I couldn’t have asked for a better start to my year long quest to up my fitness heading into 2027 Vol State. I had a couple nice wins to kick things off.
- Got into Vol State
- Building the training habits (strength, workouts)
The big win was getting into next year’s Vol State. Kinda hard to win a race without being in the race (#analysis). The race has gotten popular enough over the last couple years that there’s now a lottery. The race has not gotten so popular to keep people on the initial waitlist out of the race though. The challenge would be sitting around not knowing I’m definitely in the race until a month or two (or less?) ahead of time. That’s stress I thankfully don’t have to worry about over the next 10 months. Now I can just focus on getting my body tuned up for it.
In order to improve my fitness, I need to put in a lot of training. In order to put in a lot of training, I need to first establish the habits of training. Most people reading are probably surprised this is even a thing for me considering the frequency with which I race. The truth is that I don’t really do the training thing as defined as a structured program of workouts aimed at improving or maintaining fitness. If I’m racing monthly, then I’m lucky to get up to 40 miles per week between races all at an easy effort. When I’ve gotten up to 50-60 miles per week, it’s all been super easy effort with lots of walk breaks. There’s no intensity. There’s no strength or supplemental exercises for support. There’s no intention behind anything that I do. I like to think that I’ve been doing enough in between races to maintain my fitness, but I’ve come to the realization that getting older is finally sapping my base fitness.
So step one for me is to intentionally build the habits I’ll need to execute The Revolution. This means workouts. The easiest way to build a new habit is to start small and then incrementally increase it over time. Strength work has been like a fad diet for me over the years. I get excited about it, do it 2-3x per week for maybe a month, and then stop when I got busy or didn’t feel like doing it any more. This time I started out with 5 minutes of pushups, pullups, and planks each day in July. Earlier in August, I began alternating the Myrtl Routine every other day for a little bit of variety and because I could definitely use some improved mobility. I also started up a 30 minute full body workout once per week this month. My slow build looks like this:
- May – 0 minutes
- June – 8 minutes
- July – 85 minutes
- August – 220 minutes
I feel very good about my current ramp as it feels sustainable. I don’t know what the end game is with my strength work at this point. An hour per day seems overly excessive when combined with daily running and walking. The seven minutes per day I managed in August is clearly not enough though a solid step in the right direction. I’m thinking of increasing my time by 10-15% per month over the prior month. Maybe a little larger increase here in the earlier months, however I don’t want it to feel too much too soon.
My other really big win during August was starting up two weekly running workouts. For my Monday hill workout, I’m going back to my tried and true repeats at a local nature preserve. I’m currently structuring them as power hiking up a steep hill and then bombing the downhills with about 300 feet elevation gain/loss per mile. I believe this works best to condition my quads for my upcoming mountain hundreds. Once I get past those though, I’ll probably change these to shorter repeats running up the hills for more of a strength workout. Thursdays I’ve started attending a track session at my local high school. A couple really fast dudes have been running it for a couple years and I’m piggy backing on their workouts. I’ve done even less speedwork than strength training over the years so this is very, very new for me. I’m expecting this to translate into some quick and easy fitness gains. Fingers crossed.
I’m thinking about the rest of this year (Aug-Dec) as a large base building phase for myself. I have three hundreds still scheduled through November so my running mileage will still be fairly minimal. The focus though is firmly establishing the training habits above (strength, hill/speed). Once these are locked in, I can then scale those and my overall volume next year leading into Vol State. In prior training cycles, I’ve gotten a little burned out when I look too far ahead so I’m treating this more like an ultra and not looking further ahead than the next month.
September Goals & Objectives
- Race and recover from Virgil Crest 100
- Increase strength training to 260 minutes
- Continue weekly hillz/speed workouts outside of week before/10 days after Virgil Crest
Rome wasn’t built in a day. The king won’t be overthrown in a month.