[vik.waghray]

Over the past 2-3 months, I’ve been training for a 50k trail race, which was set to take place yesterday. Due to wildfires in the area (I live in CA) and poor air quality, however, the race was cancelled. I found a different 50k happening in about a month that I could do instead, and was wondering if you guys have any advice for how to best extend “peak-level” fitness for another few weeks? So far, my training has revolved around 3 weekday runs of varying length and 1 long run over weekends.

Topic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on November 11, 2018 at 8:52 pm #14397

I’d suggest to going back to the type of training you were doing right before you did your taper. You can get 2-3 weeks of more base training and intensity followed by 1-2 weeks of taper into the race. You’ve probably been tapering so feeling very good. This could be a good opportunity to lay down one bug volume week now, then a 10-14 days with more of a focus on intensity before tapering.

Scott

[vik.waghray]

vik.waghray on November 12, 2018 at 3:30 pm #14406

Thanks for the help, Scott. For the intensity phase, what level of frequency would you recommend? I had been doing 2-3 minute z3 hill repeats once a week prior to my taper, and found that they helped a decent amount. By focusing on z1 training the past year, I feel like I have come a long way in digging myself out of an ADS state but still feel wary about introducing too much intensity, too quickly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on November 12, 2018 at 8:20 pm #14412

When you add intensity be sure you do not have to drop the volume more than 3-5% in a given training block. In other words; add intensity don’t substitute it for base aerobic work. Zone 3 work is normally added either as continuous efforts of 20-60 minutes or in interval method doing long repetitions of 10-20 min. With your 2-3 minute reps you’ll need to do quite a fe of them to get the volume up to 20-30 minutes in a session which would be a good amount for a typical 50km training plan. I do not recommend you bump your training volume in this period. Stick with the intensity volume you’ve become accustomed to recently. Adding too much now will drive you down into fatigue too much. We normally recommend building to about 1 hours of Z3 per week before starting to substitute Z4 for some of the Z3 work.

Scott

[vik.waghray]

vik.waghray on November 13, 2018 at 12:10 pm #14423

Got it, thanks a lot Scott!