I am at 50 miles per week and injury prone. Should I start to add speedwork or continue to up my miles? If you had to pick ONLY 1 which would be more beneficial.
I am at 50 miles per week and injury prone. Should I start to add speedwork or continue to up my miles? If you had to pick ONLY 1 which would be more beneficial.
If you are in your off season, I would just do a lot of hills and 1 or 2 tempo runs a week while building up your miles. Speed work should be left for in season training. In the long run, i think its more beneficial to add miles. Building strength is hard to do. Building speed is much easier. For the injuries, take proactive measures like icing and massage to prevent any injury that might pop up. And remember, always stretch.
i agree, do base work. add miles, but don't increase more than 10% from the week before (unless you're coming off a taper week). speedwork is important at about 1/4 through the season with increasing importance until about the end of the season. don't lots of speedwork puts you into an anaerobic and is in not as benificial to your endurace as distance work.
as for the injuries...well, i'm not one to talk. but, stretch religiously and ice a bunch. i didn't and i've logged um...70 miles (maybe) for this whole year, and that's coming off a couple thousand mile year. so, be safe, be careful and run further.
What surface are you training on? If you are getting injured on pavement, try running on grass or dirt/gravel roads. Then you should be able to increase your mileage. You may also want to add surges of 6-20 minutes into your normal runs and 150m stride outs (on grass) after your training runs if you are worried about speed.
If you can't run more than 50m/week without injury, speedwork is not going to help much over 1500m.
Add speedwork. Adding slow mileage while you are in pain won't benefit your conditioning, it may just beat you up more. This doesn't mean that you should get on the track and run repeat 200's in spikes. Try to maintain your mileage while picking up the tempo.