with a Sat or Sun long run is probably more feasible though for me to use as I do have to lift and PT M/W/F (in addition to weekly swimming sessions). But if a Mon/Thur or Tue/Fri quality day schedule would lead to more improvement I'd probably just suck it up and get in a hard run after lifting (which is basically all uppper body PT work).
Just wanted to hear a little input. I am not a blistering fast runner, but always looking to improve.