As many oher middle aged people, I too have been caught up in the running boom. I started running regularly in the spring of ‘24, when I registerred for a full Marathon.
Over the coming weeks and months I plan to write a few blog posts, and perhaps including some charts looking back at the progress I have had over the last 2.5 years, and also trying to make some sense of and evaluate my progress.
The fundamental question I want to explore is:
How fast can I get?
With the very important caveat:
On a time and volume limited exercise regime.
Current State #
Beeing a father of 3, homeowner and employee the time I have available for training is rather limited. On a good week I am able to squeeze in 40-50 km, while on non-optimal weeks I usually run 20-40 km.
Most people with experience as coaches or as athlethes will say that this is way to little volume, and you can often read about top athlethes or even recreational runners having a weekly volume of 150-200 km a week. For me that is not an option purely from a time basis, but as I mentioned, it is also quite an interesting question to try to get as good as possible, when there simply is not sufficient hours in a week.
The accomplished scientist Dr. Stephen Seiler once stated that training is an optimisation challenge, not a maximisation challenge.
If I am to guess I would think that he would reccomend me to add some volume to the above weekly workouts, but the basis still remains; you need to optimize the training you do
I think that is sufficient as an intro to this series, and hopefully I have some fun posts exploring this optimisation problem in the coming weeks.