The runner always had an excuse for why he’d struggled or failed. It was the heat, it was the new shoes, people getting in his way, asthma, a summer cold, anything but the way he trained or his attitude to racing. He never improved and year on year the excuses would keep coming eventually evolving into a simplistic one of getting older and more complicated, but unbreakable, ones like rheumatism or arthritis.
I’ve struggled for years to discern what the semantic difference between an excuse and an explanation is. When a runner tells you why they didn’t do well in the race or training session, an explanation can sound like an excuse, an excuse can sound like an explanation.
I believe the difference is in what you do with that information. By definition, an explanation explains what went wrong. It doesn’t necessarily place the blame here or there, it just observes events and tries to find reasons for poor performance. But an explanation can also provide reasons for a good performance. There’s a detached observation going on which can be used to improve performance next time around. It can take the explanations behind good performance and make them a regular, routine part of training. It can take the explanations behind poor performance and look for countermeasures, interventions and ways to address them so they won’t be problematic in the future.
Excuses though only ever relate to poor performance as a deflection of blame. They’re not there to find reasonable explanations which can be addressed, they’re there to protect ego. At their simplest they’re a denial of the facts and reality. It’s said with alcoholics and other addicts that the first step is admitting there’s a problem. If you’ve ever been around one of these types of people you’ll know how difficult, even impossible, it is to get them to accept the reality of the situation. Until they stop denying there’s a problem they can’t begin to look for ways to address it.
From all this you might think denial is a bad thing. For the most part it is. Yet when you play sport or race, being able to deny the circumstances can be a route to success. Charlie Spedding recounts in his autobiography how, prior to the Seoul Olympic he’d been injured and was struggling in training, but went on to finish 6th through sheer willpower. On the day, he denied his recent form and overachieved. But, it’s important to note, he didn’t use excuses during his training as a reason to give up; he kept training as best he could never making excuses. It was only on the day, he used denial as a short-term strategy to get the absolute best out of himself.
Here we are in July with an array of sports to choose from. Football’s European Championships, Wimbledon, the Olympics starting on the 23rd and three weeks of the Tour de France. It’s only in recent years I’ve got into watching the Tour which is mostly a procession through beautiful French countryside until a final sprint for the line in the last kilometre of a 150-250km race. Occasionally they throw in a short time trial of 30km and of course there are the gruelling climbs of the mountain stages in the Pyrenees and Alps.
With ITV having over four hours live coverage to get through, the adverts are frequently interrupted by some excellent commentary by Ned Boulting and David Millar. They’re joined from time to time by Chris Boardman, who won gold at the Barcelona Olympics at a time when British cycling wasn’t that good. Nicknamed “The Professor” because he’s studied the details, Boardman brings great technical analysis to any broadcast discussing the build of bikes, aerodynamics, streamlined skinsuits, nutrition and tactics among other things. While I’m never going to be a cyclist, I enjoy listening and learning what I can from watching the Tour.
Notice the beauty of of the logo creating a cyclist riding in a tucked position
One of the things I picked up last year was that “fat burns in the light of a carbohydrate flame”. This is a saying which relates to needing some carbohydrates ingested to kickstart the process of fat-burning. Specifically Boardman stated riders will eat 20g of carbohydrate before going out on an early morning ride otherwise they’re burning through their glycogen stores. Certainly I’ve always found my heart-rate is lower (which suggests better fat-burning) after I’ve had breakfast.
I tried experimenting with eating two digestive biscuits before setting out on my long runs. I’d put two on my bedside table ready for the morning then, on waking I’d immediately eat them before getting up, getting my kit on and going straight out for my run. I never saw any notable difference when I did this so I’ve returned to running fasted but having a decent breakfast definitely helps on my workout or race days.
If you want to try it the information about grams of carbohydrates is usually there on the side of the box or packet so take a look. A couple of Weetabix is my go-to breakfast. Not too heavy and the milk helps with hydration.
The other thing I learned is that even when the Tour schedules a rest day, which are the two Mondays in this year’s three week schedule, the riders still go out on it for a two-hour ride. I could barely believe this when I first heard it. After all when you consider the riders are riding hard for the better part of 3,500km (2,200 miles), you’d think they’d jump at the chance of a day off. But, without it, I suppose they’d be almost forty-eight hours without riding.
A little closer inspection of riders’ data shows their rest day ‘recovery rides’ tend to be closer to an hour, maybe stretching out towards ninety minutes. On tour days they’re riding at an average of 40km/h with an average power of over 300W (with the ability to sprint at over 1000W); whereas a recovery day is closer to 25km/h with only 90-130W of effort being put in. It really is an exercise in keeping the legs turning over, flushing out any waste products and providing stimulus for hormonal and nutrient delivery. Unlike runners where the body’s muscular-skeletal system takes a pounding with each step, it’s much easier to cycle for over an hour without any detrimental effect. Nonetheless runners can still use recovery runs as a way to trigger recovery as well as maintain lower aerobic fitness.
