Weekend Workouts

Weekend Workouts Running coaching for beginners or seasoned athletes, to help with basic fitness or race preparation.

A life-long runner who has been training and racing since 1985. Experience of coaching all levels of civilian and military runner; those with purely fitness goals and those with advanced competitive aspirations. Have spent 20 years in the Army but now happily a civilian again!

25/07/2026

Tempted to increase your mileage?
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If you have consolidated your training volume at a particular level, and you've been there for a few weeks or even months, it might be time to add some more to your workload. Here are some considerations when you have that conversation with yourself, with your training partners or with your coach:

1. Are you racing goals changing? If so, if you are racing further, you might feel as though additional miles/kms will be of benefit. This could help your overall aerobic base.

2. Additional miles should be included carefully. Make the increments sensible and include easy/easier miles before turning the extra into hard miles/kms. Using easy morning runs on a double-day, or doing gentle off-road/sports pitches miles would help the adjustment.

3. If your workload is challenging you, it is common to feel more tired than you used to feel on lower volume. Be ready for this but remember that your body takes time to adapt and to adjust before it feels comfortable. Once the additional stress has been accommodated you will feel the benefit and begin to make progress. This won't happen immediately, so don't lose heart.

4. A graded progression from week to week or month to month can not carry on indefinitely. We must build up, reach a peak, and then taper in order to feel the benefits of the heightened workload. Ultimately, whilst some improved fitness will be seen throughout the progressive training programme, the athlete's true fitness will typically reveal itself once the taper has taken place - the taper being the period where we allow the body to recover, recharge the batteries, conduct confirmatory short/sharp sessions that give us confidence before proving our form in the target race.

5. We only learn about our capacity for increased volume by trying it out. Some runners thrive on more, some on less. The litmus test is whether you can perform successful sessions when you are at each successive level. Therefore, if your hard sessions fail when you are at 100 mpw (for e.g) and they continue to fail, consider that you are too fatigued and drop the mileage. Don't do too much that your key sessions become void, too much that you invite illness, or too much that you invite injury.

6. Increasing your overall volume first should then allow you to increase the weight of effort in your long run or your big track sessions. Ideally, your long run should be a small proportion of your week. If you are only doing 50 mpw, a 25-mile run would be 50% of your work and could potentially invite injury. If you are already up to 100mpw, a 25-mile only represents 25% of your workload; your conditioning will be so much better. Aim to keep your long run at about 20-25% of overall weekly training, or lower if you can.

7. Don't do more miles for the sake of it and don't bury yourself just because you've seen your training partners do it. This is an individual pursuit and one size really doesn't fit all.

8. A weekly increment of 5-10% tends to be fine but if you've done 6 months at 50mpw, then had a week at 25, your body will tolerate going straight back to 50. So, use common sense.

If you really aren't sure, just ask. Many of us have lots of experience and can give good pointers if doubts creep in. Have fun and let us know how you're getting on!!

23/07/2026

No goals at the moment?

It is a common conversation with non-runners or even novice runners to discuss the merits of training when you have no current racing goals. It's not imperative to have races in the calendar, despite what you might think, but it is absolutely important to maintain a decent level if fitness regardless, if your future intentions will include some serious racing.

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Have you ever bumped into someone when you're mid-run or have just finished a run and they say, 'What are you training for?', and you say, 'Oh, nothing at the moment!'. The reaction you get can often be to question your sanity or your purpose and to suggest that you can't/shouldn't/ought not to train without a specified target. It's as if training is futile if you don't have a specific goal.

Well, that's one take. Sure, if you don't know whether you're going to do a 3,000m track race or a road marathon next, how could you possibly know what training volume to generate and what sessions to do every week, or create a progressive and periodised plan? I get that. And with no timeline to work against, being so specific in your training will be difficult to set out meaningful building blocks or to chart progression. But, that lack of clarity in terms of racing goals should not be an excuse to let fitness deteriorate and for motivation or focus to wane.

The instinct to potentially do nothing of value in your aerobic and anaerobic systems is folly. It will see you come unstuck or at best it will see you waste time when a target race materialises in your diary and a medium or long-term plan crystalises.

Imagine doing nothing but a 5 mile jog every couple of days and then several months later you decide to aim at a race. You will have let your fitness platform degenerate and your starting level for overall fitness will be so poor that you will require months of development work to get back to reasonable fitness.

