After the Spijkenisse Marathon I started building towards the 2026 goals. In order to be able to do my hard sessions as effective as possible. I try to keep them as focussed and short as possible. That way I should get maximum effect for the least amount of stress on my muscles.
Still the key with getting better and faster is to make more weekly kilometers. This means that I need to increase the number of training sessions a week.
So far I managed to run every day, with the except for the day after the race. The idea is simple I build my progress on the 2 - 3 hard sessions a week (longrun, hill & speed) and use zone 1 recovery run and zone 2 easy runs to maintain strong enough to emdure the hard workouts.
Today I went for a low zone 1 (pure recovery). While this zone ranges to 121 bpm for me, I wanted to stay around 115 BPM to maximize the recovery gains (regardless of the pace).
While I maintained the bpm I had in mind it felt very unnatural because In order to slow my pace I shortened my step lenghts by roughly 20% and lowered my candans with +/- 5 steps.
Despite the somewhat unnatural feeling, it was fun to be outside for a bit and recoverywise it seemed very effective as my trainingreadiness (as estimated by garmin) increased with 11 points right after the training, which compensated somewhat for another bad night.
Happy running