A mere 5 percent

Robert Grumbine said:

5% versus 10% ramp ups came up again (marathon training post), and
I'd like to put it to its own thread. One part is that I do run for
health, and if 5% increases are better for health than 10%, which they
are, then I'll go that way. So no problem. I also like to do some
longer races, having already done a trail 50k. So I'd like to see
a schedule that leads to being able to do those.

Below is a full 52 weeks of increasing distance by 5% per week,
starting from a 30 minute run in week 1. (Or consider it a 30 mile week
if you're a higher mileage sort.)

Even 5% is a fair bit. Daniels recommends something along the lines of 10%
every 3 weeks and even that only during certain phases of training. This is
slightly less than 5% a week (which is about 16% every 3 weeks)

Daniels also places additional recommendations on how to actually implement
these increases though I can't remember them exactly -- basically they were
common sense guidelines about when to add an extra run.

I've personally found 10% every 3 weeks works quite well as a buildup.

I think this is sustainable for about 12 weeks or so (about a 40% increase)
then you need to plateau, and eventially cut back and have a rest phase.

How sustainable these increases are depend a lot on how much training one has.
For a beginner, it may be perfectly reasonable to double from 20-40 over a
year, but to go from 40 to 80 in a year is harder. I think my progression
was on the lines of:

20-40: 1 year
40-60: 6 months
60-70: 6 months
70-80: 1 year

The above figures refer to how long it took to be able to sustain that mileage
continuously for 12 weeks or more.

When you get up to the higher numbers, you hit the point of diminishing returns
regarding your rate of adaption, so you need to tread much more carefully.

Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/

"Robert Grumbine" <[email hidden]> wrote

My take on it is that the 31.5 minute increase in week 2, etc, is just a bit
picky and over cautious.

In increasing mileage, think the human performance curve: you can cover
twice the distance by slowing just 5-6%. So the endurance challenge of
increasing mileage is minimized if you just slow down.

However, I find that skeletal adaptation, and recharge time are what you
need to monitor, rather than distance.

If you can run on soft surface, and are healthy, I would think you could go
up 10-20% every few weeks, provided:

1. You slow your pace by say 5% for a 10% distance bump, and 10% for a 20+%
bump.
2. No speed or tempo work, just LSD to get your body used to recharging
more energy into your legs. Why complicate things by putting speed stress
on your legs?

After 2-4 weeks, you'll start feeling stronger at the distance and your pace
will approximate your original pace at lower mileage.

Then you can either ramp up intensity and sharpen for competition, or step
up your mileage again.

I used to go from 70 to 105 miles in one step (50% !), but I'd slow it way
down, and I had a nice soft trail to train on. After just a few weeks, I'd
feel normal at that mileage, and would be ready to train harder.

When resuming harder training, I'd decrease the mileage down to 95 ish to
allow for the increased intensity, just as I decreased my speed to allow for
increased mileage during the ramp up phase.

As far as longer races goes, if you're in marathon shape, all you need for
ultras is a couple of longer runs (eg, a 30 miler or two, obviously at a
gentle pace, with breaks), and you're ready to go. I've run 50 milers
without any runs over 20 miles, but I had a good base of 70+ miles/week, and
had my pacing and nutrition/hydration down. My guess is that with a
smaller base, you might need a few long runs under your belt.

-- Dan

Dan Stumpus said:

"Robert Grumbine" <[email hidden]> wrote

My take on it is that the 31.5 minute increase in week 2, etc, is just a bit
picky and over cautious.

In increasing mileage, think the human performance curve: you can cover
twice the distance by slowing just 5-6%. So the endurance challenge of
increasing mileage is minimized if you just slow down.

