Bumping Up the Mileage!

One of the big goals coming back from my recent foot injury was to increase the volume in anticipation of a fast summer and fall season. As runners we have a tendency to always seek more, and sometimes we think more is better without even having a reason to believe so. In my case I've been thinking about the increase in volume for a while and keep coming back to bumping up the mileage as the best strategy for getting faster this season.

Over the past year I've been gradually increasing my mileage from about 35 MPW in 2015 to a 54 MPW average in 2016, while this increase in volume has massively improved my running across all distances it still not any thing like a high volume, and compared with other runners in my pace range it's a pretty small number. That said my training age of 3-4 years is still pretty young and it wouldn't be wise to make any major increases in volume without a long steady build-up, as such I've been putting a lot of thought into how I'll go about increasing the volume and when I choose to back off and say I'm running a high enough volume for now. Given that I increased by weekly volume by 20 MPW or ~160% over the course of one year I would think that an increase of half of that or ~130% would be an appropraite goal for my spring build-up and that stabilizing my weekly mileage around 75 MPW would be a good place to land.

So what do I realistically hope to gain from this increase? Well I'm thinking that in the short term improved body composition (lower body fat) would be the first major improvement I would see, as someone who is already running a fair amount I do not have much fat to lose, but I imagine I could part with another 2-3 pounds which wouldn't hurt performance. A little later on in the year, perhaps by mid summer I imagine that I could expect to see improved cardiovascular performance playing a major role, and by fall I would like to see my XC times dropping substantially. I would love to see something like 20+ seconds come off my 5k this year and a if I could drop to low 26 min for the 8k I would be just about over the moon!

As for injury prevention, I've been giving a lot of thought to the increased risk of injury I'll be facing during the next few weeks, and I am not blind to the danger of ruining my season rather than breaking into a new strata of performance. To mitigate these risks some I've been working hard at taking care of all the little recovery things that it's so easy to ignore, and most importantly I've been focusing a lot on my sleep quality (see the coming article on caffeine reduction). My hope is that all of the things I'm doing to increase my running performance right now will not be in vain!