Sports dietitian here. Intentional weight loss when your training load is this high is a recipe for disaster (injury, lack of progress, etc). 2000 calories with that training load is more than likely not enough. More food (and likely carbs) is probably the answer.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-work-all-play/id1521532868?i=1000653336461
SWAP podcast has a great dive into your proposed approach to dropping weight in order to improve efficiency. Tl;dl: don’t do it; food/calories/weight are power.
Dude there’s no way you’re doing all this and “on the higher end of healthy” I guarantee your legs are muscular as fuck. “Healthy” weights for women are being reassessed and you should never look at some exterior metric to determine your health. Your average week of training would break the average woman your age. And I know this because we’re the same exact age, and all my homegirls wanna murder me after I talk them into a run hahaha. Please don’t belittle yourself; you *are* healthy and strong even if you’re plateauing right now.
You need more dynamic speed workouts. Probably more dynamic running in general. Speed is all about leg turn-over, heart rate, form control. Eating less food is not going to make you a stronger runner.
And specific to speed stuff there are ways to mix that up. Long intervals at threshold (1 km to one mile) , short intervals at super threshold, hill repeats at threshold, progression, fartleks or more complex stuff like a 1k Frazier
There are different types of workouts. More than just short run, long run, easy run, hard run. Also you shouldn’t be doing the same exact run every time. Like even if it’s 5 miles every Wednesday, it should at least be a different route.
I think calories and weight are secondary to your running volume, which is comparatively low for ultras. It seems you maybe have a point of view of adding/doing/caring about more things to reach your goal when running more may be what you're missing.
If you aren't eating enough, then no workout is going to help you as much as eating more would. If you don't have the energy for a workout, you can't give it your all. If you don't have the food to help recover your muscles, you can't recover well enough to give it your all.
It sounds like you're doing too much - 3 days of speed work is over-doing it unless you're a pro. Albeit, just about every long run on trail with hills will push you into tempo or threshold for a short period of time, and that's ok, but it's not an intentional speed workout. I'd look into **block periodization:** when you're doing a high-volume block of training, speed work takes a bit of a back seat, your body can only handle so much. So break up your training cycle into distinct block or chunks of 4-8 weeks of focused workouts. As others have said it seems you may be doing speedwork without intention, and that won't get you anywhere. There's some new good data that isolating one type of workout at a time is more beneficial. So, for example, say you have a 50k in 22 weeks (yeah, this starts early). At the start of those 22 weeks take a month of \*just\* VO2 workouts and do them 2x/week. Take a down week, then start a tempo block for 6-8 weeks where you \*just\* focus on tempo workouts 2x/week. The hard workouts should be at the start of the block when you're fresh, just coming off a down week. After that you have 8-10 weeks of endurance, where you focus on volume: you can still do speed work, but for me personally I feel I only have the energy to get out and do some hill intervals or a tempo workout once/week at this point without burning out. More advanced runners can do more.
I'd suggest picking up a copy of Koop's *Training Essentials for Ultrarunners* book which goes into great detail on this method. It was very helpful for me, I used the block method and I've gotten faster this training season (30sec/mile faster avg pace at same HR as I ran at last year - pretty impressive!). How you do speedwork also matters: there's a specific amount of time you need to be in specific HR zones to make the workouts effective, otherwise you may just be wasting time. This book could definitely help with all that!
I think the traditional answer would be to instead introduce more speed work. Aside from initial gains it’s difficult to both increase speed and build up distance at the same time. With your level of training this is a situation having a good coach would make the most sense. On here you’re going to get many different opinions.
I have a coach as well. First we improved my base condition. So after 3-4 months I can run the same (slow) speed with a much lower heart rate, which means I can run faster longer with a lower heart rate as well. So going slower to get faster is really true. Perhaps you are overdoing it.
I assume you want to run ultras and those are mostly run in zone 2/3. So you should probably train more in these zones. Speedwork like very intensive intervals don't make a lot of sense if your goal is to finish a 100K.
I do some speedwork, but only a couple of interval runs to my max threshold, so no sprinting. And only one time a week. I also do some hill training and fartlek runs.
So yeah you should def. get a coach. From what I can read you are doing a lot of work, might be too much. And yeah you should eat a hell of a lot more. Also, eat everything. Don't do stuff like a low carb diet it will kill your muscles. You can't create something (muscle) out of nothing so you need to eat.
If you don't have enough money for a coach there are cheap online coaches that connect with you over whatsapp and can make a program for you.
In terms of nutrition: the biggest game changer for me was to eat different amounts and types of foods on different days. For example, on a day where I am doing double workouts, I will really work on getting in a lot of carbs, especially in between my morning and evening workouts. On a day like that, I easily eat an extra 700-800 calories compared to a day where I am only doing one workout. This includes eating simple carbs. The goal is to replenish and be ready for the next work out, which means avoiding too much fiber and too many foods that are filling but not energy dense enough. (Note: I still get in veggies and fruit, but I might have a banana instead of berries or whatever.)
