Hey Coach, how should my training look at x time of year? How about y time of year?
To answer this question, let’s talk first about two kinds of training, General, and Specific.
General training is about building fitness. It’s simple, it’s sometimes boring, it’s sustainable. General training, generally (see what I did there?), is trying to optimize your volume intensity so that you can 1) Maximize key workout performance while simultaneously 2) Maximizing volume. And in General training, typically that looks like a VO2max workout, a threshold workout, and a speed workout as key workouts, mixed in with a bunch of EASY volume in between.
Specific training, on the other hand, is about maximizing even performance based on the fitness that you built in the General training. It’s about doing workouts that are suuuper event specific and dropping volume so that you can get in really hard specific workouts.
Concept 1: Usually Specific training reduces for GENERAL fitness, and usually General training limits your Specific performance.
Concept 2: You can only make gains in specific training for short periods of time. Since you’re dropping volume and probably working on some higher end fitness, you have a short amount of time where you can make gains, after which you’ll start to unbalance your energy systems and feel flat.
Concept 3: General training will make you faster, it’ll just leave a little extra speed on the top missing.
SO, “what should x time of year look like?” That entirely depends on how long you’ve been working on your General fitness. If you’ve been working on your General fitness for months/years, and you really want to do well at this race, then put in a specific block. But for ALMOST EVERYONE, you’ll gain more from General training than you will from Specific training.
A good analogy here is knives. You, without training, are a hunk of iron ore just pulled out of the ground. In order to become a super sharp knife, you first need to first BUILD A KNIFE. You need to create a huge amount of heat and turn the iron ore into steel, and you need to shape it into something that starts to look like a knife. And then you have to spend a looong time beating the shit out of it with a hammer to make it REALLY look like a knife. And then you have to heat it JUUUUST right so make the blade hard enough to hold an edge, and then you have to polish and clean it all up and ONLY THEN can you even THINK about sharpening that blade.
General training is building the knife, Specific training is sharpening the knife. What happens if you try to sharpen the knife before it’s ready? Well, sure, it’ll get better at cutting, but “better than shitty” isn’t the goal. The same is true of training. Can you do specific training on top of poor general fitness? Sure, you can, and it’ll make you a little faster than you are now, but you’re probably going to feel quite shitty. 95%+ of your training should be General, and only very rarely should you do Specific training. You’ll end up with a MUCH better knife if you wait to sharpen it until it’s ready.
