Base Building Blueprint To Set Yourself Up for a Year of Running Success

Ever wonder what it's like when two seasoned coaches break down how they'd guide an athlete through different goals and challenges? Welcome to Tread Lightly, the podcast where we bring you easily digestible data-driven insights. We're all about making training accessible, inclusive, and fun whether you're new or aiming to level up. I'm cohost Laura of Laura Norse Running. I have my masters of applied exercise science and I have been coaching since 2015. I've worked with hundreds of runners from first racist podium finishes. And I'm your cohost Amanda Brooks of Run to the Finish. Since 2012, I've written thousands of running articles and worked with as many runners through both one-on-one and group programs. So runners, start your watches and let's go. Hello, Treaders, and welcome back to the new year. We are so excited to kick this off with the huge topic of base building. And if you think you already know what it is or you're an experienced runner and this doesn't apply to you, as always, we're going to drop some knowledge that you want to make sure you're here for. And if you're a first-time listener, welcome. Go ahead and hit subscribe. Right now, it's the easiest training decision you'll make all week. New episodes drop every week and each one gives you something that you can actually use in your next run. Yes, and we want to quickly shout out a listener review that we received. This came on Apple from Mavila 49. I listened to so many running podcasts before finally finding Tread Lightly and it's the best. Factual to the point. Great realistic info. Love it. Thank you for leaving that review and hopefully you all feel the same. So if you want to take the time to go, leave your own review. Okay, one of the things we always do to start the show is answer one of your listener questions. And this one came in from @Halls121. So Holly said, once you figure out your target goal pace for a marathon, how do you strategically break up the race with pacing goals? That's a great question. So over the years, one strategy that I didn't come up with this originally, but I've heard several people say and I kind of tested it on some athletes and they've come to really like it, is breaking the race into five mile chunks or for our international listeners eight kilometer chunks. So that ends up being like five, you know, the first five, the second five, third, fourth, fifth, and then the final push. And what I think really works well for this is it breaks into very manageable pieces because like you know, you can do five miles going into a marathon. You can really easily conceptualize that. And so you can strategically brace up break up and think the first five miles are almost like my warm up. I'm building into goal pace. The next three five mile chunks, I'm just going to focus on goal pace, maybe adjust it for the specific terrain like New York City is a little different than say Chicago. And then that kind of fifth five mile chunk, try to stay on goal pace or maybe push a bit if you're feeling good and then full send however you can manage that final five mile chunk. What approach do you like? So I know we've talked about this in other episodes, but I mean, ideally the data shows us that even pacing pretty much start to finish is how we're going to hit a PR. So that's generally the theoretical goal. But then like you said, I think it's taking into account the terrain of the race and also kind of knowing yourself as a racer. And so some folks just know like I always struggle right around miles 21 to 22 or something. So some of those things if you just kind of know about yourself. So it's thinking of that first a little bit as like being within 10 to 20 seconds of goal pace and then trying to get into goal pace and honestly hang on for dear life. That's a lot of it until you start adding in where are the hills? Can we make up some time with down hills? Know that you can go a little easier with some up hills. But honestly, the biggest thing for me is just trying to get people out of the idea that like a negative split is their goal because it's much much harder than we think to negative split. You know, when you're at mile 24, maybe you feel good, but usually you feel like you're putting in some hard work. So to suddenly think you're going to drop like 30 seconds on your mile is much harder than it seems. It is. I think it's best to always frame like pushing the pace in the later section of marathon of thinking like can I go five to 10 seconds per mile faster? Which doesn't seem like a lot. Rather than you know, going 30 seconds per mile faster would be literally like trying to go your half marathon pace. And that's just not realistic like you said. Yeah. And for some reason, we tend to think like, oh, go faster means like go a lot faster. So today's topic around base building is actually interesting for all of you who have marathon, half marathon, any particular PR goals this year because the entire goal of base building is actually to help teach your body how to better handle the load and intensity of the training that you want to do. So it is setting you up for success. And I think quite often we will look at a 16 week training plan and think, oh, well, those first four weeks, that's kind of the base. And okay, maybe for a very experienced runner, but for a lot of us, we need an actual base. So let's talk a little bit about what is happening when we're doing this base building? Yes. So I think a really helpful thing to think about base building is it's a time where you're really trying to build your both aerobic fitness and your muscular neuromuscular development, your tissue tolerance. So it's a time where you are putting in frequent runs. So this is different than an off season where maybe you're running fewer days per week to let your body and mind recover. This, you know, say if you want to be running five days a week in marathon training, you're probably running five days a week here. But the difference is that these are easy runs for the most part. You might do some workouts and we'll talk about that. But you're not doing very hard and tense track workouts. You're not doing big, gnarly marathon pace workouts. You're doing maybe a long run. We'll talk about the benefit of that, but not a 20-mile. You're just really working on a consistent foundation and