Sustained Career

I have successfully sustained my running career since 1992.  How have I achieved that?

I have always done all-round training ie not just running.  I have included cross-training for variety and robustness and all-round conditioning.  I enjoy many types of training.  I feel that the older you get the more important this becomes.

I have always been active, in fact very active and in that regard, I haven’t slowed at all – in fact the opposite.

Currently, 2017, I’m training, in various ways, for about 15 – 25 hours a week depending on what training phase I’m in, plus mental and emotional training on top of that.  If you count steps, then there aren’t many days when I do less than 20,000.

Having said all that, I have almost always taken a three week, no-run break, at the end of every competition year. I remain active but no running!

My basic philosophy, especially since I got involved in multiday running, has been to “do the big miles in races”.  Rather than sustained high mileage in training, I have opted for higher intensity training (often on the treadmill) and I use 24 hour races as ‘training’ and doing ‘Training Camps’ (race simulation over 2 or 3 days at home) when I haven’t raced for a while.

This has worked for me.