Advice for thoese who only run 1-3 times per week!

Another hobby runner here. I ran roughly twice a week for about 20 years (took up the sport as an adult, no athletic history before that, went from early 20s to early 40s, stopped after back troube and eventual surgery). Maybe 5x per 2 weeks when trying to build mileage for a race. Many injuries over the years, always strategizing to avoid them, and low mileage was part of that.

I settled into a pattern where almost every run was doing something -- tempo, half-mile or mile repeats, hills, long run. Well that was when I had a race in mind, which was most of the time. Other times it was more "medium" runs (but never "easy"). I did a decent amount of cycling the rest of the week in summer, and in winter lots of 45-60 min progression/threshold sessions on stationary bike / rower / elliptical. It worked out to about 6 days/week on average, which got me decent VO2max.

I had pretty good success for a hobby runner this way (16 5k, 34 10k, 56 10M, 1:16 HM, 2:45 M). About 80-100 races in all. Probably underperformed at the marathon without high mileage but I was "good" (mediocre) enough to enjoy myself, get better, feel semi-legit, and even identify as a runner.

After 10 years of running in hs, college, and post, I had too many injuries (back, knee, mostly genetic destroying my biomechanics and arthritis, allergies, asthma) and decided to try this crazy running 3 days a week training last March.

1 tempo/track workout (half & half) day, 1 easy mileage/short speed (200s, 400s) day, and 1 long run (16-20 miles, varying pace and hills ). Non-running days are supplemented with swimming ("tempos", "intervals", easy swims, NOT running in the water) to help build "base", elliptical, and lifting (slowly increasing weight, but focused on building muscles to prevent injury).

Finished last year track season with a 15:43 track 5k (15:32 pr). Continued this past fall with an emphasis on more volume in workouts, ran a few xc races (27-28 {25:48 pr}) and resulted in taking my half marathon pr from 71:28 to 71:06 at Indy.

It works, but you have to work your ass off for it and learn to do things even more monotonous than just running, such as swimming and especially elliptical. Also I live in Denver, so I get some free extra training just by sitting at work. I suggest thoroughly analyzing what you eat as well.

Good Luck

im sorry but if you are doing 1-3 workouts a week all intervals then youre going to be aerobically weak. Yeah sure, you’ll be able to run fast for 5-10 minutes but your endurance will suck. And easy runs do build the aerobic system what a load of bull, it stimulates mitochondrial growth and turns on dna that helps transport oxygen, yeah fair enough you aren’t gonna go from a 50 minute 10k to a 30 minute 10k on easy runs alone but there are lots of physiological benefits to them. I used to just do intervals 3x a week (400s on tues/thurs and 200s on sat) with no other running and only other aerobic work was cycling to work, a mere 20 miles of cycling a week and my 5k sucked but even after A MERE TWO MONTHS of adding in 40 min easy runs and adding in a bi-weekly tempo run I have knocked 40 sec per mile off my 5k pace. Yeah I know what this site, I’ve probably been trolled but there are lots of idiots out there who are googling stuff like this wanting to get faster that will believe this bull.

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