Running 101: Consistency And Variety
- By Competitor Running
- Published Jun. 22, 2010
- Updated Oct. 28, 2011 at 1:10 PM UTC
Strike the balance between consistency and variety to run well.
Written by: Sage Rountree
You’ll be running your best when you have balance between hard and easy days, as I wrote about in my last column. But you also need to strike a balance between consistency and variety so you can reach your potential as a runner.
First comes consistency: A consistent base of miles run at an easy, aerobic pace. This base accumulates over months and years of your running career, ensuring you’ve undergone the adaptations in your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones that will keep you strong and running without injury.
This consistency is important day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year. You’ll do best when you’re running about the same number of days per week, about the same number of miles per month (roughly; of course, you’ll have some variety here), consistently over years.
A base of consistent running will have some cyclicality to it, but there should be no major fluctuations. Consider the penalty you pay, either in muscular pain or in a more serious injury, when you make a drastic jump in your mileage.
Once you’ve mastered consistency, you’ll introduce variety. This can be variety over time, adding longer runs. It can be variety over space, running on different terrain (track, road, hills, flats). It can be variety in both time and space, changing your pacing in interval workouts. This variety provokes your body into new adaptations and thereby improves your running.
This variety is important day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year. Variety appears in your daily workouts as you run various paces, including your easy warm-up and cool-down. Variety appears in the week when you alternate between harder and easier workouts. Variety appears in the month when you build progressively on key workouts week to week, then take a lighter week to absorb and integrate the work of your training. Variety appears in the year when you cycle through various blocks—base, build, peak, taper, recovery—as you target your key races. And variety appears over your career as you build from shorter to bigger races, and back again, changing focus according to your interests and abilities.
If you overdo the consistency, you’ll hit a plateau and drift into a rut; if you overdo the variety, you’ll never have time to master the adaptations. Find the balance between consistency and variety, and you’ll be able to hit your stride as a runner.
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Sage Rountree, Runner’s World’s yoga expert, is author of The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga and The Athlete’s Pocket Guide to Yoga. In addition to teaching yoga workshops nationwide, she is an active coach with certifications from USA Triathlon and the RRCA.
FILED UNDER: Running 101 / Training TAGS: Sage Rountree
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