If you know that the winter will include half and full marathons, for instance, you owe it to yourself to maintain a base level of fitness, so that you can elevate your weekly training volume from 50 miles per week to 60 then 70 within a short period. From there you can kick on with sessions that are fit for purpose and specific to your end goals. If you are loitering down near 25/30 miles per week, it will likely cost you at least a couple of months getting up to serious weekly/monthly volume.

The ideal scenario is to maintain decent volume, with a session every week or some shorter efforts and also a longer run, so that you easily progress to a tailored race-specific programme within a short period of time.

Please don't let all your hard work drop off just because you're not 100% sure about which race is up next. Knowing what the next race will be is not the moment to re-fire the training engines!!

29/09/2024

Massive congratulations to Nick Shatochin who smashed his PB in the Berlin marathon today. He chopped his PB down from 2:39:45 to 2:29:34!! A brilliant result achieved in spite of some setbacks during the build-up and despite suffering with sore quads in the last 7km of the race. What a star!! Well done, Nick - enjoy the recovery 👍💪🥳

11/03/2024

Another weekend that didn't disappoint!!

Claire Barthram ran a great new PB over 10km, chopping nearly 1 minute off her previous record that had stood since April 2021. Claire averaged 7:50/mile on her way to 48:58, securing 1st in Category at Dorney Lake.

Massive congrats, Claire. So impressive, especially after a tough week and interrupted sleep. 👍👏🥳

Keep up the good work 🙂

04/03/2024

It's the day after a big week for a lot of the team and thoughts have turned to recovery. After a half marathon or a tough cross country race, the legs can feel sore and the body can feel a little weary and run down. These things are to be expected and are just our body's natural response to hard (very hard) work. So, with that in mind, here are a few things to consider to help with the recovery phase, immediately post-race, or after a big week:

Choose between resting (doing nothing) and doing active recovery. The former will feel like a treat and might be just what the doctor ordered, but the latter might actually be a better option to kickstart your recovery in earnest. You don't have to run quickly -.keeping it to a very slow jog will be fine - and you don't have to run at all....an easy walk might be just enough to flush out the toxins from your system.

Many of us prefer to stick to a routine and will typically opt for doing an easy run to start the recovery. Well, if you like that approach, maybe add a layer to your running outfit or arrange to do a social run (with chatty runners) to force the pace down. Remember, nobody really cares about your slow runs on social media but you, so take it easy!

Book a therapeutic massage with a local sports clinic. Check their credentials and make sure they are certified and then tell them that you're a serious athlete (with an army of friends who all need a massage) and you might find a cast iron ally to add to your home team. A 30-60-min session to alleviate pressure, to dig out some muscle imbalances, with some well-trained elbows and thumbs, could do you wonders and this approach will give you so much more than a self-administered muscle-gun/massage-gun session.

Reflect on your race or your previous week's training and decide whether you need another heavy week of mileage or whether doing 75/80% of the volume would be sufficient this week. You can still include key sessions later in the week but with less time on feet and fewer miles, your body will recuperate and your tiredness will dampen down. In a few days, you'll feel refreshed and ready for the next big week/s. Importantly, keeping your enthusiasm in check here could be the winning injury-prevention strategy.

Remember to listen to your body when trying to recover and balance your fitness aims with the need to stay healthy. One should not be pursued at the expense of the other.

Good luck and enjoy your training 🙂👍

03/03/2024

Many congratulations to Lee Athersmith who smashed his 10k PB this morning at the Trafford 10Km, running in the Inter-Area Match.

Lee took apart his previous best of 32:05, revising it to 31:40!! An amazing race, proving that decent training can still bring brilliant results as a V40 😁👍

Really chuffed for you, Lee. Enjoy the moment and keep up the good work 👏👏

07/11/2023

Is it that time of year again?

It seems to be the time of year when colds start to get the better of us and we succumb to various ailments from the head down to the chest. It's not always our fault, either, despite how hard we try to avoid ill people at work(!). So, with all of these hazards to deal with, sometimes our training and racing schedule can take a bit of a hit.

And so it has been for me, in the last couple of weeks. Despite my best efforts to remain healthy and with the spectre of Frankfurt Marathon looming large, I fell ill at just the wrong time. On the Thursday before the race I had to admit defeat and cancel the hotel and the flights. Disappointing, very disappointing, but not the end of the world. Clearly, it's far from ideal but it is possible to regroup and focus on a new target. Where once I'd been looking towards Frankfurt (29th October), I am now looking towards San Sebastian (26th November).

