paulradcliffe.me

Daniels’ Training Phase I: Foundation & Injury Prevention

I had a very humbling run on Wednesday night. I felt sore, sluggish, out of shape, and to top it all off, I had to run to a bathroom during the run. It’s with that kind of humility that I am looking forward to 4 weeks of easy runs to build my base fitness up again.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised I’m so rusty: I haven’t been eating or sleeping well since the Mississauga races. I haven’t been cross training, stretching or foam rolling either. And I was negligently unhealthy during my recharging weekend. It’s really starting to show! I needed a kick in the butt to get motivated. I don’t want to feel like that again, so I’m committing to training!

I started talking about my summer training plan in this post. I’ve had a couple of days to massage a few different plans together and I’ve come up with a plan for my first 4 weeks of training.  

My Foundation & Injury Prevention Phase of training for Summer 2014

Jack Daniels’ calls these first few weeks Phase I or the Foundation and Injury Prevention phase. I rather like this idea for a lot of reasons. It’s incredibly tempting to push into challenging threshold and interval training runs. But I should know better.

When designing this period, I was very careful to make sure that my weekly mileage didn’t increase more than 10% per week. Based on the Daniels’ Running Calculator, I will be running these ‘easy’ pace runs at about 7:10 min/km. I hope to do them steady without walk breaks to get out of that habit.

I’m working on my “early quality” plan for the next phase and hope to post that soon!