Hi Robert Dickison here with a formula that has worked for me in the past and again as recently as six weeks ago. A running friend and I spent time quite a few years ago looking at our race performances and the training that preceded them. From our research we arrived at what we called the collapse point in any race up to the marathon distance, that point where you’ve been going fine and then your get up and go has gone and it’s a battle from here to the finish line.
The magic formula that evolved was that collapse point in our case was 3 times our average daily training distance so if we were to race in a Half Marathon and we were only training say 40km per week which averaged 5.7km daily then 3 times this meant after 17km we would be running on empty. This means that to effectively run a Half you would need to be training 50km per week = 7.1km average daily, times 3 = 21.3km and your across the line.
I give an example of 4 weeks training leading up to a recent 25km forest trail race, bearing in mind that this was rough with lots of hills, if you were running a flat Half you could cut back to 6 days and still be ok. What I am trying to show here is that schedules have to be flexible or they will not fit into our life, let’s face it if someone asks what do you do, you would love to say I’m a runner, but that’s not always possible without some other financial contribution.
Days Wk 1 Wk 2 Wk 3 Wk 4
Monday 6km easy 5km easy 5km easy 6km easy
Tuesday 7km easy 7km easy 10km easy 10km easy
Wednesday 10km timed 10kmtimed 6km steady 7km easy
Thursday 6km easy 6km easy 12km easy 6km easy
Friday 7km easy 10km easy 6km easy 7km easy
Saturday 8km hills 7kmflat+hills 10km timed 5km easy
Sunday 12kmlong slow 13km steady 18kmflat+hills. 25km race
Totals 56km 58km 67km 66km
Most runs of 10km or more included some hill work, plus I included at least 2 gym classes per week for strength and flexibility. So now just go out there and do it knowing you can!
