I have to admit running all those miles didn’t happen last year. It was almost a decade ago and came a few years after I’d started running seriously. The mileage was never something I specifically set out to achieve, it came as a result of how I decided to approach my training. It was the result of a Process Goal.
These days I believe the mileage you run should support your race goals but this happened at a time when I thought more miles were better and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting faster. I had speed, I just didn’t seem able to apply it effectively.
When I first took up running seriously, by which I mean going out to run six days per week and building a decent aerobic base; my mileage went from a few hundred miles each year to around 1,800 miles. In that circumstance increased mileage certainly helped. Over the next few years my mileage always hovered around this mark. Sometimes 1,700; sometimes 2,000 but never significantly different.
Each year had the same problem. I would have some months where I easily racked up well over 200 miles putting me on track for 2,500 for the year but then an injury, a virus or illness would strike for a month or two and, at year end, I’d end up back around 1,800 for the year.
The lower mileage isn’t specifically the concern, it’s that inconsistent training is always undoing the gains. Imagine picking up an injury, perhaps it’s a strain or tear in the hamstring and you think “I can run through this” so you take the next couple of weeks a bit easier, no workouts but eventually realise it’s not improving and you’re going to have to rest. You rest for the next month until it’s recovered, fretting in the meantime that you’re losing fitness and then begin to rebuild. First you have to do a couple of weeks just to be sure you can resume training without reinjuring yourself and then you have to rebuild the lost fitness. By now it’s two months since the injury occurred and at best, your fitness is still at the same level as before the injury. Realisitically it might take another month or two before you start to feel you’re back where you were. One injury has struck off three months, maybe more, without making any progress. If you start the rehab process too soon, you might set yourself back and have to start over again.
My solution for my lack of consistency was to think about what I could do rather than what I wanted to do.
Looking at my training logs, it was fairly clear I could run for up to 7 hours per week without any issue. But if I put in a string of weeks where I was doing over 8 hours that was when the issues began to occur.
My aim for the year simply became to do 7-8 hours training per week – no more, no less. Less than seven hours left me feeling like I wasn’t doing enough; more than eight was a potential recipe for setback. It meant holding back on the weeks where I felt able to do more and saying “I’ve done enough”. The result was 2,840 miles for the year! Mission accomplished.
I wasn’t perfect. There were still some weeks where I exceeded eight hours but the time goal focused me in. I knew that if I’d done too much one week I couldn’t afford to do it again the following week and needed to rejig my upcoming schedule. On the flipside there were weeks when I didn’t quite reach the seven hours and this was fine – workouts are often completed in a shorter time than steady endurance runs. And certainly if I had a race coming up, I’d taper and might only end up doing 4-6hrs.
The most fascinating part occurred towards the end of the year as I got fitter and my endurance built up – I began to feel doing eight hours per week wasn’t enough. When I say feel I literally mean the signals my body were sending to my brain were that I would arrive home from training runs feeling fresh. In the past my bigger weeks didn’t feel that draining but now there was a notable difference – I felt ready to do more.
You probably aren’t doing 7-8 hours running per week but process goals are a good way of getting into a pattern of consistency. It might be to …
- run five days per week
- run for fifteen minutes every day
- run six days per week including a workout and a long run.
Notice that, for the most part these are just specifying the process, not the outcome. When I used to think “I want to run 200miles every month” that’s an outcome goal, it made no allowance for tapering into races or low-volume speed sessions. It didn’t care that February only has 28 days while August has 31; or that running in winter might not be possible if it gets icy; it just becomes a goal to fixate on. Sometimes that is good – it creates a get it done however you need to mentality but it can also lead to burnout, injury or overtraining if it’s pitched wrongly.
If you need help setting goals or deciding how to structure your training – please consider Contacting Me and I will help you get the best out of yourself. We can do a 1-hr training review or even look at working together for longer term.
Big Red Running 
I like that a lot, looking at the time ran per week rather than distance. I definitely get hooked on x miles per week and my mood swings when I hit it or not. A big influence (to me) is how the running world really highlights miles covered rather than hours. It sounds cool to hit 1,000 miles a year vs. rather than 150 hours. Both are pretty much the same though!
On my college team, we often measured our running via time over distance. The coach would tell me to run without a way to record the distance covered. I sometimes went back in my car to see how far I ran or used a website to check later. The part I struggled with was the mindset to not track miles and measure how many miles I would get in per week during the 8 hour period. Tough to change that mindset and focus on how the time brings benefits too!
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In the pre-internet days, I used to measure the distance in the car too. Also was known to put a piece of string on the mapbook and calculate the distance based on the scale!!
The real benefit to time-based running is being able to build running into your daily life – you can block out a definable part of your day. With Easy runs there’s no hurry if you’ve got to be out there for 30mins – whereas someone told to do 4miles may run it too quickly to get home sooner. It’s particularly good way of scheduling and building up long runs especially with slower runners.
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