Nobody answered yet, but that was my question too. As someone who wants to get into long distances, I am finding a bit of a gap between 0 and marathon/trail/big vert. Because there is nothing here for us, I have decided to first do a Hal Higdon half marathon plan and then come back to UA next year to see if there something for me.
Michelle
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ParticipantMichelle on May 10, 2022 at 3:00 am · in reply to: Adapting beginner marathon plan for a half marathon #66944Participant
For me its definitely Stacy Sims: Roar
I am a HUGE believer in “Women are not small men” approaches. So she’s one of my faves. Love to science behind it all and I have interacted with some of her team quite a bit for questions on the app Wild.ai – her team reminds me quite a bit of our coaches here – super supportive and tonnes of information.
Would love to see the authors of Uphill Athlete books and Stacy Sims collaborate on a book for women 🙂 (if they do, i want credit, haha)
Participantok great! Will this work even if i had rearranged my original training plan? Will it then be the original version of it?
In the meantime, i will start just following the old week one, but not sync it until I can clean it up (because my TP now says that its Week 5)
ParticipantThe divers are killing me. I am trying to do them properly, but i just don’t have that kind of control yet. Not elbow pain, but my wrists are weak.
I don’t know what the official answer is, I would say if you have been doing it fully, with no skipping (i.e. there are some things where i can’t do the number of reps Neal is doing, or i know the form is not great), and aren’t sore at all the next day, its time to level up.
ParticipantHi Maya,
My Training Peaks still says “Upgrade” and that I only have 7 days left of the trial. Is this related to you guys upgrading us to premium?ParticipantI have found some english programs, but either in Chamonix, Zermatt or Garmisch – and they are typically longer (more stretched out over say a week) and more expensive than the German ones. I will probably end up with the Mammut Alpine School one, but I have time to decide – and who knows with covid these days. I have lots of smaller mini goals in the meantime. Looking forward to hearing how your goals evolve by the end of all this!
ParticipantHayley, I am similar to you. I can only tell you that it was only this winter that some real plans started to formulate, as I started realizing how much we have in the Alps to capitalize off of (ie alpine groups, courses, guiding, etc). Like you, I have built up a lot of climbing skills before, but haven’t had the confidence to say “ok, I am just going to go solo this 4000 m” (and thats a good thing).
I did start off pretty simple, and I sort of fell into it as people from my Track and Field club do a lot of yearly hikes (not in the alps though), and from those we started talking about higher mountains we wanted to do. My very first one was Bunderalp, and I actually DID do it alone, but there’s nothing technical involved – it just lit a fire under me to find more like it that I would like. I spend a lot of my early morning coffee time looking at websites like bergwelten to find interesting routes, but so far we haven’t done anything that involves anything too technical.
In order to maybe go to the next level, I thought, I need to break it down into smaller pieces. So right now I am working on conditioning (through this program), and my husband and I planned out another big hike (3500 m) for May. Then I want to sign on to one of the beginner mountaineering courses, maybe something like this: https://www.mammutalpineschool.com/en/fuer-frauen-hochtour-fuer-einsteigerinnen-breithorn-4164-m/ (or one in english, because I am a native english speaker). I also have my eyes on a via ferrata course. I figure with enough training, maybe I can build up some confidence.
So I guess thats basically my answer: obsessively looking for peaks I can do without equipment/crampons/etc online, and trying to hook up with people who can show me the way via the courses.
That’s mountaineering stuff though – I also want to get more into mountain/trail running and there’s SO many resources for inspiration in the Alps, races, etc, etc that I am still sifting through it.
ParticipantHi Sheila, I have nothing helpful to contribute, I just wanted to say I have similar. I managed to get my Pa:Hr positve, but JUST barely, it is hovering around 0. And I can’t physically go faster right now because I am coming off a 3 month break due to a surgery. I did go out and buy a chest strap (Polar H10) and maybe I should have saved my money because I got the exact same results.
Does 160 feel good to you for an hour? I personally thought, ok, I can do this for an hour, its comfortable, and I can talk, but I am not sure i could do it FOR hours, which is what running at under our AeT should be (or maybe that is when we start building volume, not sure). So thats going to be a question for the coaches. Because of that, i purposely ran at an even slower pace, so I could get a HR of 148 – but it felt the exact same.
Like i said, not helpful for you, but just wanted to tell you I have a similar issue. Right now I am chalking it up to: I am well adapted to run at a higher HR due to training i did last year, but just out of shape (muscle wise) after my break so still slower than I was last year at lower HRs.
ParticipantHi Lauren, yes there is. I shifted my entire plan ahead by one day.
