Building my Fellrunning Season: Part 3
Volume based on training history, benchmarks, and race goals
In parts 1 and 2, I went through how I’ll monitor fitness through testing, followed by using the test results to periodise and prescribe training intensity over the course of the season. This is, of course, incomplete without knowing how much to do.
While the first two parts in this series are more quantitative, volume has some grey areas. There’s no great measure of how much you should do, typically you only find out that you’re doing too much in the form of injury.
I’m going to cover volume in two parts; how I’m approaching total weekly volume, and then how much higher intensity volume.
Total Volume
Anyone familiar with endurance sport knows that it’s a game of mileage. The basic equation is train more = race faster. It’s much more complex than that when you get into the details, but that’s the short version.
One of the reasons that volume is so important is that it develops fatigue resistance and durability, which depending who you ask are closely related, but slightly different things.
Fatigue resistance: ability to sustain a speed over a given duration.
Durability: ability to reproduce a speed after incurring fatigue.
This has become a hot topic in sport science. James Spragg, PhD. has done a few podcast appearances that I recommend listening to, where he discusses some of the durability studies that were the focus of his PhD research.
One of the big takeaways is that higher training volume is correlated with better durability. Comparing elite U23 cyclists with seasoned pros, they had similar maximal power outputs when fresh, but after a fatiguing bout of work, the pros saw a much smaller drop off in power when retesting their max. The big difference was training volume, not only immediately prior to the study, but over their athletic lifetimes.
As far as I’m concerned with my own training/racing, fatigue resistance and durability are more or less the same thing. I want to be fatigue resistant/durable so I can maintain a fairly even pace over the full race distance, with maybe a bit left in the tank for a late push.
This frames my approach to total volume. I want to increase it in order to better develop this quality of durability.
Training History
Rather than setting a weekly volume target that looks impressive and ramping ambitiously, I’m going to look where I am and see where a reasonable ramp might get me.
In 2023, I finished the year with 3 months averaging 8.3hrs/week of running without issue, a long enough period to suggest I can handle that volume well moving forward. There were quite a few 9-10hr weeks in that mix, so there’s a hint that consistent weeks in that ballpark should be possible.
Looking back at the training load ramps I’ve tolerated, they have all been quite gradual, not adding much more than 30min week-to-week, and normally not in consecutive weeks. A faster ramp might be possible, but I don’t have the track record to prove it.
Race History + Goals
Early this year I raced fairly hard for just under 4 hours, off a training block that averaged 8.3hrs a week, with the final 8 weeks averaging a touch over 9hrs.
I trained extensively on the course for that race, so to assess durability I can compare fresh, race pace training efforts to my actual race performance on key segments.
Climb early in the race
Best training effort: 9:05
Race: 8:52 - 2% faster
Long climb at roughly halfway
Best training effort: 39:42
Race: 43:58 - 11% slower
Short, very steep climb in the final third
Best training effort: 10:08
Race: 12:00 - 18% slower
It’s not an exact science in these cases. Some of that drop off late in the race will be due to imperfect pacing, and I can give myself the benefit of the doubt that my training efforts were a little above race pace.
Nonetheless, as the race progressed my times went from well aligned with fresh training effort to substantially slower.
The middle climb was at around 1:45, and the final climb at the ~3hr mark. My race goals this year fall into the 2-3hr range. This is a fairly good indicator that I would benefit from pushing volume up from 8-9hrs to avoid this pace fade.
It also sets a floor. This race was, all in all, a good performance off 8-9hrs a week, so as long as most weeks are above that then I’m not doing too bad.
Benchmarks
Training logs from elites are dangerous territory. They sometimes lack important context, and part of the reason their training can be as demanding as it is, is because they are genetic outliers.
This is actually what makes their training logs such a valuable resource for comparison. If that’s what they’re doing, as an elite athlete, possibly as a full-time occupation, then that’s a great high watermark; I should approach that kind of volume with caution.
From what I’ve been able to find from a collection of blog posts, podcast interviews and Strava accounts, most seem to land in the 11-14hr range, while there are examples of some (particularly those focused on ultras) training much more.
So in the context of my history, trying to consistently nail >12hr weeks is pushing it, but a gradual build toward the 10-11hr range wouldn’t be insanity.
Elevation Gain
As a fellrunner, I can’t ignore the importance of weekly metres climbed as part of total volume. I can apply a similar process; looking at my training history, race history + goals and some benchmarks.
Building up to my race with +1,300m in January I averaged 2,500m per week Oct-Dec, 3,000m in the 8 weeks before taper. I’m targeting races with a max of 1,500m of climbing, so I’m aiming to stay in this ballpark.
Looking at what some of the top fellrunners are doing, many get in 4,000m+ per week. Again, this gives me an idea of what too much might look like. That said, some have a geographical advantage, and have easier access to bigger climbs. If I lived in the Lake District, I daresay my weekly total might be higher.
The principle of specificity is important in this regard, what I want is quality climbing, by which I mean it should closely replicate races. Practically, this means steep climbing at a harder effort in a few sessions, as opposed to easy climbing on lower gradients every day.
Life
Running has to fit in around everything else. This doesn’t need much explanation. All other considerations aside, I could do a maximum of ~15hrs per week without starting to really adversely affect work/relationships. This is above where I’ve set the high watermark, so all good.
Summarising Total Volume
I’ve proven in the past I can handle 8-9hrs per week with 2,500m of climbing.
