Here’s what your running probably looks like;
You mentally sign up for an event but don’t actually sign up because that’s a bit too much commitment upfront.
Start training… without a plan. Or try some free generic plan from Garmin or whoever.
Pretty much ignore the plan and run everything steady because easy running feels like a waste of time and looks lame on Strava.
If you do decide to do some intervals, you smash the first few and then struggle through the last couple or just give up.
You miss a few days of training because you haven’t committed to a training plan to help you plan ahead, so family, work, travel and life fill the spare time you hoped you’d have for running.
All of your training and race paces from 10km – marathon begin to merge into this small bandwidth because you haven’t been training for fitness or speed. You’ve just been sending it when you had the chance.
Race day finally arrives, and you’re totally unsure if you can achieve the arbitrary finish time you’ve chosen for yourself.
After the race, you know you could have run faster, but you’re not really sure how.
Can you relate? Sweet, then sign-up for my running masterclass to optimise your training, and keep reading because polarised training will give your running a massive boost.
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80/20 Running
The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of your training be aerobic in nature, zone 2 or below, and 20% should be anaerobic or ‘hard’, zone 4 and 5. The 80/20 rule is not applied to each training session but should be looked at by ‘time in zone’ over a week or month.
I won’t get into the example here, but I’ll break it down within the podcast and on YouTube.
Why 80/20 polarisation will help your running
You’ve likely been grey zone training, lacking a long-term progress pathway and purpose to your workouts.
When you train in the grey zone, you’re not training for aerobic fitness, and you’re not training for speed. Subsequently, you end up stuck in a rut.
By simply adding clear objectives and boundaries to your training runs, you can begin to break through your training rut and make real progress in your running.
80% of your running needs to be EASY or SLOW. Running slow allows you to build mitochondria and add extra blood vessels (capillarisation) around your muscles which helps build your aerobic base. Best of all, running slowly reduces injury risk and enhances recovery time between runs. Don’t believe me, have a close look at the pro runners you follow on Strava and work out how much slower than their marathon pace they’re running.
20% needs to be fast. Running 80% of your training slowly means you’ll be fresh to run the remaining 20% FAST. I’m talking 10km pace or faster. High-intensity anaerobic training has the compound benefit of maximally stimulating your physiological system and muscular-skeletal system resulting in improved oxygen kinetics, running power, and economy. However, interval training is highly stressful, so we can’t do it all the time. Otherwise, we will end up tired, injured, and right back where we started.
An example week of 80/20 running would be;
1-2x Easy-Aerobic Runs, Zone 1 -2, 30 – 60min
1x Easy-Aerobic Run, Zone 1-2, 60 – 90min
1x Fartlek Run, 2-3x (10x 30-60sec on, 30-60sec off) | 5min between, 10-15min warm up & cool down.
1x VO2max Run, 5-8x 1km @ Zone 5-6 pace/power | 2-3min recovery, 10-20min warm-up & cool down.
Where 80/20 running WON’T work.
Preparation and race phase half marathon & marathon training. I use a six-phase training system broken down into Base 1, 2, 3, Build, Prep, and Race. The prep and race phases typically start 8 weeks out from race day. Half marathons and marathons are run between 90 & 100% of your lactate (anaerobic) threshold. I.e Zone 3 – 4. Within the last two months of your training, you should be doing at least one long race-specific workout, meaning a large amount of your training will be within zone 3. Not fast, not slow, just tempo pace. BUT, as long as your zone 3 training has a specific purpose, it can be productive.
How You Measure Your 80/20 Makes a Big Difference
Heart Rate
Heart rate is often slow to react to changes in intensity, so your heart rate ‘time in zones’ will never accurately reflect your time in zones 4+. For example, your heart rate might take 5min to reach zone 4 during a set of 1min on – 1min off intervals. After 5min, you would have already done 3 reps. That means your heart rate ‘time in zones’ will under-represent your time in Zone 4+. However, if you’re running your easy-aerobic runs too hard, you’ll end up with a big chunk of your training time in zone 3, regardless of your pace or power.
Pace
Pace is mostly good, but if you live in a hilly area or run a lot of trails, your pace will be relatively slow. The same goes for if you’ve been doing a training block with a lot of hill reps. You may put in a zone 4 effort, but your pace will only register as zone 2 or 3 since you’re running relatively slowly uphill. However, you’ll get a solid overview of training distribution on average when all your workouts are considered over a few weeks.
Power
Running power is the best of the lot because it’s not affected by elevation and is relatively accurate on trails when compared to pace. Most watches have natively integrated running power, so ensure you have your threshold and zones set up correctly. https://link.drwillo.com/calculators
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Until next time.
Dr Will
#fasterwithdata
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