Sudden recent improvement

earlyevening wrote: »

Does this happen to anybody else?

In the last nine days I've run my fastest ever 21miler, 16 miler, half marathon, 10 miler (during the half marathon) and twice beaten my 8 mile PB. Every time I go out running I set a new PB. I'm totally taken aback by it. Its great to see improvement when I thought I was plateauing but its a sudden and a big improvement so I'm struggling to understand it.

Is it the free Adidas I won recently? Is it ideal weather conditions? Is it all the training?

I'm starting to think I could approach a 3hr marathon all of a sudden. Mc Millan suggests 2:57 (on the back of a 1:24 half) but I never had any faith in his calculator.

Whats everyone elses experience of these sudden improvements?

I find the exact same thing happens to me after months of training improvment tends to show in veyr quickly , not sure reasons for it apart from ALL YOUR HARD TRAINING well done.

When training is going well you will always improve in "jumps" rather than steady progress. The usual cycle is 6 weeks. Many moons ago when I could train and rest to my hearts content I could pretty much hit 6 week jumps in fitness with german efficiency.

I've found over the years that the 6 week cycle is harder to hit for numerous reasons, such as
> not being able to train consistently for 6 weeks be it due to kids, work, family etc. When I say train consistently I mean training gets progressivley harder each week and no days are lost for any reason.

> Less time for rest and thus more chance of injury/missed sessions

> Training too hard in the 6 weeks and not giving the body time to adapt to the stresses. I think this can be a reason many people haven't experienced the 6 week cycles, even when they train solidly for 6 weeks. Rest is equally as important in the cycle as hard training. You must be pushing yourself and thus forcing adaption, but also resting enough to let the body adapt and improve and thus get faster.

Also if you go through a spell of good but intermittent training, such as 3-5 weeks of good training, a few weeks missed, another 3 weeks of good training and another break and so on for a few months with no major improvement there seems to be a "pent up" improvement waiting to happen. I've had spells like that where one day I literally went from 8 min miling for easy runs to sub 7.30 and the next day my tempo session goes from 7/7.10 miling down to 6.35/6.40 in one go (and runs feeling easier aswell as way faster). Such massive jumps in one go would not be possible in the 6 week cycles. More like 8 min miling down to 7.45 or 7.40 at best. When there's a pent up jump, Ive had massive improvements in one go.

Bottom line - Git101s quote from Gary player hit the nail on the head!!!!