My tolerated volume ramps have been very gradual, maybe +30min per month
I’ve raced a duration of 3hrs well off 8-9hrs a week, but with clear room for improved durability suggesting higher volume would be beneficial
Elites targeting similar distances/durations to me train 11-14hrs a week, giving me a high watermark to stay below
Putting this together, it seems pretty reasonable to build from ~8.5hrs up toward a maximum of 11hrs as tolerated, with 2,500-3,000m of climbing. This should see improved ability to maintain pace in the later stages of races >1.5hrs.
High Intensity Volume
This whole section will tackle fundamentally one question. How much of X intensity do I need to do to get faster?
Described by Olav Alexsandr Bu on The Norwegian Method podcast, the size of the stimulus needed for adaptation at a given intensity is relative to the time to exhaustion at that intensity.
Ie. You don’t need to do much fast running to improve fast running, you need to do a lot of slow running to improve slow running.
I’m not going to break the mould with my approach to this, progressive overload is a training principle for a reason.
Early in the season I’ll start with short intervals, and fairly small total workloads comparative to my time to exhaustion. Progressively I’ll increase both interval length and total duration, but at different rates for each intensity dependent on periodisation, with some ramping down as the focus shifts increasingly toward race pace.
These prescriptions are found broadly in training plans and books, but also based on some personal experience of what works for me.
vVO2MAX
Early rep length: 30sec
Max rep length: 3min
Early total work: 5min
Max total work: 20min
My time to exhaustion at this pace is ~5min as per my maximal testing, so I shouldn’t need to accumulate a huge amount of time at that speed to improve. Due to the fairly short reps and equal recoveries, it’s possible to go well above time to exhaustion in terms of total work per session.
The phase where I focus here will culminate with something like 7x3min.
Threshold (CS)
Early rep length: 90sec
Max rep length: 8min
Early total work: 12min
Max total work: 35min
My time to exhaustion at CS is 30-40minutes, so I’ll aim to build toward that amount of total work fairly quickly, but not go beyond it. I find these workouts to be demanding and require good recovery, so I’d rather add a second CS workout to the week in the appropriate phase than push total work up to ~60min in a single session.
The CS phase of training will end up with workouts like 4x8min.
Tempo/race pace
Early rep length: 5min
Max rep length: 30min
Early total work: 20min
Max total work: 90min
This is race pace, so it’ll be a slow build toward the final phase of training in terms of the total work getting anywhere near 90min, and actually may not need to go that high. Total work per session does need to be substantial nonetheless, as ultimately I aim to sustain this intensity for ~2.5hrs.
These race specific sessions will be in the long run, along the lines of 2.5hrs with 4x20min at race pace. I may not do many of these particularly hard long runs, as B races in my schedule should provide a lot of the stimulus I need.
I’m aiming to do only one session for each intensity per week, so the total work durations are the total weekly volume per intensity. As the length of the workouts progress, it’ll add a few minutes here and there to my total volume, with the remainder of my planned increase coming from low intensity work.
Doubles
If I want to increase my running volume up to around 10-11hrs a week while maintaining one day completely off, I need to average ~1.75hrs per training day.
There isn’t a practical single-run-only configuration of that volume that doesn’t result in me running 1.5-2hrs on 4 or 5 days a week. In my experience, runs of much more than 1.25hrs start to incur a higher recovery cost relative to the extra volume you accumulate.
Also, there’s the increased injury risk being exposed to impact forces in the late, more fatigued state toward the end of these longer efforts, especially 4-5x per week.
Finally, there are simple scheduling issues, day-to-day it gets tricky to fit in a 2hr run before/after work.
There's a fine line to tread here as I mentioned earlier when looking at elite training diaries. Nonetheless, there’s some structural patterns that are informative, and reflect some of my own experience with midweek >1.5hr runs.
With the exception of a weekly long run, most elites whose training logs I reviewed don't run more than 70-80min in a single session, but will complete a total of ~2hrs most days. Their capacity to run for a long time is obviously established, but are rarely running much more than 60% of the goal event duration in one go.
Similar to using elites as a guideline for what too much volume probably looks like, I think this is helpful. If elite marathoners preparing to run as fast as they can for 2-2.5hrs are not running more than ~75 minutes in a single run (apart from the long run), then it might not be wise to plan multiple >1.5hr runs into my week.
There are certainly people who do it, but that’s individualisation, the theme of this series; my process for individualising training. In the case of doubles, I found enough examples of elites limiting mid week runs in preference to doubles that I’m convinced.
The singles-vs-doubles debate appears largely undecided in terms of physiological impact, and 2 a day training is par for the course in many other endurance sports.
A single 1.75hr run is more specific to my race goals than an easy double, but there will always be a 2-2.5hr long run. Closer to my goal race, I may convert a double into a single 1.75hr run, but this would be a specific intervention aligned with the periodisation for that event.
Wrapping up Part 3, a reasonable approach to volume. Reasonable is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Ambitious targets are great, but the runner who does too much and gets injured is a tale as old as time itself. Of all the aspects of training I’ve outlined in this series, volume will likely require the most experimentation and monitoring to make sure I’m doing enough, but not too much.
Total volume based on what I’ve historically tolerated, increasing gradually
High intensity volume based on time to exhaustion, starting with short durations very gradually progressed
Using doubles to avoid the potential downsides of too many lengthy runs (>1.5hrs)
The end of Part 3 is also the end of the Building my Fellrunning Season series. If for some insane reason you read this final part first, here is Part 1: Testing and Part 2: Intensity.