Self-coached runners - how do you go about planning your workouts when creating a training plan???

I loosely base my training off of Daniel's book. It's been a learning process for me. Over the past couple years I've done a lot of different workouts and have learned which workouts I respond to well. Unfortunately I can't offer much advice other than to try several types of workouts and see what helps you the most. I'm sure someone here can help more. Best of luck!

mr wrote:

I loosely base my training off of Daniel's book. It's been a learning process for me. Over the past couple years I've done a lot of different workouts and have learned which workouts I respond to well. Unfortunately I can't offer much advice other than to try several types of workouts and see what helps you the most. I'm sure someone here can help more. Best of luck!

That was great, tell us more

I like Daniels' book - his VDOT method is easy to follow - you always know your desired training pace.

What do you mean by self-coached? I loosely follow a training plan (Daniels, like the other posters), so I'm not starting "from scratch," but I don't have a personal coach.

I tailor the Daniels "A" plan to fit my needs. For example, his marathon plans only have two Q days per week with one being a long run, and I often will throw in an extra workout or tempo run. (Saturday long run, Tues/Thurs workouts has worked well for me.)

I get my additional workouts from this thread:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=2487659&page=0

My Q days last week were:

23 mile steady-state (easy pace) on Saturday (Daniels)

4x2 mile tempo intervals Tuesday (Daniels)

10k tempo Thursday (aforementioned thread)

I've also followed Daniels' book in the past. Thanks for the link to that thread.

I'm curious to hear from others out there create their own training plan without referring to the plans outlined in running books. Do you write down all your workouts and intended pace before you start training on day one?

looking for some advize wrote:

Do you write down all your workouts and intended pace before you start training on day one?

That would be a bad idea. Most people will overshoot their ability at a specific time leading to disappointment, overuse, or injury.

Write down a general plan to follow and amend when you need to. If you aren't gradually getting faster, then you are doing it wrong.

I have coached myself for a few years, and the poster above is right.. it will take a bit of experimentation to find what workouts that you like, and that you respond well to. However there are some guidelines you can use..

Are you new to running? If not, there must be some workouts you have done with a previous coach that you liked or could adapt a bit, that is a good place to start.

Also, what distance are you racing, and what is your goal time? You obviously want to do as much running as possible at your goal race pace,covering close to goal distance with as little rest as possible.

So if you want to run a 30min 10km for example, you could break that down in to 2 x 5km, 3 x3km, 5 x 2km, 10 x 1km.... now for a start 2 x5km @ 15min is too hard... so you try 3 x 3km.. that might be too hard etc etc what you want to do is set up a session that tests you but is deliberately achievable. No point busting a nut trying to set PB's every session you will ruin yourself.

thanks for the suggestions. I've been running seriously for about 6 years. I've following programs outlines in Daniels and also Ptfiznger (sp??).

Lately, I'm trying to shorten my training cycles and training for stuff from 10k to half-marathon.

Are there some general guidelines to follow for setting up workouts? For instance, I read somewhere that the total of race paced intervals in a workout should not exceed 8km. How do I determine what race pace I should go for if I'm running on tired legs most of the time (due to high mileage). Do I run a fit test/race before starting a cycle to assess my fitness to help determine a realistic goal pace??

thanks

1/10

if you're racing 10k to half marathon your work load/work out doesn't need to exceed 8k, that's true, however it all depends on what you're doing.

My best half marathon came right after a long track season where I did mostly interval work, hills and lots of tempos.

as far as the tired legs go, I think that your workouts are as important as your milage especially for 10k/HM. I wouldn't be doing so much milage that my work outs suffer.

that said, I like to cycle in high weeks where they fit. say I don't have a race for 3-4 weeks, I put in a couple weeks where I'm a milage whore, and I'll keep the work outs manageable through this time. by this i mean a bit slower and a bit more volume such as the 4x2mile work out at half pace. Maybe do a few more fartlek runs, these are nice when you're running tired (on purpose) because they allow you to get in a good hard effort but you don't have to worry about splits, and having a "good work out"

Ok I know this is getting a bit longwinded here, but I was talking to my old coach about this a few weeks ago and he was saying some people like to do cycles of 2-3 weeks at a time on a certain kinda work out, but he liked to give us a mix of stimuli each week. so we would run a thresh hold work out, and then we'd do a speed work out.

our most devastating month of training he had us doing 4-5 harder days a week, including the race, but that's not sustainable. so most of the time we would be getting in 3-4 hard days.

here is how I set up an ideal week of work outs.

m-10 mile steady state run say you can race a 55 run a 61-62 minute 10miler

t-ladder work out 3x4 800 mile 800 3x4 maybe at 5k pace

w-easy 8

t-light fast work out 4x400 4x200

f-easy 5

s-race

s-easy 13

only 61 miles, maybe not quite enough for you, but like I mentioned I think quality is important when training for 10k. I've had seasons where I tried to add in doubles a few days a week to get in another 10-15 miles but I dont think the added milage helped at that point. As I mentioned earlier there's a time and place for worrying about milage, and you're racing season is not the time for it.