laying those bricks over several weeks. And the benefits that come from that are aerobic adaptations. So if we look peripherally, that's increased number of mitochondria, angiogenesis, or changes in your capillaries, improved oxygen lilyvery through changes in myoglobin. If we look centrally, that is changes to your heart, your stroke volume, and then your heart rate becoming lower at those paces as you become more cardiovascular-efficient or more economical. And then there's also like your tissue becomes more tolerant of this mileage. So that way, when you go to layer speed work on top of it, even if you're doing more mileage, your body's less likely to break down under that mechanical load. And when we talk about some of these things, so say increased oxygen transport, when you are running and putting out heart and effort, you need oxygen to your muscles so that you're continuing to see that flow of energy and not cramping up and not feeling like, oh, I need to stop. So sometimes I think we sort of hear those things, but are like, okay, I don't really know if that's important. It's super important. We also know that you are teaching your body again, that better glycogen usage. Also, you're teaching your body better of kind of waist clearing. So we, lactic acid is not the evil thing, but it is one of the things we want to help our muscles learn how to like clear out. That is happening as you are setting up this bigger base and just giving your body that chance. What's interesting now as the science and the data and the coaching continues to evolve is that we used to kind of look at base building and say it's pretty much just easy runs, lots of easy runs, and that's the only thing. Now it is maybe the majority, but it's not the only thing. So we do still want to see that maybe you're doing some strides or you're starting to incorporate plyometrics if you've never done them before. And again, we're talking about a slow build. So if you've never done them, this is a couple minutes in a given week that we are slowly starting to incorporate them. And that is that neuromuscular adaptation, getting a little bit of that, oh, that spring and that speed and that power in. And what's different as well is that this is going to change based on whether you are a newer runner or a more experienced runner. So someone who has been running like Laura and myself for 10, 20 years, we have a very large base, which means even in a base building season, we could do a little bit more speed work. We could do some tempo runs. We could do some long runs with some intervals mixed in. And so that is a little bit of where you kind of see the difference. A newer runner, we may just say, I want you to do some strides over time. I want you to do some hill sprints. But the more experienced runner, and I also will say the more experienced runner who has a decent base. So having run a long time, but if you were only doing 20 miles, different than if you have at least a 40 mile or a 30 mile base that you've just kind of maintained for a long time. Yes. And for runners in that situation, like the classic littered base phase is something we can kind of draw ideas from like in that base phase, he had people doing moderate workouts a week, usually too, because you know, it is the time where people, like, this is targeted towards people running six or seven days a week. If you're running fewer than that, it might just be one in your base phase. But those were workouts like fart licks where you just kind of are picking up the pace some, but you're not trying to hit splits. And maybe there's more generous recovery sprinkled in between there. And the goal isn't to accumulate a lot of lactate in that workout. The goal is just to add in some unstructured intensity and then usually he would have steady state runs. Also, so not even as hard as a marathon pace tempo or threshold, if you know, you were doing these, you'd probably do almost like nowadays, I think a more Kenyan style progression would be another appropriate one where you're just kind of like picking up the pace as feels good as you'd go. And we can get more into depth about like what these workouts look like, but I think that's a really good way of thinking like, okay, I'm not doing only easy runs, but I'm also not going to the track and busting out kilometer repeats. Yes, I think that's a key differentiator is this is training to be able to train versus training for a race. And so there is that difference in what you're kind of asking of your body. And if you're also thinking like you said, okay, currently I'm running four days a week, but my goal in marathon training is five, then my primary focus right now is building up my volume. And so in the phase where I'm doing that, I need to be less focused on intensity instead of both focused on volume and intensity. That way, cool. Now you've got the volume. You're ready to add intensity when you get your training plan. And I think this is one of the questions I often get to is sort of the well, how long does base building need to be? Yes, I've seen arbitrary things online that's like each base building phase should last until you hit like 500 miles or something. And I think instead of thinking like I have to hit a certain amount of time, I think it's beneficial both to think how long do adaptations take to a crew and they're often based on weeks, not mileage. And then also thinking how is my training year structured? So if your training year is structured in such a way that you after recovery phase have six weeks to base build, use those six weeks to base build. I would recommend allotting a minimum of four to six weeks if you want adaptations. And maybe how I think there's really a maximum we could put on it, but realistically if you're training for a couple of races in a year of base phase might max out at 12 to 16 weeks just on nature of how much time between your October marathon to you needing to ramp up for your May half marathon or something. I think the way you describe that is perfect. It's about the adaptations. So if you're doing the same thing for six months, you've probably stopped adapting to it. You've probably already kind of hit what you're going to get from it a lot of the times. Again, new runners, maybe a different scenario because in six months, you may feel wildly different than you did month one. So depends on where you are in your running, but