Comment on My Training Structure.

A friend emailed me to point out that my training seemed to have lost structure of late- I'm not doing the alternating high/low volume weeks I was doing in April and May. Whilst I missed about three weeks quality training with the flu, this is an accurrate comment, so I thought I'd copy my reply here, and I'll welcome any further comments or observations. bear in mind my goal is sub 24 hours at the Glasshouse 100 miler in September (three finishes so far for me- 2002 in 27.39, 2003 in 27.11, 2004 in 28.56) and then the next goal is a good run at Coast-Kosciuszko (245K) in December.....


The main reason my training has lost structure is because at the moment I'm doing a "big one" each month- May rogaine, June rogaine, July 100K, etc. It takes a couple of weeks to get over each of these and by then the next big one is only a couple of weeks away, so not much room for a high mileage week. I'm happy to have all non-recovery weeks at around 100K total, rather than the 170s I was reaching in April.

As long as I do some quality each week- eg I'll do a cross country race this weekend, and based on that will resume speedwork next week.

In previous years I avoided doing many overly long runs and just did a 50K bush run each weekend- eg in the six months leading to Western States in 2003 the longest run I did was Bogong-Hotham, which took 10 hours, after that my next longest run would have been around six and a half hours. And off that training regimen I still didn't put together good "back halfs" of my long ultras (faded badly at Glasshouse 2003 and 2004 and at WS) so this year it's fewer long runs for me, but the long runs I do are much longer than before. Maybe it'll work.