On the last day of the month, I spotted someone on Strava mentioning they’d slogged out a six mile run to keep their streak of 100-mile months going. I’ve got my own experience of streaks, after all I’ve been running every day for over eighteen months now. But I never set out to create a run streak, it just evolved due to Coronavirus and lockdowns.
I learned from parkrunning that a streak can become an albatross around the neck. For the first eighteen months or so of my parkrun life, I attended one wherever I was. It got to the point where the expectations of others to see me, my own desire to be there, plus getting up early on a Saturday morning began to weigh me down. Even the streak itself began to become a relentless pressure. When I picked up an injury in the depths of winter I finally had a reason to break the streak. As soon as I broke the streak all the pressure released and I was no worse off.
I still remained an enthusiastic parkrunner, turning up almost every week, so that by 2015 I’d only missed six parkruns in four years. Among other things I was focused on reaching my 250-club t-shirt and had calculated I’d reach it the following February. Then I changed my mind. Or rather I got my head out of the ego-driven, limitations of my mind that were pushing me on towards the t-shirt as well as the routine that Saturday morning parkrun had become.
What I realised is I’d stopped enjoying parkrun. It was a combination of small things. The journey there and back through heavy traffic. Getting out of bed early for a 6am breakfast. Going to Kings Park in Bournemouth, where an icy wind whips across the fields, and the crowds gather in the shadow of the grandstand while the sun rises behind it. Standing around until the 9am start time to be allowed to go run and then having to weave my way through masses of people who’d gone off too fast. I was no longer running all-out every week but using it as a training session. My love of parkrun had died because it no longer fitted with my needs or what I liked. I wasn’t getting out of it what I had four years earlier.
So I stopped and only attended occasionally.
I began to enjoy my Saturday mornings again. Doing things on my own time and schedule. Getting out of bed when I wanted. Having breakfast when I wanted. Going for the type of run and distance I wanted. Often it was an hour’s easy run closer to midday.
After six months I felt replenished and with a couple of 10K races coming up, I went back knowing some fast parkruns would help my training. Since then this has been the pattern. I go to parkrun when it’s helping me with my training or because I want to see friends or be involved in some way. Streaks should support your training and goals, not be the point of them.
People often notice when a streak is causing them physical issues. They try to run through tightness or tiredness to keep the streak going until their body sends them undeniable signals forcing them to stop.
But streaks can also be detrimental to our mental health. Usually the mental side flags up much earlier as a loss of motivation, bad mood or grumpiness long before any physical problems. We become so focused on how it looks out there to keep our streak going that we don’t take the time to look in here to see how it’s affecting us.
I never thought of myself as a decent runner. I may have mentioned this previously. I certainly never felt I had any natural talent for running. This wasn’t simply a case of low self-esteem or high personal expectations, life fed this back to me in clear, unambiguous terms. When I was at school I was at the back of cross-country. When we did sprints, I was at the back. When I ran around in the playground with friends they were always faster than me. When I went orienteering I was always one of the slowest in my age-category races.
The only time I ever got a hint I might have some ability was when I inter-railed to Greece with my friend, Steve, and we had a sprint race in the original Athens Olympic stadium.
Steve backdropped by the unusually shaped 1896 Olympics stadium
Admittedly I false-started to get a couple of steps lead on him but as the race went on he wasn’t overtaking me and I was holding him off. It might not sound like much except he’d broken our school record for 400m on sports day when we were in Sixth Form, I believe a time of 56 seconds. Our race took place a few years after leaving school and a couple of months before my first ever 10K race.
A young sun-bronzed traveller poses pretending to awaits the gun
October 1992 and if I could remember anything about my first 10K, I’d lovingly regale you with its story. I know it was in Totton, near Southampton, but I’m not even sure where it started or where the course went, only that I took 48-minutes. The race was full of club runners with a few outsiders like myself testing our mettle.
I know these bits because in those simpler, pre-digital times, races used to send out results booklets about a month after the race (as long as you gave them a self-addressed envelope). It contained a list of everyone’s times – often split into male and female races along with team races, course records, past results and it was all very nice laid out. I poured over it to find my name and time, and somewhere past the middle page staples I found, from clear unambiguous feedback, that I wasn’t that good. The fastest people in the field were close to thirty minutes, the slowest just over an hour, so my forty-eight minutes was closer to the back than the front reinforcing the idea I was below average.