yes, you will probably need to keep changing things or adding volume or adding a little intensity to continue to see changes in your running. And I think that's a nice way to look at it. So then the other question that I mentioned earlier is sort of this idea that all right, well, I've got a 16 week plan. Why can't I just call the first four weeks base building? Which I think a recent study that came out in 2025 in sport medicine, which is a very reputable journal, looked at what impacts marathon performance in training, and they use Boston marathoners as a sample size. And they found that amongst many other variables, the training volume that you put in in the 12 months leading up to the race had a profound impact. So runners who did consistent training had better performance than those who maybe didn't run much and then jumped into a marathon plan. So if you really are serious about wanting to do well in the marathon, or if you're wanting to do a marathon and you don't want to be on the injury cycle that you've been on before because you want your tissues to be adapted, a base building phase should be before the marathon so that you have the fitness for strong marathon block or at least your tissues aren't going to break down on you. So I think that's a really important thing to think of is like if you want to perform well, the marathon block should be a marathon focused block and you're training for up to a whole year before matters too. I will say this has probably been one of the harder things recently for the coaches on my team is having someone come in who has three to four months to train for their marathon and 100% a 12 week to 16 week marathon plan is very normal, but we have had no say in the months prior to that and a lot of times the months prior to that were very low volume or entirely rest or in surrounding an injury and so the expectation of how much you're going to progress from just the marathon plan alone when you don't have that previous consistency is the piece that I wish we saw more people talk about because it's really easy to just lay all of the power in the plan but it's like you just showed from this study it is the many months before that plan even starts and so that's not to say that if you're going to do a plan that has you peaking at 50 miles a week that you need to be doing 50 miles a week in base building it's not that but if the plan is going to start at 30 miles a week and you've been doing 15 miles a week for the last month and a half you aren't coming in like entirely ready for the plan and I do think that gets really overlooked. Are you tired of training plans that weren't made for your body, your life, your goals, coach Amanda here and I started run to the finish because I got tired of seeing back of the pack and middle of the pack runners get left behind we're the every day runner and we deserve support for all the work that we put in so here's what makes us different we're a team of 10 coaches who actually get it we've been there we've done it no AI over half of our athletes are actually in parry menopause so we know how to work with your hormones not against them and every plan we do includes strength training because getting stronger makes you a better runner period whether you're chasing your first finish line or hunting for a PR will meet you where you are and get you where you want to go if you're ready to train smarter and have someone in your corner go get all the info you need at run to the finish.com it does I was interviewing for an article for runners world a while back on that exact question and they asked me like how many miles per week should someone run before they start their race plan and I do think like having a baseline of 20 to 25 miles per week is very helpful for the marathon by think also for any race you know for looking at half marathoners stuff think what do I want to be my peak volume what do I want to be my starting volume and maybe you try to hit like within 75 80 percent of that in your base build so it becomes very like individual because we know some people thrive on moderate volume some need higher but it still is putting in some consistent runs and probably still a long run over those months leading up. One of the questions that came in right around this idea was sort of how to decrease mileage without losing fitness and I think there are a couple pieces to this so one is remembering that you should not be in peak fitness year round which I think is really really hard for us to kind of like oh but I was doing 50 miles a week and I did this workout and this workout and obviously we're really proud of it and we feel really strong and it's amazing that we did it but it's a reminder that that's that was peak and that's not where you should expect yourself to be all the time and then the second piece of this is I think that it can get lost in the idea that base building is suddenly like a whole lot less and that's not that's what you mentioned with recovery post race that's when you're way down but base building itself shouldn't be this massive decrease in mileage and you shouldn't look at it as a period of losing fitness because instead you're focused on how am I setting up that consistency for all these adaptations that we were talking about so it's just a different type of fitness than that race specific focused fitness here now you have time maybe for three days of strength training because your body is recovering better without so much speed work or maybe you're just actually lifting heavier than you end up lifting during the marathon phase so I think it's important to consider it different fitness and not lost fitness I think yeah I think that's really going to phrase it's general fitness it's not specific fitness and I think a lot of times when people think about losing fitness they're thinking specifically marathon fitness or 5k fitness but if you want those to improve you have to have general fitness and that's why a lot of these workouts and base building look so different than they look in a specific build but they're still equally beneficial like if you want to run a fast 5k for example you probably want to have a foundation of steady moderate running from that base build too even though it doesn't seem immediately to be 5k fitness to you you just mentioned type of workouts so let's talk a little bit more about what could workouts look