Tell Me Tuesday: Adding a Tune-up Race to Your Training Schedule

While we recommend a tune-up race, we don’t recommend a tuning fork in a tuna fish (or vintagage REO Speedwagon albums)

As I detailed last week, my training for the Boston Marathon is percolating nicely. And in two weeks, I’m going to sample that brew (to carry out the coffee analogy) by doing a local half-marathon. As anyone who has ever trained for a race knows: It’s one thing to cover a set training distance or nail a tempo pace for, oh, four miles, but it’s another thing entirely to taste success and pride on a race course. Enter: a tune-up race. That’s a race embedded into the build-up toward a goal race–such as a 10K as you train for a half-marathon, or a half-marathon in your journey toward a full one–that allows you to gauge how well your training is going. Unlike a goal race, a tune-up race isn’t something you train for; it’s something you add into your training. Personally, I’m doing a tune-up race because I feel I haven’t pushed myself hard in a half-marathon in more than a year, and I want to see if I can still turn it up to 11, so to speak.

Before I start telling you more about tune-up races, let me offer this disclaimer to any now-fretting newbies out there: There’s no need for a tune-up race for your first 5K, 10K, or even longer races; in fact, there’s no law that says anybody has to do one. They can just be a good idea if you’re looking to race faster than you have before, or if you are particularly nervous about covering a longer distance.

Since my tune-up race, Portland’s Heart Breaker Half, falls on a day when my training calls for the plan’s second (of three) 20-mile runs, I turned to the awesome coach who created the plan, Christine Hinton, for advice on how to tweak my training. (FYI: You’ll be reading a lot more about Christine in the coming weeks, as she’s the coach/mother runner/ultrarunner who designed eight of the nine training plans in Train Like a Mother: How to Get Across Any Finish Line – and Not Lose Your Family, Job, or Sanity.) While I was at it, I asked her a bunch of tune-up questions, some solicited via Twitter, to enlighten you. Here goes:

Is there any circumstance during training when a runner should try to “make up” some distance on a race day? Like if she’s training for a half-marathon and “only” races a 5K on a day when her plan calls for a 12-mile run?
Yuppers! I am a big fan of the “supported long run.” One of my favorites is incorporating a 5k in to a long run: I’ll run the course once as a warmup, then race it, and finally again as a cooldown. Sounds daunting, but it’s actually a lot of fun, plus you don’t have to carry your own water. The shorter the race, the harder you can run it and include it in a long run. And the miles don’t have to be exact: running part of it hard can count for a mile or two.

Should you taper at all for a tune-up race, or just do regular plan then bust out the race?
When a race is used as training, I don’t typically incorporate a taper. Again, the length of the race plays a role here. If you are running a half hard, you may want to ease up on your training a few days beforehand. But nothing as long as if it were your goal race. For a half, you may want to skip your tempo run the week before, for example. Listening to, and knowing, your body is important. If you are an older or less-experienced runner, you may need to cushion your race a bit more with easy or rest days. The bottom line is you will not lose any fitness, or mess up your training, by adding a race in and decreasing your other runs to accommodate.

Me in a tune-up race when I nearly PR’d…but check out the questioning look in my eyes

If you’re looking to PR in your goal race, you should really race the tune-up one, right?
Yes. But realize that, in the midst of training for another event, you will probably not be in peak fitness. That doesn’t mean you won’t PR in the race, it just means you still have some improvement from future training to consider, which will show itself on goal race day. We just have to be careful of recovering from a really hard race effort. Better to take a few days easy, miss some of the planned workouts, recover, and pick back up where you are, than to stick to every workout, do or die, not recover, get hurt, and spiral down.

If your tune-up race time ends up being slower than you like and you’ve still got, say, two months before the race, should you try to get in another run a month before your target race, or no?
Another race?  Hmm….Sometimes it can be good for the confidence, but in general I would say no, let it go. Racing is great but you don’t want to be doing too much of it in a training cycle. Analyze why it was slower than expected–weather, the race course, your health? Perhaps your expected time goals are too fast and need to be adjusted. Maybe your fueling/hydrating, needs to be reviewed. You can often learn more from a race that didn’t go as planned, than one that went perfectly: Use that info to do well in your goal race.

How close to the goal race can you go? If, say, Lisa is running a half in October, how late can she do a 10K?
Depends on the goal race and the race you are incorporating into training. Here’s a chart from TLAM to help you out (FYI: Our Finish It plans are about, um, finishing the race, whereas Own It plans are aimed more at setting a personal best.)

So, mother runners, tell us: Do you do tune-up races, or just keep your eyes on the grand prize, your goal race?