It was no different when I ran my first half marathons four years later. I did three in a couple of months and they all came in around 1hr51 – give or take thirty seconds. Wading through the results, I was somewhere down around the 60th percentile. The fastest runners were closing in on 1hr05, the slowest taking 2hr15. Once again I was closer to the back of the field than the front.
My first marathon followed on soon after the halfs and at 4hr23 it was the same back-of-the-pack story. Among my small group of running friends, the talk was always of being good if you could break four hours so clearly I wasn’t. Obviously the sub-3 was vaunted and only for seriously good runners, I remember looking at the London Marathon results of the time printed, over the next five days, in one of the broadsheet newspapers and seeing that only a thousand of the 40,000 strong field had broken three hours. It seemed like a benchmark which only the talented could achieve. It was a pipe dream for a below-average runner like me. I was a long way off the decent times.
Even ten years ago races were still generally organised by clubs. There were more charity runners and non-club runners than before but it was all relatively niche and those latter categories tended to be bucket listers rather than regulars. The majority still belonged to clubs.
By then I’d improved to have run a 1hr38 half and a 3hr41 marathon, both of which began to give me the idea I was better than I realised but I still wasn’t sure of myself. Unfortunately I was mixing with friends who could run sub-3 marathons and break 1hr20 in a half. Nonetheless I began to find myself running paces I’d never thought myself capable of while training with runners who I saw as much better.
My early parkruns were usually placing somewhere in the top 30-40 in a field of 150-200. That’s not bad but it’s not outstanding. But when I got my training together and started going sub-20 each week, I found myself up towards the front and enjoying the open space of few runners around me. There was no longer a need to navigate through the runner traffic and it felt good to be ahead of the pack.
I also discovered RunBritain with its custom handicap system and ranking of your times against the rest of the running population. I began to see my times over 5K, 10K, half marathon were all good enough to rank in the top 10% that year. While I was miles off the times of the elites, it’s obvious top 10% is decent and it gave me a measure of satisfaction, or rather an accurate measure of where I ranked within the running community.
The growth of running during the 2010s took me by surprise. Professional events companies began to organise more of the mass participation races while an influx of Couch25K and parkrunners gve them a market to sell medals to. The composition of modern results looks very different now when compared to what I saw in the nineties.
Half marathons that once had a 2hr30 cut-off now happily extend those numbers out to three hours and beyond. The consequence of this became clear when one of my friends ran the Liverpool Rock ‘n’ Roll half marathon a few years ago. In a field of 7,000 runners she finished in the top half. In fact closer to the 40th percentile. Now, remembering that I used to be down at the 60th percentile with my 1hr51 times, you’d expect she must have been significantly faster than me, wouldn’t you? Except she wasn’t – her time was 2hr07. When I looked deeper into the results of that race, my 1hr51 times of twenty years ago would have put me in the top 15%.
There’s no doubt I improved over the years. But my move up the field was as much about the other people in the field as it was about me. Where my 20-min parkrun in 2011 gave me a RunBritain ranking of 11.4%, when I ran 19:39 six years later it now put me at 4.2%. My time hadn’t improved but the attendance at parkrun had.
Your perception is shaped by reality.
What reality looks like depends on, how much of it ,and how clearly, you can see it.
When only committed runners took part in races, I perceived myself as a poor runner.
When races opened up to the general population, I began to perceive myself as a decent runner.
When parkrun began in Poole the majority were committed runners and my stock dropped again.
When parkrun grew, I once again began to see how far I’d come. Sometimes the evidence of your eyes and senses can fool or mislead you.
Half a lifetime ago I ran my first half marathon. I was still young, in my twenties, with a lot of growing up to do. I had many psychological issues that I hadn’t even begun to start unravelling. That day was a landmark in my life, firstly because it was the first half marathon I ever did and secondly because I had a psychological breakthrough while running it.
The route took me around Portsmouth and Southsea, near where the Great South Run is held these days. Somewhere around the 8-9 mile mark I noticed an older woman ahead of me. I estimated she was probably somewhere around fifty but she may have been forties or sixties for all I knew; when you’re young anybody over thirty looks old and you’ve got no concept of age. However old she was, she was ahead of me. There were only ten to twenty metres between us and for the next couple of miles I set my mind to catching up with her. Except I couldn’t. I never got any closer but she never got further away. I just trailed round in her wake as the miles ticked by in the back streets of Southsea.
My anger and indignation at being beaten by this woman was summed in a question – “How can this old, weak woman be ahead of tall, fit, athletic twenty-something me?”. Her being ahead made no sense to how I conceived the world, my place in it or what is right and just.
Then I had the landmark thought.
