Week 4 pre-season (transition) training schedule - 9/14-9/20

 Most noteworthy about this week of course is the fact that (at long last) in-person practice will resume on Friday the 18th. This is a topic that will get its own post on this website in the next few days, as there's a fair amount of details to go over. 

Regarding the training this week, the plan for those who have been training through the summer months is to decrease the overall amount of training, a concept known as a "down week." This is way of giving yourself an opportunity to absorb the training you've done over the past few weeks and hopefully avoid staleness, illness, and/or injury. For those who are still getting their legs under them and haven't been running as much over the summer, it's best to stick to doing 3 or 4 runs including Friday's practice. 

This week most of you should hopefully be doing a total of five runs (or mix of runs and cross training workouts) with two days off. The breakdown of the workouts is laid out below. Note the different length of the workouts depending on your level of experience (Level 1-4). These levels are explained in the "Breakdown" tab of the summer training spreadsheet.

2 short runs - for Level 1 athletes these should be 20-25 minutes in length; Level 2, 25-30 minutes; Level 3, 30-35 minutes, and Level 4 should be at 40-50 minutes. If you're feeling good you can pick up the pace a bit in the final 5-10 minutes of the run.

2 medium length runs - Level 1 - 25-30 minutes, Level 2 - 35-40 minutes, Level 3 - 45-50 minutes, Level 4 - 55-60 minutes. One of the two medium length runs will be Friday's practice, which will include a series of repeats on the (newly resurfaced) track. More details on that will follow. The other medium length run, i.e. the one that isn't Friday, should include a series of 4-6 pickups of 15-20 seconds in the second half of the run. These should be fast but not all out, and give yourself enough time after each one of them (at least a minute) to catch your breath. 

1 long run - Level 1- 36 minutes, Level 2 - 48 minutes, Level 3 - 60 minutes, Level 4 - 72 minutes. We alternate between doing Progressive Long Runs (PLRs) and Cyclic Long Runs (CLRs). This week is a PLR which means you should be gradually picking up the pace over the course of the run, starting out easy, picking it up after a time to a good pace, and then picking it up again to a "fresh" pace before the final few minutes back to an easy clip. It's fine to take a brief break once or twice during the run, just be sure to stop your watch while you've stopped. A more thorough breakdown of how the long run is structured can be found in the "long run breakdown" tab of the summer training spreadsheet.