I’ve enlisted the services of Ultra Running Coaches William Sichel and Shaun Brassfield-Thorpe (UltraFitnessTraining.com) to prepare myself for the McNaughton 200 mile trail race this May in VT. In an email discussion with these guys I posed the question about how many miles I should be running each week this far out from the race, and what the progression will look like as the weeks pass and race day approaches.
I’ve always intellectually known that weekly mileage is a poor judge of fitness and training, but sometimes emotionally I forget this and use it as an easy benchmark to judge my training. I’ve described this to others in the past and heard it from others as well. Shaun and William did an amazing job of going into the idea of quantity of miles versus quality of miles. The below is some email responses from these guys about quantity vs quality, race preparation and the overall principle of training for a multiday race. I do want to qualify that these were emails response to me directly and not a post that would go up on their website that they would spend a lot of time editing and tweaking. They did an off the cuff response and I decided it was so good I asked to post it on my site. They graciously agreed. The only editing I did was to remove non pertinent info to the topic, stuff that applied directly to my training but doesn’t matter to anyone else.
Shaun Brassfield-Thorpe:
“As to a weekly mileage figure, this is a question we are often asked by clients and it is always a bit difficult to answer, basically because with the way we approach training this is kind of the “wrong” question (but we do understand why you are asking and why you need to have at least some idea).
To try and explain why it is in many ways the “wrong” question, we’ll send you something on the concepts of Intensity, Duration and Frequency. Hopefully this will help you understand our approach a bit better and also make you view your training in a different light, but just to begin to raise such questions, imagine for a moment we were not talking about running but instead some other type of training. I’ll use lifting weights as an example, just because it gives a good and simple contrast. Obviously on the one hand there is a world of difference between running and say lifting weights, but they are both physical activities that work the body and in this respect they often have more similarities than differences, at least more than most people think. So, let’s imagine someone asks a similar question from a weight training context. For example this might cover such questions as :
1) How many hours should I spend in the gym each week?
or
2) What is the total weight I should aim to lift each week?
or
3) What is the total number of repetitions I should perform each week?
At first glance these can seem like reasonable questions, but basically they are the “wrong” type of questions for most people. There’s nothing wrong with asking/working out such things either at one (extremely basic) extreme e.g. just for casual interest, or at the other (rather advanced) extreme e.g. if attempting to calculate a total training load to assess fatigue resistance, but for most people these really aren’t the most relevant factors in their training. I’ll try and explain why.
1) How many hours should I spend in the gym each week?
Well, one could reply “as few as possible while still fitting in your full weight programme” but it is a bit hard to give an actual precise total, and this isn’t really the best guide anyway. What happens if you increase the amount of time resting between sets? Possibly this will allow you to handle more weight, which may be a very good thing, and will also add to the total amount of time spent in the gym, even if the amount of time spent actually lifting stays the same. But then again, taking more rest time between sets while reducing the weight on the bar would also add to time in the gym, although this would probably be making the session rather easier. But for example leaving the weight the same but reducing rest time between sets might reduce time in the gym yet make the session harder. While on the whole it is a good idea to aim to complete a workout in the minimum time possible without negatively effecting performance, adding or subtracting say 30 mins of time in the gym isn’t usually the main issue – it is rather more relevant to look at what exercises are being performed, with what weight, and for how many sets and reps etc. Basically saying “I spent an extra hour in the gym this week so I must be improving” is false logic.
2) What is the total weight I should aim to lift each week?
Again this is kind of the “wrong” question. Sometimes working out the total tonnage for an exercise, or a session, or a week can be useful (we do actually use this approach with some kinds of advanced weight training) but naturally this might vary hugely between individuals and there isn’t a “simple” way of calculating this. For example, if a person lifted 10kg x 15 they’d lift a total of 150kg. If the same person lifted 100kg once, they’d have lifted a total of 100kg. But which would be harder to do? Just looking at the total weight lifted doesn’t tell you much, it has to be considered in relation to various other factors.
3) What is the total number of repetitions I should perform each week?
Much the same applies here. There isn’t a simple way of answering this. If a person does 10 different exercises the chances are their total number of reps for all these exercises will be a lot higher than if they just did 2 or 3 exercises. On the other hand, the person just doing 2 or 3 exercises may be lifting a lot more weight. Even if 2 people both just perform the same, single exercise, one person might do 10 sets of 10 reps with 5kg (totaling 50 reps and 500kg), while another might do 3 sets of 3 reps with 150kgs (totaling 9 reps and 1350kg). It probably doesn’t take a genius to work out which one is doing more work.
