My Saturday morning parkrun routine hasn’t changed much over the decade since I started at Poole. I get up early, eat breakfast immediately to give it time to digest and then drink cups of tea. Just after 8am, I pick up my barcode, heart-rate monitor, change of kit and head out the door. Typically I arrive about 8:20am and sit in the car until 8:30am.
I’d love to live close enough to a local parkrun that I don’t need to drive but they’re all 4-5 miles away and so, while I run there on occasion, it’s usually a drive away. As I park I’ve already turned on my GPS watch yet invariably I still have to wait for the satellites to fully lock in. Once I have them I jog to the start line – which is about a kilometre away if I take the shortest route. But I don’t, I go round the lake which measures a bit longer at 2km and depending on how my legs are feeling takes a little longer or shorter than ten minutes to reach. What surprises me is how many people I pass who are just walking to the start. They aren’t jogging, they’re wandering along.
There are many things elite runners can do which the average recreational runner can’t – running at 4 min/mile pace, running 100 miles per week and training twice per day. One thing the recreational runner can do as well as any elite is warming up.
The typical recreational runner warms up by jogging over there then jogging back. It takes about a minute and they’ve done enough when their breathing starts to pick up. I should know because that’s how I used to do them. In my early days of parkrunning, I did the jog over there, jog back warm-up! It’s no wonder that after dashing off the start-line I’d be gasping for breath until things began to settle down around the first mile mark. That’s what happens when you don’t warm-up properly.
A thorough warm-up is not achieved quickly. Any elite athlete, whether footballer, runner or tennis player will take the better part of thirty minutes to do one. They will do some jogging, dynamic stretching, mobility drills and sport specific movement such as kicking or hitting a ball. I’m not advocating we take it to that level for a weekly parkrun but an easy-to-do, simple running warm-up can be done in 10-15minutes.
At some point, for some forgotten reason, I decided to start doing a longer warm-up. I have no idea why, but it had long lived in my memory what Ian Parker-Dodd, one of my university lecturers, had said “It takes twelve minutes for the body to reach steady state”. I didn’t know what that meant when he told us but I knew it was something to do with warming up – so twelve minutes became my standard.
Looking back at my records from 2012 I didn’t have a regular time for setting off on warm-up – that evolved later. It probably depended on what time I’d arrived and how quickly I got my gear sorted. Typically I’d amble off at around 8:30am to run a lap of the lake, possibly taking in a toilet stop. It took anywhere between 12-15mins just as Ian Parker-Dodd suggested. The effect was notable – I knocked 45seconds off my parkrun PB. Who knew there was a reason the elites warm-up?!?
This standard warm-up was partly dictated by the features of the park – once I was on the far side of the lake there’s no shortcut back. That said I’d picked the route because I wanted to meet IPD’s time requirement. This ended up totalling just over 1½ miles (2½ km) and is what worked for me. It’s important to think in terms of time – if you tell a slower runner to go do another half of a parkrun before they start, they’ll switch off. Doing 5K is already enough for them. For anyone taking over 30mins for 5K, jogging at the slowest of paces for twelve mins is likely to still be too much but perhaps five minutes is a good compromise.
One mistake I made in my early warm-ups was running them too fast. With my parkruns being run at sub-7 min/mile pace; running my warm-up at 8min/mile was too quick. It left me a little drained before the run. Eventually I slowed them down to 9-10min/mile. These days I start at that pace and let it build up as I warm up, never pushing it. Quite often I’ll be running the latter part of my warm-up around 7:15/mile and that’s okay – it’s doesn’t last too long and I’ve warmed up through the lower paces to get there. When I’m zooming along at the faster pace, barely breathing hard I know my body is warmed throughout.
What occurs during warm-up
While warming up could help you to run faster and breathe easier you may be wondering what’s going on that enables this?
We all know that when we start jogging we soon begin to breathe harder. Typically that’s when we slow down to a more achievable level or, if using the jog over there then jog back warm-up, stop. Muscles use oxygen to create energy and when you start to jog, you activate more muscle so the oxygen demand goes up. Warming up is the body responding to this increased demand.
The first thing is for the heart to start pumping faster – we see this as our pulse increasing. Alongside this, by breathing harder we expel more carbon dioxide out of the lungs allowing more air into them. The sacs of the lungs open up to allow more air in which leads to more oxygen entering the bloodstream which the heart can then pump to the muscles.
When the muscles receive the oxygen from the bloodstream they use it to release energy from glucose and fat stores. The complex breakdown process creates by-products such as carbon dioxide as well as heat and water. While the CO2 is breathed out, the heat and water are sent to the skin to help us cool. To make it easier to sweat, warming up triggers the pores of the skin to open up.
Many runners feel stiff or uncoordinated when they first start running. Warming up helps the muscles, ligaments and tendons get mobile. The tightness and aches may alleviate as a warm-up goes on and you will probably feel your stride lengthen until you are flowing along.
By warming up systematically you can find out if there are any strains or injuries that might need to be taken account of and even that it’s not a good idea to push things today. Sometimes a good warm-up will ease these and then you can run fast.
As well as monitoring the body, a warm-up can be a good time to mentally focus on what you’re intending to do on your run or training session. Will you be going out fast? Holding back? Doing some complicated interval session?
If you run some of the route you’ll be participating on it’s a good opportunity to see if there are any issues. Running around Poole Park, I often find there can be puddles or muddy patches down the back of the lake. They’re not enough for the organisers to cancel the parkrun but I know I will want to position myself on the run to avoid them. On an unfamiliar course, it’s even better to get to know where the tight spots are and maybe just where the course goes. Obviously on a longer race you can’t run the whole course but I’ve always found it useful to get a feel for the run-in to the finish to get an idea of where I might want to start my sprint finish.
How to warm-up
Just start jogging very slowly. Focus on your breathing and if it starts to pick up then don’t panic, just slow down a little. Probably it will settle within a minute or two so just keep jogging while it does. When it’s settled you will naturally find yourself willing to push a little harder. That’s okay as long as you don’t stress your breathing to the point where it doesn’t settle.
Each time your breathing begins to get out of kilter, avoid pushing – just wait and see what happens. Eventually you’ll find yourself jogging along at a particular pace which feels comfortable, isn’t getting faster but isn’t stressing your breathing – you’ve reached the Steady State. While IPD said it takes twelve minutes to reach steady state, it differs by individual. Some will get there quicker, others take a little longer. Personally I’d say it takes 15+ minutes for me to reach it – natural distance runners will likely get there quicker.
Having reached steady state it’s time to warm up the race pace muscles. While my warm-up pace may reach around 7:15/mile; on my parkrun I’m hoping to hit 6:30/mile or quicker. I need to prime the body to know I’m going to do more than I’ve done this far in warm-up. But I also don’t want to exhaust the muscles by doing too much. The compromise is therefore to do some short bursts of quick running known as strides or pickups.
All I do is accelerate for 10-20secs to just beyond race pace then go back to jogging before I do another. Warning – these are not all-out sprints – just an acceleration to a faster speed to get the body used to the quicker pace. Three of these efforts is usually enough to get me breathing harder and the muscles ready for what’s expected from the start-line.
I like to complete this warm-up about ten minutes before the start. This is long enough that if I’ve overdone it the body will recover; but not so long that it will cool down again.
As I say on my arrival at parkrun I often encounter runners walking to the start-line. While I do meet other committed runners warming up the vast majority aren’t. It’s a little bit of a mystery to me why if they have to walk to the start-line from wherever they’ve come, they don’t turn that into a benefit and jog in. Okay, they may not do the full warm-up but even 5-6 mins is better than nothing.
Big Red Running 