I was lucky in some respects, as the entry conditions for the race in Northern Spain were very generous; they were still taking payment for registration even at the start of November and it isn't an astronomically expensive race to get into. I was able to get myself a new race and to book the trip in no time at all. That was the easy bit...

The hard bit was to accept that I'd tapered for a race that I was no longer doing and that I would now have to re-engage in some sort of hard training block (albeit a short one), and to try to hold onto whatever form I had left after the taper and the head-cold.

Firstly, I would need to do some mileage - somewhere between the peak mileage from pre-taper and the mileage of the first week of the taper. In this case, something in the early to mid-70s would be fine.

Secondly, I would need to do a marathon-type session off a short recovery - in this case I did 6x1mile, off 1 min recovery. Not a huge session, but I had to be careful not to rip my legs apart in an attempt to prove something.

Thirdly, I would need to factor-in a long run, in the region of 22-23 miles. In this case I did just over 23 at 6:14 pace - quicker than the pre-London long run that set me up for a 2:34 showing. Happy enough with that.

And lastly, rather than go through a full 3-week taper, I would rather add some more miles to the legs and another session, before going through a 2.5 week taper. In this instance, it will be 8x1mile off 1min recovery as the session, to build on the 6x1mile session of last week, and to stop short of the usual 10x1mile that I would do under normal circumstances just before tapering.

Once all of this has been done, there will be chance to do some easy miles, gradually reducing the volume throughout the taper, but keeping hold of form by doing lighter sessions from week to week (fewer efforts, and with longer recoveries, but turning the legs over at a decent pace).

Anything else? Oh, yes, as always, there will be a trip to the chiropractor for various bits of the body to be cracked and reset, and a trip to the masseuse to have thumbs and elbows thrown at all the soft tissue. That will take us up to 1 week to go and the final prep will be trying to get lots of sleep, hydrating well, eating quality food and aiming at minimal walking or running all week long.

We'll let you know how it turns out and whether the false dawn of Frankfurt and the new horizon of Northern Spain offer us a late birthday present!

21/10/2023

Getting those one-week-to-go vibes?!

It's that time again. Only a week until I'll be lining up for the next marathon. I'll be returning to Frankfurt after 6 years and I'm looking forward to it. I've got pretty fond memories of the place, in a running sort or sense, and am optimistic about my chances of running well.

A few things that stood out in 2016 and 2017 when I ran the race in 2:28:16 (2nd V40) and 2:31:08 (4th V40) respectively;

The start of the race is very close to the hotel district, maybe only 1/3 to 1/2 of a mile from the budget brands (Premier Inn, Frankfurt Messe, for e.g), and access through barriers to the pen itself is very easy. Raceday admin was a doddle on both occasions. Probably only 5-7 mins of nervous jog/walk from front of hotel to holding area.

The cityscape seemed to prevent decent GPS coverage at the start (one occasion), so keep an eye on the Km markers to take a split when you can, to reset, otherwise your watch could bleep distorted splits at you for the rest of the race.

The race feels like it's an out-and-back, and can therefore throw a headwind at you in the first half. Get into a bunch and save your energy. I spent 2 or 3 miles trying to get into the group in front in 2017, never made it, and burnt all my matches in the process.

The final few Kms weave through the city, with some bumpy sections underfoot, leading you to an indoor finish on a red carpet. Classy finish setup, from memory.

It's a slightly underappreciated city race and it can boast fast times to compete with many other Euro competitions. Dewi Griffiths ran a debut 2:09 in Frankfurt in 2017, so it has genuine fast course credentials. Luckily for Dewi, he went into that race in 61:33 HM shape, so he definitely showed up in good form. I'm in 55:20 10-mile shape, which equates to about 72:45-73:00 HM shape. That should allow me to target 76:00-76:30 at halfway, and anything from 2:32 to 2:35 at the red carpet. Mmm....

Let's see what happens on the day - see how my 47(nearly 48..)-year-old body copes this time 🙂

15/10/2023

Massive congratulations to Rob Devine for his run at the York Marathon today. He chopped his PB down from 3:12:29 to 2:59:23. Amazing result - so pleased for you!!

Weighty Issues.....How heavy are you? Do you know? Do you particularly care? Is it important to you as a runner and do y...
06/07/2023

Weighty Issues.....

How heavy are you? Do you know? Do you particularly care? Is it important to you as a runner and do you think we should be talking about weight more?

Weight is a tricky subject to bring up, so it would seem. There are plenty of us that don't pay too much attention to it and then there are those that have an extreme view of their weight, are very conscious of it and take great care to monitor whether their weight is going up or down, or remaining stable. Attention to detail can be extremely productive to a runner seeking marginal gains, or any gains, come to that.

