By Dr. Ross Tucker

With one month to go, things should be taking shape for your race.

By now, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what kind of condition you have earned for yourself, and so your training runs will have taken on a new focus – you should be aware of the signals that your body is providing, and gaining a better understanding of where your own limits are.

For this final month, there are three focus areas.

Physiological

The first is the physiological, and here, your goal is to wrap up the training and begin to sharpen up.

In your program, you’ll see two characteristics of the final month. One is that you’ll start to do a little more faster paced running. A few intervals, a few hill sessions and some leg speed sessions, which are designed to get your nervous system in gear – activate those muscles, give you a bit more “bounce” and teach your body how to run a little faster. The idea is that by getting more efficient at faster speeds, you’ll be that much more comfortable at the slower speeds. So “speed” (which is a 100% relative term, remember) is key in the final month.

Also key is recovering when you need to. It’s easy at this stage, having earned a solid foundation of fitness, to get carried away, and to push those easy runs a little harder than you should. You really need discipline to avoid this. The worst thing you can do is to run your easy days too hard, because it will compromise your harder days, and slow your recovery.

By race day, the result may be that you are feeling a little flat and heavy-footed. So be aware of this, and force yourself to be slower and easier when you do the easy runs. This is all part of what is called the ‘taper’ – bringing down the volume, and allowing full recovery so that you can take advantage of the work you’ve done before.

Psychological

The second focus is psychological, where the big “battle” is so often fought on race day. I’ll discuss the mental aspects of the race closer to the big day, but for now, the key is awareness. You have to be aware of your pace, and what it feels like to run at a given speed. For example, if you are aiming for a 1:45, then your goal pace is 5:00/km. Learn what this feels like – how does it feel on your legs, on your breathing, on your ground speed movement? It’s so important because the single biggest thing that will derail your race now is a false pacing-strategy. You go out too hard, and you’ll pay later, and so it’s absolutely vital that you learn your own pace. You can do this on those easy runs, which tend to be more or less at race pace – as long you have one or two measured out kilometers, try to include them on your run and just check that you’re aware and capable of holding your target pace.

Also, be aware of your body’s signals to you. If you feel heavy in the first 10 min of a run, then back off and don’t overdo it. The body is saying rest, and now is the time to listen!

Recovery

And finally, the third focus area in this last month is recovery. I have already emphasized how important it is that your easy runs are controlled and easy, so that you don’t end up tired and flat by race day. But here, I’m talking recovery outside of running. We’re in a busy time at work, life may be stressful, and finding the balance between those demands and running is so important. This last month is a chance to exponentially capitalize on all the hours and miles of running you’ve done since last year, and so if you can manage your ‘stress’ holistically, then you stand to gain a huge amount. This can be difficult – we are not all professional athletes, after all! But simple things, like getting a good routine around going to bed reasonably early, taking a day a weekend to do no other work, setting aside even 30 min a day to just relax, can make the difference.

Develop your routine around diet as well – don’t get too carried away on the weekends, for example (and yes, I’m talking alcohol intake here as well!), and recognize that if you make a few small sacrifices (early bed-times, less junk food etc) they add up and allow you to really capitalize on this last month of training!

Good luck with the training, and over the next few weeks, I’ll be going into more specifics about the race – what to eat, how to manage the route, pace yourself, deal with any unwanted circumstances and so forth!

Ross