“I don’t know anything about this woman. For all I know she may have been Olympic champion twenty years ago and been training hard throughout her life. She may be on the downside of her running career and have a pedigree that far outstrips my own.”
The more I thought about it, and this is the great thing about distance running – you’ve got plenty of time for thinking, the more I realised I knew nothing about who she was, where she’d been and therefore why she should, or shouldn’t, be ahead of me. Simply put, I had no justification for believing I should be faster other than my own arrogance and prejudices of what older people, maybe specifically women, are capable of. I was judging on appearances.
With that realisation about the darkness of my inner thinking, I stopped jumping to conclusions about other people. I started to withhold judgement until I knew more. That became my default mode, refuse to make a judgement until I know more about situations or expectations. Always ask more questions, find out more information and when pushed for a conclusion, include a caveat along the lines of “to the best of my knowledge at this time”!
Now this “Don’t judge a book by its cover” approach may seem a little sanctimonious but there was a hidden benefit that I began to see in the following months.
When I stopped judging other people, I stopped judging myself.
By doing that, I opened up new vistas for living. No longer was I tied to my ill-conceived, ready-formed judgements about who I was. Now instead I was free to change and evolve whenever new ideas and information became available. I could incorporate better ways of living and being, without jeopardising my self-image because I no longer had one set in stone.
This post is the 4th in a series of six. Other posts can be accessed from the Readables menu tab.
When I tried MAF training I ran for 5+ months, logged 200+ hours of training where only 4½ hours was spent above a heart-rate of 138bpm. This heart-rate was determined using Maffetone’s age-related formula that I can see no scientific basis to explain. I can’t say I got any notable benefit from the training as I could run a 21-min parkrun before I started and, at the end of it I was running 20:39. In the midst of it, I did run 19:52 but regressed after doing some sprints and drills on a coaching course.
The training itself was demoralizingly slow and I was always fearful of the heart-rate monitor beeping at me to slow down because I’d exceeded the maximum heart-rate. I said I’d never train with it again because it was so unenjoyable and because there are better ways to train.
Today I’m going to prove there are better ways to train to get the same benefits.
Six months of non-MAF training
Let’s roll back to November 29th at the end of last year when I ran my standard Sunday long run in 1:39:26. It’s an average pace of 8:31/mile and my heart was pumping away at an average of 148 beats per minute. Six months later, May 30th, I ran it again, a minute slower, but my heart-rate was now only 131bpm. That’s a drop of 17 beats and an indicator I’d improved my aerobic system.
Regular readers will know I’ve spent the intervening six months training for 800m following a plan from one of Jack Daniels’ books. Although I know much about coaching and how to train I’ve never tried middle distance before, so I decided to see how one of the world’s best coaches approaches it and see what I could learn.
As I’ve documented in monthly updates – January, February, March, April – I logged 40-45 miles per week with a mix of easy runs, long runs, intervals and threshold runs. The training got tough in the depths of winter but I got through it. I ran every day and while I got tight at times, I never got ill or injured. By April I was ready to test out my new found fitness and was highly surprised when I only achieved a 3-second improvement!
Nonetheless a few days after a second 800m time trial I ran my long run a minute faster (1:38:38) than in December and was now averaging a heart-rate of 140 – eight beats lower. So I’d done nothing like Maffetone training and improved by his measures.
I suspected the poor time trial results were due to a lack of endurance and embarked on six consecutive weeks of nearly fifty miles through April and May as I documented in my May 800m update. When I ran another 800m time trial it was still about the same at 2:53, a five second improvement over six months ago, but the rest of my running was feeling easier. My easy runs had sped up but more notably I broke 1hr30 on the long run in training. An improvement of ten minutes for a nearly twelve mile run.
What would MAF suggest?
Seven years ago at age forty-two, when I tried my MAF training experiment, I calculated a MAF-HR of 138. But actually, given I was coming off an illness, I should have taken ten beats off and used 128bpm which would have made things even harder and certainly slower.
Being older, Maffetone would suggest I now train to a lower heart-rate than I did last time around. At forty-nine this gives an initial MAF-HR of 131 but I’ve been running daily since late 2019 without issue. According to MAF you need to have trained for two years without issue to be allowed to add a further five beats, but for this comparison I’m going to do it anyway and analyse my recent training against a MAF-HR at 136bpm. This may sound like a cheat but if I used the lower figure, the stats would skew even more against MAF training.
If you’re wondering why I’m calculating my current MAF-HR when I said I was never going to use MAF training again, it’s purely to analyse the recent training I did and show I improved despite not following any of the low heart-rate training that MAF recommends.
