[emilykatemarchant]

emilykatemarchant on July 1, 2019 at 1:15 pm · in reply to: Encouragement for a trail beginner! #24290

Hello Scott and Tonya,

Thank you for your encouraging responses. I’m certainly happy to put the time in and know that this is exactly the point you make in your books, but the support makes all the difference and it’s good to know that it’s normal to have to work for weeks and weeks before you start to see changes. I am being very careful this time around about injury, having gone through the typical overtraining/injury/long lay-off cycle every time I’ve trained for something before, so I wonder if a good compromise would be to stick to the conservative increases in running volume but add some time on the step machine / bike to put more time in at AeT and improve a little faster.

Given that I have a marathon coming up in October with 3000ft of ascent, I’ve also been switching between hikes and flat long runs to make sure I’ve got some climbing in my legs. Sometimes that means my HR is above AeT by 5-10bpm for portions of the time – should I use those as my ‘tempo’ efforts, or is it best to ease off on the intensity and do my tempo efforts as runs? Maybe it doesn’t matter too much and I’m just overthinking it!

Thanks again!

[emilykatemarchant]

emilykatemarchant on May 7, 2019 at 8:15 am · in reply to: 24 week marathon training #21637

Thank you Scott! Really appreciate the help.

[emilykatemarchant]

emilykatemarchant on May 5, 2019 at 4:38 pm · in reply to: 24 week marathon training #21515

Hi Scott,

Thank you so much for the reply. This reassures me about focusing on my running this year – and then I’ll probably try doing the more mountaineering-focused training after the marathon. I like your idea of doing some weighted carries as the marathon I’ve chosen is fairly hilly.

Thinking it through, I think part of the reason I was keen to keep strength training is because I’ve been a little injury prone in the past, specifically IT bands and I think I was vaguely assuming strength training would help with that – but I’m hoping the slow ramp-up built into the plan, getting a fair number of miles on trail rather than road, and focusing on foam rolling will help this time around.

One question I have – is there a reason that the functional runner stops at some point fairly early in the program?

Thanks again for your help!
Emily