Now, I expect that you probably think that the above examples, even if somewhat artificially simple, all basically make sense, and even are pretty obvious when one thinks about them. So in many ways you wouldn’t really think that anyone other than a beginner would ask this type of question or base a training programme on these kinds of things (even though many people do). But now let’s look at this in relation to running.
A lot of runners training for marathon or any distance above assess their running in terms of a weekly mileage. While it is very useful to record how far one runs in a session, how many miles one runs in a week etc, and while it often makes a lot of sense to aim for a specific mileage in certain circumstances (say, if one has never before run a marathon, or is aiming to tackle a first ultra etc), we tend to think that how many miles a person runs each week is almost irrelevant. Obviously a person does need to do a reasonable amount of running to train for an ultra (so not say 10 miles a week or something), but just aiming for a specific mileage figure isn’t (or shouldn’t) be the point. One needs to look at :
1) The pace at which the miles are run, including the top speed in training and the average pace maintained
2) The terrain, incline and similar factors which effect the intensity, speed and fatigue of the runner
3) Whether the runner is carrying XL (etc) note – XL means extra load training, additional weight
4) What other training is also being performed during the week
- and so on.
Let’s apply some of the factors we looked at with weight training to running. So let’s say,
person A) runs 100 miles each week
and
person B) runs 50 miles each week
and
person C) runs 40 miles each week.
Which one has done the most work in training?
On the surface most people would say person A) because they have the highest mileage, but let’s imagine we have a few more details…
All 3 runners aim to enter a race and cover 100 miles in 20hrs (I’m just picking some figures almost at random as an example). This means that in the race each needs to average 5mph throughout the 20hr target time.
Person A) ran 100 miles at an average of 4mph on an athletics track
Person B) ran 50 miles at an average of 6mph on the road
Person C) ran 40 miles at an average of 7.5mph on the road while carrying 5kg of XL and half of these miles were up and down hill
and then we might add…
Person A) did no other training during the week
Person B) also cycled 150 miles during the week
Person C) also did 2 very heavy weight sessions, 3 hours of high intensity intervals while cross training on various machines, and spent an additional 4 hrs hiking carrying a heavy pack
So, all things being equal, assuming they taper etc, person A who’s been doing the 100 miles a week at 4mph has to go into the race aiming to do 100miles, but at 1 mile an hour faster than they average in training, person B has to cover 100 miles (twice as many miles than they do in a week’s training) but at 1mph less than they average in training and without all the cycling, while person C has to cover 100 miles (60 miles more than they average in training) but at 2.5mph less than they average in training, and without carrying XL, and without fatigue from the weights etc.
I expect you can see the theory here – essentially miles run with higher intensity (for example, faster than race pace, or with incline/decline, or with XL etc) are “worth more” than miles run at lower intensity (e.g. below race pace, with no XL, on smooth terrain etc). Additionally, cross training counts toward improving running even if it doesn’t add miles to a weekly total.
The good news is that this isn’t just a nice theory, it does actually work. Just as an example, in 2010 William ran his first ever 1000 mile race. He came 2nd overall, and in the process set age group world records at 6-days, 1000km and 1000 miles, and finished the race in good condition and with no injuries other than a couple of blisters on his feet. Want to guess his average weekly mileage training for this race?
40-60 miles per week.
But every mile was run either at above race pace &or with XL &or using incline/decline, or drag (and so on). His total weekly mileage was low to moderate, but the intensity was high. In addition, if you don’t look at the mileage but at the total training time, if one adds in all his weights sessions, cross training sessions, plyometric sessions, stretching etc etc, William was training approx. 18hrs per week, even though his weekly running mileage was relatively low.
Now, all of that said, it probably will help you to have an idea of a rough weekly mileage at this stage (even though this is likely to change over the coming weeks) so I’ll let William suggest a figure – but basically have it in mind that over time you should aim to increase the *intensity* of your running, even if this means actually reducing your total mileage, and not just aim to add to the gross number of miles you run each week.”
William Sichel:
“Just to add to what Shaun explained – with your new and varied training programme your total running mileage is a poor measure of your training load.
Maybe think in terms of your total time spent training?