Recent training
What follows is a look at my training for the six weeks after my mid-April time trial. There are one or two miles missing where I was coaching or giving a Personal Training session, as well as a couple of days where I didn’t wear my heart-rate monitor but the bulk of the training is shown.
The general format of each week:
Eight mile Steady runs on Tuesdays and Fridays with a ½-mile warm-up / cooldown aiming to run at my threshold.
On Sundays the long run, usually at the crack of dawn, again pushing it along and throwing in some strides along the way.
The other four days of the week I aimed for a forty minute recovery run.
With six consecutive 50-mile weeks, this block of training totalled 300+ miles and 42 hours.
Yet when you break down all this running, twice as much time was spent running in excess of my MAF-HR (136) as below it. (Note: there is a small issue with the software I used to total the Above-Below durations because it double-counts heart-rates of 136-137 into both categories. The actual figures were 28 hours above MAF-HR, 14hr45 below it but only 41hr50 total run time).
You can see in the graph below the length of each run in time and the proportion of it spent above or below MAF-HR. The yellow is the time spent exceeding it and accounts for 65% of running time. Almost every day I was exceeding MAF-HR for some of the run – that can’t be good according to Maffetone.
Now take a look at the graph of 2014’s MAF training where I only exceeded the MAF-HR for 2% of the time. You can barely see any yellow in the early weeks and it doesn’t increase a whole lot. In the graph above, I often spent more time above MAF-HR in a single run than I did in a week then.
Graph of MAF weekly MAF training in 2014
It’s not even close. It’s very clear I was constantly breaking the MAF-HR in my recent training and not just by one or two beats as happened back in 2014, but by large margins.
Here’s a graph of the time I spent in excess of 150HR on those runs. You can see I was regularly running for over 45-mins with heart-rates on the Steady and Long runs that were nowhere close to MAF-HR. I was effectively training to the MAF-HR of someone over twenty years younger than me.
Recent training – blue lines showing time spent running at 150+ heart-rate
What’s amazing is I accumulated twelve hours of running at over 150HR which isn’t much less than the nearly fifteen hours I ran below my recommended MAF-HR of 136. Yet somehow I got exceedingly better results than when I trained to MAF-HR in 2014.
Getting faster
Not only was I seeing improved heart-rates, my effort runs were improving too.
The November run was my fastest time on the long run course at 1:39:26 and with the 800m training this had reduced to 1:34:03 by March. On 2nd May I reduced it to 1:32:55 then on May 23rd took it down further to 1:29:15. The average heart-rate on this final run was 149 which is only one beat higher than when I was running it in late November. Then my fastest single mile was ripping along down Gravel Hill at 7:52, by late May I was sub-7 with a 6:58.
On the Steady runs I only have one comparator. Back on November. I ran a local 7 ½ mile course round Merley which took 58min52 at an average pace of 7:54/mile and the fastest mile was 7:33. In mid-May, during a spell of high winds I decided against going to the beach and opted to run the local route in 20mph winds. The run came in two minutes quicker at a pace of 7:38/mile with the fastest mile now at 7:08 along with a couple more showing in at 7:18 and 7:21. At the beach, I’ve begun to see miles in the 7:05-10 range. There’s no doubt I’m speeding up and if I were racing longer distances I’d certainly see better times.
Better ways to train
I’ve loved the past six months of training for all the reasons I hated the MAF training. I got to run fast, sometimes I even got to sprint as fast as I could. I rarely looked at my heart-rate while I was running and I certainly didn’t have the heart-rate monitor beeping at me to slow down. The variety of paces and training sessions kept me interested as well as nervously excited on occasions.
I haven’t cracked the 800m yet but I’m confident training is going in the right direction to get there. I’ve seen improvement and I’m running faster than six months ago with heart-rates at slower speeds being lower. That’s an indication the body is improving its fat-burning capability. I’ve been sleeping deeper, got leaner, faster and remained healthy and injury free which are the sorts of reasons Maffetone puts forward for following his method.
The premise of MAF training is that to improve fat-burning you have to run at low heart-rates and stop eating carbs. I did neither of those. Across six months I regularly hit higher heart-rates and I never restricted my diet or stopped eating carbs – if anything I’ve eaten more during the winter months with two bags of Doritos each week and regular cakes from the bakery. Yet I proved it’s possible to achieve the promised benefits of MAF training despite regularly breaking the heart-rate that it suggests a man of my age should use.
None of this was achieved by sticking to a heart-rate calculated from my age and is why I put no stock in MAF training as a system in itself. I believe there may be applications for it in certain circumstances but not general training.
I’d love to hear people’s comments and questions about this block of training and my MAF training review. All reasonable scepticism or thoughts are welcome!
