Looking Back on Five Weeks of Training

Right now, I’m five weeks into training for the JC Stone 50K on March 17, 2017. I’m still in the initial ramp-up phase before a weekly distance run become something too routine to be novel. Pittsburgh’s terrain is more challenging than Rochester’s, but I’ve finally found my way from the little burgh of Dormont into the city:

As an update, I thought I’d write about the ultra-marathon training plan that more or less describes what I’ll be doing during the next thirteen weeks. I don’t plan on holding to this strictly but it is something to shoot for:

Something I noticed when putting together this training plan based on what other people have posted is that training for distances greater than a marathon does not entail a massive jump in the number of miles run in one specific day. Instead, longer runs are “stacked” closer together.

This goes back to the heuristic that the recovery time required from a run increases super-linearly with the number of miles run. Running a marathon, for example, takes more than twice the time to recover from than running a half-marathon. Stacking longer runs allows you to build up the endurance to do a longer distance without need long periods of time to recover.

Part of the training I have been doing involves weight training several times a week. I like running, but I am willing to sacrifice a modest amount of speed or endurance in order to keep some extra muscle tone. My favorites are dead-lifts, squats, and functional fitness exercises in order to improve body composition and to give me a break from just running all the time.

Diet has also been a major concern for this. When I was training for my first marathon I found the difficult part to be recovering and feeling well around the distance running days, not the distance running itself.

In the past month I’ve let my diet become less strict and though this hasn’t caused any sorts of health issue or weight gain like you would expect, it is a weakness that can be quickly fixed. I’m going to brush the dust off my diet spreadsheet and use that to plan my meals for each day.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing by 20 miler, which will be the longest distance I’ve done since August, but I’m looking forward to a brisk (though not quick) venture on Pittsburgh’s north trail.

À la prochaine!