Elite Marathon Training Series: Hendrik Pfeiffer Training Part 2 – Specific Key Workouts
If you had to quite specifically describe what you are doing in a normal week of training, including the treadmill runs, day-by-day, what would it look like?
I can tell you an example week from July 2015, when preparing for a big half-marathon. Usually Monday is the mileage day for me, I do two medium long runs – in the morning I do a 15km long run, starting at 3:56 pace and at the end I was running at 3:28 pace. That might be faster than a lot of other runners but I think that is my speciality. I always do my long runs at a relatively fast pace, usually I don’t doanything above 4:00/km.
In the afternoon I do a 12km long run, relatively fast one in 3:33 per K, and after that I always do 3 or 4 strides for changing my running technique. Normally 3 or 4 strides of around 100m.
On Tuesday I would do a long one, 25km at 3:30 pace and in the afternoon I did some stabilization work for my body. And I swam for 30 mins.
Wednesday was easy, 10km in 3:52 pace. In the afternoon I did a workout, 20 x 300m in 50 seconds with a 200m recovery in 46-50 seconds.
We usually do a pretty fast recovery, 4min/km pace for the recoveries but the workout is not that fast, 50 seconds is relatively easy but as I prepare for a half marathon that’s fine. I think if I prepare for a 10K or a 5K the 300’s would be way faster and the recovery would be a bit slower.
Just rewinding quickly back to the 25km run at 3:30/km – is that a hard run or is that a relatively comfortable run?
Relatively comfortable, I love running long runs at 3:30 pace. For me it’s a pace where I control it but of course I wouldn’t call it easy. After that I feel sore, but that’s why I went to the water in the afternoon.
Thursday, also mileage day, 12km in the morning at 3:48 pace and a core workout in the weight room, and in the afternoon I did 15km in 3:38 and it’s always in the morning and in the afternoon I do 3-4 strides after the run.
Do you do strides after every run?
It depends on how I feel but usually I try to do it every time, but for example after 30km run sometimes I feel so tired that I say “no, it’s fine”, I prepare a warm bath, but usually I do it, because it’s important for me. In the 5km and 10km the fast guys catch me in the end and that’s very frustrating for me. That’s why I always knew that I will be a marathon runner, even when I was 17 or 16 years old – my coach told me that my way will be a marathon runner. I think always had something like that in mind and that’s why I’m already a marathon runner and although I’m relatively young for that.
Focusing on the marathon as an elite athlete at 23, is quite young. How about the rest of the week, what did it look like?
Fridays are normally 1 or 2 steady runs again, but sometimes, and in this particular case that I am seeing in my journal from 2015, I took the day off. I think that something I never did very well up until my injury problems was listening to my body.
This is absolutely essential for any athlete and I have started to do it a lot more lately. If I feel very tired and not quite right, I will take a day off. It doesn’t happen that often but sometimes it does. I’m very ambitious and it’s a strength of mine but also a weakness of mine, that’s why it was good for me to say “no, I feel tired, I skip it”. That’s something I would not have done the year before.
Is your coach normally okay for you to say, “I feel very tired today, skip it.”Is he the sort of person who is okay to do an adjustment, or how does that work?
Even more than that – he encourages me to do it because usually I do more than I should do. That’s why he advises for me to stop if necessary and in this week I was glad that I did it; there has been a lot of other weeks where I’ve said “no, I have to do more than he said” and that’s something I don’t want to do in the future. And it has become better. 2013 and 2014 I was too ambitious.
After skipping the Friday I felt very good and on Saturday I did a very important workout of mine – it’s a key workout before a half marathon. This particular week was a short week of preparation so it wasn’t as bad, but the next week the workout became much faster. 1km warm up, and the program is 6km, 4km, 3km, 2km, 1km with a short rest of 200m jogging. Starts on road and I finish on the track. I usually do the 6K, 4K and 3K on road and 2K and 1K on the track. This week the pace was relatively easy, I started with 6K at 3:35 pace, 4K in 3:30 pace, 3K at 3:18 pace, 2K at 3:10 and the 1K in 3:08. Then I did a 3K slow down. I felt very very good after that and thats’s why I did a 12km steady run at 3:36 pace in the afternoon.
So it was a good mileage day for me, 32km mileage. In the afternoon I still felt very good.
Sunday was always a long run for me. A 27km steady one in 3:32 pace, it was so hard, it was my longest run, because the 30km , 35km I hadn’t done before yet, I just started them in 2016.
Are you doing these long runs on your own? There can’t be too many people that can do that?
Continued in Part 3
