Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Truthiness

A NYTimes article about the origin and the effectiveness of the 10% rule when ramping up mileage.
Posted by at 1:22 PM
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3 comments:

JAR said...

If I were off due to injury for 3 months, I’d probably go back to 60 miles a week almost immediately. It’s not like the guy was off for years. But, hey, that’s just me. I think the cited study was a failure because they maxed the runners out at 90-95 minutes per week. Let’s see a study where they max the runners out at 90-95 minutes per day.

June 21, 2011 at 6:28 PM
RM said...

Having been off for injury for a year, I can say that I followed this to some extent. When I was allowed to start running again, it was 1min on/1min off for 20 minutes. The whole first week I did that maybe three times. They I went to 2 on, 1 off, then 3 then 4. By the time I got there, I felt like I was basically at the point where I should be able to run 2-3 miles straight. The whole process took a while but I think by 6 or 7 weeks I could run 4 miles, and then another few weeks I could run 6.

If you look at my monthly mileage from last May/June/July 2010, I did 1 mile in May then 18 in June. By July I felt ready to run more and was like 94, then August was 153.

I don't think if I were hurt and not running for three months would I just immediately jump back into the same number of miles per week I had been running (whether that number was 20, 30, 60, whatever) but I do think that I could build up faster, so if I did only do 20 the first week, would move to 30+ the next week rather than just 22. But we've also been running for a long enough time that we can do that.

June 21, 2011 at 10:26 PM
Dart said...

Mother efFFFFing work firewall. I had a crapload typed and lost it all. Here goes again.

I just came back from injury. 6+ total weeks off, 5 of which were non-weight bearing on crutches. I've been back now just under 10 weeks. Weekly mileage since return:

<2, <6, 19, 13, 12, 27, 30, 24, 34, 34.

I've focused on these key elements:
1) number of days per week, including lifting, biking, softball, and running
2) how my body feels on the run, and increased distance as I could
3) speed before endurance

I couldn't do an effective workout on the track until about week 6, and at that everything is 800m or less, with a week of hard 2's, week of hard 4's, and last nights 3-minute torchure followed by a few mile tempo run.

Moral - I didn't follow the 10% to the science of it... but across the board, given my workout effort (either running, lifting, biking, or softball), my level of intensity has increased probably just as that, 10% per week.

I also am trying to follow the 4-week cycle, of build 1, build 2, peak week, and recovery week.

Coming from 60+ per week avg (of actual running weeks) over the last full year, it's taken 10 weeks to get to about 60% capacity.

First race back over the weekend since club challenge was a demoralizer, as I've run the race over 25sec/mile faster. The takeaway reward was getting to the line to begin with.

Patience, Patience, Patience. It's easy to forget how badly getting back into shape hurts. I damn near forgot how long it takes.

June 22, 2011 at 1:03 PM

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