My Sundays orienteering were spent with my best friend, Malcolm. On a couple of occasions our friend Steve joined us but it didn’t last, I suspect Malcolm’s parents didn’t want the responsibility of all three of us. I was enough to handle as the add-on and Steve had kind of self-invited himself so he got the boot. One thing I recall is him pointing out how noisily I ran, I think his words were “sounds like a baby elephant” and in fairness he wasn’t wrong about it.
I’ve never been a quiet runner. Sometimes I’m aware of this more than at others. I noticed it on my Sunday long run a few months back as I ran up into Broadstone Broadway and my feet were slapping so loudly on the pavement that an old woman looked round and commented that she’d been expecting a herd of runners to come through!
Another morning, as I was warming up on the way to my 800m speedwork session, I was hammering down the road closing in on a slower runner. She looked round well before I reached her, I assume because she heard the commotion, so as I passed I could only think to comment “Yes. I’m a noisy one, aren’t I?”
The problem with being a noisy runner isn’t so much being embarrassed by other’s opinions (although it can be); it’s that making a loud noise implies there is a big force going straight into the pavement rather than being used to propel you along. It’s said that a group of Kenyan runners will go past with a light tappity-tap sound. Of course it would be useful to be able to see this “noise as ground force” quantified in the lab but that’s the realm of university departments which few of us have access to.
After all these years of running I’d come to the conclusion that perhaps I’m simply a noisy runner, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m doing anything wrong. But then one Sunday morning my legs were relatively fresh and I noticed I wasn’t as noisy as normal. I thought about it for the first mile or so, noticing what happened on the first incline (stayed relatively quiet) before my attention shifted to rising breathing and heart-rates.
Three miles into the run I’d reached Gravel Hill and bumped into Mike and Nigel from Poole AC. Naturally I tried to look relaxed with good posture as we passed each other. But once past, with the road empty at that early hour, I noticed I’d become noisy again. I was on a downward stretch so I wondered if that could account for the difference, Realising I was stretching forward for each step, I experimented by tilting my pelvis back slightly and the noise disappeared. I returned to the lighter tappity-tap which I’d begun the run with. I also noticed that my left glute began to ache as it became more engaged.
I tried to maintain this feeling of pelvic tilt and glute engagement through the rest of the run. By the time I reached mile eight, I started to get a pain in my core muscles to the right of my belly button but it disappeared after a minute or two. I pushed through the rest of the run concentrating on my form.
Now I should point out that what worked for me is not an instruction for others. It may be useful but it depends on what they’re already doing. When I say that I tilted my pelvis back, it may be that it was already tilted too far forward (“posterior pelvic tilt”) and needed to be tilt to get more neutral. For another runner, making an adjustment from neutral would give them an undesirable anterior pelvic tilt.
The important thing to understand is I did two things which both revolve around awareness. Firstly I was listening to how noisy and slappy my feet had become so I played around with my pelvic tilt. Doing that I was then able to find a position which reduced the noise and where I could feel more engagement of my left glute. Using awareness in this way can be a great way to improve your running. It remains to be seen how this affects my running in the longterm but I’m hoping I can get the swiftness and lightness of a gazelle rather than the baby elephant!
Something different today. Usually I write about running but I’m going to looking back to one of the first sports I played seriously – thirty years ago in 1991 – it was squash. I have no recollection of the specific moment I decided to try it or why. Working at Chase Manhattan Bank, squash was a popular sport and there were two courts onsite with a competitive league and an annual knockout cup. My boss, Jon, was one of the best players in the bank. Nigel, his boss, was also very good. As I recall, Matt, Rick, Gareth and Alan all played, as did Pete and Greg, two Aussie contractors. I think JohnnyG may have played but Benardette didn’t and neither did SteveS. I can’t imagine Bernard, Charles or SteveT playing and certainly myself and Danny, the new kids on the block, didn’t. Quiet Nigel may have played but he was so quiet, he never uttered a word in his six months of being in our department so I never found out! But when you look at it, half our department did and I suspect it’s that which led me to start playing.
If you’ve never played squash, or quite possibly in this day and age even seen it being played; I’ll give a recap. During the 70s and 80s it was very popular with every sports centre having courts and leagues. It was something of a corporate sport, played by middle class office workers, yet by the late 1990s it was dying out. Certainly that’s what happened at Chase. The league had been very popular when the bank first came to Bournemouth in 1986, but was all but gone by 1994-95ish. When I started there, you’d always hear a ball echoing around the court as you walked over to lunch, or to the onsite bar at 5:15pm. But slowly the distinctive sounds faded away and often the courts would stand empty in darkness.
Eventually as the bank’s workforce expanded, office space became a premium and the courts were converted. That’s similar to what happened to many of the local courts – Littledown Sports Centre turned their courts into part of the fitness studio, the Lanz Club in Boscombe got knocked down and rebuilt as flats, the South Dorset Squash Club on Ringwood Road is now a Co-op supermarket. When I worked at Broadstone Sports Centre there were two courts but these were converted into additional changing rooms and a soft play area when the swimming pool was built circa 2000. There are still courts around – Haymoor in Canford Heath, Ferndown Sports Centre, Two Riversmeet in Christchurch but they are few and far between. Apparently there’s a decent size league in Dorset of 400+ players but that’s next-to-nothing when you consider our local parkruns attract that many runners every Saturday.
Walking onto a squash court always had a special feel. You walked through the doorway into a cavernous white room with high, white-washed walls. At least they were originally white but now covered by hundreds of marks from squash balls. The room would echo, the lights needed to be bright and on closing the door, the handle dropped flat making for a smooth surface. If you turned round and looked up there was a balcony for spectators to look down on you. Above and behind you, people could sneak a look over and you’d never know they were watching. The cold, echoing, emptiness with just the two of you made it feel like a gladiatorial contest. The only noises were the grunt of long rallies, the squelching and braking of feet in motion and the ball ricocheting off the walls.
The ball was a small, black sphere of hollow rubber. Flexible once warm, it could reach speeds of well over 100km/hour. Some balls had a yellow dot, others a red one, each of which indicated a different speed. You’d have to agree with your opponent which ball to use – a slower one being more advanced because it didn’t bounce as much. I quickly found any decent opponent would snort contemptuously if I even considered offering up the lesser ball. Once agreed you then had to warm the damn thing up. Usually that involved hammering it repeatedly against the front wall, which was easy for people like Jon or Nigel who had the skills, but for a beginner like myself it simply displayed my ineptitude. Two or three hits then the ball would skew out of control and I’d have to scramble over and pick it up. A feeling of embarrassment towards my opponent and a shame that I was irritating or holding them when they wanted to get warm. In winter the courts would be chillingly cold which made warming the ball up even harder. There was a shortcut available though, rolling it vigorously back and forth under your shoe. Occasionally in matches the ball would split or, more likely, get lost in the rafters. When that happened you had to suspend play and warm up another ball. Another opportunity to display ineptitude.
