Training by Effort

On a run a couple weeks ago I was contemplating my training and some of the workouts I wanted to do during my half marathon specific phase. When planning workouts I have a couple of primary considerations which take in to account many subcategories. For example a primary consideration being what type of training stimulus you want to achieve. The subcategories being the general planning of a workout all revolving around how to achieve that training stimulus: 1) Do you want to do a long tempo, a fartlek, hills, intervals or repeats? 2) What should the volume of the workout/amount of reps or sets be? 3)How much recovery do you want between sets or intervals? - and so on....

When I was planning the workouts I was always taking in to consideration the pace which I wanted to be doing them at. I have a goal of running 65 minutes in the Shamrock Half, so naturally my goal pace is 4:57.x per mile for my half marathon specific workouts. As my brain kept churning through my training plans one idea surfaced - why train at a specific pace? At this point in my training as I'm starting up my specific phase goal pace may be a bit tough to maintain. Over time the goal is of course to make it manageable and comfortable. Yet, what if, through a couple weeks or months of training my body has adapted to that stimulus (and is ready for another)? Then, by continually running 4:57 pace for my key workouts I'm almost assuring myself of a couple things: 1) Come race day I should be confident in my ability to run 65 minutes...but...2) I can also be confident that I won't exactly have a "breakthrough" race, as I haven't necessarily been training myself for the possibility.

Now this isn't to say that you can't have breakthrough races while doing paced workouts, I just believe it's a bit more rare. The one thing I miss about being a young, high school runner is that I was naive and ignorant about my training and ability. I am of course still a bit naive, I always will be...you can always learn something new. Yet, I have lost a bit of that ignorance in training which can, sometimes, be bliss. I never did paced workouts in high school, I just ran hard during workouts and that was that. This ignorance led to some breakthrough races one being a 4:23 mile senior year with my previous personal best having been 4:32. This is what I think training by a specific race effort can bring. You have that little bit of ignorance which can be a savior in injury prevention or a step forward in a race that meets an aspiration (when I set goals I always set an expectation and an aspiration). The reason I say it can prevent injuries is because some people have the habit of training at a level above where they should be at the moment. Now, I'm not saying one shouldn't train at a higher level than their current fitness (that's how you improve...). Yet, sometimes people get a little carried away. The name of the game in long distance running is consistency, and that comes from intelligent training through listening to your body. In terms of exceeding expectations (and meeting aspirations) sometimes training at a goal pace can put you in a bit of a rut. Or, as I said before it could cause a plateau in training if your body has already adapted to the stimulus.

This also makes workouts a bit more enjoyable since you aren't as stressed if you aren't hitting times. After all, even if you can't hit paces during a workout it doesn't mean that you didn't achieve the training stimulus you were going for. It's always important to consider the human factor. Some days running one pace can be quite comfortable, while other days it can be quite the opposite. On those days when it's difficult to run a certain pace the purpose of the workout may be ruined if you overly tax yourself to do so. Anyways, those are my thoughts for now. These ideas may be a bit scattered since I was typing as thoughts came to me, so if anyone has a question about anything I said let me know.