Five weeks to Woodside Ramble 50 km

Five weeks to go until the Woodside Ramble 50 km trail run, which means prime time is now for building my fitness. I have at most 3 weeks of build ahead before I need to taper the distance.

Following the Lake Chabot 30 km race, I took a planned week off from running. This was originally going to be 6 days off, but I extended it to seven to do a Saturday bike ride to Mount Diablo with Patrick and others from SF2G. That capped off a week in which I did two solo rides to work, totaling 153 km, making for 276 km total on very little cycling base. That's not exactly "recovery", but at least my running-specific muscles got a break. But it left me tired, rather than fresh and ready to go, on the Sunday of the weekend after Chabot.

So a modest 12.8 km on Sunday (actually a bit more due to Strava app problems), then a rest on Monday, but 14.8 on Tue, a solid 22.8 on Wed, Thu another rest, only 1.7 on Friday, but a year's best 32.6 km on Saturday, then a straight-up, straight down 15.6 on Sunday put me back into the thick of it on my CTS and ATS score.

Here's my plot, where for "ATS" I use an exponentially-weighted average with a 7-day time constant, and "CTS" a 42-day time constant, using a "TSS" (training stress score for the day) of just km run or hiked (no hiking in the recent past).

plot

The plot shows 100 days. The CTS trend line of 0.43 km/week was fit from 100 days back to 2 weeks back. After my post-Chabot off-week I've got CTS back to that trend, almost 7 km per day. In 5 weeks I should be able to push that up 2.1 km further, to 9 km per day, but I'll want to make the substantial majority of that progress in the next 3 weeks before I start to taper on distance. Even a "taper" on distance can continue to improve the CTS: I just need to keep ATS (red) at or above the CTS line, and there's plenty of margin there.

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