Forget tracking your weekly mileage: get to know your Rating of Perceived Exertion and you’ll be a stronger and happier runner

Words Lucy Waterlow

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If there is one stat runners and coaches love to track, it is weekly mileage. Knowing how far you have run each week is a great way to monitor your progress, and ensure you aren’t doing too much, too soon.

The golden rule is to only increase your weekly mileage by 10 percent each week when you are upping your training.

But while tracking your mileage has numerous benefits, physiotherapist and elite middle distance runner James McMurray (physiomcmurray.com) recommends you don’t use it as your only means of monitoring your training load.

He says the total can be misleading if you want to avoid over-training – which can lead to illness, injury and loss of form – as not every mile is created equal.

He explains: “Measuring weekly mileage is a good, quantifiable value and can help ensure a runner doesn’t overdo their distance training. But it doesn’t take into account the other factors in their life that can influence their training load.”

He continues: “Training load is the amount of stress your running puts on your body. The more stress, the more likely you are to get injured. Running high mileage is one such stress but considering it alone ignores the other external and internal factors that are also at play. For example, one week you could run 40 miles at a slow pace, mostly on soft grass. Then the following week, you have a really stressful time at work so can only fit in 20 miles. You run at a faster pace and mostly on

RPE is a measure of how hard exercise feels so is a good way to gauge how your training is going

|| Keeping a record of how each run feels is important so you can be more in tune with your body||

pavements. If you only monitored mileage, you would think the 20-mile week was the easier one. In reality, your body has gone through a higher amount of load in the second week due to your stress levels, speed, and the surface you ran on.”

This shows the importance of both external and internal factors that have an impact on your body and ability.

External factors

As James cited in the example above, external factors that can affect your training load include the terrain of your running route. If you are always running on hard surfaces like concrete, you will be giving your joints more of a pounding. Running offroad can be kinder if it is short, soft grass but not necessarily if it is a technical trail route.