like in base building and I know I sort of mentioned hey for the brand new runner initially it's just your volume but then it's maybe you try strides once or twice a week and you just get that feeling for what does it like to pick up the pace it's not a structured interval workout you should not be gassed or exhausted from strides and then once you've kind of got a feel for that adding in some hill sprints so again very short but easier to not get injured so what about though for the person who already has a little bit more fitness yes so for our more intermediate seasoned runners some workouts that I really like kind of like we mentioned earlier with the literate style are far less so we're not pushing super hard repeats on the track you're not trying to hit a split your effort might be maybe it's like cruise interval effort that like 45 minute race effort maybe it's threshold maybe it's even below you're not really trying to target something but some samples of these workouts are things like you could do that very classic Hudson ladder of like one two three two one two three etc until you hit your amount and there's equal time rest in between it's not a tremendously stressful session but it's enough of a stimulus that you're working on fitness or you know there's the here's one that I think like Maria Freole had in his newsletter that's like 10 8 6 4 2 of like picking up kind of steady building into faster and you can modify that with like 8 6 4 2 if you're training volumes lower but these like time-based workouts are effort-based I really like those and I've seen runners respond really well progression runs where you just kind of pick up your pace as you go and you're maybe starting easy but finishing steady maybe approaching marathon or half marathon pace but you're not pushing hard those are helpful and then hill repeats are another great workout this time especially for athletes who you know maybe don't do those often the benefit of hill repeats is there is a lot less stress on the tissues so for some injury prone athletes unless their injuries are in the Achilles and the Shins hill repeats can be helpful and there's been a number of studies around hill sprints and hill repeats and how well they work even in six weeks of like consistently doing them appropriately people getting stronger and faster so I nobody wants to go do hill repeats of all of the potential workouts but they are short and quick and they do work so I encourage you if you've been avoiding them give it a try and just keep focused on the payoff which is huge so that also goes to another question that we've gotten which is if my pace is slower and I want to improve my easy run pace before a marathon block should my base building look any different I think actually base building is the best approach to improve your easy pace before a race build so that you can a have that improved aerobic fitness but be not be like totally burnt out like you would from a very intense training cycle by the time you get to your marathon build so like it's this approach where if you're looking to improve your easy pace having consistent volume having a long run of about 90 minutes and then maybe one day of strides and one day of fart like our hills that's you know again a moderate workout not an all-out workout I think that approach would work really well and I think it's then just giving the benefit of time and maybe if you are concerned about making your easy pace increase maybe give yourself like a solid 12 to 16 week base build first agreed and some of it as you mentioned earlier is maybe increasing your volume a little bit so that a lot of times for a lot of folks is what is going to help bring paces down in other areas and during this base phase maybe initially you're not doing the fart licks if you're trying to run a little bit more and as you mentioned earlier one of the adaptations that we generally see as long as you work truly keeping your easy runs easy you are fueling and sleeping so all the things have to be done but you should start to see that at the same effort you have a little bit lower heart rate and so that means you've become more efficient at it your body is now finding that pace a little bit easier and so once that happens maybe you pick it up just a tad because you're okay getting to that 140 heart rate or whatever it might be for your easy day 130 but I would watch that a little bit and kind of make sure you're seeing that adaptation happen and if you feel like you're not then double checking the other things that again are boring I know the sleep the food the hydration but base building is also your chance to make sure you've got that dialed in so you're good to go for for your training cycle I've mentioned a few times about long runs and base building so I feel like it's worth touching on those a little bit more just to clarify so when we're talking about long runs we're not talking about specific mileage that you're trying to hit research shows including a recent 2025 study that long runs of about 90 minutes improve your durability which as we've talked about in recent episodes on fatigue resistance your durability is not slowing down at the end of races and it is a big determinant of fitness so you know especially if you're thinking I want to race a half I want to race a full thinking can I keep my long runs around 90 minutes even every other week in the base building phase maybe every week with the exception of cutback weeks if you're pretty injury free that can really really help and again that's not saying go out and run for two and a half hours it's 90 minutes whether that's seven miles for you or 12 yeah and I will say for some athletes kind of depending on where they are if they are not it's really not even pace dependent I would just say depending on the athlete and knowing yourself if you've got a marathon goal and you know you're going to go into a 16 week cycle I do like to see that you are up to 12 miles before we're actually even starting that plan so know that your base building can also build just like a plan would so if you've got 12 weeks the early weeks may max at 90 minutes and then you may slowly start to increase it so that you feel on par with the long runs you'd like to do for your marathon cycle too so that's okay too yes oh yeah that's a very good point and I agree with that another question we received from a listener