McMillan's Six-Step Training System

Step #5: Buidling Your Plan, Part I
by Greg McMillan, M.S.

The first four sections provided the building blocks for optimal training, now you just need to arrange them in the proper order to build an individualized and optimal training schedule. In this section, you'll do just that. You'll first learn how to critique yourself. You'll examine how your body responds and adapts to different types of training. Then, in Part II, you'll see how I develop training programs "from the ground up". Using what you learn in Part I of this section, you can then build your training plan. Finally, in the last section, you'll learn how to continually mold the plan as your body and performances progress.

3 Steps to a Perfect Plan

In building your training plan, I believe there are three important steps. First, you have to evaluate your particular strengths and weaknesses as a runner. How can a program be optimal if it doesn't take into account your individual physical and mental traits?

Second, you must evaluate the physiological and psychological demands of your chosen race distance as well as the race's physiological and psychological limiting factors. Training for a marathon necessitates a slightly different approach than training for a 5K.

Finally, you need to account for your particular goal, whether the goal is achieving a certain time, executing a new race strategy or simply placing has high as possible. For example, if your goal is to win a championship in the 5000m, you will need to prepare not only to have a fast time but also to execute or react to varying race strategies (surging, negative splits, going out hard and hanging on, etc.). Since championship races are often tactical, you'll also want to improve your finishing kick.

Utilizing these three steps may seem like common sense, but in my experience, these easy steps are lacking in most runners' plans. The tendency is to find a training program in a book, magazine or on the internet and simply follow it. This may work for the general population but not for high performance athletes like you. You require (and deserve!) better. You deserve a schedule that will help you fulfill your potential and race your fastest.

For example, you should know why there are four weeks of speedwork instead of six. You should know why for you, more stamina training is needed but your training partner needs less. In an earlier section, I stated that you should know the purpose for each and every run you do. This idea carries over into this section as well. You should know why your program is designed the way it is.

Step #1: Evaluating Your Strengths and Weaknesses

The first step is critiquing yourself. Are you a "speedster" or a "the-longer-the-better" runner? Do you easily handle lots of miles per week or do you get fatigued? Do you adapt faster to speed training or stamina training? Love the 5K, hate the marathon? Love the marathon, hate the 5K?

These are the types of questions that you need to answer to get a handle on just what your strengths and weaknesses as a runner are. In general (and this is a big generalization), you'll find that most people are either tortoises or hares. Tortoises are those who race better the longer the event. They often enjoy long hard runs but find that speedwork is difficult and leaves their legs flat for a few days. You know them. They are the runners who seem to just roll along effortlessly for long distances but seem to have trouble generating much power on the track.

Hares on the other hand, like the shorter races. They run can run well off lower mileage and find that speedwork invigorates their legs. They may not be as "effortless" as the tortoise at the long stuff but get them on the track for some fast running and the power is impressive. They will simply eat you alive.

Knowing whether you tend to be a tortoise or hare plays into how your training program will be created. They are related to how much of each type of training you should include, the amount of recovery time necessary after a certain type of workout and how to avoid overtraining.

For example, if you are naturally more of a "speedster" than a "the-longer-the-better" endurance runner, you will likely excel at faster speed- and sprint-type training. You will perform well in the workouts and find that you quickly adapt or gain speed, power and sprinting ability. However, you may find that longer, more endurance training is more demanding on your mind and body. You may find it more difficult to execute these workouts and adapt to the training.

In this case, it will take longer to fully develop your stamina (lactate threshold pace) since you must take longer between workouts for your body to adapt to this type of training. On the other hand, you won't need to plan as many weeks of speed training since your body needs less time to "consolidate," or recover, from the workouts. It may only take six or eight workouts over three or four weeks to reach your full potential in workouts that match the type of runner you are.

