Perfecting the Art of Peaking

How to navigate common problems en route to a goal race

It reads like the plot of a running horror story. Your goal race date is circled on the calendar. Training is flying by in a happy frenzy, your log a testament to strength and fitness. Day by day all those sacrifices--the predawn runs, the early nights in bed, the plate of seven-layer nachos skipped here and the weight room session made up there--seem to have had a higher purpose. You're on the fast track to PR City.











I 'm six weeks into a 12-week program. My goal is to set a PR for 10K, but I feel like I've already peaked. My times have stagnated and I no longer feel fresh when running most days. Should I try to maintain for the next six weeks? Should I take a down week? Or will I feel fine if I just cut back in the week before the race?

Nothing brings the confidence train to a screeching halt like feeling flat for days on end. The boundless energy and enthusiasm of attaining peak fitness is suddenly replaced by the haunting sensation that you might have done yourself in. The biggest question is why.

"Many times when you're confronted with this, it's an overtraining problem," says New Zealand Olympic medalist Lorraine Moller. "If you've worked really hard and don't see the results, you probably need to let it sit awhile because the body needs recovery to realize the benefits of the work you've done." At its heart, overtraining is really nothing more than under-recovery.

"Where people get in trouble is they try to 'do something,' whereas they've 'overdone something,'" says Moller. "They need to stop 'doing' and let the body go into the recovery phase that it needs. The adage that always went with the Lydiard training was, 'If you go off your training, easy jogging until you come right.'"

Not all feelings of stagnation are caused by overtraining. In fact, for some athletes it's the constant repetition of what they believe works that's keeping them stuck in neutral.

"A lot of times all our body needs is a new stimulus," says coach and 2:40 marathoner Nicole Hunt. "You get stagnated in the same training, doing the same thing over and over again." Hunt has found hill work (everything from short reps at mile pace to 10-mile climbs) to be particularly effective, but realizes there's a wide variety of options available to wake up the system. "If you've been doing a lot of track work, move to the roads or trails and do fartlek intervals. Don't wear a Garmin--just run by effort."

While Moller and Hunt agree a stale runner needs to change something, determining the cause remains paramount. "Good training is doing what's needed to get you ready for the race," says Moller. "If a runner insists on doing something counterproductive, then it's self-sabotage." Yet there's an instance where staying the course has its benefits.

"In my experience, a lot of times when people start feeling flat they're on the verge of a breakthrough," says James DeMarco, former Division II All-American and coach of multiple-champion Blacksburg High School in Virginia.

"Oftentimes they're the most frustrated when they're about to have their best races. They just give up because they keep running the same things over and over and over, and they don't see the improvement." Plateauing in the middle of hard training is to be expected, says DeMarco, and like the other coaches he recognizes that for some a few days of cross-training or easy jogging might be what's required to spice up the system. "But what I've noticed is [runners in this situation] often get a beautiful day and they go out and crush it," he says.

In such an instance, staying the course will have paid off.

I ran a couple of 5Ks as a tune-up for my peak race, and I ran significantly slower than my training would indicate. The races weren't much faster than my tempos, but they felt a lot harder. What's causing this struggle and how do I fix it before my goal race?

Even in this era of information overload, it's possible for training myths to exist. Example No. 1: "A lot of runners think if they can run harder or faster every day, then it's better training," says Moller. This isn't the case. "You want to look at the weekly rhythm. You don't want to be stressing the body 50 percent every day. You're better to stress it some days and not at all other days so you get a better response from the stimulus/recovery curve. Those are the two sides of the coin."

When runners continually grind out every day at a moderate pace, the results are predictably moderate. "If you train at the same intensity, you never get a range," says Moller, "and when your racing is the same, it's because the range isn't there. You're a one-pace horse."

To combat this condition, Spangler recommends training at a wide variety of speeds, paces that are faster and slower than what's being run now. "If you're doing the same types of workouts all the time, maybe you just need some variety," she says. "If you're training for the 5K you need some of that harder fartlek work, some track work. Maybe you need to put a little more variety in there."

Going too far in the speed direction, however, can have equally deleterious results. Enter Training Myth No. 2: "I think when people start to 'tune up' they start to switch to speed training," says Fort Collins High School (Colo.) coach Chris Suppes, whose teams have won multiple state championships and qualified for Nike Cross Nationals. "Once they switch to speed training they miss out on the good threshold stuff. That's why when we get to the end of the season, we keep a lot of that longer stuff in there."

This belief has led Suppes to incorporate some unusual strategies.

"One thing I've learned from coaching is you don't have to take it easy the week of [a peak race]," he says. This applies equally, if not more so, to tune-up races. "A lot of people think of those tune-up 5Ks as their race for the week," Suppes says, "and they don't do anything on Monday or Tuesday. That might be a long enough break where they don't feel comfortable."

The goal then is to just keep the blood moving. "You're in good shape," Suppes says. "You've got a good oxygen support system. My guess is you just have to open up the veins in a couple key workouts and you'll feel fine."

I'd really like to assess my fitness, but I'm never sure when to do the test or what test to perform. I'm worried if I do it wrong and the run goes horribly, I'll lose all my confidence. Any suggestions?

"I'm a bit old school," says former marathon great Dick Beardsley, "but I've always been one to test things out in a race. There's just nothing like getting that race feeling, those butterflies in the stomach, getting in there with other people and knocking elbows a little bit."

For any number of reasons, though (cost, geography, family obligations), assessing your current fitness through a local race isn't always possible. Fortunately, there are any number of ways to determine your progress heading towards the big day.

"Periodically, I believe you need to do some test that simulates a race distance just to make sure you're not steering so far from your goal," says elite coach Brad Hudson. "A 3:50 miler should be able to run a 3:57 mile in the [early] period of his training without tapering too much."

