Thursday, July 12, 2007

Summer of Malmo

I first ran across this concept as a member of the Dead Runners Society, whose motto is carpe viam, loosely translated as 'seize the road.' Then member Kevin Beck, and writer for Running Times, posted it to the list.

I since have 'googled' it and the credit for its creation is fuzzy at best. Regardless, the Summer of Malmo was created for High School runners. Naturally, it was designed to give them a strong base for their upcoming cross-country season. The program is very simple: to run as much, and as often as possible, with particular emphasis on doubles as they help increase the volume.

The program suggests to run only two quality runs in any given training week, 12X200s and a tempo run. It doesn't really go into specifics as to how fast the 200s are supposed to be done but I suspect them to be at 3K pace. It also fails to specify the length of the tempo run. While both of these quality runs are important to the program, the build up of volume is the real objective.

Now, I left High School many moons ago but I liked this idea. However, I never really tried it. My goal marathon is December 2, and my official training begins late this month, so I have been concentrating in mileage volume and decided to revisit the Summer of Malmo. The last eight weeks, I have averaged 52 miles per week. Not a lot, needless to say. But when my 'best' marathon program averaged 42 miles per week [which helped me run three marathons in a span of six weeks in 3:24, 3:17 and 3:22], and most of my 35 marathons were completed with training of 30 mpw or less, the 50+ weeks were expected to produce results.

Unfortunately I have failed to meet goals during my evaluation runs. Sadly my legs are slowing down. I still had hope that they had a few more PRs in them, but the horizon does not look too promising. Ah... the vicissitudes of an untalented runner :o)

2 comments:

Love2Run said...

52 mpw is getting to be pretty consistent and I'm sure you've got some PR's left in you. I think you just need some of that unstructured Malmo speed work to put the spring back in your legs.

Quinto Sol said...

love2run: Thanks for the encouraging words.

SL: That is the thing, I have not really ran hard during those days with the exception of the evaluation runs. Lo and behold, I have had two great runs since my post. My guess is that the cooler weather has a lot to do with that. Thanks!