Ah, if I slow down any more, I'll be going backward. 😉
Seriously, I doubt I could jump from 3 hr to 6+ hr in a long run by
slowing from 17min/mi to even 20 min/mi. Actually, that kind of change
is noise level for me (last race varied from about 13 to 20 min/mi,
depending on terrain). The soft tissues wouldn't be happy at all - just
the part about putting 1 foot in front of other many times (running or
walking) - never mind any impact. Having long run as smaller part of
total volume (mine may be 1/2 for that week, 1/3 of a 2-wk total) may
work better with your thoughts.

Quoted message said:

However, I find that skeletal adaptation, and recharge time are what you
need to monitor, rather than distance.

Right. I think the skeletal adaptation is what may be slower for some
than for others and/or how much they can increase at one time. In the
particular case that started this discussion in another thread, where
the person is probably still rehabbing from last marathon and wants to
build for one in 4 months, the monitoring is really critical - and even
average of 5% may be too much - at least until they're healed *and*
strengthened.

Quoted message said:

If you can run on soft surface, and are healthy, I would think you could go
up 10-20% every few weeks,

But isn't this almost what Bob just posted - except you do it in jumps?

You suggest
10% inc every few weeks = 1.1 * 30 = 33 at week 4
20% inc = 1.2 * 30 = 36 min at wk 4

He has 34.73 min at wk 4 - half way between your 2 values.

The difference is that Bob is just taking the average 5% increase every
week (for illustrative purposes of the original issue), where with your
approach, it's more steplike - jump, adapt, repeat. Just my gut feeling,
but I think people may tend to do things more continuously at lower
miles, then more jumpwise with larger miles. (lower / larger being
relative to person)

I tend to be a jumper, somewhat either by accident or trying to
capitalize on some good weather in winter, rather than any real intent
to do it that way. I may repeat certain durations also, if I was really
uncomfortable at it the first time.

provided:

Quoted message said:

1. You slow your pace by say 5% for a 10% distance bump, and 10% for a 20+%
bump.
2. No speed or tempo work, just LSD to get your body used to recharging
more energy into your legs. Why complicate things by putting speed stress
on your legs?

After 2-4 weeks, you'll start feeling stronger at the distance and your pace
will approximate your original pace at lower mileage.

Are you talking total volume? or long run volume (the original topic)?

Quoted message said:

Then you can either ramp up intensity and sharpen for competition, or step
up your mileage again.

I used to go from 70 to 105 miles in one step (50% !), but I'd slow it way
down, and I had a nice soft trail to train on. After just a few weeks, I'd
feel normal at that mileage, and would be ready to train harder.

Ok, sounds like you're talking total volume. That makes sense, as does
the rest.

Dot

--
"Success is different things to different people"
-Bernd Heinrich in Racing the Antelope

Robert Grumbine said:

5% versus 10% ramp ups came up again (marathon training post), and
I'd like to put it to its own thread. One part is that I do run for
health, and if 5% increases are better for health than 10%, which they
are, then I'll go that way. So no problem. I also like to do some
longer races, having already done a trail 50k. So I'd like to see
a schedule that leads to being able to do those.

Below is a full 52 weeks of increasing distance by 5% per week,
starting from a 30 minute run in week 1. (Or consider it a 30 mile week
if you're a higher mileage sort.)

Not sure if you remember a discussion like this from about 4 yr ago when
someone (like DF) suggested I should aim for a longer race. Instead of
several decades to reach 50 miles like I thought was realistic, the
5-10% formula said I should have been able to do a 50 miler by 2005,
iirc, even accounting for summer field work, recoveries, winter
conditions, etc. I stumbled across those calculations the other day -
and threw them out.😉 I'm figuring another 1-2 yrs, but I'm enjoying the
journey. (some of my slow buildup was probably related to foot/ankle
issues and muscle imbalances,etc, that needed to get resolved)

Dot

--
"Success is different things to different people"
-Bernd Heinrich in Racing the Antelope

"Dan Stumpus" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

"Robert Grumbine" <[email hidden]> wrote

My take on it is that the 31.5 minute increase in week 2, etc, is just
a bit picky and over cautious.