How you do it: in your training peaks calendar, Hover over the grey header bar of the first day you want to shift; the grey bar that has the day number on it (i.e 10 for the 10th of january). When you do that, three lines show up in that bar. Click on those three lines (but not the options that show up, just the lines). Then select the LAST day of the range you want to shift. You will see the entire range is selected and you have the same options, one of which is “SHIFT”. Click on that, and select “-2 days” to move everything up two days.
Maybe in your browser it’s easy to do the whole set at once. But I would try just one week first, so that you can make sure it’s all highlighted and to see how it works. Then, do the rest. On my browser, it seemed to lag when I scrolled and tried to select the entire 12 weeks and I wanted to make sure i had everything, so I did it in small batches (2-3 weeks selected, shift by -1 day to move them up, then go further in the calendar and grab the next 2-3 weeks and move those up, and so on).
If you don’t want to shift your ENTIRE calendar like I did, then you can also just switch your day off (ie. maybe your sunday with your friday). To do this, you can just drag and drop workouts from one day to another – i.e. drag “DAY OFF” and “OPTIONAL YOGA” to Friday, and drag “AEROBIC DAY” and “MOBLITY” to Sunday.
ParticipantThanks Maya! Your answer definitely helps me wrap my head around it. I should add that yeah, at even HR 145-150, I am still pretty slow for an hours’ run (i am coming from more of a sprinting background so its been a big transition the last 2 years trying to slow down so I don’t burn out, build volume, increase endurance, etc). So i do look forward to more discussions and seeing this improve!
ParticipantGreat Idea!
I am a Canadian living in Germany on the French border with my Swiss husband. Career wise, I am a hydrogeologist. In university (long ago), I was a varsity cross country runner, cross country skier and sport climber, so endurance and altitude was never something I really ever focussed on. And from flatland Canada (northern ontario), mountains were not a big part of my life until recently. 20 years later after a long pause and 2 kids, my husband and I started eyeing the Alps and aiming for easy treks/peaks. I have definitely noticed that my endurance going up needs a lot of work and that’s basically why I am here.
My goals are not very lofty at the moment, since I am really new to alpine sports, we would like to do at least one 4000 m in the alps this spring and see how that goes. Another goal is a multi-day cross country ski trip in the Black Forest (where we live). I am also interested in mountain running (i.e. Rosenlaui to Dossen) but one step at a time – I still need to build a lot more volume before I can even think about it.
Aside from that, i also love swimming, am on my local senior swim team and obsessively play tennis between everything else. When covid hit in Spring of 2020 and life pretty much halted in Europe, I started to really reflect on what made me the happiest – mountains, water and forest. So here I am!
ParticipantThanks Maya! I have another question about the threshold number but i am not sure if i should ask it here, ask it in a zoom meeting or start my own topic. It’s basically about a realization I had – I seem to have a higher threshold (top of zone 2) than what the MAF method gives me, by far – I am 48 so that would be 132. But i ran for 60 mins yesterday and slowed my pace down to try to get to 142, but still only have a drift of 1%. I did this test last year, and I think it came to 148-150, which is a threshold where i can still have conversations when i run.
Now, I always thought my high HR was an indicator that i was out of shape. But then i read somewhere on here that “our goal is to increase our threshold HR”. Does that mean since i can run at 150 for an hour and not have a drift of 5%, that I am not doing as bad as I thought I was? Wouldn’t it be better for my endurance to be able to run the same pace with a LOWER heart rate? Or is my brain completely screwed up and the goal isn’t to have a lower heart rate, but to be able to adapt to a higher one?
This doesn’t need to be answered here, but I just wanted to lay my thoughts on the table so we can discuss it somewhere, sometime. I know we shouldn’t compare, but I do get jealous of the people in my running club who are running along with me at a HR of 125 or something crazy low and I always had it in my head that thats what I should be aiming for before adding on more volume. (and its why i signed up!)
ParticipantDunbar, if you mean for the zoom meeting, it is in this forum under the subject “Zoom meeting”
ParticipantHi Sheila,
I think it means you are running below your threshold and could try again by bumping up your heart rate another 5 bpm and see what happens. Caveat for anyone else reading this: this can also happen, as i understand it, if you start your 60 mins before you are adequately warmed up – but I also selected a range in your chart to disclude the data from the beginning, and it was still negative, so this doesn’t appear to be the case.Mathematically, it means that overall your heart rate decreased slightly while your pace improved. You did maintain it really well, but it did decrease. The conclusion for me then is that you can stand to run with a bit more increased heart rate and get it more towards between 1-3%.
I hope the coaches will chime in and say if im wrong or right because I am also learning – and maybe have a bit more specific advice about how much you could bump up your heart rate, should you want to repeat it. Mine was also only at 1%, so i am going to try again tomorrow and see if i can get it closer to 3.
ParticipantThank you!