(stretching and groaning)
- Morning trainiacs.
40 minute hard, hard, open-water swim just over there,
and then a one hour on the nose run, 13 1/2K.
That's my buddy, Super Dave, from Windburn,
head coach of Windburn, he's on the radio right now.
Today, how much do you need to run
for all different kinds of things?
I got a good one teed up.
(car door slams)
Don't worry, we'll do that at home
so I'll have more clothes on.
(fast-paced electronic music)
So all right trainiacs,
tasty little 13 1/2K run there
let's get into how often you should run.
And this is gonna be....
I padded up, screenshared,
flowed, shot, recorded.
High-tech stuff.
So what I've laid out here on the top
of the screen is a week,
and we're gonna fill in an average training week.
On the bottom of the screen,
we've got a graph where, on the y-axis,
it's how much faster
are you getting with the x-axis
of number of
runs per week.
So if you're going from zero runs a week
to one run a week, the amount that you're
going to be getting faster from the point
that you're at now is immense.
It's gonna be very, very big and significant,
and where I would put that run if you can only do
one run a week, it's going to be a Saturday or Sunday,
and let's just call it Sunday Runday,
a long run on Sunday.
Now if you are extremely injury-prone,
you have a history of running injuries,
you can change that long run to a long hike
to a really long walk.
The idea is just to get an extended period of time
building up to hopefully your race distance,
or about 20% more in that one chunk of time.
Now we're also going to put a line
indicating how long it is.
A second run a week, I would space far enough out
from a week, that it kinda slams itself in the middle
of the remaining days.
So somewhere on a Tuesday, Wednesday, a Thursday,
I would be doing a brick run,
and that is where you are going
from the bike to the run.
And those two runs are going to be
like your bread and butter.
You're gonna get a lot faster with that,
because with the long run,
you're increasing your body's ability to run
for an extended period of time.
With the brick run, in the case of triathlon,
you're gonna overcome the single biggest tough
few seconds that you're going to experience
when you're going from the bike to the run
and that next one or two kilometers
where you've got a really big opportunity
to cramp up, if you can get over that
your entire run is going to be a lot quicker.
And how long should that brick run be?
That brick run can be fairly short,
in my case I do brick runs of only about 30 minutes.
What if you can run three times a week?
Well in that case, what I would be doing
is I'd be moving that brick run and I'd be adding
a very speed-focused run.
So this is something like a track workout, a tempo workout.
In our case, because we're really crunched for time,
we've got to be super efficient
if you're only doing three runs a week,
I would be doing a speed-focused track run.
And again, I would only make this a very short run,
but the effect of it, for this third run,
I think is going to be at kinda the pinnacle.
Doing those three runs is going to accomplish a lot.
Those three workouts is like the bread and butter
of if you wanna get fast, but you don't wanna train
a whole heck of a lot more, that's how you do it.
Now in my case, I'm running four times a week,
and in here, I'm adding a day somewhere around
a Wednesday, a Friday, a Monday, a Saturday,
it doesn't really matter, because in all these cases
it's not like I'm not spacing everything equally.
But in my case, if I put a strength-focused run
anywhere in any of these available days,
Saturday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
it's not like I am taking away rest time otherwise.
So in my case, what I'll end up doing,
is I will switch a brick run over to Saturday,
and I will put the Tuesday run as a strength run.
And a strength run is something like doing
really low-intensity, but really high-value.
So it's doing bounding strides, it's doing fast feet,
it's doing little bits of hills.
So it's not like it's going to be really long,
really intense, it's just kinda quality.
Now, how much faster is that going to make you here?
On the bottom graph, really not
much more than the third run.
I should clarify that this getting faster
is the difference between zero and one.
The difference between one run and two runs.
The difference between two runs and three runs.
So what you can see is that the difference between
three runs and four runs, it starts to wane.
It's not like you're getting that much faster.
And the same is gonna happen as you start going down,
that as you start adding workouts past about three runs,
your return on investment isn't nearly as high,
and that's why most age-group triathletes should be
running somewhere in that one to three or four runs a week.
As a bonus here, because I've got a Saturday
and Sunday brick run, and then a run on Sunday,
what I end up doing here,
I can shorten up
the amount of time that I'm spending
on that long run on Sunday.
Because it's more at that point about how much
time on your feet can you accumulate over the course
of a week, not necessarily how much time
do you accumulate in each run.
So at that fourth run,
you can start backing off some of the other runs,
so it's not quite so daunting.
But at this point, you've got a huge amount
of running at four runs,
sure you can put in garbage miles
on Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
a lot of marathoners do that because it's like
miles in the legs, miles in the legs,
we gotta condition the body
to always, always, always, be running.
I think once you get past that third run a week,
you're not necessarily doing a whole
heck of a lot much better for yourself,
the only reason that I'm doing that,
is because I wanna be able to shorten up
that long run so that I'm not running
on really tired legs with bad form, risking injury,
because I've been very injury-prone
with running over the past year.
Now how much do you need to run
is actually probably a fairly easy question.
Number one, how much time do you have available?
And don't start running just because Taren says
that you gotta run three or four times a week,
run as much time as you can fit into your schedule.
Number two, look at how often you're running right now.
If you're running zero times right now,
don't go to three or four times.
Start with one time, and then add a second
maybe a month or two later.
And then the last thing to keep in mind with all this,
is listen to your body.
A lot of pro triathletes,
and this is talked about in podcast after podcast
and article after article,
are getting away from that notion of
"I have to run a lot to keep my running fitness fresh",
so do the same for yourself.
If you start running a whole heck of a lot
and you just can't shake that feeling of being beat up,
feeling little bits of niggles and tiny injuries,
you're probably running a little bit too much.
Back it off, and then slowly build up.
Remember, it's more about quality and running well,
than it is running lots and running fast.
What we're trying to do with your training here,
that is a big thing that we are building into the
Team Trainiac training platform,
it's much less about going fast,
than it is about trying not to slow down.
And you do that by running well and being strong.
Not just running a whole lot, that's like the '80s.
A lot of science has happened since the '80s.
So here you go trainiacs,
that is how much you should run.
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