One of my old running friends recently popped up in my Garmin feed. I’d say it’s four or five years since she was last running and she quit then because of a nagging hip injury. She did two runs last week, and another two the following week. Most of those sessions appear to be some kind of mix of 1min on, 1min off intervals taking her out to 5K. It seems a little like the Couch25K programme but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an AI-generated programme. I would have said her past fitness would probably be enough that this programme could help her get back to running parkruns or any other races she wanted to do – however after two weeks of running activity it stopped.
A few weeks back I went to my local track on a Saturday afternoon to do some sprint work. When I arrived there was a young woman doing a mix of walking and running laps. I chatted to her for a while and she said she would like to do a half marathon at the end of the year i.e. in six months time. When I first spoke to her she said she’d completed 9K, when I left an hour later she was at 15K with just 6K left to do. She was intent on doing the full half marathon distance of 21.1K that day either running or walking. It was a hot sunny day and she had the sense to be drinking water and eating some energy bars. Again she was a relatively fit young woman in her early twenties and she’d previously been working out in the gym so she will probably get there.
I have another friend who is now in her mid-fifties and overweight. When I’ve trained her at the gym and with some runs she has a decent amount of strength and speed. If she could commit to regular training I think she would be a decent runner. At times she has followed the Couch25K programme but it’s a half hour of exercise and, by her own admission, when she does a training session she wants it to cover 5K or she won’t feel satisfied. Currently when she goes to parkrun it is a 45min run-walk effort. There’s nothing wrong with that time per se but as I have pointed out to her that is like me racing a 10K every weekend. There’s no way I’d do that – it’s just too much stress on the body.
This is one of my concerns about beginner runner programmes – they’re all too focused on reaching targets rather than progressively overloading the body on what it can do. There’s many people who have had success with Couch25K so it is probably a short enough distance that it’s okay for the majority. But then there is the more extreme version of the woman at the track looking to cover a half marathon distance yet never having run more than 5K before. People who train for marathons always build the distance up progressively – most of them want to complete a twenty mile run in their training but they don’t simply go out and run-walk twenty miles on the first Sunday of their plan; they build up to it over the weeks with long runs of increasing length. With slower runners I won’t even have them complete a twenty mile run because it’s simply to much for where they’re at.
In my last post about Zone 2 training, I quoted from Arthur Lydiard’s book which said to start off with five minutes out and back runs every day and then when that feels manageable increase to ten minutes then to fifteen and so on. It was a little more detailed than this but you get the idea – start with a small amount of exercise and then add to it. To me, this approach of doing little and often is the way to build up your running; trying to do too much, too soon may just leave you too tired to train often enough to make a difference.
Big Red Running 