To speed or not to speed .........
Jan2320127:51 p.m.
That's the question!
Evening All!
Another week done – 30 miles in total this week – 4 Tuesday, 6 Wednesday, 8 Friday and then 12 miles in the wind yesterday! (first 6 were a pleasure with the wind behind me – the last 6 were being blasted in the face so hard you can hardly open your eyelids!)
So far, my 2012 km total has been reduced to 1872 which is ahead of schedule (although it is still VERY early days!)
Which brings me to my next question – most people who run races look to run as fast as they can – which therefore means you have to do speedwork (yuk!). My only problem (apart from hating speedwork) is that more often than not (and training for last years VLM unfortunately came to pass) I get injured. Is it because I train too hard? I don’t know, I followed a schedule last year and everything was ok for the first few weeks – it was almost as though the more load my body had put on it, the less it could take it.
The reason I am asking this is I have a race at the end of February – do I use speedwork to try and bring my time down again? Or should I just stick to the long steady runs and hope that my general fitness will get me round in a fairly good time?
At the moment, I am enjoying my running and I don’t really want to tweak anything that may upset the rhythm. Any tips or words of wisdom would be gratefully received!!
Hope everyone is getting into their training now! The nights (and mornings) are slowly drawing out (hooray!) and we’ve been very lucky this winter so far (there, now I’ve said it we’ll probably have a dreaded "cold snap"!!)
Happy Running All J
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Comments (7)
Nick 'You don't have to do speedwork if you don't want to. And if it causes you to be injured then maybe it's better that you don't. But if you want to try something not too taxing, then perhaps you could try a session of one minute fast, one minute slow. Something like that?' added 23rd Jan 2012
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Jenny1961 'I have done relatively little formal speedwork since I've been running Helen and I think that's why I've remained relatively injury free. However that doesn't mean I don't pay attention to pace- I do push the pace a little in some of the morning runs as I do think I haven't reached my full potential yet. However I don't go flat out in training as I'm pretty sure that wil lead to injury and I would rather sacrifice a little bit of speed than have a long lay off from running! However, as you are running consistently I am sure your legs could cope with you upping the tempo a bit in one or two of your runs' added 23rd Jan 2012
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Petecw29 'Helen, why not do an unstructured fartlek session (Fartlek is Swedish for 'speed play') During a run pick up your pace for half a mile - maybe only 30s a mile faster than your steady pace then reduce speed again to recover for half a mile before upping the speed again. Do this a few times but not until exhaustion and make sure you have around a mile at the end to reduce your pace for a warm down. That way you should be able avoid injury by increasing speed gradually.' added 23rd Jan 2012
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Firefly123 'Great running, Helen. Some fartlek sessions, like Pete suggests sounds like a good plan to me, but I wouldn't feel bad about not doing speed work. After all, we need to enjoy this running malarkey. ' added 23rd Jan 2012
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Petecw29 'But can't we enjoy speed work Sue?' added 24th Jan 2012
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Johnf 'Good weeks running, even with no speed work. No doubt it can be more likely to cause injury so Pete's plan is good to build it slowly as you incorporate it into your schedule.' added 24th Jan 2012
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Petecw29 'Hi Helen how's things? Not heard from you for a while.' added 10th Feb 2012
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