Somehow, I’ve created a run streak that goes back into the 2010s. Admittedly it’s only just a decade ago as my last rest day was December 7th 2019 but it’s still a streak of over eighteen months. It’s been 5K every day often more.
It sounds impressive to anyone who isn’t a runner.
It sounds impressive to people who are runners.
No-one has asked me about it but I imagine the sort of question I’d get is “How do you motivate yourself to keep getting out there?”. Well, motivation has rarely been something I had to think about. I have running goals and to reach those goals, I have to get out and do the training, but equally I make it manageable so it never becomes a strain.
My seven day week splits into three workouts and four recovery runs. The workouts are the exciting part of the week where I get to do something that’s different, that’s exciting and which I know will progress me towards my goals. How can I not be motivated to go do those?
The recovery runs are more mundane but they’re usually only around forty minutes long. Once you’ve been running consistently for a while it’s the sort of run that seems to be over before it’s started. If I were a less experienced runner, I’d probably only do twenty or thirty minutes until the fitness expanded to make them feel achievable.
But it’s the pace of the recovery runs that makes them, and therefore the streak, achievable. I always keep them very easy. Some of them have been closer to ten minute miles even though I can run much, much quicker. I focus on my breathing from the beginning and never put in any undue effort on the hills. I never try to speed up, I just let my body take me along at the pace it wants to go. Sometimes there are days when I have to stumble through the run because the legs are feeling hollow but, more often than not, it’s a chance to get out, look around and think about life.
It wasn’t always like this. When I trained a decade ago, I pushed myself harder on every run but that then lowered my motivation for getting out there frequently. Your body is good at telling your mind when it’s had enough but, while people hear it, invariably they don’t act compassionately towards themselves. Some days I turned round after a mile because I knew my legs couldn’t handle the run. It’s just not possible for a poorly trained runner to run hard every day and not need the occasional break. I haven’t been taking rest days but that doesn’t mean I have been taking a break.
A decade ago I was simply someone who ran to keep myself active and occupied. The majority of my runs were completed quickly. Under half an hour. Occasionally I’d enter 10K races or half-marathons and put in more training to get ready but when I wasn’t racing, it was mostly short, fast runs.
As an eighteen-year-old, my first attempt to take up running was to go out of the door, run to the bottom of our road and then back as fast as I could. It was a 1½ mile round trip with a long uphill finish which, I think, took me around seventeen minutes. I tried to run every day but contented myself with doing six runs each week and kept up the regime for six weeks until other activities (like drinking, Christmas and training for the local Swimarathon charity event) distracted me.
In his book, Running to the Top, legendary coach Arthur Lydiard states:
“The stranger to jogging or running will follow his medical check by running easily out for, say, five minutes and then turning for home … That five minutes out-and-back routine should occupy a few days to accustom leg and arm and body muscles to the activity. The beginner can then start adding time on his/her feet … When you can do 15 minutes every day, at least every other day, step up to 30 minutes, followed by two days at 15 minutes, another 30, another two 15s and so on.”
Now I’ve paraphrased and left out bits but what I find relevant is that he’s telling people to start out with ten minutes running and to get out doing it almost every day.
In my first job at Chase, when they opened an onsite gym I joined because it was a good deal at £6 per month! Other people recognised that too and its membership quickly grew to the point where they expanded the size of the gym by knocking down a wall and building into the restaurant. During busy periods we were limited for how long we could use the cardio equipment; so my treadmill runs were no further than fifteen minutes. More often than not, it was only as long as I could last running at full pelt. The machine would whir away at 9.5mph, I’d gasp for breath and push myself to hang in there for a nice round ten minutes. My best ever performance was putting the treadmill at full speed and running three miles in 18:10. Those extra ten seconds were spent getting it up to full speed.
Eventually I tried a 10K race which was a big step up and had me going out to do some overdistance training in the lead up but then it was back to short runs. If I was bored at home, with nothing decent to watch on TV, a quick run round the local streets was often a solution and I’d only be out for 20-25 minute.
It was a few more years before I started entering half marathons and to complete those I went through a period of doing longer runs from Bournemouth pier to Shore Road and back. But once my interest in those died down I was back to the 20-25 minute runs round the block.
Off this relatively low level of training I could run 10K in 47-48 minutes and half marathons in 1hr50. I was getting decent results off 10-20 miles per week.
All of this is counter to what I see among the modern influx of runners. Most of them have graduated from the Couch25K so have a mentality of goal-setting for distance. Once they can do 5K, they set their sights on 10Ks and then onto half marathons and marathons. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, to an extent I did it myself, but my earliest beginnings were to start with runs that simply lasted as long as I could run. If I ran round the streets, I ran a route I knew was only going to last twenty minutes or so.
