A question about my article on training efficiently prompted this post, which delves deep into how to efficiently train for longer events. It's a re-post from last year called Training Short for Going Long, which chronicles my training throughout 2011 where I used a year of sub 1 hour training sessions to prepare for the World Sprint Duathlon Championships and parlayed it into three epic days (12-20 hours) in the month of November. It's completely with training schedules and evaluations to what went right and where it could have been better, so for those looking for a deeper analysis of my efficiency post this should keep you busy for a little while. Or you can skip to the end:
In conclusion, if you build a strong base and are smart about your specific training you can definitely compete in ultra events without having a lot of free time to train. Certainly longer sessions increase your ability to go fast. However, the risk of too much free time is overtraining, which is exceedingly common with amateur athletes and that can sink your results faster than being undertrained. This means that, for most of us, having “too little” time to train is probably preferable and, if done smart, will actually increase your odds of success. Finally, there is simply no doubt that P90X2 and Insanity: The Asylum are effective training programs for outdoor athletes. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better.
Somebody should point this out, so it'll be me:
ReplyDeleteIn the training schedule above you only have 2 days less than an hour. one day @ 1.25 hours, and 3 days at >2 hours.
Just sayin'.
Josh
Good eye. Grabbed a random week to post and it just happened to be the week of Ben's birthday challenge, which was, by far, my longest day of the year to that point. Oops. Due to it week 2 was almost certainly recovery, which would offset all those hours. Anyway, that's a terrible example. Will look for a better one.
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