I should be into the heavy part of my City2Surf training by now, but due to my sore foot I’ve had to cut back so I don’t risk making it worse.
Yesterday’s run should have been a 10km on a hilly route but I ended up doing a fairly slow 7k jog around the lake.
My schedule calls for a 13km run on Sunday, which will be five weeks to go until the City2Surf. I hope a rest today tomorrow will help.
How’s your training going?
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When you are in training, don’t get disheartened if you have difficulty running up hills. I find that it doesn’t matter if you walk and jog up the hills; the most important thing is to do the distance. And when training, try to run up at least 50% of the hills ‘with effort’, but you can walk the rest.
I find that it makes a big difference to my performance if I train with hills as opposed to training without them, but it doesn’t necessarily make a big difference whether I run all the way up or walk and jog up the hills.
So that when it comes to a big hill in an event, such as ‘Heartbreak Hill’ in the City2Surf, I can generally jog up it with minimal discomfort. In fact, one year I remember running along watching the ground and the people around me so intently that I didn’t realise that I was going uphill until I was rounding the bend half way up Heartbreak Hill.
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Hard to believe it is only six weeks to go until the City2Surf. Where has the year gone!
This week we will continue doing runs with increased focus on performance. There is a fartlek run on Tuesday and you should start to concentrate on our breathing.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that many social runners take very shallow breaths when exercising. Your body needs oxygen as you run so deep breaths help to reduce the stress on your body. You want to get the oxygen deep into the diaphragm, not in the chest.
Just like in swimming, a good breathing rhythm is very important. And when running, it is generally considered good practice to breath through both the mouth and nose.
A common practice is to breath in a 3:2 ratio for jogging (that is, 3 steps inhale and 2 steps to exhale) and a 2:2 for running and a 2:1 ration for fast running.
This week I’d like you to concentrate on your breathing. What is your breathing ratio? Try altering it and be aware of how your breathing alters your performance.
Time to look at your shoes
Now is the time to have a good look at your shoes. If you are thinking of buying new shoes before the City2Surf, it is better to get them early so you can wear them in.
Good shoes are very important as they can help prevent many injuries, such as joint problems as well as muscle problems, such as the ones I have now!
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I didn’t do my morning run today because after my run yesterday I found my heel was painful to walk on and I also have minor shin splint in my right leg.
Plantar fasciitis, commonly called ‘heel spurs’, in most people (including me this morning), shows up as heel pain with the first few steps in the morning. I felt fine after my run yesterday but unfortunately, it can take 12 to 36 hours after activity before the plantar fasciitis pain increases.
These types of stress related injury are common when running shoes wear out and begin to lose their cushioning and support, as mine have done. Being overweight and/or a sudden increase in exercise can also aggravate them.
It is apt that I should get these pains this week, as I had planed to write a post this week about getting new running shoes, and these pains are ideal indicators that I need new shoes.
I got my current pair of shoes just before Christmas 2008, and looking back at my training log, I see that I have jogged 593km in them in the first six months of 2009. So, there is no doubt that I need new ones.
I find that running shoes generally last me between 500km to 600km. It all depends on the terrain that I’m running on. Mostly this year I’ve been on bitumen, which wears them out quicker than most other surfaces.
Like this blog post? Click here to shout me a drink or send a tip!I’m not a sports physio and I don’t like running injuries so I try my best to avoid them. Having said that, I have had a fair few, so if you have an injury, I can empathise with you.
Running injuries usually come in the form of pains in the joints, pulled muscles, twisted ankles, stress fractures (such as shin splints), and tendinitis. And when you start to do longer distances, you may also get blisters and chaffing, (and chaffed nipples, which can be rather painful!).
Most of injuries are preventable, if you pay attention to your body. For example, when I started getting a pain in my knee, I didn’t slow down and let it heal properly, subsequently, it became worse and I had a much longer recovery period.
Another time, I got shin splints (a stress fracture in the shin) caused by training too hard on a hard surface after a long period running abstinence. Shin splints are rather nasty and can take six months or more to recover from, depending on how you manage it.
