How far ahead should you plan your running or cycling training?
Runners and cyclists do not need every session or race planned 18 months in advance, but looking roughly 6, 12 and 18 months ahead can provide useful direction for training. Longer-term planning allows you to work backwards from future goals, identify what needs to improve and give yourself enough time to build volume, intensity, strength or consistency progressively. This article explains how to plan ahead without turning your training into a rigid long-term schedule.
Strength training for runners and cyclists over 30 is a game-changer for performance, resilience, and long-term health.
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TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"This is one way of setting yourself up to fail before you've even started."
By Emma O'Toole
Hi there,
The weather has certainly taken a turn and I, for one, have been dusting off the turbo trainer!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at how runners and cyclists can get faster, including the sessions that help, whether increasing training volume will actually improve performance and how strength training supports your running and cycling.
They’ve been a little more research-heavy than some of my usual posts, but for me, it’s important to share some of that research because BUILT TO ENDURE® has always been coaching-led and research-backed.
The training I give my athletes and the advice I share here should have good reasoning behind it. Good coaching is then about applying it to the person in front of me, taking into account their training history, current fitness, available time, previous injuries, life outside training and what they want to achieve.
This is what coaching is. We can talk about training load, intensity, consolidation weeks and so on and so forth, but the decisions we make around them depend on what it is that you're preparing for.
Look beyond your next race or event
This has been on my mind this week because I’ve spent a lot of time having conversations with my coached athletes because although their next race is obviously important, so too is where we're heading afterwards. What do we want your training to look like in 6, 12 and 18 months...?
You might want to run a marathon PB next spring, while knowing that further down the line you'd love to tackle your first ultra.
You might have a big sportive booked for next summer, with longer-term ambitions to ride further, climb better or see what you can do in a completely different event.
Or maybe you've spent this year dealing with niggles and your focus for the next 6 months is to get some consistent training under your belt before you start chasing another performance goal.
You don’t need every race and training block planned out. Having a rough idea of what you want your running or cycling to look like in 6, 12 and 18 months gives you somewhere to work backwards from.
Work backwards from where you want to get to
Once you have a rough idea of where you're trying to get to, you can start working backwards to where you are today, looking at your strengths, areas for development and sticking points.
This also gives you some context when you're making decisions about training volume and intensity.
More volume could make sense for one goal, but be unnecessary for another. For example, if you’re a 50-mile TT specialist who is currently doing one key session a week, eg. threshold intervals, but you’re looking to specialise in 10-mile TTs next season, rather than simply adding more volume to your week, I’d be looking at your capacity for more intensity. Questions like: Could we add another key session to your week? Can you recover from it? Do we need to drop down some of your overall volume to make that sustainable?
The answers will depend on the athlete, but knowing where we're trying to get to gives us something to base those decisions on.
I’m forever looking ahead and working backwards!
Give yourself enough time to prepare
Take the London Marathon. It’s 28 weeks away from today, which sounds like a lot when you think of it as 6 and a half months. However, when you think 2 of those weeks are taper weeks, around 6-8 are consolidation/deload weeks, and we need to allow 2-3 for holidays, illness, training plans changing and, well, life, suddenly you might only have 15-18 build weeks to play with.
This is why looking further ahead matters.
If you know what you want to achieve, you can give yourself enough time to actually prepare for it rather than getting 8 weeks out and realising there's a pretty big gap between where you are and where you want to be.
When time starts running out, it can be tempting to force the training to fit the goal. For example, your mileage increases faster than you'd planned or would want it to, you end up squeezing in hard sessions back to back, or start trying to make up for training you feel you've missed. You basically end up trying to cram more training into less time, which isn't how you'd choose to build towards a goal. This is one way of setting yourself up to fail before you've even started.
On the flipside, you also don’t need your next 18 months mapped out to a T. Your goals can change, you might want some time off racing to just focus on your training, or end up being lured into a race/event that you haven’t even heard about (yet!).
For the runners and cyclists I coach, thinking about the next 6, 12 and 18 months is less about creating a rigid long-term training plan and more about having some idea of where you're heading.
Every now and then, look beyond next week’s training or the next race sitting in your calendar and ask yourself:
What do I want my running or cycling to look like in 6, 12 and 18 months?
Then look at where you are today and what needs to happen for you to get there.
That might mean gradually building your training volume, developing your ability to handle more intensity, improving your strength, spending a period focused on getting consistent again, or giving yourself more time than you originally thought you needed.
The important thing is giving yourself enough time and context to make sensible decisions about what you do next.
If you want to talk through your goals, ask questions about your training or see what other runners and cyclists over 30 are working towards, head over and join us in the free BUILT TO ENDURE coaching community.
You might even find that next race or event you haven’t heard of yet!
Happy running and riding!
Emma x
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I've been guilty of jumping from race to race and not really make any progress or even making it to the start line from been run down or injured. Since working with you, I'm pb'ing regularly, we've planned far better and no more wasted entry fees!