I'll use myself as real life an example. My individual strengths as a runner are my high aerobic capacity and natural sprint speed. (My VO2 max has been recorded as high as 78 ml/kg/min and I've run under 53 seconds for 400m.) As such, I develop my speed with only a few speed workouts and can always perform well at 5K and shorter distances.

However, my individual weakness is that my lactate threshold speed is very slow. If my goal race is the marathon where the key demands are a high lactate threshold and the key limitation being glycogen depletion, then I would need to alter my training plan to include more lactate threshold-building workouts. I would spend more time on my base phase and my stamina phases and less on my speed. After all, I only need three to five speed workouts to optimize this aspect of my running. So for me, a stamina phase lasting eight weeks works well. However, for a person with a high lactate threshold speed, eight weeks would likely be too long. They would get stale. This happens to me with speed training. Since my body adapts readily and quickly to speed training, I find that I can't tolerate too much speedwork, too frequently or I get fatigued and feel "flat".

You can probably think back across your training and notice some of these trends in your training. It's likely that your favorite types of training are the ones that take advantage of your strengths, while the training that you dislike indicates your weaknesses. You should build your schedule to maximize your strengths but also to begin to overcome your inherent weaknesses. Using myself again, I now spend much more time building a base and doing stamina training to begin to overcome these limitations. My speed continues to develop quickly so across my training plan, I can now very easily maximize all my energy systems and peak on demand. Though it may take a little experimentation, you can now do the same.

Understanding what type of runner you are and how your body tolerates each type of training (as evidenced by how you perform in workouts and how your body recovers from them) is a fundamental key to optimal training.

Step #2: Evaluating Your Race Distance

Step 1 is just the start though as you'll also need to account for the physiological and psychological demands and limitations of your chosen event. It's no secret that the demands of a 5K are quite different from a marathon. Likewise, the limiting factors in your success are also different. The table below lists a few of the most common race distances and describe their demands and limitations. From this overview, you get an idea of what every race distance requires and what limits performance. You'll adjust your training plan to address these issues in order to maximize your chance of success. For shorter races, you'll emphasize more speed and sprint training while for longer races, you'll emphasize more endurance and stamina training. For all races, you'll need to include some of each type of training but the table gives you insight into which types of training deserve emphasis.

Step #3: Evaluating Your Goal

The third step involves your goal. Is it to run as fast as possible or to achieve a certain placing? Are you trying to execute a different approach to racing this year, maybe going out easier and running negative splits versus your normal front-running tactic?

Whatever your goal, you'll need to adjust your training program to address this. It will be important to set up specific workouts that teach your body how to achieve your goal. Running fast is pretty easy and simply is about training the body to maximize its speed over your race distance. You will, however, benefit from some goal pace training so that the body and mind are familiar with this pace come race day.

When it comes to achieving a certain place or executing a particular race strategy, runners often forget to adjust their plans accordingly. For instance, say you are going to compete in a championship race and you know that (1) the race will most likely be tactical with the finish time slower than your maximum performance at that distance and (2) that you want to employ the strategy of surging at the two-thirds point in the race with a long finishing drive to the tape. In addition to the normal training to maximize your finish time for this particular race distance, you would need to include training that teaches your body and mind this method of starting even but then surging at the end. It's helpful then to structure your workouts to mimic this trend. Interval workouts can always begin slowly and get faster and faster with each repeat. You might run your tempo runs evenly for the first two-thirds then finish with the last one-third as an aerobic capacity interval.

There are, of course, a myriad of strategies that can be used in racing and thus you will have to develop some workouts to address these. The main point is that your goal should also factor into how you build your plan.

Using this Information

I know that this first part is a little vague with respect to offering specific recommendations but it has to be. We're talking about the individuality of you and your racing. However, with a little evaluation of yourself and your chosen race distance, you can better modify and adapt the general techniques for building your plan described in Part II of this section. Always go through this critique before you build each of your training plans. With several cycles of optimal training, you'll find that your body changes and you will need to "tweak" the quantity, quality and "flow" of training in successive plans.

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