[Neil]

After a 4-week transition and just starting week one of base I realize my training hours are out of kilter. I’m aiming for 16-17 hours total in this first week which suggests a 4-5 hour hike in Z1 is on the menu. However, what I typically do (whether I’m in training or not) is 1-2 hikes per week (2-3 hour drive from my home to the Dacks) in Z1-2 with peaks in Z3. A short hike is 8 hours and 12-14 hours is not uncommon. Therefore, a small week would be 8 hours and a big week as much as 20 (2 days in a row).
If I were to try and balance my hours out I would be doing one very long Z2 per week (I instead am currently breaking it across 2 different days) plus 2 very long sessions in the gym with max strength.
It seems counter-intuitive for me to decrease my hiking time while training for a 3-month long hiking project. I wonder though what the impact of all this hiking will have on my progression as I go through the regime. Left to my own resources I would continue hiking the way I always have and let the Z2, Z3 max strength and ME workout times “catch-up” to the hiking times as the weeks go by.

Topic

[Mariner_9]

Mariner_9 on July 21, 2017 at 8:03 am #5679

Hi Neil,

re: “plus 2 very long sessions in the gym with max strength” – do you mean 2 very long Max Strength sessions?

[Neil]

Neil on July 21, 2017 at 9:09 am #5681

Yeah, that’s what I meant. One very long max strength session. Not that I would actually do much more more than about 90 minutes, including rests.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on July 24, 2017 at 1:26 pm #5705

Neil:

I’m afraid I can’t tell what you are asking for in your post? But, I’ll take a stab at answering what I think you might be asking about. The training volume when laying out your base period should only include the aerobic training and not the strength training. If you are planning on 16-17 hours for week 1 of your base period this would include the longer Z1-2 hikes and any other shorter Z2 or Z3 workouts mid week. The strength would come in top of that. The reason for this is that time is not a good way to account for strength training. This is especially true with Max Strength which involves a lot of resting time.

Anyway, if I am way off target can you please try restating this in simpler terms so I can grasp the question being asked?

Thanks,
Scott

[Neil]

Neil on July 24, 2017 at 3:40 pm #5707

Sorry about that. Looks like I made something simple complicated!

My goal was to start week one of base with 15 hours total. 20% of that would be three hours in Zone 2. That leaves 12 for zone 1/recovery. However I went hiking twice during the week for a total of 18 hours. This dropped the percentage of time in Z2 to below 20%.

This pattern could play out throughout most of my base period. (Especially for weeks 3 and 4 because my wife are going on a hiking holiday.) My feeling is that if I increased the Zone 2 and then the Zone 3 weekly hours to “fit” percentage-wise into the total hours I will wear myself down.

My question was whether I should hold my Z2 & 3 times down to less than 20% of my total aerobic training time because I hike so much.

Disregarding time in the gym in tallying up the weekly totals makes it all a lot simpler (and makes more sense). I was basing my times on the chart on p. 247 which includes the gym time. This raises another question for me. For weeks one through four what percent of aerobic training time is to be spent in each of Zones 1 and 2? Intuitively, I would go with 80-20.

Thanks and I hope this time it’s clearer!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on July 29, 2017 at 7:50 pm #5748

Neil:

Yes, you need to cut back a bit on the % of Z3 work when you are increasing overall training volume by so much. You can’t go wrong with adding more Z1 so do that to fill out volume.

Sorry I didn’t understand before. The book has a typo regarding calculating hours. Next printing we’ll fix it. Sorry.

Scott

[Alan Russell]

Alan Russell on September 21, 2017 at 5:14 pm #6156

I’m a bit confused about how to calculate an appropriate starting volume for training after reading this, though the point about time not being a good way to measure strength training makes sense. It says on page 187 that the calculated time includes strength training, but is this a mistake?