I'm not yet sure if this post will end up being incredibly short or incredibly long. It's hard to really outline my philosophy on training because it is constantly evolving, but I have some core beliefs that I always hold to.
First, I want to make it clear that my own training philosophy and my coaching philosophy are slightly different (meaning I coach my high school athletes differently than I coach myself). There are certain things I do as a runner that I would never ask my high school runners to do. For example, I am a big believer in a base-building phase to training that includes mileage, some short up-tempo work and strides that lasts several weeks early in a season, especially for a high school team that has a tendency to get out of shape in the off-season. However, for my own training I normally incorporate workouts into my early stages, more for my own sanity than any true belief in completing hard workouts early in training. I enjoy completing a hard fartlek or interval workout way more than completing a 60 minute run.
Anyway, my training for long distance races has been something I've studied over the past several years in an attempt to make my marathon experiences less frustrating. I've run 2 marathons in my life, and in both cases my body decided to quit on me around 16 miles, making me miss my goals by over 10 minutes each time.
I've always been a big believer in Arthur Lydiard's foundational belief that aerobic capacity can be built with virtually no limits and should be the basis for your training system. I am a huge believer in the long run, even for my high school athletes who run as much as 14 miles during their training in cross country season. I have always placed a long run as the most important run of the week and made my early workouts focus on aerobic capacity more than anything else.
However, I recently read an article about the the coaching philosophy of Renato Canova and my idea of long distance training immediately changed. The focus on "hard" long runs went completely against some of the ideas I had already had about training. I had always figured that if I did several runs of 20-22 miles, the pace didn't matter as long as the distance and time were there. He basically says that the buildup of the "slow" long run should be in your base-building (what he calls the global phase), and your true marathon training should last about 3 months (called the specific phase).
The "Global phase" can be as simple as a season of short racing (5k/10k) and can include your slow long runs. However, once you get into your specific phase, the hard long run becomes important. This means that you shouldn't be doing 20 miles at 7:00 pace if your goal for the marathon is 6:00 pace. You should be doing 18-20 miles at 6:10 pace or so.
My other belief, outside of the "hard" long run is the fact that you need to remember that your body doesn't know how many miles you've run, how far your intervals were, or long the hill was. What it knows is how many times your heart beat, how many steps you took. The point is that doing specific intervals isn't always necessary. I know lots of people who are obsessed with making sure they run a specific number of miles or a specific interval workout. But your body doesn't know it's running 400 meters, 800 meters, 2 miles, etc... If you can't get to a track or a specifically marked area, it's not that difficult to run a similar workout as a fartlek with no markings, or just guessing distance and measuring off your own course.
I'm a big believer in effort more than pace for many workouts. That's why early on I put an emphasis on fartleks and tempo runs more than intervals.
However, for those who believe in intervals, think about this for a second. If you can't get to a track and you want to do 800 meter intervals, find a place or loop you think is close to 800 meters and do your intervals on that. Then you may not know your specific pace but you will know if you are keeping a steady pace, or if you're slowing down or speeding up. I have a loop that's about 750 meters long where I do intervals all the time. I know my times should be faster than my goal 800 pace, but my body doesn't care that it's 50 meters short. It cares that I'm running for 2 1/2 minutes hard.
I generally try to break my training into 3 phases: Base building (for me this includes some workouts), Race-Specific training (meaning I am focusing on my goal pace or a bit faster), and Sharpening (focusing on speed in the last 2-3 weeks before a race). Follow the links below for examples of how those phases look:
Base Building
Race-Specific Training
Sharpening
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