Training

[Posted by Chris]

Many people have asked me how one trains for an event like this.  I suspect there is no definitive answer. However, I will start by saying that most healthy and active people could actually enter and complete the MdS on zero training if they walked it.
A lot of people will scoff at this but they've probably not discovered what one is capable of when pushed.
The human body is uniquely evolved to travel huge distances on two legs using minimal calories, and in hot weather too.  All our ancestors did so regularly just a few hundred generations ago and there has not been enough time for this to have evolved (or unevolved) away.
However, I'm hoping to go a little faster than walking for much of it and this has necessitated quite a training commitment.

I've been doing the odd run regularly for a while so I wasn't completely unfit when I entered this 18 months ago. I began by doing about 50km per week from Sept '11 to March '12 culminating in the Cambridge half marathon where I got a PB but missed my 90 min target by 10 seconds. That was particularly painful as it was apparent before halfway that 90min was right on the edge of my capacity which meant red lining it for most of the 13 miles! All good mental training...

Unfortunately my role at work as Timetabler for an ever-expanding school with a lot of very conflicting and unique pupil/subject/teacher/room constraints means that I spend stupid hours per week at my computer from mid April to mid July. I'm not completely averse to midnight training but running did kind of take a backseat and in some weeks dropped down to just 10-20km. Now unfortunately, I have a below-average natural athletic ability* so fitness tends to vanish very quickly for me, and being sleep-deprived doesn't help. When I began training properly again in August I was back to being rather slow, struggling to even manage a handful of 5 min kms. This was the most depressing time of the entire training, made worse by discovering that some of my more naturally talented friends  could easily keep up with me having done no training at all.

However, who couldn't be inspired by The Olympics and so I began to build up the miles again with a 100km / week target. I haven't always hit that target but since September I have averaged nearly 90km and have done about 3700km since the start of last year.
Pleasingly, the speed and fitness started to return and I was soon back running 5 min kms for long distances.  I try to mix up the sessions a bit based around other things in my life (I'd love to boast about what these all are but in reality it's mainly work...)  However, a week usually consists of one long run (25km+), one extended intervals session (my favourite is alternating 4 min light and 6 min hard for an hour) and about 4 aerobic sessions of 40 - 80 min at sustainable speeds. I sometimes fit in one more hard session, either short intervals or a hard 30 min tempo run. I also ensure I take 1 day free of running each week.

As a proper geek I obsessively record all the details of every session helped by a very swish GPS and heart rate monitoring watch and an unnecessarily complicated spreadsheet.

What I have found is that this volume of training has not got me much faster (the extra 50km a week bought me a whole minute in this year's Cambridge half marathon, but I did finally break 90 min). However, I have noticed an enormous improvement in my recovery time, both short and long term.  I can run a hard interval session in the morning and be virtually unaffected in the evening. I also find that the day after the long runs is no longer miserable and it is this aspect that is the key thing for this.

My New Zealand holiday (where all 4 of us were there) gave the chance for some practice long days, although I am still unsure whether our (successful) attempt to kayak 96km in a day will be of much benefit.

For the past month I have also been running with 10kg on my back, as I will be next week. I have found this slows me down by slightly less than you might expect (it is 14% of my mass) on the flat but considerably more on any hills.

The final training is the heat acclimatisation. The wonderful UK weather has not exactly helped but I have spent the last fortnight running in many fleeces and even rigged up a couple of fan heaters in front of the treadmill for some sessions.  I decided to make one of these into a proper scientific investigation and so on one particularly grim Saturday I completed 32 km like this, weighing myself and taking my temperature every 15 min. This actually went surprisingly well and my temperature only rose by 1C (and never actually went above 37 but I think oral measurements are always a bit low). However I did discover that I sweat 1.6kg per hour which might explain why I'm never too hot but will mean  I'll have to drink lots!

*People who don't understand the effects training have often scoff at this, but 3 years ago I was found to have a minor tricuspid insufficiency. This sounds alarming but essentially means that the valves in my heart aren't perfect and thus blood is pumped around inefficiently**. It is entirely benign but suffice to say no amount of training would get me to the front of this race! However, as this race is probably 75% mental and I'm not trying to win it anyway, there is no cause for concern!

**If you haven't already then please sponsor us. My nominated charity is the British Heart Foundation and it is from their work that machines exist that can measure these things and also spot all the other more serious issues that would otherwise go undiagnosed.