There now seems to be a mindset that every run has to last the better part of an hour; the idea that anything less than a 6-8 mile run isn’t worth doing. This turns it into something that needs scheduling rather than being fitted into the day wherever it can.
No planning’s needed to nip out for fifteen minutes while dinner is cooking, twenty-five minutes during lunch hour, twenty minutes round the block in the morning before a shower. A quick run boosts fitness and keeps everything ticking over between more meaningful workouts, sessions and parkruns. It’s a lot easier to get out more frequently when the runs are short.
I’ve been as guilty as anyone of promoting this mentality. In my “How to Improve” series I say one of my running rules is to make runs last thirty minutes. But I’m beginning to rethink things. If you’re committed to improving then aiming for a minimum of thirty minutes is a good idea but I suspect most people are struggling to commit in the first place, and I suspect it’s because they don’t have the time or haven’t found enough joy in running.
One of the ways you find joy is by getting fast and clocking decent times. Another is by blasting out the door for ten minutes, hammering round the block and arriving home feeling reinvigorated. This sort of run triggers all sorts of positive hormones and changes in your fitness. Shorter runs equal less to dread, less to go wrong and less to plan. The hidden benefit is there’s also less recovery needed. I reckon the more you do them, the easier it becomes for running to become a habit and you to stay motivated. Secretly you’ll discover you’re building the fitness in the background that filters down into your longer races.
A while ago I wrote about how noisy I am as a runner – it’s been a lifelong trait. So you can imagine my surprise when a few weeks ago on my long run I suddenly noticed an absence of heavy plodding.
It was 5:30am on a Sunday and being so early in the day there was an absence of traffic. I’ve come to love getting out early in the summer at the crack of dawn. I actually woke up an hour earlier because my curtains are thin, but I elected to have something of a lie-in. Eventually I recognised I should get out there while it was quiet, before it got hot, so I could be home by 7am and still have the whole day ahead of me.
Running this early is so peaceful and quiet. Sometimes the sun is just rising, there can still be a slight chill in the air but you barely notice it once you’re off down the road. The birds may be singing their dawn chorus and there can be fog in the fields or, as you cross over the bridge into Wimborne and look up the river.
But I digress. I was about twenty minutes into my run and began to go up the hill at the back of Merley and suddenly realised all I could hear from my feet was a tappity-tap. Each footfall was noticeably quieter than usual. I continued on and didn’t think too much more about it. My focus was on keeping the run genuinely easy and not kicking up into a higher gear.
I ran up Lower Blandford Road into Broadstone and, with the final few metres hitting a steeper incline, I found my legs go a little wobbly from the surge of lactate it manifested. On into The Broadway I went but now my feet were noisier. It was highlighted by two guys outside the papershop noticing me before I reached them.
I thought nothing more of it until I reached home. After uploading my run to Garmin I noticed the cadence graph had many blue dots in the first half of the run. They turned to green as I reached Darbys Corner and began to run up into Broadstone. Blue dots indicate a cadence of 174, green indicate it’s lower.
While I’m not someone who gets tied up about running at certain cadences, I have been working on improving my form over the past decade. Ten years ago my cadence was usually 150-155, maybe topping out at 160. This morning it was heading for the mid-170s when I was light on my feet and barely make a noise.
The latest form work I’ve been doing has been to use some sprint drills to improve knee lift and get my glutes working better. It would seem these may now be beginning to have an effect.
In April’s update I talked about the surprise of seeing no improvement in my 800m time despite seeing myself get fitter, faster and leaner over the course of training. After the time trials, I slipped into a six week block of endurance training taking me through to the end of May.
At the height of training back in January and February my weekly mileages were in the 40-45 range. As the April time trials approached I eased off to let the legs freshen up and recorded a couple of weeks in the high thirties. With the return of endurance training and the bigger runs midweek, the totals for the six week totals were 49, 49, 50, 52, 47, 48. May alone comes in at 220 miles.
My schedule for this block of endurance was:
Monday – 40min recovery run
Tuesday – 8-mile Steady run (with warm-up / cooldown)
Wednesday – 40min recovery run
Thursday – 40min recovery run
Friday – 8-mile Steady run (with warm-up / cooldown)
Saturday – 40min recovery run
Sunday – 11.7-mile fasted Long run
I adapted it once or twice, threw in some strides occasionally but always two Steady runs in the week with a Long run at similar effort level on a Sunday. Recovery runs on all the other days.
