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Runners World Articles: Archives - November 2002

Use It or Lose It

Keep your running edge all winter with these four workouts

As the days get shorter and colder, it’s all to easy to start lurching towards couch-potato status. But with the right plan, you can maintain your warm-weather fitness. All it takes is one specialized workout every week or 2, and you’ll keep your summer speed, marathon endurance, running rhythm, or hill strength. Just pick which of these gains you want to maintain, and follow the workouts below. And if you’re really ambitious, check out my 2-week Survivor Plan. It’ll help you “survive” the winter with all four of these running capabilities completely intact. The, come spring, you can pick up right where you left off.

SUMMER SPEED
With only 5 to 10 minutes of speedwork a week, you can maintain enough “speed fitness” to jump back into regular speed training. You can do with workout on a road, trail, indoor track, or treadmill.
On an easy 4- or 5- mile run, do the fist and last mile slowly. During the middle miles, speed up to your summer 5K or 10K race pace for 1 minutes, then jog for a minute. Repeat 5 times. When this becomes easy, increase the fast segments to 2 minutes, or pick up the pace slightly.

MARATHON EDURANCE
The key to maintaining your marathon endurance over the winter: Keep doing that long run. Plan to get in an 18 – to 20- mile run every 3 weeks throughout the winter. Run it slowly; the idea is to just cover the distance.

To maintain endurance for shorter race distances, do one long run between 12 and 17 miles every other week. For better recovery, insert 1-minute walk breaks every mile or so during all long runs. If the weather makes an outside long run impossible, pop a classic movie into the VCR, and do you long run on the treadmill.

RUNNING RHYTHM
To maintain a quick, easy running rhythm, try this drill once a week during an easy run: 10 minutes into the run, time yourslef for 30 seconds as you count the number of times your left foot hits the ground. Jog for a minutes, and then repeat the 30-second segment, but this time try to increase the number of steps you take by one or two. Don’t try to run faster (although this may happed on its own). Just stay light on your feet and concentrate on a quicker turnover. Do this exercise two or three more times, until your turnover feels noticeably quicker.

HILL STRENGTH
While running hills is still the best way to build strength, there’s an indoor workout that does just about as well stair-climbing. Actual stairs, that is. After 10 minutes of easy running, plan to end up at a stadium, indoor stairwell, or a multi-story parking garage.

Run up the stairs at a moderate pace for 30 seconds, then recover with 1 minutes of walking back down. Option 2: Do your hill runs on a treadmill, with the incline set at three or four percent. These are tough workouts, so start with only a few repeats, even if you feel you could do more. Each week, add one more repeat until you reach 10 or 15.

SURVIVOR PLAN
So you want to have it all: speed, marathon endurance, running rhythm, and hill strength. Not a problem. Stick with this 2-week schedule throughout the winter, and you’ll make it to spring feeling summer fit and ready to race.

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