Hey guys,
I just went through both a long cross-country season and a long summer track season. Last year I had surgery, which led to me missing summer racing and led to me running a month and a half or more of base mileage before the cross-country season started (and I felt great). Then I ran through the season, finished, had about a month of track base, then had a gruelling 8 month season.
Next season I will be training off yet again .. another 5 week base. I'm starting to think that this is waay too small of a base season and I'm considering doing cross-country, university track, then just skipping summer running and putting in 4-5 months of solid base to improve aerobically.
Would this be too much? I was going to steadily increase mileage, while doing one speed workout and one steady-state workout a week (maybe throwing in the odd tempo if I get bored) similar to what Mcmillan athletes do. I'm not worried about missing summer trak, because I simply won't compete at the level I want to this year anyway (senior age is a little above me right now)
So, would this kind of thing be beneficial in the long run? Or is it too much to be doing base for such a large portion of the year? Oh, and I'm a 5k/10k runner.