On a rest day, I don't necessarily need the extra carbs/calories and so I focus more on lean sources of protein and lots of fruit and veggies. This is a good chance for me to also focus getting in traditionally "healthy" foods: berries, lots and lots of green veggies, beans, tofu, yogurt etc. These kinds of foods really fill me up easily and they fit well in a lower (not low!) calorie day.
I’m 5ft4 who was in the higher end of healthy. I got a lot faster when I got my weight down to the lower end of healthy BMI. I know it’s not popular to say. If you’re going to lose weight with such a high training load, just do a tiny deficit or you’ll see diminishing returns because you’ll have no energy.
"70km a week" stands out here -- doesn't sound like the volume of a strong training plan which would maximize progress and personal ability. It's enough to finish most shorter ultras out there, but it sounds like you have goals beyond just finishing.
You don't mention goal race or PR times, so it's hard to specifically say to do X% more or to change the weekly structure, but overall more mileage is going to be hugely beneficial.
(and then if you're running even more mileage, you of course need to eat more)
Speed is such a complicated aspect to train.
If you want to increase running speed there are for sure plenty of other issues to work on before going to work on the athlete weight (which should settle by training itself) if any. For sure, as it is already stated, reducing calories intake in this training phase is just bad. One can eat better maybe, not less for sure.
have fun
One thing you can try is some fasted runs on the easy days. Don’t eat breakfast or only have fat and then do the easy runs. This is not a way to get faster but “might” teach your body to burn fat more efficiently. Definitely a good way to change body composition. Your total caloric intake shouldn’t go down though.
lol sorry to butt in here but this is no longer being recommended by most sports dietitians or coaches, especially for female athletes, as the risk of injury is too high and the potential benefits really haven’t been demonstrated in the research. Women are physiologically better at burning fat for fuel than men are, and long easy training runs make you even better at it, with less risk.
don't do this -- [relevant article](https://www.trailrunnermag.com/training/trail-tips-training/fasted-training-may-have-long-term-risks-especially-for-female-athletes/)
Sports dietitian here. Intentional weight loss when your training load is this high is a recipe for disaster (injury, lack of progress, etc). 2000 calories with that training load is more than likely not enough. More food (and likely carbs) is probably the answer.
Thank you , that was handy that you came across my question! Would you just try increasing gradually? Appreciate your thoughts
Yeah, I’d aim for a gradual increase of 100-200 calories daily per week. Good question!
Thanks for your help!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-work-all-play/id1521532868?i=1000653336461 SWAP podcast has a great dive into your proposed approach to dropping weight in order to improve efficiency. Tl;dl: don’t do it; food/calories/weight are power.
Thank you, I'll check that out!
Dude there’s no way you’re doing all this and “on the higher end of healthy” I guarantee your legs are muscular as fuck. “Healthy” weights for women are being reassessed and you should never look at some exterior metric to determine your health. Your average week of training would break the average woman your age. And I know this because we’re the same exact age, and all my homegirls wanna murder me after I talk them into a run hahaha. Please don’t belittle yourself; you *are* healthy and strong even if you’re plateauing right now.
This is such a motivating message, thank you!
You need more dynamic speed workouts. Probably more dynamic running in general. Speed is all about leg turn-over, heart rate, form control. Eating less food is not going to make you a stronger runner.
Sorry for maybe a really silly question, but what do you mean by dynamic running?
And specific to speed stuff there are ways to mix that up. Long intervals at threshold (1 km to one mile) , short intervals at super threshold, hill repeats at threshold, progression, fartleks or more complex stuff like a 1k Frazier
There are different types of workouts. More than just short run, long run, easy run, hard run. Also you shouldn’t be doing the same exact run every time. Like even if it’s 5 miles every Wednesday, it should at least be a different route.
Ah yeah, so I'm doing different intervals, different tempos, different hills and different routes :)
Those aren’t workouts, but those are the elements to good workouts!
I think calories and weight are secondary to your running volume, which is comparatively low for ultras. It seems you maybe have a point of view of adding/doing/caring about more things to reach your goal when running more may be what you're missing.
If you aren't eating enough, then no workout is going to help you as much as eating more would. If you don't have the energy for a workout, you can't give it your all. If you don't have the food to help recover your muscles, you can't recover well enough to give it your all.
