Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 63, October 2014 | Page 38

Ma training

You’ve been running for a number
of years and PB’s seem to be
a thing of the past, so you tell
yourself that “Age is catching up
with me,” but a simple change
to your training pace can set you
back on the road to new PB’s.

Slow Down

to Get

– BY RAY ORCHISON

W

Faster

The question then is what do we need to do to
push new levels of performance once we reach
this stage of our running career? The answer
may lie in polarised training, which means to
train at either a low or a high intensity, with
very little training time spent in-between. This
is by no means a new concept, but one that is
often ignored by veteran runners, because as
we become more experienced, we often fall into
the trap of thinking that to get faster we need to
train faster... all the time. While the first part of
that statement is true, the second part, “all the
time,” is not.
When the gap between our easy run pace and
our fast interval or race pace is small, we find
ourselve ́