One of the things I hated most when I was following a strict training plan was having to turn down taking part in other sports in order to be able to stick with the plan. Even those plans that include some kind of cross-training normally only put it in one day a week, frequently a couple days after the week's long slow run. When your cross-training involves swimming, going to the gym or cycling for example, its no problem to fit them straight into your plan but if you want to take part in team sports things are a little more difficult. It's not really plausible to say to the guys I play football with 'my training plan only lets me play other sports on Tuesdays, so we'll play then, yeah,' and expect them to go along with it.
So then what to do? My plan, and i'll only be able to tell you if its a good one when I get to the finish line in Madrid in April, is to keep things flexible and move things around as much as I can to accomodate other activities. What does my multi-sporting involve? At the moment I am playing football once a week, while occasionally I'd like to do some trekking.
Then how do I go about accomodating these other activities? The first thing to recognise is that these other sports do constitute training so shouldn't be just done on top of your running mileage, so I replace a session with a game of football. Given the sharp bursts of running in a game I see it is a good bit of speed training. For trekking its a bit more difficult to see the cross-over benefits for running, from a cardio-vascular point of view it doesn't get close to matching a run. Nevertheless there are other benefits, walking on varied terrains, often rough and uneven, and on gradients of various degrees puts your joints and leg muscles through forces very different to those experienced on a flat run, this undoubtedly leads to stronger ankles and knees. Clearly there is a trade-off here, trekking is itself a risky activity that could lead to an injury, but personally I see it as a risk worth taking. This Saturday I did a trek up a nearby mountain, I didn't replace a session with it, but just reduced the length of my long Sunday run to accomodate the previous day's strenuous activity.
So what's the point of the story? Just to say that I'm going to continue to do the stuff I enjoy whenever I can but adapting my training accordingly so that I don't over do things. At some point in the last month before the marathon I will most likely stop playing football, the risk of picking up a knock that sabotages the previous half-year of training is just too high, but that apart I'll continue to try to keep things varied and interesting by doing different things.
