I read this article and found it very interesting, thought it might be something for you. The article is called Are You a Small Monkey or Big Monkey? – Data Thursday and is located at https://runfastacademy.com/data-analysis-small-monkey-big-monkey/.
It’s last day of Sept! Been running 302km in mostly Easy and Marathon zone for the past 1 mth to build my aerobic base.
Improvement comes from proper stress+recovery.
According to Dr. Nicholas Romanov “The Running Revolution” some runners run high mileages to achieve higher performance and these ppl are known as the Big Monkey. They feel uneasy if they were to stop running for one day.
On the other hand Small Monkey (like me) typically train 3 days a week with recovery in between and this would do good for their performance.
It takes some trial and error to know which types of Monkey you’re.
Not to be confused that which monkey is better, its objective is to maximize the benefit of your training and to avoid over-training.
Aside from mileage, you should also consider workout intensity (for instance, 20 minutes interval training gives you more stress level than a 30 minutes recovery run) to estimate your acceptable stress level to avoid over-training. We’ll cover more on workout intensity calculation in the future.