One of the things I’ve noticed with any injury is that one injury almost always leads to another. My worst injury occurred when I stacked water skiing in 2007. My left leg was forced up over my head causing my bicep hamstring to detach from the hip and tearing tendons and my gluteus maximus (my butt).
My torn hamstring the next morning. By the end of the day the brusing went from near my foot to part way up my back.
I’ll spare you the details, but the end result is that I received very poor attention in hospital and it wasn’t until many months later when I still had no power in my leg that my physio diagnosed the hamstring as being a detached. Further investigation revealed that should have been operated on at the time and now I just have to live with it.
The result is that I have very poor strength in my left leg with certain movements. And in fact I still have difficulty wiping my left foot on a doormat without some muscular pain.
When I started jogging again, I had a dreadful limp which is still obvious when I pick up my pace or when jogging uphill. This limp initially put my body out of balance and this led to a dreadful cramp in my right calf along with some other aches, many of which still recur at times when I put a bit of effort into my running.
But you don’t have to have a dramatic accident to find yourself with running injuries.
The big message here is listen to your body, if you start to feel a pain or an ache, ask yourself, ‘what could be causing it?’. Since my water skiing accident, I’ve become much more aware of listening to my body. One of my realisations is that most running injuries are preventable with a change in running action or better running shoes.
Have you ever tried sitting still with your eyes closed and just listening. You’ll hear a lot of sounds that ordinarily you aren’t aware of such as birds, maybe dogs, water, wind, cars in the distance etc. Using the same principal, try running without distractions such as your iPod and try to focus on the feelings coming from the different muscle groups and joints in your body as you jog or run.
You’ll be surprised how much your body is telling you if only you listened.
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Training should be a mix of easy and hard workout sessions. In some training sessions you will go flat out, and you need to do this occasionally in order to build your anaerobic conditioning, but you also want to make sure you don’t over exert yourself too often.
Remember that when you are training, you should be aiming on working at no more than an average of 75 to 80% of your maximum capacity.
You’ll need an experienced running coach to help you with your running style, but over exertion is something you can easily manage yourself.
As a general rule of thumb you can monitor your level of exertion by keeping an eye on your heart rate. The easiest way to do this is with a heart rate monitor, but when you have used one of these for some time, you will get to know your body and you’ll be able to feel when it has reached the level of performance you are looking for.
How to work out your maximum heart
As we get older our heart rate slows down, so this is different for everyone. There is an easy formula, which is 220 minus your age. So if you are 20 years old, your maximum heart rate around 200 beats per minute. For me at 49 years of age, my maximum heart rate should be around 171 beats per minute.
So in training, I’m looking to do no more than 80% of that. This will help to ensure that I don’t overdo my training and that on the day of the event, I’ll have a little in reserve to be able to put in a better performance.
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It stands to reason that if you are selling secrets, you must be a spy.. right! And spies that sell secrets are at great risk of being gaoled, fined or even killed.
So why is it that every day I get at least an email or a tweet, or I come across a website that is offering to sell me a quantity of secrets. Most secret vendors sell them in bundles of seven, although sometimes you can purchase 17 or 27 and sometimes even 101 (of the best-kept ones that is!). Some days I even come across three or four vendors offering me very special limited time offers on secrets.
Why are so many people living on the edge?
It seems that over the last few years there have been more and more secrets coming up for sale. Some people have even put their secrets in books that have gone on to become ‘best sellers’. But who are all these spooks that are selling these secrets, and where are they getting them all from?
The other week, I received an email telling me where I can get ‘Seven Secrets of Selling’, and then I thought, wow, if this fell into the hands of someone who was selling secrets … they could put together the ‘Seven Secrets of Selling Seven Secrets’! And then where would total chaos!
When I was jogging yesterday I pondered on why is it ok to sell all these secrets? I could think of only two possibilities, either all of the secrets that are for sale aren’t really all that secret or no one gives a toss anymore.
I just did a search on Google for ‘7 Secrets’ and got heaps of possibilities:
- 7 secrets to beauty, health and longevity (I don’t know if the is 7 of each or 21)
- 7 secrets to real freedom
- 7 secrets to attract more customers
- 7 secrets to weight loss
- 7 secrets for treating your pet at home
- 7 inner secrets volume one (wow does that mean there are another 7 in volume two!)
