&&&&& Why Not INCREASE Mileage When Leaving Base Phase???&&&&&&

because the whole idea is to start developing the anaerobic energy system, not the aerobic. once you leave the base or aerobic period or whatever you want to call it, you are basically saying "i'm done developing the aerobic systems for this season" and the aerobic work you do from that point on is to MAINTAIN all the aerobic gains that you made in the base period. i'm sure others will have different ways of looking at it.

Yeah, I always wondered this also. People go on about how after a month not training you'll start to loose fitness rapidly. So I could never understand why in the summer, all the long runs and high mileage done in the winter wouldn't be lost. But as 'Hansen' says its all about maintenance. Once you've built up the base, you just need to remind the body every so often that it needs this aerobic ability.

I confess to knowing nothing about physiology, so somebody correct me if i'm talking complete BS. The way I look at it is, when you train you put your body under stress. Your body then say's "ouch that was hard, I’d better adapt so next time it will be easier." So then it increases the strength of your muscles, lungs etc. However if you just do nothing, your body must think "these areas aren't really getting used that regularly, which is pretty inefficient. I'll shut them down to save on energy requirements etc." But I think if you keep ticking over the body is reminded that you need to use certain parts so it keeps them activated.

As I say this is probably complete BS, but it's the best analogy I can come up with.

Anybody else want to chime in? Surely somebody has some knowledge of physiology that could make sense of this.

Well, if you are doing your base phase appropriately, you won't be able to increase your mileage once you increase the intensity.

For base phase, you basically want to be doing as much mileage as possible without breaking down, and including a long run and some tempos. You need to experiment on yourself to determine how much your body can handle. But ideally you want to be pretty close to the edge. Ride the edge, then take a down week to recover. Repeat.

The reason you drop your mileage when you increase the intensity is because the edge changes. If you can only run 70 mpw and be healthy when it's all easy running, your body will not be able to handle more than 70 when hard running is involved.

You'll get injured. This is common sense.

If you ARE able to increase your mileage after leaving your base phase...why didn't you just run higher mileage during your base?

Racing regularly should be enough to maintain your endurance. If you are racing each week, that doesn't leave much time to recover and train hard, recover again then race.

Most people who are racing every week, train too hard. They don't give themselves a chance to race to the best of their ability. You can see it in their eyes at the start of the race, they have a look which shows they are beaten before they begin.

If you have two weeks or more between races then you do have time to train hard.