The dreaded doubles and how to do them

So with most things training, if it's good for you it's usually a love hate relationship.  Hate to do them but love the results that comes from it.  Things like early morning runs, intervals, maximal efforts and the likes.  The same goes for doing two a days.  Usually two a days are great because you can get in more mileage and since it's usually spread out over two runs it doesn't put quite as much fatigue on your muscles at one time (it's almost the same premise behind a run/walk strategy at a marathon)


So why would you want to do two a days? You're essentially doing twice as much at least that's what your body feels like so you do need to build up to it, but once you do it's absolutely fantastic.  You get better economy and cardiovascular fitness just by sheer volume.  That benefit is really just a measure of scales.... run more means you're probably fitter.  If you're doing 40 minutes or more 5 times a week, you're probably ready to try and start tackling doubles. So how do you do it?

There's actually a pretty methodical way of going about this. You take your normal run, and divide it by 2.  So for me that'd be doing something like a 5k run (3 miles) in the morning, and then doing about a 6.5 km (4 miles) in the afternoon.  So you're probably thinking HOLY CRAP instead of doing 6 miles, you're now doing 8 miles, and depending on how your run that day is it might end up adding a ton of mileage on.  So the key with this is that you should build up slowly by taking your two easiest easiest runs and turning them into doubles.  This way you'll be able to adapt your body to the load, increasing your mileage and conditioning (that never seems to be where it should be).

So now that you've managed to do it on your easy runs you can start doing it on your longer so called quality runs so like pace runs or just the long distance ones.  This is less so to build up more mileage but to make sure your legs are nice and loose and make sure you feel awesome (the cycling equivalent of opening up your legs with a warmup before a tt and near race level).  Usually you don't want to do it on your super long distance one unless you need more mileage.  The other thing that is almost great but nobody does it going for a walk/run in the afternoon after a morning race (or you can go for an easy spin on your bike.....VERY EASY) which helps to get the blood flowing again so you don't get any awesome swelling and you'll recover faster. 

The thing to always remember with this is if you're running doubles, don't do everything at 100% effort, back it off to 60-70 as you're trying to do doubles, not every day but as many as you can without burning yoruself out.  The other thing is if you're going to do doubles do it consistently, so if that means once a week, twice a week, but keep it consistent.  You'll see results come through, just give it a bit of time and don't kill yourself.  Happy running

~Cheers