You don't run five miles at your 400-meter pace because you'll wear yourself out after the first mile and probably ruin yourself for the next couple of days. On the other hand, you don't run 400-meter repeats at your five-mile pace because it's too easy. You don't get the most you can out of the workout.
Now ask yourself this question: What was your training goal for your last three runs?
If you can't answer that question, then maybe you should ask if your runs looked something like that five-miler that was too hard or those 400-meter repeats that were too easy. There are plenty of old sayings to describe that kind of run training.
"No one ever plans to fail, they just fail to plan," for instance. My personal favorite is, "If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it." So what exactly should we aim for? Our two primary objectives are to run fast and run long. In the context of a triathlon, our goals become a little more nuanced:
- Go into the race well rested without sacrificing fitness.
- Have legs strong enough to run after a hard bike.
- Have a cardiovascular system that can sustain a target pace from start to finish.
- Maintain form throughout the run.
Understanding that the swim and bike are no easy tasks, we see that a triathlon run is actually a pretty tall order. It's not just about being able to run fast and run long, it's about being ready. We have to train for speed, train for endurance, and still find time to rest before race day.
How are we going to cram all that preparation into a seven-day training week?, We don't. Instead, the key to success is focusing on doing one thing at a time. Welcome to the world of periodized training.
The very name may sound technical and scary, and the little wave-like diagrams with their color-coded phases and detailed explanations may look like something only Olympic-level athletes and coaches can be bothered with.
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In fact, the opposite is true. Once you understand it, periodized training relieves your burden by reducing the time you spend running and increasing the gains you make from it. It's especially beneficial to triathletes because it synchronizes your swimming, cycling and running instead of setting them in opposition.
The best way to explain periodized training is to tell the story of where it originated. In the 1970s and '80s, American endurance athletes basically trained for their events by actually doing the event or something close to it every day. IRONMAN athletes like Dave Scott and Scott Tinley piled on the training like it was a contest to see who could run more miles in a year rather than the fastest time in Kona. And in many ways, that's what everyone thought. More was always better.
If you couldn't run a marathon in the time you wanted, you went out and ran a marathon every week as fast as you could until you did it. They were literally going out there and trying to run five miles at their 400-meter pace. Some athletes achieved their goals that way. Most of them wound up with a litany of overuse injuries.
Meanwhile, Olympians from the Soviet Bloc countries kept hauling gold medals away at the Olympics. Americans believed they just weren't training hard or long enough. But the longer and harder Americans went, the better the Russians got. Something was happening behind the Iron Curtain.
A former Olympic rower-turned-coach from Romania named Tudor Bompa called it periodized training. Instead of going out hard every day, Bompa told his athletes to spend long blocks of time training at specific intensities for set amounts of time. His primary emphasis wasn't on training, but on avoiding overtraining.
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He realized that physical fitness is the cumulative result of long periods of physical activity. The idea was to make training just hard enough to make the body adapt and grow stronger, but not so hard that it couldn't continue training.
The Americans showed up to the Olympics comparatively weaker, more tired and frequently more battered than their Russian and East German competitors. It took nearly a decade before other countries' Olympic programs caught on to what Bompa was doing and evolved their own periodized programs.
