extending fitness | Uphill Athlete

extending fitness

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  • #14395
    vik.waghray
    Participant

    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.

Posted In: Mountain Running

  • Inactive
    Anonymous on #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

    Participant
    vik.waghray on #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.

    Inactive
    Anonymous on #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

    Participant
    vik.waghray on #14423

    Got it, thanks a lot Scott!

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