Balancing daily running?

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Thanks for the reply.

This might come off as a dumb question, but did you notice that your biking fitness increased as you ran more, even though you were not necessarily focused on bike fitness?

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How do you balancing getting in a good bike workout when you need to let your legs recover and be ready to go again for another run?

After a while the recovery period becomes rather short.  A session on the bike is like a stroll in the park. 

I supplement with yoga a few times a week and swimming as well, since that has little impact on my legs. Does anyone have a good suggestion on balancing out running daily (or building to an ultra) and keeping tabs on other areas of fitness?

Stick to time on the feet versus mileage when focused on the ultra side and it will be less intimidating.  Swimming is by far my favorite x training activity after a long run. 

Mixing the tri world with the ultra world takes some serious strategy, but is very common with people that I run with. 

 

Edited by Dultra 2011-10-01 11:41 AM

I finished my first ultra yesterday, the Blues Cruise 50k in Reading PA, and I credit a lot of the reason for finishing strong and having an enjoyable experience to a summer spent with a balance of biking and running, maybe a little swimming. After mid-August, I started building longer weekend runs into my plans but if the offer for a long Saturday bike ride with the boys came up I took it. I was stricter as the race got closer, within the last month prior.

The plan was simple - a long run on Saturday, peaking at 24 miles about 3 weeks out, followed by 10 on Sunday. Monday and Friday were off days, and weekdays were typically 4, 8-10, and 6 miles. (Google ultraladies...) Max mileage was 54; I did most of my training in the woods on trails around where I live. Half my training was in New Balance Minumus shoes. I got wet, I got muddy, and I had a ball. My shoes were relegated to the garage.

During the race, I kept to my early goal pace, fueled and hydrated well, and kept moving while I ate. I probably made up 20 or 30 places at rest stops.

End result; I finished in 5:39:17, good for the top 25% - and more importantly did not bonk or feel miserable at all the whole way. A lot of life-long runners would find it hard to believe that you could run a 50k comfortable on 54 miles tops in a week, and I was too; but when I finished the last 24 mile training run and felt good I knew I was in good shape for the race.

Most importantly, I finished injury free and have no joint pain at all today (just a whole lot of muscle soreness.) I attribute this to running almost all of my miles on unpaved surfaces, good recovery, and not overdoing the pace on my long runs. Have fun!

The way I eventually balanced it out, and it took the better part of 2 years to get where I am at, is that I did run only for 6 months or so. I found that when I added biking in my running suffered, both in quality and quantity. Whatever, I like biking. Biking does not make you a better runner. My running continued to suffer. After 6 months of biking and running and went to running only again for about 5 months. I upped my volume to about 55-70 miles a week which was more than I was doing previously. I found that this second time around when I added biking my running did not suffer as much and even then only in terms of quality, I could still do the quantity for the most part, averaging 45-50 miles a week or so even though I threw in quite a bit of biking. I threw in quite a few 180km biking / 80+km running weeks which for me is about 16 hours of working out.

We are moving into winter again so I will be run focused again and I anticipate next biking season I will be in even better condition.

I do yoga too, almost nightly, for 10-30 minutes.

Anyways. So my suggestion is, max out running (at least 10 hours a week), try to slowly add in biking on your easy running days, expect some deterioration in quality of runs but try to push through to keep the quantity (as in mileage, so you may spend more time running) up as that is what will get you through the ultras.