Being the first individual sport I’d played, I now realise I felt a sense of responsibility not to show myself up with the wrong etiquette, so I’d go through the motions of warmups that I didn’t know or understand. All my routines were copied from the players I met over the following months. If someone jogged around the edges of court or up and down in the corridor then I did that. If they swished their racket and did some hip looseners or shoulder swings then I did them too. Mostly I stood there thinking “Can we just get on and play?”.
Games were, of course, preceded by the need to decide who would serve first. No flip of a coin, play for service or “Which hand is the ball in?” deciders as some sports do. The tradition of squash was to spin a racket on its head having identified a logo on each side of the racket to represent each player. One of my few moments of one-upmanship was having a racket that had “My Serve”, “Your Serve” printed on it precisely for this situation. Opponents would begin to ask whether I wanted the Slazenger logo or blank side of their racket, and I’d proudly interject and show them the “My Serve” / “Your Serve” markings. Of course there’s always one person who doesn’t get it and I recall showing this to an opponent who then said he wanted to take the “My Serve”! Didn’t seem to understand the implied ownership of my racket, my serve.
A difficulty of squash is that it’s not a sport where the ball easily goes out of bounds, it usually stays in court until it can’t be returned. Out of bounds happens if you hit it upwards enough, or aim too low at the front wall thereby hitting the bottom 18-inches of the metal “tin”, but most of the time you’re playing until one of you is unable to return the ball before it’s bounced twice. The front wall is theoretically unmissable, it’s 20 feet wide stretching up to 15 feet. You can play the ball off the side walls before or after hitting the front wall. It can rebound off the back wall if it goes deep enough. This is what begins to make squash so difficult for a beginner, it’s a game of angles and you have to be able to read the flight of the ball, predict where it’s going and get into position for your next shot.
Skilled players have an ability to keep rallies going for an average of 15-20 seconds, but as a beginner mine were often over before I’d even started. My opponent would serve, I’d lunge to volley the ball in mid-flight and misjudge it. Even then, I still had the chance to scrabble around and try to play it before the second bounce. But I rarely had the technical skill to play a good shot. Good players knew how to exploit my weaknesses. They’d play the ball off the front wall to die in the back corner. They’d play every shot in a rally to my backhand which was technically harder to co-ordinate returns from. They’d play drop shots after pushing me deeper and deeper to the back of court.
I dived in enthusiastically, playing lunchtimes and evenings – whenever I could get a court booking and find an opponent. With the games popularity, that might mean arriving at 7am for a pre-breakfast game or waiting until 2pm for a late lunch – the courts were well-used at peak times. With regular play, my understanding of the game grew gradually. I no longer lunged wildly at serves which I should have waited to bounce. I began to learn the footwork and technique for a backhand. Jon taught me how to face into the back corner so that, with a flick of the wrist I could simply sweep a shot back down the line to hit the front wall, then watch it loop back to land in the same corner where my opponent had just tried to put me under pressure. What happens as you learn to play a sport is you develop technically, tactically and mentally. Being a bad player means you physically develop your speed and strength only as quickly as you can learn to play the game well.
One of the key tactics is to control the “T” – the centre of the court – from there you can reach the rest of court easily. Every shot you play is trying to force your opponent off the “T” so you can take it over. Of course they have the same aim. If you watch good players, you’ll see there’s a dance going on as one waltzes off the “T”, the other moves onto it only to vacate it moments later and be replaced by their opponent again. As a beginner there was no such dance going on. My opponent would stand on the “T” and I would constantly be scrambling around them to reach balls at full stretch, just about able to return them. My opponent would take two or three strides from the “T” and play the ball to some corner of court where I wasn’t, leaving me to take five or six desperate lunging steps to try to get the ball while my opponent would waltz back onto the “T” comfortable in the knowledge they had the game firmly under control.
So in my early days, I wasn’t very good. I’d take a couple of steps to return a serve, I’d take a few lunging steps across court to reach a ball, my opponent would kill the rally and score a point. I only needed enough fitness for a few seconds of play. That was the way it was for the first few months.
As I improved I began to make rallies last longer. I began to win more points which made games last longer and, consequently I got fitter, which in turn helped rallies to last longer. I began to understand the angles involved. Experience told me that when a ball hit this point on the front wall, it would go over there. When it hit that particular spot, it went there. I began to be able to position myself earlier for return shots and gradually my technique improved. Mentally, my shot selection improved as I learned when to play a drop shot, when to play it deep and when it was inadvisable to play them. I started playing better opponents who in turn pushed me for longer rallies, better shots, and fewer mistakes and so on. That’s the nature of the improvement, there’s nothing radical in this if you apply yourself.
The highlight moment of my squash years was taking part in the annual tournament. Maybe I played in two, but I only remember the game where I was knocked out by Mack. An experienced player, I’d guess he was around fifty; he was lean, wily, whitehaired, a talker and he was full of gamesmanship. He’d take any ‘let’ he could, slow the game down when he was losing and find ways to take breathers after long rallies. Fitness was my greatest asset, so of course I tried to run him ragged but he’d take every second he could and every break between sets to recover. Looking back, I can’t blame him.
With my boss Jon being a good player, I’d already seen and heard about the tournament before I played in it, I probably supported him in the previous years. I reckon the tournament was played over two weeks of February, in the evenings with a straight knockout. What I remember distinctly is the hubbub associated with it. The balconies overlooking the courts would be crowded with supporters and players who’d entered, especially those still in the tournament or due to play later. And like Wimbledon fortnight or the FA Cup, as you got closer to the final, the interest level increased. If you arrived late you’d be watching over the shoulder of others or trying to squeezing into the gap at the end of the row by the wall. The support generated oohs, aahs, and rounds of applause for exciting rallies. It was nothing like playing on a lunchtime when a couple of friends might watch for five minutes to fill time before they had to return to the office.
I played Mack in, what I think would have been, the third round of the tournament. The winner of the game would then play Paul who I’d become good friends with. We often played matches and he always beat me. Always. But I was fast-improving whereas he’d been playing for some years; I felt I held something back in our friendly games and that the do-or-die nature of the knockout would give me a sharper edge. I was sure I’d beat him if I could get past Mack. And if I beat Paul then I’d probably have been in the quarterfinals.