True but it is just a simple 5% table. The main flaw as Donovan pointed
out it has no plataues. Increase, increase, hold steady and adjust. A
constant increase is deceptively dangerous be it 1 or 10 percent.

Quoted message said:

In increasing mileage, think the human performance curve: you can
cover twice the distance by slowing just 5-6%. So the endurance
challenge of increasing mileage is minimized if you just slow down.

However, I find that skeletal adaptation, and recharge time are what
you need to monitor, rather than distance.

If you can run on soft surface, and are healthy, I would think you
could go up 10-20% every few weeks, provided:

1. You slow your pace by say 5% for a 10% distance bump, and 10% for
a 20+% bump.
2. No speed or tempo work, just LSD to get your body used to
recharging more energy into your legs. Why complicate things by
putting speed stress on your legs?

After 2-4 weeks, you'll start feeling stronger at the distance and
your pace will approximate your original pace at lower mileage.

For you and maybe me with years of base maybe. It's all about individual
recovery rates and they vary widely. For those new to the sport and or
distance, take more time.

To over-genralize, people are always in a hurry to run faster and/or
further - why rush it?

-DF

Dan Stumpus said:

I used to go from 70 to 105 miles in one step

Aha, and this is exactly why you burned out. If you'd kept it capped
at say 50 miles, you might still be running these days. ;-)

In article <[email hidden]>,

Dot dot.h@#duh?att.net said:

Robert Grumbine said:

5% versus 10% ramp ups came up again (marathon training post), and
I'd like to put it to its own thread. One part is that I do run for
health, and if 5% increases are better for health than 10%, which they
are, then I'll go that way. So no problem. I also like to do some
longer races, having already done a trail 50k. So I'd like to see
a schedule that leads to being able to do those.

Below is a full 52 weeks of increasing distance by 5% per week,
starting from a 30 minute run in week 1. (Or consider it a 30 mile week
if you're a higher mileage sort.)

Not sure if you remember a discussion like this from about 4 yr ago when
someone (like DF) suggested I should aim for a longer race. Instead of
several decades to reach 50 miles like I thought was realistic, the
5-10% formula said I should have been able to do a 50 miler by 2005,
iirc, even accounting for summer field work, recoveries, winter
conditions, etc. I stumbled across those calculations the other day -
and threw them out.😉 I'm figuring another 1-2 yrs, but I'm enjoying the
journey. (some of my slow buildup was probably related to foot/ankle
issues and muscle imbalances,etc, that needed to get resolved)

The memory passed through my mind as I posted. Certainly you'd
get in to trouble pressing an exponential curve forever, or even this
more modest one for 'only' one year. Doubly so if you were starting
from scratch and hadn't even had time for muscles and skeleton to
adjust to the fact you were running.

The striking thing to me is that with so many talking as if 5% were
some terribly small rate of increase, it suffices to take you from 10
mpw to 120 mpw in a single year, or from 30 minutes as your longest to
6 hours. Those are wildly different levels!

--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences

Dan Stumpus said:

I used to go from 70 to 105 miles in one step (50% !), but I'd slow it way

That's why your running economy was so poor. If you'd shortened your stride
length to 10 miles or so, you might have been a bit faster (-;

Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/

In article <[email hidden]>,

Dan Stumpus said:

"Robert Grumbine" <[email hidden]> wrote

My take on it is that the 31.5 minute increase in week 2, etc, is just a bit
picky and over cautious.

Indeed. It's just a table that shows what 5% per week looks like.
Even for myself, and I'm a numbers person, I won't be setting my watch's
timer to the second and stopping that instant. But it serves as a
good reminder to me that I needn't be making big jumps. On the early
end, a silly little 90 seconds is a significant addition.

For practicality, I have a route that takes 31 minutes, and another
that takes 36 minutes. Well over the 5% jump, but since I'm not going
to set the countdown timer to the second, it's what I have. So the increase
becomes to do the 36 minute run 1 time in the week, then 2, then 3 ...
such that the week total grows by something more like the 5% even though
that longest day goes up by 20% in the first week.