was should the frequency of runs be the same as when training for a race we kind of touched on this a little bit more or a little bit earlier but generally I'd say in a base building phase yes that's part of the goal is adapting the tissues and more frequent runs helps you improve that aerobic fitness yeah I think it's really I do just really think it's a mindset shift around what is base building for some reason we tend to just think of it as like an off season but it's yeah they are different but I think for some reason we've kind of lumped the two together and so instead just that mental switch and starting to think about everything that you're wanting to get out of this phase of training may help everyone just sort of look at it a little bit differently and while it's not as intense or as serious as when you're in your you know training cycle starting to call it training and maybe that's the problem maybe we need to start calling it base training instead of base building um but it is training and so going into the mindset of okay I'm training which means I have a goal right now my goal is creating a body that can handle the load I want it to so what do I need to do to make that happen and for you that maybe I need to get to the gym I need to do my strength training or I keep saying I want to run more miles but I just haven't figured out how to make that happen so now's sort of your chance with that less intense workload to see is it actually doable at all or are you shooting for a goal that's really not going to be feasible for your lifestyle at all yes and yeah I think that's a really good way to think of it is like again I don't know why we have this confusion of like it's the same as in offices and you're barely running it's it's I think it's maybe we get lost in doing so many races all the time without laying the foundation that it's easy to like be like well I was able to do five marathons this year without a base build phase and I was fine but I think you know there's there's times we move past the old school approaches because we evolve but there's still some wisdom in the old school approaches of maybe it's best to put your year into seasons where you have your off season you have your base building season then you have your goal race and that build that process might take like four to six months depending and then you rinse repeat versus like a conveyor belt of goal race goal race without much build or recovery or base in between and I think some of this goes back to one of the episodes we did at the end of last year performance versus health in terms of training and I do think having this little bit more phased approach gives us more longevity in the sport and I understand that races get people excited and it does help with motivation so that's where I feel like if we can just make a little switch here in base building to still give you a goal whether that goal is building to a certain mileage or hitting a new PR in the gym like you can still have goals they just don't all have to be a finish line. I think so and I want to bring out some numbers as I was reflecting on this past year of coaching that can kind of help show how much just can so see I had one athlete who we spent the first half of the year base building and then did a couple marathons by what happens beyond the calendar and marathon time went down from over four hours to 341 another athlete we spent the first two thirds of the year base building and then did a marathon in her time CPR by 21 minutes another athlete had a 14-minute half marathon PR 14-minute marathon PR 8-minute PR plus a BQ so like this just I think is some good numbers to hear for conceptualizing like well how does this make a difference because I think some people fall into the trap of like the only way to get faster in a marathon or half marathon is to keep doing marathons and half marathons in perpetuity that was fantastic I would 100% say the folks who are willing to give more time before going into the race cycle almost consistently across the board minus like crazy weather or an unexpected injury have significantly stronger race days and again I know that it's it's not sexy it's not the Instagram that's getting 8,000 likes because there's always a race on the calendar but instead they're actually hitting their goals and they're feeling really good when they hit their goals and then they're recovering really well afterwards so I just yeah I've been having a moment with social media lately and all the back-to-back races making me so nervous so no I mean I've did the same like I've been off Instagram more and moving to substack and I just even as we recorded today put out a substack kind of talking about like here's what a marathon actually does to your body on a cellular level and maybe the racing a marathon with six weeks of trading in between even though you got your bib paid for isn't the best idea but the algorithm doesn't reward that but we're here to remind you that there is a lot of running that happens outside the algorithm yes so so much and also that you are very normal not to be doing back-to-back things all right as always we hope that this helped and we really want to hear from you so what was your key takeaway from this feel free to drop us a note wherever you're listening or shoot us a note on Instagram over at tread lightly running over the past three years we've loved bringing you evidence-based running advice every single week and thanks to you we've hit over one million downloads I mean that's incredible but we keep hearing from our listeners that you want us to go deeper on specific questions can you give me more guidance for a sub for a marathon or what does this study on carb loading actually mean so we're excited to be launching the extra miles bonus episode exclusively for subscribers on apple podcast or patreon think of them as deep dives into your questions or more timely responses to popular training science and social media trends same fact-based approach do you trust just more of it we hope this is a way to give you even more of what you've told us you already enjoy so if you listen to apple podcast you can subscribe through there or if you listen on Spotify or another app you can join us over on patreon dot com slash tread lightly running we'll make sure to put all the links in the show notes and as always thank you for being part of this community