During this time of uncertainty, it can be tough to have a plan. Many of us have been training a little aimlessly, myself included. It’s been hard to have a plan when there isn’t a definite end point to that plan.
So, today, I want to give you the 30,000 foot view of training and work it down to a single day.
That way, even despite the uncertainty now, we can ensure that we are still making progress towards our long term goals.
Admittedly, my 2020 was as haphazard as many of you experienced. I ran the Houston Marathon in late January as a last ditch effort to qualify for the Olympic Trials. I was tired and had spent too much time chasing the standard over the last couple years. I was tired. It didn’t go well and so I just needed a long break. Besides, I had all of 2020 to race, right! Needless to say, that wasn’t the case. Like many of you, I started training for a race and in self denial just pushed forward because races said they were just postponing, right? So there was a lot of starting and stopping. Finally, I “committed” to racing two 5k’s. I did find a race around Halloween and then did a 5k time trial with my workout buddy Alex Wilson. However, when I say committed, I mean I ran every day, but there was no concrete plan. Did I make progress towards 2021? Well, I guess it was better than a complete lockdown on my training, but I would say it was more like treading water.
Ultimately, I did get a bit of a kick in the backside though.
My time trial on the track woke me up a little bit.
On the one hand, I didn’t reach a loose goal of breaking 15:00 in the 5k. On the other hand, I came pretty close at 15:20 with about 80% of the training that I really wanted to do (in the plan I had in my head). So, while it could have been a time to just say “oh well, it’s 2020” I became motivated again. If I was that close with the minimum, I can get there with an actual plan! And so, this post is a culmination of that realization. I’ll work through my big picture view and how that relates to cycles of training.
The preface:
I turn 40 in April of 2021, so that is essentially an opening to a whole new career for the next few years as a competitive masters runner. Personally, I also have some feelings about how long we can be competitive and even improve into our 40’s, so I want to put those thoughts to the test on myself. The Big Picture goal for me is to qualify for the US Olympic Trials again while in my 40’s. It’s a fun goal for me and I am blessed with the time to train hard.
So, the question is, how do we get there?
Unfortunately, what many of us simply answer with “train harder.” Maybe, but sometimes it’s other things and we could talk about those things forever. For today though, I want to talk about mapping the timeline out.
Starting small, we have the microcycle.
Typically, this a 7 day cycle, or your weekly training. However, something we have been doing and has gained popularity, is extending this out to a 10-14 day cycle. I personally find the advantage of this as I feel like we try to cram a lot in over 7 days when it might not be as beneficial as making sure you can recover sufficiently between workouts. Regardless, with a microcycle, you are looking at a 7 to 14 day cycle. The key here is that no single workout in this cycle will provide significant increases in fitness, but a bunch of them done consistently, will promote the specific adaptations we trained for.
This leads us to the mesocycle.
This is a cycle of 4-8 weeks. While the microcycles individually don’t increase fitness, a bunch of them added up will. This is what we’ll often refer to as a training block- a block of specific work to elicit specific results/adaptations. If you follow the HMM, you’ll see these as the base, speed, strength blocks. How long you make these depends on several fact...