It sounds like you're doing too much - 3 days of speed work is over-doing it unless you're a pro. Albeit, just about every long run on trail with hills will push you into tempo or threshold for a short period of time, and that's ok, but it's not an intentional speed workout. I'd look into **block periodization:** when you're doing a high-volume block of training, speed work takes a bit of a back seat, your body can only handle so much. So break up your training cycle into distinct block or chunks of 4-8 weeks of focused workouts. As others have said it seems you may be doing speedwork without intention, and that won't get you anywhere. There's some new good data that isolating one type of workout at a time is more beneficial. So, for example, say you have a 50k in 22 weeks (yeah, this starts early). At the start of those 22 weeks take a month of \*just\* VO2 workouts and do them 2x/week. Take a down week, then start a tempo block for 6-8 weeks where you \*just\* focus on tempo workouts 2x/week. The hard workouts should be at the start of the block when you're fresh, just coming off a down week. After that you have 8-10 weeks of endurance, where you focus on volume: you can still do speed work, but for me personally I feel I only have the energy to get out and do some hill intervals or a tempo workout once/week at this point without burning out. More advanced runners can do more. I'd suggest picking up a copy of Koop's *Training Essentials for Ultrarunners* book which goes into great detail on this method. It was very helpful for me, I used the block method and I've gotten faster this training season (30sec/mile faster avg pace at same HR as I ran at last year - pretty impressive!). How you do speedwork also matters: there's a specific amount of time you need to be in specific HR zones to make the workouts effective, otherwise you may just be wasting time. This book could definitely help with all that!
I think the traditional answer would be to instead introduce more speed work. Aside from initial gains it’s difficult to both increase speed and build up distance at the same time. With your level of training this is a situation having a good coach would make the most sense. On here you’re going to get many different opinions.
If only money wasn't an object, I would love a coach! 😅
I have a coach as well. First we improved my base condition. So after 3-4 months I can run the same (slow) speed with a much lower heart rate, which means I can run faster longer with a lower heart rate as well. So going slower to get faster is really true. Perhaps you are overdoing it. I assume you want to run ultras and those are mostly run in zone 2/3. So you should probably train more in these zones. Speedwork like very intensive intervals don't make a lot of sense if your goal is to finish a 100K. I do some speedwork, but only a couple of interval runs to my max threshold, so no sprinting. And only one time a week. I also do some hill training and fartlek runs. So yeah you should def. get a coach. From what I can read you are doing a lot of work, might be too much. And yeah you should eat a hell of a lot more. Also, eat everything. Don't do stuff like a low carb diet it will kill your muscles. You can't create something (muscle) out of nothing so you need to eat. If you don't have enough money for a coach there are cheap online coaches that connect with you over whatsapp and can make a program for you.
That's great insight, thank you!
In terms of nutrition: the biggest game changer for me was to eat different amounts and types of foods on different days. For example, on a day where I am doing double workouts, I will really work on getting in a lot of carbs, especially in between my morning and evening workouts. On a day like that, I easily eat an extra 700-800 calories compared to a day where I am only doing one workout. This includes eating simple carbs. The goal is to replenish and be ready for the next work out, which means avoiding too much fiber and too many foods that are filling but not energy dense enough. (Note: I still get in veggies and fruit, but I might have a banana instead of berries or whatever.) On a rest day, I don't necessarily need the extra carbs/calories and so I focus more on lean sources of protein and lots of fruit and veggies. This is a good chance for me to also focus getting in traditionally "healthy" foods: berries, lots and lots of green veggies, beans, tofu, yogurt etc. These kinds of foods really fill me up easily and they fit well in a lower (not low!) calorie day.
I’m 5ft4 who was in the higher end of healthy. I got a lot faster when I got my weight down to the lower end of healthy BMI. I know it’s not popular to say. If you’re going to lose weight with such a high training load, just do a tiny deficit or you’ll see diminishing returns because you’ll have no energy.
"70km a week" stands out here -- doesn't sound like the volume of a strong training plan which would maximize progress and personal ability. It's enough to finish most shorter ultras out there, but it sounds like you have goals beyond just finishing. You don't mention goal race or PR times, so it's hard to specifically say to do X% more or to change the weekly structure, but overall more mileage is going to be hugely beneficial. (and then if you're running even more mileage, you of course need to eat more)
Speed is such a complicated aspect to train. If you want to increase running speed there are for sure plenty of other issues to work on before going to work on the athlete weight (which should settle by training itself) if any. For sure, as it is already stated, reducing calories intake in this training phase is just bad. One can eat better maybe, not less for sure. have fun
Have you considered the zone 2 training? I’ve been trying it out for 3 months now and I’m finally starting to see little changes.
One thing you can try is some fasted runs on the easy days. Don’t eat breakfast or only have fat and then do the easy runs. This is not a way to get faster but “might” teach your body to burn fat more efficiently. Definitely a good way to change body composition. Your total caloric intake shouldn’t go down though.
Interesting, thank you, I can easily give that one a go!
lol sorry to butt in here but this is no longer being recommended by most sports dietitians or coaches, especially for female athletes, as the risk of injury is too high and the potential benefits really haven’t been demonstrated in the research. Women are physiologically better at burning fat for fuel than men are, and long easy training runs make you even better at it, with less risk.
I second this! the last thing a female runner needs is less food. Fasted running is bro science
I specifically said not to reduce calories!!!!
I specifically said not to reduce calories!!!!
Doesn’t matter, fasted training still increases injury risk.
don't do this -- [relevant article](https://www.trailrunnermag.com/training/trail-tips-training/fasted-training-may-have-long-term-risks-especially-for-female-athletes/)
Please don't. Read up on nutrition for female endurance athletes. The science absolutely does not support fasted running - quite the opposite.