Training to train

So this week was my first full week back into serious running. I say "serious" because, even though I only ran mileage with no structured workouts and the fastest I ran was probably 6:30 pace, I reached full mileage and what I plan to hold for the rest of this training cycle. My weeks will all look very similar to this, with core 2-3x:

Monday - 9/6
Tuesday - 90 minutes (13+)
Wednesday - 9/9
Thursday - 90 minutes (13+)
Friday - 9/6
Saturday - 10
Sunday - 2 hours (ideally 18+)

This was the base mileage schedule for XC last year and I liked it a lot. I thought I was able to balance recovery with good stamina training on the long days instead of just burying myself with mileage like I had in other cycles. Previously I had always loaded my week with doubles every day and tried to max out mileage, which put me in a perpetual overtraining hole. This schedule adds up to 104 miles, which is less than I have done the past two summers, but because the mileage is condensed into only 10 runs instead of 13 or 14 I think that it is actually better conditioning work.

I call this part of the year "pre-base training" or, as I said up top, training to train. The objective of all those relatively easy miles and unstructured work is to be able to handle the next step of training, which for me is long, hard half marathon workouts. A lot of people make the mistake of treating easy mileage as base training. While that might be true for less experienced runners who lack the lifetime base and background to handle the true stamina workouts that will be my bread and butter, it should not be the case for collegiate runners. People think that you can race well off of just easy mileage. I define racing well as racing at a high percentage of your 100% perfectly trained/peaked potential, and I do not think it is possible to race well off of just mileage. You might run well compared to past seasons, you might even PR, but I guarantee that if you spent some time doing long tempo runs and long intervals you would race better than if you ran the same amount of mileage with all of it easy.

Since I don't plan to work out until July, I have a bit of a challenge. How do I keep my training interesting and progressive but at the same time not change my mileage? Well, my answer is to acclimate to it and to push some of the runs when I feel good, especially the long run. My overall fitness goal by September is to be at the level I was at on January 1, 2013. At the end of my winter training at home I was running the same mileage schedule, doing tons of core, running long and hard workouts Tuesday and Friday and running a fast 18-19 miles on Sunday. If I can get back to that, I know I can PR in the half marathon and probably every other race that I contest on the roads.