Is this something that you consider much in your routine, or is it something that you have a fairly casual relationship with? Maybe you view your weight from the perspective of which clothes fit you and which belt hole you can use. Perhaps weighing scales aren't needed.

The reason I'm interested in this subject is that there is a danger to becoming unhealthy, both in terms of losing too much weight or indeed gaining too much weight. The wider world in social media and on daily magazine programmes tends to protect those that are overweight and to sympathise with those that are underweight. That's all very well and I support a world where we can defend difference, or difficulty - but should there be a different approach and a more critical discussion amongst competitive athletes? My view is that we should definitely talk about it more but very much in a constructive way. I don't see much value in calling out those that look chubby or those that look anorexic. I think we should approach the discussion from a different attack point.

To offer a little context, the boxers of this world, or the rowers, judo players or martial artists have a weight category that they compete in. Part of that is due to safety and part of it is down to adding genuine sporting value to a competition – creating better match-ups. These athletes therefore become too heavy for one category and too light for another, and then naturally (or otherwise) fall into the category in which they compete. As runners, we don't differentiate ourselves based on weight but merely on whether we're sprinters, middle-distance runners or long-distance runners. Perhaps we should be encouraging some of the bigger and heavier folk to drop down a distance band from marathons and half marathons to 5ks and 10ks. Perhaps. It might just help them settle into a zone where they aren’t beating themselves up to cover the ground or to constantly wrestle with injury prevention. Their natural predisposition could be to sprint rather than slog around miles and miles of road.

The approach I would prefer to use when thinking of the weight of an athlete is to take a view of the person as a whole and to assess the outward indicators. Do they look overweight or underweight? Are they doing lots of miles or very few? Are they performing well? Do they get injured a lot or are they clearly always very healthy? What I might say to an athlete who is training for a long race is do you think you're training enough, because I think you would benefit from slightly increased mileage. Perhaps I would advocate additional tempo work or additional speed endurance sessions. I would insert event-specific training and get to a point where the training is fit for purpose and the desired outcome would follow that process. As a bi-product of doing sufficient miles and adequate specific training, the weight of the athlete ought to stabilise at a decent weight for the individual and in relation to the type of event they are training for. Almost regardless of weight, they are now fit for what they’re trying to do. All things being equal, the ongoing process of training would bring the athlete to a sensible and functional weight.

I would also always prefer to talk about the target competition, the planned training load, and the athlete's ability to cope with specific training than to talk about a current or target weight (which could easily be construed as being confrontational or negative in some way). Attempting to get to a specific weight is to distract from the real focus. The focus is the training process, which should always be appropriate for the individual and in the context of aiming for a particular race. The weight of the athlete is very much the associated result rather than the result itself. (Even if you are an experienced athlete who has been running for many years, someone who knows your normal racing weight, I would still suggest that the idea of fixating on a number is unhelpful. There will be variation over time and who is to say that you were perfectly prepared for all of your previous races, and therefore that that particular racing weight was ideal for you? Commit to the current process and accept that the weight or form you produce at the end of the process is the right weight for you at that time).

Having said that, if I saw an athlete carrying extreme weight I would advise a steady build-up to a long distance race and caution against taking on such a stressful and demanding challenge before the foundation had been set. It is no more appropriate for someone who has just passed their 1-width swimming badge today, to go down to Dover tomorrow and attempt to swim the channel than it is for a beginner to run a 5k or 10k today and attempt a marathon in the very near future. It's an admirable goal, of course, but it's inappropriate. As an experienced athlete and a concerned coach, it is my aspiration to help runners prepare as well as they can for any race and to get the most out of it, which means taking a methodical and tailored approach to any build-up; they are more likely to enjoy what they are doing, have a successful race and want to come back for more in the future. As part of that build-up, the necessary stepping stones will be included, so that there should be no concern about weight and, therefore, hopefully, no need to discuss it. It should be subsumed as a factor or a concern into the fabric of the intelligent training programme.

I hope that wasn't too heavy! I was thinking about weighing scales and the thought occurred to me that we don't often talk about weight. If you decide to talk with each other about it, be sensitive, be constructive and remember that being healthy should always go hand in hand with being fit. One shouldn't be at the expense of the other.

Enjoy your running and please get in touch if you need any help with training or race preparation – 07949 268 155. Happy to talk to beginners or old hands.

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