In other words, the implementation is more like an increase and plateau
as mentioned several times already.

Quoted message said:

In increasing mileage, think the human performance curve: you can cover
twice the distance by slowing just 5-6%. So the endurance challenge of
increasing mileage is minimized if you just slow down.

However, I find that skeletal adaptation, and recharge time are what you
need to monitor, rather than distance.

Rule of thumbishly, the farthest you can race is 1.5 times your longest
run (down here in my current part of the distance curve). I've done
some single run increases of about that order, and even with backing off
the pace by at least 5% and really more like 10%, 1.5 is a tough increase
to make even for a one-off with plenty of rest before and recovery after.

To leap from 36 minutes (my longest of the last 4 months) to 72 tomorrow
is just not going to happen with me running, at any pace, on any surface.
I wouldn't be happy, I expect, with increasing to the 54.

The 5-6% is better, imho, as a guesstimate of equivalent paces for
someone sufficiently trained to do the different distances. If you're
in training to run 10 miles, you can run it about 5-6% slower pace than
your 5 mile run. One of the interesting features of Benson's approach
(at least as used and modified by Warren and Patty Fink, runners and
researchers in the same area) is that he does have your pace for runs
follow such a die-off curve -- even (especially) for the easy runs.
Rather than say 'your LSD pace is 9 mpm, so run all easy runs at 9 mpm',
they take the dieoff curve and say that 'your race pace for 10 miles
would be 60 minutes, so your 10 mile easy jog should be 80 minutes,
5 mile easy jog should be 38'.

I find this to accord better both with what I had more or less been
doing anyhow, and with the reason you have in mind -- that the effort
(stress) levels were more comparable.

Quoted message said:

If you can run on soft surface, and are healthy, I would think you could go
up 10-20% every few weeks, provided:

1. You slow your pace by say 5% for a 10% distance bump, and 10% for a 20+%
bump.
2. No speed or tempo work, just LSD to get your body used to recharging
more energy into your legs. Why complicate things by putting speed stress
on your legs?

After 2-4 weeks, you'll start feeling stronger at the distance and your pace
will approximate your original pace at lower mileage.

Then you can either ramp up intensity and sharpen for competition, or step
up your mileage again.

I used to go from 70 to 105 miles in one step (50% !), but I'd slow it way
down, and I had a nice soft trail to train on. After just a few weeks, I'd
feel normal at that mileage, and would be ready to train harder.

When resuming harder training, I'd decrease the mileage down to 95 ish to
allow for the increased intensity, just as I decreased my speed to allow for
increased mileage during the ramp up phase.

As far as longer races goes, if you're in marathon shape, all you need for
ultras is a couple of longer runs (eg, a 30 miler or two, obviously at a
gentle pace, with breaks), and you're ready to go. I've run 50 milers
without any runs over 20 miles, but I had a good base of 70+ miles/week, and
had my pacing and nutrition/hydration down. My guess is that with a
smaller base, you might need a few long runs under your belt.

-- Dan

--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences

I support the idea of taking several years to gradually build up a
substantial base,
not these quickie few month programs. This is if you want run a
marathon or more
every year.
One recommendation is increase the long run about an hour per year
until one
gets up to 3-4 hours. Thats only 3 minutes longer per long run if you
are doing
two a month.
The other is is increase ones base weekly mileage to a good number
like 100 km (63 miles) over the period of a couple years. This would
comprise
about five 10 mile runs a week, the every-other-week long run, and
shorter long
run on inbetween weeks, and a rest day per week. I kept this schedule
up for
almost the entire 1980s without injury.
A marathon then becomes an extra hard long run, but not an
extraordinary effiort.

Some people have better natural abilities than others and can build up
much
faster without difficulties.