But I had to get past Mack first. And initially that didn’t seem too hard. The matches were best of five games and I easily went two-nil up running him round court with repetitive whipping forehand shots, gradually pulling him off the ‘T’ until, I’d drive an unreturnable cross-court shot to his backhand to win the rally. It was all going to plan and then as victory closed in during the third game, I tensed up and began to make mistake after mistake.
It was a classic case of choking and Mack was wily enough to just keep popping the ball up for me to smash it into the tin or mishit. It was terrible. Not just because I was losing but because I knew the whole balcony were watching me throw the match away. I’d shown them how well I could play for two games, now I was showing them how badly I handled pressure. I could hear gasps and mutterings whenever I played a bad shot. It became obvious I was going to lose the third game and then the fourth. A friend or colleague would shout down a word of encouragement but all it did was remind me that I was playing badly and now needed some kind of external support that I hadn’t needed when I was playing well. I don’t recall the details of how I came to lose the deciding fifth game, only that I went from two-nil up to losing three-two. I think Mack went on to beat Paul in the next round, it’s not etched in my memory, as it wasn’t something I wanted to be reminded of or talk about.
I don’t recall exactly when or why I stopped playing. I first touched a volleyball in the summer of 1992 and decided I wanted to get good at it. The bank also opened an onsite gym which was a bargain at £6 per month and it began to take up my lunch times and evenings. I believe that’s how I got into running and entered my first 10K. Either there were some entry forms on the reception desk when I walked in, or someone at the gym talked me into it. It was also the winter I moved out of my parents’ home and began growing up and looking after myself. Extra time from living closer to work and a need to recreate my routines saw me move away from old friends and habits.
I’d guess the gym hastened the demise of the squash league. The guys who’d enthusiastically competed five years before were getting older and gaining more family responsibilities. Hitting their thirties and forties their knees were creaking and they knew their place in the pecking order of the league. The competitive fires were probably beginning to die down as they knew who they could beat and who they couldn’t. The gym presented an exciting new, alternative for keeping fit with no dependency on finding opponents or booking courts. It could easily be fitted in around the rest of their lives.
I’m sure I played the occasional game of squash in 1993 and 1994 but volleyball became my new all-consuming passion. I started playing basketball, going to the gym, there was circuit training in the sportshall on Wednesday lunchtime and tennis lessons on Thursdays. With so many options available, squash fell by the wayside. Just the occasional game now and then.
I’ve only played three or four times since I left Chase in 1997. Each time I played I was in a terrible state the next day. I could still read the game well enough to know where the ball was going. I had the fitness to get into position to play those shots. I didn’t have the fine motor skills to play winning shots so rallies lasted much longer than when I first played. As a beginner, my fitness built up as I got better at the game, now I’d play hard for forty minutes using squash-specific muscles that weren’t used to being used. Deep lunging stretches to reach the ball in all corners of the court. I’d walk off court dripping in sweat feeling like I’d had a good workout. The next day, I’d suffer from muscle soreness that lasted two or three days. I couldn’t take those matches easy but, with decent fitness, I paid for it in the following days.
Nowadays I see the same thing happen with runners returning from injury. Having been used to running regularly for an hour or more they jump back in with a half hour test run. Invariably it’s at a decent pace because their legs are feeling fresh. What they don’t do is go for a gentle easy run to ease back in and be sure the injury has fully healed. If they were running thirty miles per week before they get injured they come straight back running five days per week and quickly back up to that sort of mileage. Then they wonder why the get injured again.
When you come back to running after an injury, you should begin with short gentle runs – possibly as short as five minutes and ideally no more than fifteen minutes. If that’s ok you might do it again the next day but you might take a rest day for extra assurance. If nothing’s causing problems you build slowly back up from there, adding five or ten minutes until you’re sure you’re injury-free. Of course it depends on how big the injury was but for anything major, I’d aim for the better part of a month to rebuild.
Likewise when I went to circuit training after a break, I never pushed it. I took the session easy knowing I’d get a decent workout and consequently I avoided the next day soreness. But I never figured out how to achieve that graduated approach when getting back into playing squash. I don’t think it’s possible. You book a court for forty minutes, you’ve got to use the time up. And you have to give your best efforts for your opponent. All you can hope is to walk away unscathed and maybe to accept you’re going to be sore for a while.
As the pictures attest I still have my squash racket and the Hi-Tec shoes I bought all those years ago. They’ve been up in the loft ever since. I thought I’d barely used the shoes as they look so clean and the soles are hardly worn. But when I looked inside, I could see the insoles had been worn around the ball of my big toe. I spent a lot of time on my toes and driving off the forefoot to get to balls quickly. The cleanliness of the shoes is no surprise because squash courts are clean and shoes don’t get dirty like running shoes would. I was obviously into Hi-Tec as my first pair of running shoes were Hi-Tec Silver Shadows which I think I bought for £25.
Picking up my racket I’d forgotten how light it is. I cocked my wrist and gave it a couple of swishes – the old three finger hold with thumb and forefinger loose came automatically. I regripped the racket a few times myself. It was one of those tasks I’d do periodically, more because I enjoyed doing it than out of necessity. I remember Jon used to have about three grips on his racket so that it was big and fat to nestle in his hand. I also remember if you ever saw him running around a football pitch he ran with one hand open and the other as if he was holding a squash racket!
My racket was made by a company called Unsquashable and the headcover has a stylish mix of fluorescent pink and black. I rarely buy things based on looks but graphite rackets were becoming more attractive than the wooden and steel ones that preceded them and I think I bought this one because it had a larger sweet spot. Unsquashable still seem to be in existence, making rackets and I recall they were connected to Jahangir Khan, who was the best player of the 1980s.
I was definitely not the best player of the 1990s and when I look back squash was simply a sport I played regularly for a couple of years before relegating it to “once in a while” as a way to connect with new acquaintances. There’s a part of me that would love to play again just to experience hitting the forehands and backhands down the line. To stand waiting for the serve and the frustration of trying to dig a ball out of the back corner. Maybe one day the opportunity will present itself and I’ll be ready to give it another go but I’m also content to leave it in the past. Squash was what I did then and life moves on. For now, I’m far too focused on my running and coaching others to become better runners.