Steady improvement
Across the six week I did twelve Steady runs. May was unseasonably poor weather so the conditions varied from complete calm to 20mph winds. All but one was done at the beach where the wind doesn’t always blow in the same direction. I have a 9-mile out and back route from Durley Chine to near the end of the prom at Hengistbury Head. I always just allow the runs to get faster but the first half mile is taken carefully and I discount the split for this, then run four miles out, four miles back and run the last half mile back as a warmdown. This eight-mile exertion takes a little over an hour which is perfect.
Here’s a table of those eight mile runs at the beach. For ease of reading I’ve ordered the miles from fastest to slowest for each run as it allows you to see how the quickest are getting faster.
20-Apr
23-Apr
27-Apr
30-Apr
04-May
07-May
11-May
14-May
18-May
20-May
25-May
28-May
1
08:10
07:55
07:29
07:44
07:37
07:11
07:45
07:23
07:06
07:08
07:09
07:31
2
08:15
07:59
07:36
07:51
07:44
07:18
07:49
07:24
07:10
07:18
07:11
07:35
3
08:31
08:00
07:37
07:52
07:46
07:26
07:49
07:26
07:22
07:21
07:28
07:45
4
08:42
08:09
07:45
08:01
08:01
07:33
07:52
07:35
07:30
07:39
07:31
07:53
5
08:55
08:33
07:50
08:03
09:09
07:47
07:55
07:38
08:04
07:48
08:28
07:58
6
08:56
08:39
07:55
08:03
09:15
08:07
08:17
07:48
08:20
07:55
08:33
08:00
7
09:02
08:54
07:59
08:06
09:29
08:15
08:20
07:48
08:20
07:57
08:38
08:01
8
09:05
08:57
08:03
08:07
09:30
08:16
08:21
07:53
08:31
08:00
08:42
08:03
Avg
08:42
08:23
07:47
07:58
08:34
07:44
08:01
07:37
07:48
07:38
07:58
07:51
You can see in the first week I couldn’t even break 8-min mile pace on these runs whereas by the final week, every mile was faster. If you track across the fourth mile row, you can see it was beginning to consistently be around the 7:30 mark a solid improvement from the early weeks. The final run was a backslide but I suspect the legs were tired from the excellent 7:38/mile paced Sunday long run preceding them.
This table also highlights how improvement isn’t a linear thing. It can be two steps forward, one step back while you recover and consolidate but if you can stay injury-free there should be an improvement over time. Some of the ups and downs in the table are due to windy days!
Changing run form
In April, I began thinking about my form again. I’ve probably been looking at aspects of my form since 2013 when I bought a cadence monitor and started improving that. It’s a real work in progress and last year when I was doing hill sprints and bounding I began to feel some sense of how to get quicker. In the summer when I strengthened up my core I found it made a difference to my running but I still feel there’s been something missing from my sprint speed.
I reread some of my books which talk about technique and watched some Youtube videos of sprinters and how it is something of a difference action to how most distance runners run. I found some drills and exercises that began to improve my knee lift and instantly I could feel more drive when my feet hit the ground. At my coaching sessions, I do these drills as part of the warm-up to try and help the runners to improve.
Over the course of this training block, I’ve slowly been integrating this new knee drive action into my running and when it’s going well I feel like I’m running on air. My upper body seems to become almost still (other than armswing) and my lower body begins to feel like it’s doing all the work. It feels like I’m running from the hips and every step is driving me forward. My cadence is slightly up and I’ve even begun to notice quieter footfalls at times.
I still haven’t seen this translates to increased speed in my sprints as I haven’t done many strides but I think it may be responsible for the increased pace on my steady and long runs. I’m looking forward to when I get back to the speedier portions of 800 training as I’ll be hopefully be able to further ingrain this new action.
One small downside is that the outsides of my shoulders have ached towards the end of runs. I think this is because as my armswing is becoming freer and driven by running it’s causing muscles that haven’t previously been used to get involved.
Another time trial
Coming off the six week block of endurance I knew I’d speeded up on my easy runs and hoped it would transfer to my 800 time. It didn’t. At the start of June I did another time trial this time clocking 2:53 – so overall five seconds quicker than in December.
It’s possible that my legs weren’t ready for this recent time trial. The final week of the endurance training saw the paces pick up noticeably and this can sometimes lead to what I call a VO2max lull; a 10-14 day period where the body is adapting and takes a step back.
Truth be told I’m somewhat frustrated by the lack of significant progress in the 800 time, especially as I feel fitter and faster but also because I’ve been quicker following my own methods in the past.
I’m going to stick with JackD’s plan for a second go around and throw in the strides he suggests doing to see if this improves my top-end speed. I suspect there’s a missing linkwaiting to be filled in that will connect my general endurance to my speed and ability. Let’s see what happens.
Big Red Running 