 Welcome to FMR. This is episode 12 of the Lakeland 100 training series. We are up to 150K this week, so let's get down and dirty. This week's running has been spread over 13 activities, two of which were hard efforts. I did approximately 86km of outdoor running and 66km of running on the treadmill. Thereabouts. So I started my week on Monday morning with 10K low heart rate, nice and easy on the seafront on Monday morning. And then on Monday evening we took to the treadmill on Zwift for the Zwift community run. And again that's a nice easy slow relaxed low heart rate 10K. 20K by Monday night. Tuesday was a slightly harder day, so filmed my run 500 on Zwift in the morning. That's a 500m climb at 12% on the treadmill. It's not a hard effort in terms of cardio, but it's a hard effort in terms of leg strength. And you do get into zone 3, I must admit by the end. So then on Tuesday evening I was back on Zwift on the treadmill doing an interval session. Heart rate managed to get up to 170, so definitely an effort. So it was three sets of ladder progression. You start relatively slowly and the distance then decreases as you get faster. So three sets of those. The Wednesday was the hardest day of the week. We started with 21K over the hills of the south down, so some elevation. Keeping the heart rate low, but it's still a bit of an effort. And then in the evening I was racing with the wording Harriers. An event called the Round Hill Rump in Stenning. It's part of the West Sussex Fun Run League. So after a couple of warm ups it was 8K as hard as you can with a nice big 200m climb in the middle and then a very steep fast descent at the end. I managed to hit a max heart rate of 172. Average heart rate was 161 for that race. Thursday was a full 15km on the treadmill. So we started in the morning as usual with Film by Run 500 which is about 4km. And then in the evening another event I lead on Zwift bag that badge. It was 11km this week. So that made 15km on Thursday. Then we doubled that distance on Friday by going out on the seafront doing nearly 22km whilst filming episode 11 of the Lakeland 100 training series. And in the evening we did 9K or so on the treadmill on Zwift. So that made just over 30K for Friday. So this is all about building that strong aerobic base which means that you'll build mitochondria, you'll build capillaries to transport that energy, to transport the oxygen, to metabolise your fuel so that you can run further for longer and then if you do the fast sessions that will also make you faster. So it's all about hours on your legs, time on feet, miles in the bag. Remember we're training for a 100 mile race here that's going to take me upwards of 30 hours to complete. So that's more important, time on feet is more important than speed work. I do want to do speed work but we're not training for a sub three marathon here. That said I will be ramping up the hard efforts and the interval sessions when we do finish Lakeland and get down to training for Berlin. By the way if you're enjoying this training series do please give it a like and subscribe to the channel, much appreciated. Now it's not often that I run on Zwift at the weekend I often like to take that weekend off from Zwift but I had a Zwift friend come over from the USA and so we did a live stream together on Saturday evening so we did 10K on Saturday evening on Zwift and then I took him on to the hills on Sunday morning we did 21K on the south downs so I showed my Zwift US friend Marcus the south downs on Sunday morning and then he left and I did a nice 5K on Zwift in the evening. Some people live in very nice houses don't they? So now we come to the stats let's look at it in terms of time in heart rate zones, the distance covered and the number of activities I've done. So over the course of the week's running I spent 54 nearly 55 minutes in zones 4 and 5 so as a whole that makes well 6.7 nearly 7% of my running was in a high heart rate zone 7% of hard effort during the week. In total I did 152 just over 152 kilometers of running and 21 kilometers of that was a really tough effort so we did that interval session on Tuesday and then we did the race on Wednesday so both of those combined hard efforts make 21 kilometers out of my 152K this week. So as a percentage because we all like our percentages that's just under 14% hard effort in terms of distance covered and then I did 13 activities in total 11 of which were an easy effort so two hard efforts so that as a percentage is just over 15% so we're approaching the final week of big miles in training for the Lakeland 100 next week I'll be running 161 kilometers 100 miles of running and then it's taper time but what is taper why do we do taper what taper am I doing what taper should you do whether you're doing a 5k 100 miles a marathon what taper is right for you and for me look training is tough when you're putting in big miles you're going to get tired weeks and weeks of training increasing the mileage doing all those hard efforts all those long runs massively increases the fatigue on your body your fitness might be increasing but so is your fatigue you're tired all the time believe me you just want to go to sleep or you just want to eat and drink loads all this running is breaking down the muscles in your body especially the vo2 max efforts breaking down the muscles causing micro tearing which needs to repair and it can't repair fully when you keep running all the time so before race day your body needs time to recover it needs time to rebuild those muscles stronger than they were before you need time to sleep you need time to rest you need time to eat food in preparation for race day one of the main worries that people have when they taper is that they're afraid that they're going to lose their fitness well yes you will lose a little bit of fitness over the course of your taper period but it's a trade-off between loss of fitness and fatigue and the loss of fitness is outweighed by the benefit that you'll get from the sleep the rest the recovery that you will get in your taper which means you'll start your race refreshed and ready to go precisely how much taper you need depends on your experience depends on your level of fitness and where you started from in your training block so for experienced runners runners who do a lot of miles regularly consistently every week they can probably get away with a couple of weeks taper whereas if you're a brand new runner it is your first marathon or your first race you probably want a taper for three to four weeks and what exactly does the taper involve well generally it means cutting down the mileage not stopping don't stop completely just reduce your mileage so i'm doing a two-week taper and that means i'm going to reduce by half each week so i'm going to do 161k in my final big week then i'm going to reduce it to 80k and then the week of the race i'm going to do around about 40k maybe a bit less in the week of the race you'll often hear it said that you should reduce the mileage and keep the intensity and that's right so a couple of five k's a couple of hard five k's would do you the world of good in your taper period but a 20 mile long run is not going to help training for a goal race is all about discipline and consistency so getting out there and doing your long runs doing your hard efforts and making sure you do that regularly consistently every week but it's also about control making sure that you don't go off and blast out there every day 100 miles an hour and the same applies in your taper it's desperately frustrating wanting to run but you can't overdo it you must rest you must recover so try not to go and do that sneaky run during your taper just because your legs are itching to get out there rest and recover and one of the most important things is sleep get those eight hours of sleeping because honestly that's where the rebuilding will occur that's where your muscles will strengthen and your body will get itself ready for race day now i've been on youtube as filmed my run for quite a number of years now but i've never really tried that hard to get loads of subscribers but i can see that 10 000 subscriber mark fast approaching so if you have enjoyed the video please do subscribe if you're not already subscribed click the like button and ping that bell for notifications i'd really appreciate it it helps out the channel a lot and you know they always say about the algorithm i mean you know the algorithm thanks come on then and that's it for this episode of the lakeland 100 training series thank you very much for joining me next week we'll be talking about the 161 kilometer week my 100 mile week in the final week of training for lakeland 100 we'll also talk about what's gone well in this training series and what's gone not so well thankfully i haven't been injured but what could i have done better in my training block if you haven't seen the other episodes in the lakeland 100 training series click this link here it'll take you to the playlist and we'll see you next time for episode 13 13 of the lakeland 100 training series bye bye