I have always said running is about filling in the gaps, by which I mean, there’s usually something missing from your training, stopping you from running faster which needs to be addressed. After I first ran sub-20 at parkrun, I quickly zoomed on down towards nineteen minutes and, while I was flat out on the runs, I always walked away saying “there’s a lot more to come yet”. My legs felt strong and my breathing never felt top-end laborious, so I was super-confident that breaking nineteen minutes would be easy, and yet it took almost a year before it happened.
This came back to me earlier this week during an 800m training session. I did a twenty minute warm up then I ran a 600m as fast as I could. The previous week I’d run 600m in 2:07 in 20mph wind. I’d been gasping for breath after the first minute but managed to push myself on. This week the weather was better and I clocked 2:05. It never felt as difficult as it had been on the windy day yet I ran it as fast as I could. Some kind of limitation had built up. My legs were far from aching so they weren’t tired, my heart-rate was still below 170bpm and I was barely gasping for oxygen but something unknown was limiting me. What it was doesn’t really matter to this story.
I was happy enough with what I’d done as I was on target with that effort and the rest of the session. It was as I jogged to warm down I thought about this idea of how the limitation isn’t necessarily what you expect it to be. It would be easy, and I’m sure many runners do this, to believe that because I wasn’t gasping for breath throughout, the way forward is either to, do more repeats, do them faster, give myself less recovery or some such idea.
But what I began to learn all those years ago in my early days of parkrunning is that you have to find out what is limiting you and then fill in the gap. I didn’t have the understanding then to see where the issue lay. I can spot it quicker these days Sometimes it’s about building a bigger aerobic base, other times you need more lactate clearance, maybe to improve lactate tolerance, or simply to go out and build more speed. There are many things that could be limiting you and obviously if you don’t do much running then there are lots of gaps waiting to be filled in. But once you’re training regularly and frequently, working out exactly where a limitation lies is often the toughest part.
Arriving home from a run, I unlock the back door, step into the kitchen and find myself faced by a marauding list of things to do. Life used to be so easy when I was irresponsible – I could pay the price later but these days …
I’m stood in sweaty kit that I want to get off because, well, who wants to stand in sweaty kit?
I particularly want to get my bandana off because it gets cold and damp quickly. I want to put it on the hallway radiator but I’m in the wrong part of the house and I’m wearing my shoes.
So my shoes need to be taken off (particularly if they’re muddy) but I also want to get my heart-rate monitor off.
I need to take my heart-rate monitor strap off but … if I wait a few seconds more … it’ll pop up a Heart rate recovery stat indicating how much heart-rate has dropped since I stopped running two minutes ago.
But once I’m thinking about my heart-rate and watch, I want to look at the splits from my run. I barely glance at the watch while I’m running, so arriving home is the first opportunity to get a good look at the numbers and … feel pleased or start rationalising.
I want a cup of tea. This one’s easily solved by flicking on the kettle. Unless of course, I forgot to fill it before going out and then I’m going to have to step across the kitchen in wet shoes.
Now drips of sweat are beginning to form. Previously they’ve been evaporating as I run, now I’m stationary they’re building up on me. I need to get to the towel I’ve left in the dining room but to get there I need to have taken off my shoes. Sometimes I’m still aching from the run and don’t feel ready or able to bend down and unlace my shoes. I got out of the habit of kicking my shoes off when I was about twelve. This is the downside of becoming responsible, growing up and doing things properly.
And then there’s nutrition. I should be eating something in the first few minutes after I arrive home, shouldn’t I? The first hour is the best time to reload the carbs and nutrients into the muscles. Miss that window and it impacts future workouts.
How did life get so complex? This is nothing like it used to be. Finish playing football, shake hands with the opposition then straight to the changing rooms to shower in the sports centre. Stick the sweaty kit in the backpack – maybe leave it there overnight by accident. Shower, change, walk back to the office and start sweating again. Pop to the shop and buy a bottle of Lucozade and a couple of packs of crisps to go with my sandwiches. Get back on with work.
My downstairs tasks are done. I need to get upstairs, get the sweaty kit off.
Take the heart-rate strap and put it in the bathroom sink for a quick soak. Maybe put the bandana in there too. While the sink is filling with water, I’ve just time to open up my laptop to leave my watch uploading to Garmin. Maybe also time to get the soggiest kit off.
But I also need to make sure I remember about the heart-rate strap. One afternoon, I came upstairs after sitting in the sun for hours and heard a curious noise. I couldn’t place it, it was unfamiliar. Walking into the bathroom, I discovered to my horror the tap on and the sink was full. Fortunately I’d left it filling slowly enough that the water was trickling out of the basin overflow. Phew!
The Critical Path Analysis skills from my project management days have me flitting from one task to the next. Many is the occasion when I’ve done an upstairs task and gone down to the kitchen to find a teabag stewing in the cup. In the 1-2 minute window between filling the cup and waiting for the teabag to brew, I’d thought there was enough time to ‘pop upstairs’ and do something else. But then a variation of Doorway Effect kicked in and, once elsewhere, I’d forgotten the teabag was steeping.
It’s still too soon to shower or wash if I’m sweating. Got to wait for the body to cool down and get back to a calm level. So much for the warmdown jog at the end of my run.
So while I wait, maybe I’ve got time to write some notes on my Garmin upload. Copy them to Strava – think of what to say about the session, make separate notes in my spreadsheet and training log. And that’s before I get out around to any kind of analysis or comparison to previous sessions.
Once I’ve logged into Garmin and Strava I’ll want to see how everybody else’s runs have gone, so there’s another time sink. Maybe I should nip downstairs first and get that cup of tea, grab a banana or bagel to put some immediate nutrition in. I might even risk putting on lunch but must remember to set the timer so there’s no chance of it boiling over while I’m upstairs.
If shoes are wet they need to be stuffed with newspaper and put by the radiator. That’s a job I can do while I wait for the second teabag in my fresh cup of tea to brew. All of this with no stretching or foam rolling in sight! That’s one thing never making my list.
Finally most of the jobs are done. I’ve got my cuppa, I’ve munched on a snack and it’s time to wash or shower and get some clean clothes on.
A few days ago I found a way to make it all seem easier. I stood outside my house when I arrived home. I didn’t go straight into the house but instead took a minute or two to look around and enjoy the quiet. I was able to take my headband off. Wait for the watch to ping up its recovery stat thing, take a look at the splits from my run and generally recompose myself before getting indoors. The extra minutes made all the difference and had eliminated some of the tasks I’d taken to fretting over.
