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Reader’s Question: Master’s Running, adjusting the program.

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Below is a question from our Hanson’s Coaching Community Page on Facebook. This week’s question asks about Masters running and ways to adjust the schedule.

Don S: How can non-elite-runners in their late fifties adapt the beginner program in the book to a five day a week marathon program after training with a three day week marathon program for several years. Also can you reduce some of the tempo run mileage if you’re just trying to complete the marathon in 4:30?

Let’s tackle the first part of this, which is going from 3 days to five days per week of running. Personally, I think that’s great! Ordinarily, I’d like to see you try to get to that 6th day of running but I won’t push on that right now.

After reading the questions, my takeaway is that the primary concern is the amount of recovery with the increase in volume.What will propose below can accommodate both of your questions. As I mentioned, I think we can “spread” things out a little bit without sacrificing performance. There’s a couple of ways to spread the schedule out and I discuss in Hansons Marathon Method in the “modifying the schedule” section, but will discuss another approach that I took this spring.

The Alternator:

The basic premise of this schedule is to alternate your major weekend run with either a straight up long run or with a longer tempo. I typically do it with a 6 day per week program but I think you could easily adjust to a 5 day program.

Early Segment
MondayEasy
TuesdaySOS
WednesdayOff
ThursdayLonger easy ( 6- 10 miles )
FridayEasy
SaturdayLong or Tempo
SundayOff / Easy
Later Segment
Monday – WedsSame as above
ThursdayMedium Long: 10-12 miles
FridayEasy
SaturdayLong or Long Tempo
SundayOff / Easy

 

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A reader’s question

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I get a lot of emails and do my best to answer as many as I can. Luckily for all of us, our readers ask great questions that allow me to write a quick blog post that can help out many runners at once! This morning, I woke up, made coffee and sat down to a full inbox. One reader, Rico, made a comment on one of our blog posts. It was in a spot that will probably get buried, so I thought it made a great excuse to write a quick note here.

Ok, so his question is basically this- “I’m 14 weeks into the marathon schedule and have my last 16 miler this weekend. I also have the Gate River 15k. Not sure what to do?” In this case, I know the 15k is on Saturday morning and if he’s kept the schedule, the 16 miler is on Sunday. Oh snap! For Rico, the 15k is a good race distance because it’s a good distance for a tempo replacement. However, the long run is super important. That is quite the predicament…

There’s a couple of ways to approach to approach this. Let’s explore our options.

  • Don’t do the race. It’s as simple as that. Just stick to the schedule. I know that’s not you wanted to hear, but you have to consider it. How important is the marathon? How important is this race? Answering that question can make your decision for you.
  • Run the race as a tempo and not do the long run. This is not desirable either because you do three 16 mile long runs while doing a tempo of some distance every week. At this point, what’s going to give you a better training benefit?
  • Do the race as part of the long run. In this case, the race is 9.3 miles (15k), so there is about 7 miles to account for. I think if you are going to run the race, then this is the least evil of the options. I would approach by warming up 3-5 miles and cooling down 2-4 miles to achieve the 16 miles.
    • The caveat here is that you should run easy on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday at mileage high enough to keep the overall total close to what it would have been without adjustments.

These are the three most viable options. At the end of the day, decide what is most important to you, what your training needs the most, and how you are going to be able to move forward with the schedule. Hope this helps!

 

-Luke