In fact, I discovered that I could use Google to find heaps of freely available ‘secrets’ on almost any topic. And, here is a funny thing: if you go to a library and look for a book on direct marketing published in the 1960s, 70s or 80s you’ll actually find the bulk the ‘secrets’ Internet Marketers are selling today.
The marketing techniques haven’t changed at all; only the medium and the prices are different. Instead of costing $30 or $40 for a book, now you can pay many thousands to have the content spoon fed to you a week or a month at a time via email, a podcast or a membership site.
What do you think about all these secrets that are for sale these days? Frankly it gives me the pips. I think it is just a bunch of false advertising.
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We are starting to get into the serious part of the program and it is time to begin putting some more effort into our training. You don’t want to get too comfortable with jogging day in and day out, or your performance will suffer.
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your running, but without actually watching you train, I couldn’t guess at what is the most critical thing is for you. It may be that you are turning your feet turned in or out, or you are swinging your arms across your body in an odd way… who knows!
It is a good idea to ask a running coach to watch you run and try and iron out your technique as soon as possible. The longer you have a bad habit, the harder it is to change.
The first of these is to concentrate on lifting your knees.
If you focus on raising your knees higher than you have been doing, this will cause you to get more bounce and take longer strides. It also causes your heels to lift higher and you tend to break into a run instead of a jog.
From now on, but particularly over these next three weeks, I suggest that you really focus on lifting your knees. You will find that this takes more effort, so the idea is to run with bursts of a minute or so with high knee raises as you do the fartlek training runs.
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With seven weeks to go, you should be feeling a bit fitter and by now you should also be getting comfortably into a regular jogging routine. So, now we want to maintain the routine but it is time to get uncomfortable again:
In the next three weeks we will focus on increasing our speed and conditioning by introducing the fartlek into the program, along with three important techniques for increasing your speed and overall performance.
The second stage of this program is very important because if we continue to walk and jog as we have been doing over the initial stage of the training program, Our bodies will get used to a fairly sedate aerobic routine that will ultimately lead to us developing fairly slow running techniques.
By varying our speed throughout this second stage of the program, we will work both the aerobic and anaerobic systems. This variation is called fartlek, (what we used to call interval training when I was a kid).
Muscles trained under anaerobic conditions develop differently to those trained under aerobic conditions (such as jogging), leading to greater performance in short duration, high intensity activities. By introducing anaerobic work, such as sprints, we can develop more speed and better prepare ourselves for variable conditions that we will find on the day of the big run.
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Yesterday I had planned to run a 10km before breakfast but circumstances meant that I didn’t have enough time available. The temptation is to run a 5km, do nothing or reschedule a 10km run for another day; but I did none of these.
Scaring the kangaroos while running after dark
A few years ago I had a friend who was a very good half marathon runner. He had been quite sick for around six weeks leading up to the Sydney Half Marathon and had done no training whatsoever.
He hadn’t planned on competing that year because of his poor condition, but as a seeded runner the previous year, when he received his invitation to again compete he couldn’t resist and started to train with only three weeks to go before the event.
His training method was to do many short runs, and in fact, he didn’t do race distance until the day of the event. What he told me was that if you run a 5km in the morning and another 5km at lunchtime or at the latest on the evening of the same day, you get the same benefit as if you had run a 10km.
He ran in the morning and then did a lunchtime run four days a week. He ended up placing in the top 15 in the Sydney Half Marathon.
Not a good idea to run through the bush in the dark!
Yesterday I employed this technique for the first time, doing a 5km run in the morning and a 5km run at day’s end. Unfortunately it was so dark when I finished my run that I had to walk the last kilometre, so as not to twist an ankle on the rough track.
Although I really didn’t want to go for a run at all yesterday, I forced myself to do a freezing run in the morning and another in the evening so now I feel great in the knowledge that I did what I set out to do.
See a video of my run on our Facebook page. or on Youtube.
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