It was like the days when I played football, volleyball or any other sport. We used to shake hands, walk off the pitch in a wearisome way and amble back to the changing rooms. Sometimes we would even stretch before we left the arena. But it was always much less hurried. Deliberately so.
Just don’t ask me about the days when I come home desperate for the toilet!
I’m a big believer you can train in all weathers. There’s only one thing that stops me and that’s ice, mainly because it’s too easy to get injured but anything else I’m willing to get out there. My resolve has been tested recently with a bitterly cold wind and driving rain alternating for what seems like the past month. But I suspect my body is trying to convince me to have a little break. I certainly don’t recall it being as tough this time last year.
I remember in the first winter after setting up Poole parkrun, I got in the car and its temperature gauge said -6C, or it may even have been -10. Whatever it was, by the time I arrived at the park it had risen to -2 degrees but with no wind it was a calm, still day. Not even a breeze. Wrapped up warm with thick leggings, long sleeve running top, t-shirt over it, plus obligatory hat and gloves it was a surprisingly pleasant morning run. The lack of wind chill made all the difference.
All layered up for a cold morning
At the other extreme I suffered heatstroke one summer. Or at least that’s my self-diagnosis of what happened. I’d planned a ten mile run at the beach on the prom – five miles out, five miles back. The outward leg went well but what I didn’t realise was the breeze on my back was pushing me along. It was intended as an easy-paced run and I found myself ticking along nicely at 7:45/mile but when I turned around the breeze hit me. I immediately began to find running harder. It was the height of summer so it shouldn’t have been a surprise but I’d done the same run the day before without incident. By seven miles I was slowing to nine minute miles and stopped to stand in the shade of a beach hut. Hands on knees, head down, not feeling great and my heart-rate only recovered to 115bpm – a good thirty or forty beats higher than I’d expect. I tried running the eighth mile and could barely struggle along at ten minute mile pace so eventually decided it would be safest walking the last two miles back to the car.
I’ve run in heat before without issue but the temperature registered as 26C which is higher than I’m used to. Normally I avoid running in the heat of the day, I either go early morning or in the evening. There’s no point running at the beach on a sunny day, I’ve tried it and you encounter walkers, the pushchair mafia three or four abreast, dogs on leads, as well as other exercisers running, cycling or roller-blading. It’s too crowded to have an enjoyable session and impossible to do a workout on target.
Running in snow is fine when you’re the first one out there. Sound is dampened, all is quiet and it feels fantastic. But Poole has its own microclimate so snow is a rare thing. In a lifetime of living here I can remember decent snowfalls in only six or seven winters. Most times it’s melted away within a day. I don’t think I saw a decent snowfall from 1993 to 2008; it’s that rare around here. This year the news outlets warned of the second coming of the Beast from the East hitting large parts of the country – the picture below shows the snowfall that hit us. So my snow running experience is limited and certainly never been tried in knee deep drifts.
Typical Bournemouth snowfall!
We did have two days of snowfall in March 2018 although it was barely a foot deep. The first morning was a Saturday so I ran to Poole parkrun and was highly disappointed to find it was called off even though there’d been no notice on the website when I checked at 8am. The great thing about the first day of snow is everything shuts down and no-one else goes out other than to sled, build snowmen or throw snowballs. The fresh snow is easy to run on and the council is good at getting the main roads gritted and cleared. Without traffic, the roads become the perfect track for running on. But the good times rarely last and by the second evening of our snowfall, everything was melting, turning slushy and the pavements packing down, turning to ice. Unfortunately I came a cropper only a few hundred metres from home after running five miles in the morning and five in the evening. I lost my footing and went straight down spread-eagled. I believe that may have been the cause of a groin injury that came on over the next month but I’m not sure as I was running big mileage during that period.
Rain is never fun to run in unless it’s warm rain on a hot summer’s day but that’s pretty rare. Most rain really isn’t that bad to run in. If you look out the window and it’s absolutely pelting down, just wait and it eases off within ten minutes. When it’s not pelting down, it looks worse than the reality of being out in it. Often I’ve looked out pessimistically at a rainy day before stepping out of the backdoor to find it’s not torrid at all.
A few years ago the big man-up phrase was “Skin is waterproof”, but my logic is slightly different – you’re going to get sweaty and shower when you get home so getting wet first doesn’t make much difference. Some like to wrap up with layers and rain jackets to keep from getting too wet. I take the opposite approach – the less wet kit there is clinging and weighing me down, the more enjoyable it stays. It’s easy for wet kit to become cold, uncomfortable kit. On arriving home a pair of shorts and a t-shirt can be thrown on the radiator, and it doesn’t take long to towel off dry.
I remember getting stoned one lunchtime along Baiter Park. I’d started off in bright sunshine in Poole Park but as I came round onto Whitecliff Park ominous black clouds were forming and then the rain came. My biggest concern was getting caught by lightning as I’d have nowhere to hide. But while it never struck, hail did. It only lasted five minutes but it was painful. Stinging with every hit, the wind blowing me back and the rain soaking me through. I found myself running bent over, head turned down to protect my eyes from getting haildashed. It was an occasion when I considered quitting the run but some part of me wouldn’t quit. Anyway what was I going to do? I’d still have had to get back to the car, so I might as well run back. Then just like that, the hail stopped, the rain ended and the clouds parted so I was back to blue skies and sunshine.
Windy days are my least enjoyable. At 6’2” with equivalent reach I bear the brunt of a headwind in a way smaller people will never understand. There’s too much surface area creating drag which in turn slows the pace to a crawl. But it’s the wind on cold days where the wind chill ramps up that have begun to do for me. Leaving the house with leggings, long sleeve top, gloves, hat, even a buff to try and cover up every piece of skin I’m like an Arctic explorer fearing frostbite if any part is left exposed. Captain Oates springs to mind on these days “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
I suffer with cold hands and feet, always have. I’ve even run with two pairs of gloves in the past and had my hands go numb. Feet going numb is something weird I’ve experienced on a few occasions, it’s very disconcerting not being able to feel how your foot is striking the ground. Generally I warm up once the blood gets pumping but if I forget gloves I’m in trouble. One September, I misjudged an unseasonably cold morning. An hour into my long run I’d lost half the feeling in my right hand. Two fingers, a thumb and most of the palm were numb. Returning home I could barely hold the door key and certainly didn’t have the dexterity to unlock it. I had to employ a two-handed, childlike manoeuvre with my palms pressed either side of the key to create enough pressure to turn it. Having gone through the pain of hands getting cold, I then had to endure the pain of them warming back up, tingling as the blood flowed into the constricted veins.
