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If your race is a marathon then doing a 15 mile tempo run in the days leading up to the race would be ill advised.
All of them. Just run easy. Sheesh.
Speed, unless you're a natural sprinter.
i actually have a question like this but dont feel like making a thread
my coach today made us run a "simulated race" a 5k where we are supposed to surge at certain points... i just dont see how this will help us, we have our league meet on Thursday. in my eyes its just running an extra race.
thread stealer.... wrote:
i actually have a question like this but dont feel like making a thread
my coach today made us run a "simulated race" a 5k where we are supposed to surge at certain points... i just dont see how this will help us, we have our league meet on Thursday. in my eyes its just running an extra race.
I don't know the rest of your team's sequence of training (and races), but a simulator (depending on how you ran it) three days before the league meet is not necessarily bad at all...
There's nothing you can do during the week before a race to make yourself a better runner. You can only screw things up.
You can do things to help make yourself a better runner a month from now, but not a few days from now. You can cram for a test, but not a race.
Hence the runner's rule of thumb on race week, "The hay's in the barn."
How about strides or short repeats (nothing longer than 150-200m) just to keep the legs turning over without exhausting the systems?
Also what about some marathon-pace miles, nothing too long, maybe 2-4 miles just to keep the rhythm and cadence leading up to a marathon?
NYC for me wrote:
thread stealer.... wrote:i actually have a question like this but dont feel like making a thread
my coach today made us run a "simulated race" a 5k where we are supposed to surge at certain points... i just dont see how this will help us, we have our league meet on Thursday. in my eyes its just running an extra race.
I don't know the rest of your team's sequence of training (and races), but a simulator (depending on how you ran it) three days before the league meet is not necessarily bad at all...
There sure seems to be a lot of incredibly stupid people on here lately. Yes, doing anything resembling a race in practice is pretty much always dumb (unless you haven't raced in a long time and are doing a time trial a few weeks out from a race), but especially the week of a race this is about as stupid as it gets.
Basically, anything that produces a lot of lactate is bad before a race. This means that the workout before a race should be a light threshold or short sprints with full recovery (things like 12x100m with full recovery). Things like VO2 max workouts (or anything including VO2 max pace), hills, or hard 400s etc should not be done within 3 days of a race. The coach I ran for in college always had us do a long mix of everything two or three days out of a race, so it included everything from threshold and VO2 max to short fast running. I found that doing VO2 max stuff, even if it was only 1xMile, made me feel tired during the race. I never understood why anyone would try to cram so much into one workout anyway. You don't get a strong training stimulus to any one thing in particular and mainly just tire yourself out. Since graduating I generally just do a 4 mile threshold at a pace a little bit slower than I usually go for a threshold plus some strides. It's worked well for me and I always feel better in races.
tatter wrote:
Basically, anything that produces a lot of lactate is bad before a race. This means that the workout before a race should be a light threshold or short sprints with full recovery (things like 12x100m with full recovery). Things like VO2 max workouts (or anything including VO2 max pace), hills, or hard 400s etc should not be done within 3 days of a race.
Bullcrap. You can't make such sweeping statements for everyone and every race. Some of my best races came at the end of very hard weeks with several hard sessions. Tapering sometimes has the opposite effect to what is intended, and you race like crap.