notice we are working different systems with each work out, and the thursday work out is just enough to get your legs moving nice and fast, but not quite enough to tire you out.

the key is that you have to remember you have a workout on tuesday when you're doing mondays steady state run

S - Long Threshold

M - Mileage + Strength/Abs workout

T - Mile repeats/ K's

W - Long Run

Th - Mileage + Strength/abs

F - Short repeats (ie 400's)

Sa - Recovery

This routine gave me the best results but took a long base period to build up to. I didn't push any particular workout more than another and tried to maintain a solid pace on every run accept the recovery. Also I was running the equivalent of mid-70s mpw during this stretch (recovery day was on the bike for an hour or so).

I just want to echo what others have said here. You start with a plan but then modify it to fit your needs and how you feel. For example, I base all my training off of Joe Rubio's middle distance guide:

http://img.runningwarehouse.com/pdf/middle_distance_guide.pdf

However, I found through trial and error that I can't handle everything in there. It is too ambitious, and I've gotten injured. So I modify. For example, in the spring when he would have milers doing 3 workouts per week, I've changed that to 2 workouts per week, and it works fine, I am still competitive and running pr's. Likewise, I'll change a few other things here and there - for example, I don't place much emphasis on a fall peak, so I just cut that part out. Instead I'll start my track training in December (rather than January) and it ends up working out anyway because inevitably I miss some workouts during the winter due to snow or getting sick.

If you don't know where to start, just start with the written schedule you have. But if it ever starts to not work for you, you need to be able to mix things up. Don't continue to stick to a pre-written plan if you find yourself getting injured, sick, or rundown. Listen to your body.

thanks for the suggestions, lots of good stuff to digest.

I understand that workouts aren't set in stone and its best to have a flexible approach with them. For some reason, I thought that it doesn't make sense to do the same workout too often. That it's good to always be mixing things up and not do the same workout more than once in a training period. Is this not true?

"Never" is taking it too far. Approach it from first principles and ask instead what the purpose of the workout is and whether it's still serving its goal. Hopefully, over a period of time, you're getting faster/more endurance/stronger/something. Which means two things:

- The workout you did previously won't cause as much stress;

and

- It's likely that something else will start to become your limiting factor.

But that suggests more that you need a system in place to get feedback about the effectiveness of your training and adapt your workouts thereby. It also suggests that you need to plan the overall set of workouts so that they're training everything that's weak. But within those broad constraints, are you going to lose out on something by doing, say, a steady state (tempo, whatever) run every week, as long as you adjust the pace and time to *remain* tempo with increasing fitness? Nope. You'll be fine. Are there times in your training cycle when you might want to do something more or less intense than that tempo instead? Absolutely. But you don't have to change everything week-to-week. Think on slightly longer timescales of several weeks. Your fitness doesn't change *that* fast due to a single week unless you're just starting out.

I've been self-coached for 19 years now, and my results are not bad (14:17 / 28:36 (Road) / 48:24 / 1:05 / 2:18)

Here are the rules to live by:

(1) Never do 2 quality days in a row.

(2) If you are feeling crappy on the 2nd interval of a workout, bag the workout, do a long jog recovery, go on to the next day (which is logically a recovery day) and don't try to "re-do" the workout.

(3) Recovery days are no faster than 7:30 per mile. 7:00 per mile if you are feeling absolutely slamtastic.

(4) Do a tempo run at least every 7-10 days. Tempo runs are 6-15 miles at a faster pace. It should hurt a bit.

(5) Do not run your long runs too fast. 6:00 per mile is about optimum for me. Long runs should be about every 2 weeks. Since I am 42 years old and my muscles have 1000's of miles of base in them, I don't need to do a lot of long runs.

(6) For 10km and above, long intervals of 2km to 3km are best. I ran my fastest 10km by focusing on workouts like 15km fast, 5x2km and 3x3km. I didn't run a workout with intervals shorter than 1km all year.

Jason

10 day cycles with 2-3 workouts, a long run, a day off, and the rest as easy mileage.

Several cycles of base... just pure mileage.

Several cycles of tempo work... those 2-3 workouts are all tempo runs of varying distance and speed.

Several cycles of interval work... 2 interval sessions and 1 tempo session in that 10 day cycle, usually try over the course of several cycles to go from 400s at 5k pace to miles, try to increase pace once I get to miles, and decrease rest.

A couple cycles of speed work/tapering... cut my mileage, 2 traditional speed workouts around mile pace, still do 1 interval workout.

That's pretty much it.

wake up

listen to your body

go run whatever it tells you to

-it works for me during summer and chistmas break. I try and map out a week of training but always make it too hard and some days i just don't feel like running a workout or a long run or whatever so i just go by feel. if you've been running for years and competing you should be in tune with your body.

Well, I do not come on here. It just starts a feud between those who respect Lydiard's way and those who prefer another.