I recently ran at the beach during the cold spell. The wind was 20+ mph and the chill had it feeling like -4C. Sand was whipping across the prom, a danger of getting it in the eyes, and I only managed a mile before turning round. It was meant to be a recovery run so my legs weren’t at their best as it was. By the time I got back to the car, the tips of my fingers were numb, even in gloves, and the layers of clothing weren’t enough to stop me shivering sat back in the car. It reminded me of the Saturday morning two days before my run streak reached a year when it was a howling storm and pitch dark. So close to the goal I had to run but went out in shorts, t-shirt and no gloves; arriving home I was chilled to the bone. I stripped off my wet clothes, put on my dressing gown and went back to bed where it took over half an hour to warm back up.
I never used to be a big reader of weather forecasts. After all if you’ve planned to do something, you can’t control the weather, just get out there and do it. However in recent times, I’ve begun to look at what the weather will be like during the day to see if there’s a best time to run. Should I get out early at 10am, wait until midday or even the evening? Is the wind picking up or dying down as the day goes on, are the chances of rain increasing or decreasing? What is never in question is whether I’ll do a session. I don’t look at the weather forecast and use it to talk myself out of running. I only look at it to see when the best time to run might be. That’s been more applicable with pandemic lockdowns, but once we return to normal and life regains its own schedule the runs will have to be slotted in wherever the rest of life dictates. It’s just a case of making sure I wear the right kit for the conditions.
What a block of training this has been! You’ll recall from my previous update that I’ve been following an 800m plan written by Jack Daniels and in his notes he said this phase would be the most demanding. He didn’t lie. In the previous update, most of my workouts were short intervals at paces between 5:30 – 6:30/mile to get the legs used to running faster. The rest of my week was easy running to recover. It never felt too bad as my legs have always liked faster running and coped very well with it.
What I hadn’t appreciated about my fitness was … the huge gap in it. Before starting this training I did three months of easy running where the majority of it was 8-10 min/mile. My long runs for example were averaging 8:30/mile in November. Along the way I clocked a few miles close to 7:30 (but only a few) and this is where the gap opened up. I had nothing to connect me between those autumn runs, at 7:30 or slower, to the 800m speedwork at 6:30 or quicker. Bridging the gap is what this phase aimed to do as you’ll see when I explain JackD’s T-pace and I-paced running.
To begin the recap let’s rewind to mid-January and the start of this phase. The first thing was to up the paces to account for (hopefully) improved fitness coming off of the previous block of training. This meant where I’d been running 200s at 48secs they were now expected to be run in 47 secs. Faster 200m repetitions quickened up from 44 to 43s and the other short interval distances were all increased using equivalent paces to these.
The sessions focused on what JackD terms I-pace training which are longer intervals at your predicted 5K pace. These began at three mins (where I managed 700 metres) and incrementally stretched out to five minutes (1,200m). I like what he says on p.108 of his 3rd edition book about how this “adds an aerobic stress but not any faster running speeds, which would be an additional new stress for the body to deal with.” i.e. you only add one stress, not two. My I-pace has been 6:50/mile (4:15/km).
The T-pace (Threshold) running should have been around 7:20/mile but I’ve found myself running them at 7:10-15 fairly comfortably. I think my recent years of endurance training probably made this easier to achieve than expected. There was also one 40-minute run at M-pace (Marathon) which I ran at 7:45/mile but could feel myself flagging in the last 5-10 minutes. Another gap filler.
There were still lots of 200s, 300s, 400s and 600s being run at fast paces but not the 100+ efforts of last time. Once again I’ve summarised it all in a table below and you can see, while the shorter efforts were generally successful, I struggled on the longer 400s and 600s. I think this is because my legs were often still recovering from the I- and T-paced sessions which totalled well over 45km.
Target time
On target
Missed
Efforts
Fastest
200m
47s
10
–
10
(2km)
38.44s
(5:10/mile)
43s
12
2
14
(2.8km)
300m
1min05
9
–
9
(2.7km)
59.77s
(5:21/mile)
400m
1min34
6
4
10
(4km)
1:24.9
(5:42/mile)
1min26
1
4
5
(2km)
500m
1min57
1
–
1
(0.5km)
1:53.54
(6:06/mile)
600m
2min23
4
6
10
(6km)
2:17.2
(6:08/mile)
I-Pace
6min50
33
1
34
(27.7km)
T-Pace
7min20
7
–
7
(11.2km)
M-Pace
7min45
4
1
5
(8km)
Total
87
18
105
(66.9km)
Stats for those who love them!
What’s been most interesting is Sundays have alternated between doing a Long Run one week, and a workout the next. By the time I’d run warm-up, efforts, jogged recoveries and warmed down home; the Sunday workouts were close to ten miles – not far off my standard 11-12 mile Long Run. Some of the midweek workouts have also been in the 8-10 mile range.
The first couple of weeks had their usual slump as the legs got used to the new regime. There were some aches and pains occurring especially in my left knee and right calf but these disappeared about three weeks in. My body began to feel comfortable with the training but I fatigued after a heavy fourth week. I found myself sleeping more and the fifth week of training was the toughest I’ve encountered so far. Thursday of week 5 was the workout where I physically couldn’t run fast enough on a set of fast 400m efforts missing target by 2-3 seconds. Fortunately in week 6, my legs perked up and I reaped the benefits of all the training so far. In the final workout I recorded my three fastest 200m times since I started – hurrah! Arriving home my Garmin promptly corrupted the workout so it wouldn’t upload. Fortunately I’d done a cursory review of the numbers in the kitchen. Frustrating but not the end of the world.
My overall mileage stayed about the same as previously and the six weeks resulted in 45 / 45 / 42 / 45 / 41 / 46 miles. These have been achieved with 6hr10 – 40 mins running each week depending on how my other commitments allow.
Weatherwise the training was a nightmare. As a golfer I’ve always found the end of January / start of February to be the worst conditions and I usually took a month off to stay warm at home. But, as a runner, you need to be getting out as often as possible so it’s a case of wrapping up warm, wearing the right gear. This year’s weather was rather diabolical – a combination of high winds, minus-figures temperatures, almost some snow, and two weeks of heavy rain. It seemed to dominate the forecast for every scheduled workout but there were one or two nice sunny days jumping out from nowhere to give surprise relief. Even so, when you’re struggling with fatigue, it’s not encouraging to go into a session knowing high winds will be suppressing your pace. But it’s already beginning to feel like “Spring is here” with mornings getting brighter and even birds tweeting!