Each race distance is going to have its own unique way of being tested. Beardsley likes to have his 5K runners run a 2-mile time trial at 5K goal pace. "When they're able to do it, it gives them so much confidence," he says, pointing out that with the added adrenaline and magic of race morning, they're likely to hold that pace the extra 1.1 miles. Similarly, Hunt recommends 3 x 2 miles at goal 10K pace to assess fitness for that distance, and a 12-or 15-mile run at marathon goal pace to see how her marathoners are coming along.

Despite your best intentions, there are times when a time trial shouldn't be attempted. "I think it's counterproductive when you're tired or you've worked a lot," Hudson says. "Then it's better to just go by feel and run a fartlek. Also, if you're already racing well, and you're already in good shape, then you don't need to test that specific endurance because you know it's there."

Hunt has her athletes pay specific attention to the weather. "Disregard the results if it's windy or snowy," she says, unless the race you're planning for is known for adverse conditions. If you're ill or stressed, that should also be taken into consideration. When comparing time trials, Hunt recommends you look back in your training log and see how the preliminaries (amount of easy days before the effort, weather, stress level) stack up.

No matter how far away race day is, Hudson believes you should never get too far away from your competitive roots. "I think the sport's about racing," he says. "I think you should never go blocks of just slow distance. I think you always keep in mind what your race goal is."

My track workouts the past two weeks have been miserable. The first one I was really struggling to hit my times and I cut it short. The second one I was determined to gut the whole thing out, but the only way I could do that was to get progressively slower on the last few repeats. Now the race I'm aiming for is only a month away. What should I do?

"Training doesn't lie," says DeMarco. "If you're not in shape to do the workouts, then that's telling you something." If that sounds like an exceedingly harsh way to open a dialogue, it's only because the consequences are far more dire.

"You don't want to go risk going into a marathon and hitting the pace for the first 10 miles and then the next 16 you're done," DeMarco says. "Same thing in a 5K, where you only get through the mile." Assuming your ferritin level is good (i.e., you're not at risk of being anemic), the weather is a non-factor, and your outside stressors are manageable, one month from race time is the place to be honest with yourself about realistic race goals.

"At that time, the paces are the most important thing," says Suppes, citing the example of a 5K runner struggling to nail her paces. "If you can't hit them in a mile, you sure as heck had better be able to hit them on a 1200," he says, adding that you ought to shorten the rest period if the intervals are cut down.

While variety is important to keep a strong training stimulus going, repeating several workouts can be exceptionally valuable as you build toward a key race.

"I can guarantee the first time you do a workout, 70 percent of the time it's hard to hit [the splits]," Suppes says. "Your muscle memory, everything like that, is a little bit off. The second time [through], it's always so much easier and so much faster."

When all else fails, a bit of psychology never hurts.

"I will always make paces a little bit slower than they're supposed to be in workouts," says Suppes. "That way the [runners] go out and can always finish it. You're not really lying to yourself, just slowing up the paces as a whole. If your threshold pace is 6:40, you run 6:45. Then you know you're running a little bit slower than you're capable of, but you [also] know you're going to finish it. That's more of a mental game than anything. When they hit the paces, they just feel great about themselves."

For the self-coached runner, the key is to let yourself (the coach) give yourself (the runner) paces that are challenging but realistic, that you can hit feeling strong and confident. If you can't, this is the time to adjust your goal race pace.

I'm a few weeks away from my target race and things just got crazy at work. Last week all I could muster were a few token easy runs to stay sane. What should I do about the missed sessions? What can I do between now and race day to best build my fitness and negate lost time?

There are few things running coaches can universally agree on. Add this topic to the short list.

"For the body, stress is stress," Mahon says. The key to succeeding in light of outside stressors is to strike a balance between ideal training and realistic outcomes.

"The [best] thing to look at is how can you rearrange your training schedule around the stressful times at work so that you don't overdo it," says Mahon. "That might mean you're only doing one hard session instead of two, or the sessions themselves need to be reduced in terms of volume or time." Mahon recommends using a heart rate monitor to help judge effort in times of excessive stress. "The monitor is going to be a good indication of where your energy levels are."

Even if your energy levels start to rebound, a few weeks out isn't the time to slide in a few extra sessions.

"You don't ever try to make up for lost training," Moller says. "You can only go from where you're at right now." A big problem she sees in the athletes she coaches is a dissociation between their work stress and their training stress. "You don't have a work body and running body, you only have one. Training is a stress you put on the body. The more [non-training] stresses you have, the less you need to put on your body in workouts because then you're going to go into a training hole."

Beardsley sees this all the time with his coaching clients. "What I tell them is, 'Don't even worry about it.' When you're only a few weeks from your goal race, you're in pretty gosh darn good shape. Backing it off a little bit, it's only going to help you."

His training logs confirm this.

"If something came up, and I could only get in an easy run or a shorter distance than I was planning on, then mentally I'd feel like I was losing it," Beardsley says. "But if I look back, a lot of times when things like that got in my way, and I had to miss a run or cut it short, it was the best thing that could happen. It gives you that little bit of freshness back in your legs."

Unfortunately, stress is often an uninvited guest who overstays his welcome. If your outside stressors look to be sticking around for the long haul, Mahon offers several ways to adjust your training to help maximize gains.

"The best thing to do when you're crunched for time is to stay on top of the lactate threshold work," he says. "It's going to do 90 percent of the job anyway." Because of the stress on the adrenal glands and cortical reserves, Mahon is against VO2 max intervals in these types of scenarios. He does, however, recommend some shorter, quicker repetitions with lots of rest to balance the tempo work. "Those will be plenty to get you the majority of the way there without risking the disaster of totally bonking."

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