Of Mice and Marathons

You're sure in a good rythym with all of your doubles. With about 3.5 weeks to go til my next big race, do you think it's kinda late in the game to start incorporating doubles? I'm not to worried about the extra mileage as I still plan to increase for the next 1.5-2 weeks anyways but moreso wondering about losing the extra 1+ hours of sleep (other run in the am). I think my body's getting used to the extra hour from running at night and healing up very well.

It takes a few weeks (I think) to see the benefits, and even then it is sometimes hard to see. It's probably best to start them them earlier in a cycle and to do so slowly.

I've been doing them for ~15 months and I think I started with something like 5/4 and I worked up to 3 per week over 2-3 weeks. Now I do a minimum of 10, at most 15 or 16, and rarely more (I've done as much as 19/4). You'll see me start to move from 3-4 per week to 4-5 per week in the coming weeks.

So, I would wait. You probably won't do much damage, but you won't really gain anything. I do think they have great recovery benefits, especially on race day (but again, you work into that).

Some say that you should max out your daily run before adding doubles, but I don't know. You can build a decent base with doubles and safely. It's how I went from 50-58 miles in May and 65-85 in September/Oct last year, which has been tremendous for my running.

Also, sleep is good! And it's part of how we recover. Such is why I am laying off the beer and wine, for the most part. Better, uninterrupted sleep. Speaking of which, I need to hit the hay, set o mile 'peats in the morning.