The great coach Bill Shankley said: “Some people think running is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that. “* Now, look, running is not a matter of life and death and the corona-virus is for some people so here I’ll do you a favour: I won’t spout my uneducated opinion about what you should do on the virus and instead give you a well-educated opinion about what you can do with your training while this situation persists.

* come to think of it he might have been talking about football, but let’s move on…

The situation

Most of my clients have had their upcoming races cancelled or postponed and as such I feel that I can offer a few ideas for how to continue training along in the absence of your previous goal event.

You may have put in some very hard work to peak for a particular race. This is certainly the case for most of my clients as I employ a peaking model meaning we build a base first and then we do very race-specific workouts in the final 6-10 weeks. This means we can find ourselves with a very ‘sharp’ ability to race but a floundering ‘capacity’ – we are just about ready to ‘hit the race’ but our basic physiological abilities are beginning to sag around the edges. What do we do now that all this pent up energy has no place to go?

I think I have a good view of everyone’s pain. I am an athlete with my own goals. My three next race goals are nearly certain not to go ahead and for my main goal of the year (early June) I judge that the chances of my getting to race it is 60/40. Yet I will continue to plan for reasons I’ll outline below.

But I also see this from a race organisers point of view: I direct the Lap of the Gap Marathon and I am co-organiser of EcoTrail Wicklow. The first race is not under immediate threat but I know from people in the industry that May events are by no means safe. We could be forced to reschedule. There’s lots of preparation we are doing behind the scenes for these eventualities. For events further ahead – like EcoTrail Wicklow – there are other considerations about how we will be affected.

As a club coach, we have been told to suspend all training activities for the upcoming period so some of the cherished regular weekly meet-ups will go down the toilet for a while.

I also run an AirBnB with my wife. We decided to close this already a month ago. It did not seem prudent to invite strangers from all over the world into a house with our three small kids for an income stream we can survive without for a while. Apart from this, I onboard less clients and expect I will onboard less in the coming months until people gain certainty again about what goals they can commit to. Every business will probably feel the impact of this over the coming three months at least.

Finally, I am a holiday organiser and had been looking forward to a trip to the Lake District end of this month with a group of Dane with Paul Tierney as our local guide. This trip was also postponed until October.

So whether you’re losing your holiday, your race, income for your business, or have to reschedule or cancel your running event or even your weekly training with your club or your friends, I feel your pain. Now to what we can do about it (again this is about training – if you want to know what to do about the virus go to the HSE.ie!).

The solutions

The first step in this type of process is acceptance. There is no value in labelling any situation as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Situations simply are as they are and it’s always best to deal with what is in front of you and totally put aside any notions about how you would like things to be. it could be worse – it’s still nice to go for a run every day on your own even if there is no race next week and no training session with the club. Our sport thrives in solitude too.

Whatever training plan you are currently in the middle of will have gained you some fitness. You may not be able to employ it right now but you can hang onto it. If your race goal was imminent – such as the upcoming Vienna or Rotterdam Marathons or the Maurice Mullins races – then you should enter what is called a ‘Refresh Period’ for 2-4 weeks first of all.

Refresh!

What is a refresh period? It’s a period of training where you refocus briefly on neglected parts of your physiology. A ‘General Endurance’ refresh is used to rebuild the basic aerobic foundation usually gained through running in zone 1 and to a lesser degree zone 2 or under what scientists call the Aerobic Threshold or First Ventilatory Threshold. During race specific training this system always begins to erode a bit. In the absence of a race – rebuilding this a bit again is a great idea.

You can do other types of refresh if you need it more: a General Refresh focuses on both rebuilding basic endurance but also basic strength ,technique and speed through training such as weight-lifting, easy sprints and strides and form drills.

It’s also possible you were training for an ultra but now have something else in mind. If so your anaerobic capacity has likely suffered a bit and you could decide to do a period with some more intense work to revisit that system ahead of figuring out new goals.

If your race is a bit further way – like my own goal is – I advise that for now you continue as if nothing has occurred. Keep training until you hear for certain that your race is gone. At that time you can move into a refresh period as described above.

Return to basics

Should it become clear that the disruption will last longer than 2-4 weeks then your best bet is to ‘return to base training’ and simply stay in that base training until things normalise and then prepare a new build-up. You can never really do too much base training as long as you understand where your current weaknesses are and what needs attention (modern base training doesn’t just mean lots of slow volume although it’s a start as long as you can handle the volume you pick).

Finally, if you’re worn out by your training and you don’t really care any more whether you lose some of your race fitness, then this is THE IDEAL PERIOD to take a 2-4 weeks mental break from serious running similar to what you would do after a hard race. Think about something else and follow a lose and non-demanding schedule – just enough to keep you healthy and active.

 

So hang tight folks – we can still train and keep ourselves fit so we are ready to resume ‘life as normal’ whether it be in 2 weeks or, as some epidemiologists think, more like 12 weeks or more.