The August Mileage Jump Nobody Feels Until September

Your fall race is on the calendar, so the miles go up in August. They should. You can't run a strong half or full off the mileage you were doing in June, and building volume is how you get ready.

The problem isn't that you're adding miles. It's how fast you're adding them, and the fact that you won't find out you went too fast for about a month.

Here's why.

Your body gets hurt when the load you put on it is more than it can currently handle.

Load is everything you're asking of it. Capacity is how much it can take.

Add a few miles and your capacity has time to come up and meet it. Add a lot at once and it doesn't. Muscle adapts fairly quickly, but tendon and bone take weeks to get stronger, and those are usually the tissues that end up hurting. That lag is the whole issue.

And it's rarely one bad week. It's a jump, then another jump the next week, then a long run that's suddenly your longest of the year. Every one of those feels fine while you're doing it, because nothing hurts yet. So you keep going, and the gap between what you're asking for and what you can handle gets a little wider every week.

Then week 3 or 4 arrives and your shin, or your Achilles, or the outside of your knee starts talking to you. It feels like it came out of nowhere. It didn't. You've been running on that gap since the first jump, and this is just where it finally showed up.

Running also isn't the only thing adding load. Heat, short sleep, a hard week at work, a full day on your feet. Add five miles in a week you barely slept and that's a much bigger jump than your watch shows.

So for the rest of your buildup:

• Raise volume or raise intensity, not both in the same week. Pick one thing to make harder.

• Don't jump every single week. Build for a few weeks, then hold a week at the same mileage and let your capacity catch up before you go again.

• Keep lifting. Running spends capacity. Strength work is the only thing on your schedule building it back.

• Judge a new mileage week on day 4 and 5. Day 1 always feels fine. That's the whole problem.

• When life gets heavy, hold your mileage flat. Not zero. Flat.

  
  

Adding miles is the easy part. Growing the capacity to carry them is the slow part, and that's what decides whether you make it to the start line.

Nobody gets a medal for their biggest week in August.

-Eliana

P.S. If something is already nagging and your weeks away from your peak, you can book a free discovery call here and we'll figure out what's going on.