Success in running isn’t directly proportional to the number of miles run – although many think it is!
Your measure of success is your race performances.
Currently you are doing very high quality running sessions supported by a variety of other training.
The most important thing is that you push hardest in your quality sessions the hill work, the speed sessions.
Subtle changes in your running volume might be required but it won’t increase radically being in the 40-60 miles range most of the time.
The changes will be in the weight carried when running, loads lifted in the weights sessions and speed and intensity in the quality run sessions.
Remember that the vast majority of runners stand on the start line over-tired, unhealthy or injured and in some case all of these!
The winner of every race, no matter how long, is always the runner with the fastest average speed, not the runner who has run most miles in training – never forget that!”
They both followed up with a joint comment about training for ultra distance events in general.
“One of the key principles we work on is that training should be more intense than the event itself. Obviously this is something that has to be phased in over time, not leapt into blindly on day one, but the point is that once a training programme is established it should provide training that is tougher than actual competition. The whole point here is to train hard and run easy when it comes to the event.
We think this principle is important for pretty much all sports/activities, but especially with ultra-distance training as it is generally impossible to replicate the duration of an ultra in training.
A sprinter, a 1500 metre runner, or even a marathon runner, could actually go out and run their chosen distance in training and so practice the full duration of their event at their target race-pace. Someone aiming to run say 100 miles, or do a 24hr race, let alone a multi-day event, simply cannot nip out on a Saturday morning and run the full distance of their event, let alone then do another similar session later in week.
Running 100 miles or so during an entire week, maybe doing 10-15 miles per day, may well build up a resistance to fatigue, but it really is not a very close approximation to running 100 or 200 miles non-stop. This may be useful for a person aiming to move up in distance (as it gets them used to extra time on their feet, covering more miles), but we tend to think that in most cases if an experienced runner runs 100 miles or so in a week, especially if they do so at an average pace slower than they aim to use in competition, the main effect this has is to waste an awful lot of time needlessly!
So how can a person properly prepare for the demands of something like a 200-miler? Our chosen approach is to make the miles that they do run a lot tougher than the miles run in competition. This might mean running at well above race pace, or it might mean running at race pace but while carrying extra-load, or it might mean doing a lot of up and down hill work, or it might mean doing interval training running at notably higher speeds with recovery breaks in between. Most often we use a combination of these, mixing in lower impact cross training sessions as well as heavy weights work and other types of training.
This sort of approach has a lot of benefits. Shorter, more intense bouts of training may be exhausting at the time, but this means that running at a slower (race) pace feels pretty easy by comparison, and with a high-intensity / low-mileage approach there is actually more recovery time available between sessions. High mileage training often causes recovery time to be cut down to almost nothing, which is often a recipe for developing over-use injuries and causing all sorts of other problems due to general under-recovery. Of course high intensity / low mileage training also means you can fit your training into less time each week – which can often be essential if you have a job, or are studying, or have a family and so on. It always helps if your training fits well in to “real life”.
The actual principle of making the training harder than the event is really a very simple concept that most people can grasp very easily. The hard part is actually figuring out things like exactly what training to do, when to do it, how much recovery time is needed between sessions, what speeds to aim for, what duration to attempt for a given session, how much extra load to carry, what cross-training exercises should be performed and in what order, when to introduce, increase or decrease weight training exercises – and so on. Understanding the principle of “quality running” rather than “quantity running” is the first step. The next is to be able to use this principle effectively, which means doing a lot more than randomly guessing what effect a given type of training may have on the body and hoping for the best. You don’t really need a coach to grasp the basic principles of high intensity / lower mileage training, but good coaching can often be essential in actually figuring out how to make these principles work, not on paper but in reality. Getting expert advice based on your own needs, abilities and goals as an individual is where having good coaching really can make all the difference in maximising your training and producing better results in races.”
Hopefully this helps anyone understand the idea of quantity vs quality as well as realize that training for an ultra event can be done by anyone with time constraints. On a personal note I was planning on running numerous 100+ miles going into training for my upcoming race. However since working with these guys that’s not in my plan anymore. I’m thankful for that cause it means I’ll be able to be proud of my finish time at the 200 mile race as well as have a life during training. I’ve done alright so far figuring out how to run ultra distances but with the help of William and Shaun I believe I can attain a higher level than I would have by myself, and I’m very excited to see where this will take me.
