Does anyone else live in a bubble where time-zones tick by as fast as minutes? Last night I got back home from one trip, unpacked, repacked, and flew off again this morning….traveling can be tough on our routines, and unfortunately, wreak havoc on our athletic efforts. Let’s face it, on some trips we have hours on end to utilize the high end gym (that is likely nicer than the one you have at home!). But for most of the time, it’s a pulley machine, a swiss ball, and a treadmill stuck in a standard sized hotel room masquerading as a “gym”. Not really an ideal environment to push the limits. And on top of limited equipment, you likely only have about 30 min between answering emails from your “regular work” on top of everything else demanding time on your trip. So how do you maintain your benefits of your weight…

What is the best way to train for a marathon? If you are not looking beyond the present season, you can choose between several good answers, according to personal circumstances and inclination. A number of quite diverse approaches, ranging from a Lydiard-style program starting with high volume base-building followed by race-specific training, to the more intense Furman ‘train less; run faster’ program combined with cross-training, offer a the prospect of a good marathon, provided the training is consistent yet flexible enough to allow a good balance between hard work and recovery.

The question of how best to train in a way that leads to year or year improvement is less easily answered. The recent study in which Stoggl and Sperlich randomly allocated previously well-trained athletes to one of four different training regimes: high volume, high intensity, threshold and polarised found that the polarised schedule (characterised by a large amount of…