Build ur aerobic base before running hard

There are now just four weeks left to go till the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon (SCSM) takes place on 3 December.

Have been Training with Coached

For the past 12 weeks, I have been training for the marathon with Coached, which has teamed up with Power 98 FM and the Under Armour Run Crew on a training programme geared towards the year-end marathon.

Coached is a heart rate based training programme that allows you to track, optimise and enjoy your training. It is led by Ben Pulham, 36, a former professional Kiwi triathlete.

The first hard session

This session was quite different to previous ones, where we had focused on building strength.

With the marathon just around the corner now, the session consisted of one lap of easy warm up on the track, before going into running drills for about 15 minutes. Then we had been required to do 20 minutes on the track, alternating between one minute of Hard and one minute of Steady running. To conclude the session, we did two laps of accelerations followed by one easy cool down lap.

This was a hard session according to Ben.

He said, “Tonight was hard. It was the first time we had really brought in the anaerobic intensity. Next week though will be harder than this.”

Injecting speed into the latter stages of the training plan

The reason for only injecting speed into the latter stages of the training, according to Ben, is because the body learns speed quickly. It does not learn endurance and strength very fast.

Said Ben, “So hopefully you have been taking on board, what I said in the past 12 weeks. You should have been doing the low intensity stuff at a low intensity to build the aerobic base and doing strength stuff to build your strength endurance. Now you only need a few weeks of really hard running to build your fitness level. That will be the focus of the next few sessions up to race day.”

Recover adequately from hard sessions

And after intense sessions, too, Ben recommends that runners should recover adequately. He said, “Because that was intense, you need to go home and do some light stretching or get onto a foam roller.”

He added, “Also, eat a healthy meal with lots of vegetables and stay hydrated on sugar free electrolytes. Get salt into your body as well, to get the recovery process going.”