The next six weeks focus on T-paced work which so far I’ve found fairly easy, but it includes fast repeats out to 600m which are going to need to be run in 2:06 – the fastest I’ve run so far is 2:13. I’m not looking forward to those but let’s see what happens ..
Sprinting into the finish of Lordshill 10K, I was overtaking other runners and feeling strong. Yet my Garmin only recorded a Best Pace of 4:45/mile, which while useful, is slower than Kipchoge runs a whole marathon. Looking at the races photos of my sprint finish, I began to see why and started to think about some form changes. Sadly I never got a copy of the photo so I can’t reveal its horrors but this one from the 2010 New Forest Marathon begins to hint at my lack of form. Here, I was only running at eight minute mile pace, not even trying to sprint. If I hadn’t mentioned it you might not see much wrong. But there’s issues, notice the heelstrike of the right foot.
At least I look as if I’m enjoying it!
Below is another picture I came across as I was reading through my backlog of Runner’s Worlds. It’s a happy photo, you can see the joy of the runners. I’m guessing they’re approaching the finish as they’re spaced out and smiling, not overwhelmed by already having run for two hours with many more miles left to do. But my eye wasn’t drawn to the runner’s joy, it’s another photo where heelstriking is visible. (This isn’t criticism of the ladies in the image, they’re simply demonstrating something which is common among runners, myself included, that can even be seen at the elite level).
But heel-striking isn’t the focus of this article. That’s because it isn’t caused by, or easily corrected by adjusting, how the foot lands. Heel-striking is simply a reaction to a chain of events. The foot is connected to the ankle, which connects to the shin, to the knee, to the thigh and on up to the hip and pelvis. This is where the problem is really occurring. The pelvis is rotating forward, thereby flinging the leg forward, so the only place the runners can land is on the heel.
It’s hard to see pelvic rotation because the hip and thigh muscles obscure it but there’s another way to identify it. Here’s a close up of the same picture with some lines added. You’ll see I’ve highlighted the shoulders because this is where the issue is obvious. Shoulders also rotate around the spine, which is the centre axis connecting the upper and lower bodies. Whatever happens in the lower half is mirrored in the top half, for example as you walk or run, your arms and legs swing in opposite time. Unless you consciously block it, or have your hands in your pockets, your arms always swing back and forth when moving.
Lower half travelling forwards, top half turning
When there’s excessive pelvic rotation you get excessive shoulder rotation. In the RW photo, the runners’ arms aren’t so much swinging as being turned. If you look back to my photo, you’ll see the opposite shoulder is coming around, emphasised by the arm moving towards the middle of the body. The disaster photo from 2017 of me sprinting, shows an even more pronounced rotation of the shoulders and hips. I would hazard to say my shoulders were 45 degrees to the square – but I’m trying to mask this by swinging my arms straight forward and back despite the turning! I really wish I had the photo to show you how bad it was.
A good way to see why this is a problem is to imagine yourself riding a bike along the road. If you begin to wobble the handlebars then the front wheel wobbles. You end up zigzagging in danger of falling off, continuously understeering and oversteering to try and keep stable. When you keep the handlebars steady your bike travels effortlessly straight. It’s the same issue for the runner. Keep over-rotating the pelvis and you’re constantly fighting to run in a straight line. No longer do the muscles which are most efficient do the work, but lots of auxiliary muscles have to compensate which is both energy costly and puts you at risk of injury.
Sprinters
If you compare this to any world-class sprinter you’ll see their shoulders and hips stay relatively square. Of course some rotation has to happen, we’re simply interested in avoiding excessive rotation. Here’s a video of a sprinter doing 26+ mph on a treadmill. Helpfully, the university researchers have put reflective dots on the sprinter’s body which allow us to see the rotation of the upper and lower bodies. Or rather the lack of it.
We can see there isn’t much rotation occurring in the hips. I’d estimate one hands width, so maybe 3-4 inches. The dot under the armpit is moving more but we never see the shoulder on the far side coming into view. The stability of the hips is reflected in minimal shoulder turn. And if you look at the footstrike while the leg comes out in front, as the foot strikes the treadmill it’s flat – no heelstrike in sight.
If you see sprinters head on, you’ll see their arms and legs are moving straight backwards and forwards. Coaches actually teach sprinters not to let their arms cross the centreline of the body which happens when the shoulders turn.
Improving your form
I don’t focus very much on running technique, certainly not like when I played other sports. But I have been working on reducing my hip and shoulder rotation because it’s a cure-all for a bunch of problems. If you reduce rotation you raise cadence, reduce heelstrike, power your running with your glutes and reduce quad involvement which can lead to lower back pain.
Here are some ideas and things to try that I’ve found helpful over the years.
Exercise
Try running with one hand on your hip and feel how it affects you. The hand on hip forces the shoulders to stop rotating and the other arm then has to swing. Do it for thirty seconds then change over. This exercise isn’t intended to be used to rework your form i.e. don’t go run for an hour with one hand on a hip (for one thing you’ll look silly); it’s to give you an understanding of what the proper form feels like and which muscles should be working.
Strengthening
The problem of excessive rotation is often down to not stabilising the core and not using the glute muscles to power the running. I get runners doing exercises at my sessions in Poole Park when time allows. I recommend Planks and especially Side Planks for core stability. For glutes, try Glute Bridges progressing to the Single Leg version. Also Single Leg Deadlifts. You can find examples of these exercises on the web and Youtube if you can’t make my session.
Glute Activation
Once strengthened you need to ensure the glutes are being activated when you run. Here are simple exercises to do before running, perhaps while waiting for your GPS watch to lock in or a friend to arrive:
Stand with one foot out in front, the other underneath you. Then push up on to the toes of the rear foot to rock forward onto the front foot. Relax back down before doing it again four times then switch legs.
Imagine pushing a shopping trolley in front of you which doesn’t allow your legs to swing forward while walking. Forward motion has to be powered by pushing away behind. Walk twenty yards then break into a jog and try to keep the same feeling.
Standing against a wall, walk away from it by pushing against it with the back of your leg and heel. Do five push offs with each leg..
Walking up the stairs at the office or home, push up off the lower foot to fully straighten the leg. Barely lift the other leg onto the next step. Practice every time you use stairs.
In all these exercises the leg that is behind the body does the work, the one in front remains ‘quiet’. Your aim is avoid using the quads to power the exercise. Again, I incorporate this activation work into coached sessions during warm-ups.