"Robert Grumbine" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

...
In other words, 5% per week is also probably not sustainable for
a long time. Tripling in 24 weeks is itself a pretty substantial
increase that will take some time for the body to get used to.

I agree with those who say you need some plateaus along the way to adjust.
Any straight % rule is bound to fail at higher mileage's, and you'd do
better to choose a target mileage and use a curve that levels off toward the
end, putting in plateau periods to make it more real. Using an adjusted sine
curve with 20mpw start and 100 end gives the following:

wk % inc
1 20
2 22 11.6%
3 25 10.4%
4 27 9.4%
5 29 8.6%
6 32 7.9%
7 34 7.3%
8 36 6.7%
9 38 6.3%
10 41 5.9%
11 43 5.5%
12 45 5.2%
13 47 4.9%
14 49 4.6%
15 52 4.3%
16 54 4.1%
17 56 3.9%
18 58 3.7%
19 60 3.5%
20 62 3.3%
21 64 3.2%
22 66 3.0%
23 68 2.9%
24 69 2.7%
25 71 2.6%
26 73 2.5%
27 75 2.3%
28 76 2.2%
29 78 2.1%
30 80 2.0%
31 81 1.9%
32 83 1.8%
33 84 1.7%
34 85 1.6%
35 87 1.5%
36 88 1.4%
37 89 1.4%
38 90 1.3%
39 91 1.2%
40 92 1.1%
41 93 1.0%
42 94 1.0%
43 95 0.9%
44 96 0.8%
45 97 0.7%
46 97 0.7%
47 98 0.6%
48 98 0.5%
49 99 0.5%
50 99 0.4%
51 99 0.3%
52 100 0.2%

Now for my own example for this year based on time:

hrs wt
wk run %inc ma %inc
01 0:50
02 2:18 176%
03 3:01 031% 2:24
04 3:05 002% 2:55 021%
05 4:24 043% 3:43 027%
06 4:36 005% 4:16 015%
07 3:24 -026% 3:58 -007%
08 5:15 054% 4:31 014%
09 1:33 -070% 3:05 -032%
10 3:43 140% 3:15 005%
11 6:10 066% 4:34 041%
12 4:16 -031% 4:48 005%
13 6:03 042% 5:28 014%
14 6:32 008% 5:59 009%
15 6:21 -003% 6:21 006%
16 6:09 -003% 6:16 -001%
17 9:04 047% 7:38 022%
18 3:59 -056% 6:02 -021%
19 7:42 093% 6:41 011%
20 7:32 -002% 6:59 005%
21 7:39 002% 7:37 009%

It's hard to follow based on percentages. I established a weekly pattern and
most weeks I added time to each day. Long runs on Sundays skew the numbers
of course. I'm at a level now where I feel ok but realize that I should add
very slowly from here. Probably increasing over an hour/wk over the last 3
weeks was excessive.

-Tony

Robert Grumbine said:

... 5% per week ...

A couple thoughts.

[a] At the very low end for an absolute beginner - and no doubt, an
absolute beginner needs to be very patient and careful about increasing
the running, I'm not suggesting otherwise - 5% may not be so useful. I
mean, it's obviously absurd for one's very first week of running: let's
see, zero last week...

[b] I don't know how to quantify it, but my experience and gut agree
with the oft-expressed notion that if you've run XX miles (per run, per
week, whatever) before, you can build up to it significantly quicker
the second or tenth time. There's probably a handful of significant
factors here, one being how recently you logged XX mile weeks and how
many of 'em.

I think generally that your elaboration of the 5% series is interesting
and useful. Indeed, one doesn't need to make enormous jumps to make
radical increases over time.

Hell, I'd be thrilled with a savings account which gave me a mere ONE
percent interest each week! ;-)

rick++ said:

One recommendation is increase the long run about an hour per year
until one gets up to 3-4 hours.

Bob, forget the 10% increase in ramp ups.......we were hoping you'd go
with a 10% increase in personality.