Is 28 weeks too long for a training cycle?

Rhetorical questions: What do you intend to do in your 12 weeks of base building? What will you do in your first 4 weeks of your racing phase? You won't necessarily get stale from your base building nor burn out from racing.

28 weeks is fine because it's 3 different phases (or 2 depending on how you count the 4). 28 weeks of specific training would be overkill. I've seen base builds as short as 8 weeks & as long as 20. 16 weeks of base with some racing in the last 4 weeks sounds fine to me, although idk if it's still base training if you're racing unless you're really sticking to the threshold/tempo stuff & just racing off of strength. If you add in some faster workouts then maybe you want to think about a couple of transition weeks before outdoors.

That is a long bike ride

Many of us had a year and a half of base building through covid. You'll be fine.

I’m more interested in the 12-week racing phase with 8 weeks of hard anaerobic work. That’s a long time! What sort of periodization are you planning within those two months? How many times do you hope to peak in 12 weeks?

Yeah the details matter. For the base if you are doing mileage, thresholds and easy reps (200s at 1500m pace with 90s rest), you can do them forever. Just take some down week every 3rd/4th. To me the tricky part is that 4 week indoor and then going right into outdoor races. The details there matter a lot as you might want some recovery and mileage for a month before building up for the outdoor peak.

I would definitely worry more abo

No.

Ask your coach instead of the idiots of letsrun

28 is fine, but I have found that 12-16 weeks is better. When doing 12-16 weeks you can get to 'peak' workouts and peak mileage more frequently. And just take a few days off or potentially a full week off between each 12-16 week cycle. Shorter cycle makes it less likely to get injured since you're not spending too much time in the migh mileage or high intensity phases and get the little break more frequently. Example of 12 weeks, is 4 weeks building up to high mileage post break, then spend 4 weeks at high mileage while adding in tougher workouts over time, then last few weeks you're pulling back the volume a bit but keeping the intensity high as you approach peak race. You can stack many of these cycles in a short amount of time since they're only a few months. The few days off after each cycle isn't really enough to lose the fitness gained during the cycle.

28 weeks is not to long, you can run base training as long as you want-with intervals, as well as fartlek, as long as two conditions are met: (1) recovery times between reps are not short and (2) the speed of the reps is controlled relative to current physical condition (meaning, don't run faster than your body can currently handle; without straining).

The last 12 weeks with 8 of hard anaerobic training is probably where the danger in this plan is, you may get a little too far away from your base training and your peak may run out. The devil is in the details for that training block though so if you have some high end aerobic in that final phase you may still be okay.

This is just an anecdote, but you might find it useful. My friend Roger ran very similar times to me (e.g. in 5k). He would go from just doing some unstructured base fitness running to peak condition so quickly it seemed incredible to me - in perhaps ~5 weeks, he'd be running his best times - but, like a fragile race horse, he could not stay at that peak for long at all - in 2 or 3 weeks, he'd be injured or burned out. By contrast, in my best season, I'd laid down a base and was already starting to do some hard speed workouts when there was still snow on the ground (beginning of March?), and kept working hard, building and building, doing a marathon PR in November (doing PRs in everything from 400m to mile to 5k to 8k along the way). If Roger and I had raced 5 weeks into each of our training cycles, he would have crushed me; if he had tried to race me after both of us put in 8 months of hard work, it would not have been a competitive race (he might not have been able to run at all if he'd tried to train hard for that long).

Of course, both of us were outliers, but I share this anecdote because I feel there may be more dramatic individual differences than people realize. (Incidentally, he and I were different body types - he was naturally very lean but slight without a lot of muscle - I was more of a larger strong muscled guy than most runners. Not sure how much this had to do with it ...) No doubt, most people - and most elite runners we read about - may fall more in the center of the curve, with, for example, 12 to 16 week training cycles working for them, broken into base/strength/speed/taper/race periodization ... but it's *possible* that something different will work for you. I'd say "try what you propose" and see how it works for you!

Through covid, many of us had over a year and a half to establish a foundation. You'll be just fine.

krunker