More on TE

Eric chuckled last week at the store when I told him I I finally was coming around to the “Less is More” idea behind Training Effect as a guideline. More miles at a foundation or base level of effort, steadily improving while doing more targeted speedwork.

Following the TE numbers (“points”) seems to be much more effective at making sure I don’t overreach on every run. For example, I set a target of say 4.4 TE (highly improving) and, as I run, continually check how many mins at current effort it will take to reach… knowing how many miles I still have, I adjust the pace up and down to try and hit zero mins when I am at the end… Using the TE logs as a guide I can also know quickly what constitutes an “easy/recovery” day compared to higher effort days.

Previously I was simply focused on staying within heart rate limits for an entire run. That  works but I realized that I was working every session at 80% or so - no real “easy” days to promote recovery. The plan we discussed will involve fewer long (20+ miles) runs at race pace. More 8-14 milers at below race-pace. An increasing number of 6-12 milers at (eventually) 7:00/mile or faster…

I’m not going to radically change my typical 16-week plan now that I’ve already started, but I’m pretty confident that some tweaking will see an improvement for Capital City in May(3:25:00 ?). After that, I am homing in on Tucson in December – for that I may adopt the new approach completely.

~ by John Rankin on Feb 22, 2007.