Know your weaknesses - and then attack them!
By now just about everyone who has a spring target race on the calendar is into their training cycle. If you’re prepping for Boston and on a 16-week plan you’ve been at it for a month now. In my case, I’m working towards Cherry Blossom Ten Miler on April 7 and am only in Week 2 of my 12-week buildup.
The early weeks of a training plan are largely about making sure your base is solid and adequate for the race-specific training that will come later.
So what’s a base? A lot of runners would say it’s just mileage and aerobic fitness, and to be sure that’s a big part of it. But I also think it’s when you make yourself as well rounded a runner as you can be. And that means knowing what you’re good at...and not so good at. Simply put, now is a great time to identify those weaknesses and address them. You may not entirely eliminate them before the race specific phase of your training begins, but at least you can tame them a little, or feel a little less threatened by them.
So what can you do, without taxing your existing training program too much? Well here are some examples for attacking weak areas even while training for a specific race:
Core Strength: Hopefully you’re already doing some core strength work to supplement your running, and in doing that you’ve noticed what exercises make you struggle more. Don’t avoid those exercises, do extra reps of them, and make sure you are doing them better, with proper form. I use videos on McMillan Running and on the Life Time Fitness app to check myself for use of the proper technique.
Speed: At the end of one of your easy runs, tack on some 100 striders, 4-8 of them. Work on building up speed with each strider. The first one can be at about 70% effort but build up to 90-95% by the last strider.
Hills: Similar to addressing speed issues, you can do your striders on a short hill, and work on increasing speed. Another thing you can do, which I enjoy, is during an easy run throw in some short 15-second hill sprints; go as fast as you can up the hill, then revert to your easy pace. On a short interval day, it’s also perfectly fine to replace, for example, 200s, with 60-second hill repeats. Do the same number of reps as the track session prescribed, at tempo effort instead of the 5k or faster effort most likely prescribed.
Endurance: The fix here is simple enough. Just add an extra mile to your easy runs! Also focus on sustained effort on your cross training days.
Feeling “ready” to run: I hear this one a lot, especially from newer runners. They start their run and everything feels off. The legs are tight, the heart is racing. Ugh. Try doing some dynamic warmups before hand: some skips, knee lifts, butt kicks, even jumping jacks; a few minutes of these go a long way in getting the heart working and the body primed for your workout.
There is no need to fear your weaknesses, or to let them hold you back. Recognize them, and then go after them with little tweaks such as these! Then you will be really primed for the big days that lie ahead.
