Hey everyone and welcome to you today's episode of the One to the Top Extra Kit daily podcast. I am your host one of the Coachete Daily Podcast I am your host one of the coaches here

at Runners Connect, Haymema and I'm excited to be talking to you today.

This podcast is called Three Ways to Build Races into Training.

And building races into training is something I've done a lot in my running journey and I think it's really

important to give it some consideration. And let's talk about the why. Well if you have

a goal race that's several months away, chances are that you'll have some races that you want to do in the lead up.

I'm fully tapering or taking quite a lot of easy time before and after the race. It's fine for one or two, but if you have more tune-up

races than this, tapering and recovering from each of these races could take away from the

training that you're doing for your main goal

race. So we can get around this by incorporating these races into the training

without too much of a tape or recovery period. We can even use the race as our training. To do this, if you have several races in the lead

up to your goal race, I'd rank your races in the order of most important to least important.

For the one, maybe two most important races depending on how long you have.

If you're quite pushed for time for your goal race, maybe just one.

If you've got like 16 weeks or more than two, I mean, we don't really want to do more than 16 weeks of race specific training, but if you've got 16 weeks too, it's fine.

Go ahead and taper for those two, take some good recovery days afterwards.

For the rest of them, it's likely to be useful for you to include these races as part of your training rather than thinking

them just as race efforts.

You don't need to taper for these one or two easy days before and after just as you would a normal workout is just fine.

I hear three of my favorite ways to include races as part of your training.

Firstly by doing a workout after this works best for shorter races so like say you have a 5k

race and you're training for a marathon a 5k race isn't a lot of miles if you're

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