By Erin Schreiber, DPT
- Training progression or periodization does not Just apply to one race cycle: It’s cumulative stacking! Look to layer your gains intentionally season after season!!
As important as it is to follow a training program to gradually build mileage for any specific race in order to help ensure proper recovery and avoid injury, your training gains help to lay the bricks for your next phase or season of training. If you come off a “marathon season”, which could mean 4 months focusing on a specific race or a year focusing on two, it’s important to shift your focus to a slightly different element of fitness for a time as your direction for really pushing the needle in terms of your personal global fitness in order to continue to see improvement. Shifting between strength, speed, endurance stacks to help you better yourself overall. Additionally, as long as you maintain your fitness following a specific event, it will carry through and apply for all of your future training as well. Stack those gains.
- Recovery means investing in the basics
You can’t do better than getting proper sleep, nutrition, and relative rest between training days! No special massage gun, or supplements, or devices will do better than being solid with these basic things!
- Shoes don’t matter nearly as much as you might think
The more we understand about shoes the more we know that the most important factor is what you put in it. If your foot is adaptable, or can both absorb shock and create a rigid lever for push off the shoe takes on less of a role. Generally the most important thing is that we train in multiple different shoes (read: types of shoes, not just the same genre and/or model) in order to continue to encourage this adaptability. There are times and places to pick a shoe but 9 times out of 10 the shoe is not a make or break factor
- Listen to your body
It’s very easy to push through pain because our training program says so, but if your symptoms are lasting >24 hours after a run, or generally not trending better overall since onset, it is time to seek medical help. Additionally, if you’re feeling run down you
- Have fun!!
Running is a celebration of what our bodies can do, and if you’re not enjoying the ride then “why”? Plus no city turns out like Chicago for the marathon. When it comes to race day, you’ve worked hard so Enjoy It!!