Integrating the two – my journey
Last Easter I started an exercise program to rebuild the strength and power I’d lost while focused on building endurance. One of the exercises I did was “Bounding”. Very long loping strides where you hang in the air (like a triple jumper) aiming to cover distance rather than go quickly. Pushing off with each bound, it became obvious if there’s over-rotation going on because you start to zigzag down the road. I started to find myself pushing with the glutes and maintaining hip stability.
In the summer, I started a new core stability programme and the work I did on side planks helped with minimising rotation. I’d always been strong in the core but when combined with improved running form the two things began to work together. I came home from one of my Sunday long runs and found the oblique muscles either side of my core were aching because they’d been stabilising me for the first time ever. You can run for years with bad form and never know it!
But still I wasn’t sorted. As I’ve moved in to 800m training with its emphasis on shorter 200m efforts, I began to notice my right hip was rotating forwards. I had to work on keeping my hips squared and getting the glutes to fire.
I know I’ve still work to do on this. It’s slowly coming together. Form change is difficult and tends to be a series of plateaus then improvements as you find something that helps you move to the next level. I started trying to improve my cadence back in 2013 and I’m still working on it. The recent form changes for getting glutes to fire have been a stepping stone for that. No doubt I will be looking again at photos in five years’ time and still finding fault.
A Final Thought
You often see people carrying drinks bottles. I believe it’s something that causes runners to engage in shoulder rotation. After all, if you carry a cup of tea or glass of wine through to the living room, you try to keep it as level as possible, you don’t want to spill any. A correct armswing will cause the bottle to shake up and down and the liquid in it to slosh around putting strain on the arm and shoulder muscles. I don’t know what the answer is for those who want to carry a drinks bottle, personally I’ve never found a need for them even on the longest of runs. My encouragement would be to learn to trust your body can handle running without needing to take a drink. Obviously in hotter, more humid condition this may be unavoidable.
I was standing on an empty street. A grey January day but not cold. I’d run here from home. The plan said a 15-min warmup and that’s what I’d done. Just shy of two miles beginning with a jog until my breathing settled in, gradually picking up the pace with some downhill running that had got as quick as I was going to need for my first effort.
So now I wandered up and down the street. A minute to the lamp-post eighty metres away then a minute back. Two minutes wouldn’t be long enough to clear any lactate built up during warm-up. I decided to do another trip to the lamp-post and back.
As I reached the lamp-post, I now cued myself into what I was about to do. Six hundred metres at 6:18/mile pace, anywhere from 6:15 to 6:20 would be good enough. Jog the recovery then a five hundred metre effort at the same 6:18 pace with another jog to recover. Then it would get interesting. Four hundred metres followed by three efforts of three hundred metres all at a faster pace – 5:50/mile. Could I do these? I’d struggled to hit pace last Thursday on similar efforts over only two hundred metres. I’d run strides on Tuesday less than 48 hours earlier, did I overdo it? Would my legs be fresh enough to hit target? I needed to go out on the six hundred at the correct pace or risk jeopardising the later intervals. My mind whirred. Not overly anxious but enough thoughts to start getting on my nerves.
I called a halt to it. “Let’s see how it goes” I said to myself and instantly all the thoughts were gone. I was back in the present, walking the street on a grey January day. If I failed to hit target then so be it. I’d have some decisions to make about whether to adjust the plan or just put it down to fatigue from previous sessions. If I hit target it would be great as I’m on schedule. “But let’s just see how it goes” I told myself. The unsaid follow-on being “then figure out what to do once I’ve got concrete information to work with. Let’s work with reality not a bunch of needless fears and anxieties swirling around”.
I went through a phase a few years where I got very Zen about life. I was able to simply say “It’s all just information. Whatever happens today is information about what to do next”. No longer did I interpret events or add my own narrative to them; I simply saw them for what they were and it was impossible to rile me up. The simple truth is no-one can make good decisions when they’re riled up. They might luck into a good decision while making a panic choice but more often than not, fear and anxiety lead to the wrong decisions. People play it safe to avoid their worst fears coming true.
“It’s all just information. Whatever happens today is information about what to do next.”
In my update on 800m training, I wrote about how I sometimes felt nervous, or low-level anxiety going into a session. This doesn’t relate to the pain of what’s about to occur, only whether I’m going to hit the targets I’ve set. For someone else maybe it would be a fear of the pain or breathlessness.
How do I get round this? It’s simple and effective. I stop worrying about those targets or goals, and say “Let’s see how it goes”. Doing that immediately brings me back into the present. All fear and anxiety comes from the past or the future, the present is the only moment where you can take action and make a difference.
Does this mean I don’t plan for the future? Not at all. But what I don’t do is emotionally engage with it. The moment you start worrying about what’s going to happen is when you have to recognise you’ve become distracted and refocus back to now. Once calm you can go back to planning. The better you get at this refocusing, the more it becomes second-nature.
Mindfulness was a big watchword a couple of years ago and what is it? It’s about becoming present in the moment. It’s a variation on meditation which is also about focusing on what is happening now. Next time you go to a race and start feeling nervous about whether you can win (or whether you’ll be last), bring yourself back to the present moment. In a calmer moment begin to explore why it would an issue not to win, or to be last. What would that mean to you? What consequences do you imagine may occur because of it? Uncover the underlying fear and then dissolve it by sitting with it. Commit to facing up to it.
There’s one period of my life where I remember experiencing extreme levels of anxious thinking. It was when I was twenty and my fear of not being able to handle an upcoming situation would begin a domino stream of consciousness with one thought leading to the next. The trigger could be any sort of thing. Maybe my manager had arranged a meeting with me the next day but not said what it was about. Maybe I’d be invited to a party, accepting because I didn’t know how to decline, now worried my social skills would be lacking. Maybe it was about taking something back to a shop.
Night time was often when those thoughts came because I kept myself too busy the rest of the day to address them. But in the dark, quiet of my room, the express train of thoughts would depart, setting off down the tracks at high speed. With the party or returning something to a shop I could stop it by making a negative decision – simply decide not to turn up or keep the defective item. Anxiety derailed by avoiding the situation; that was my go-to strategy, ultimately to my detriment.
But there was no way I could avoid a meeting with my manager so I’d start going through all the possible things I’d done at work recently. I’d explore and examine each situation, I’d come up with excuses or reasons about why I’d done what I’d done. I’d imagine the response I’d get and how I could counter it. Fatigued, eventually my mind tired of the “This happens … what do I do next?” game of Twenty Questions and I’d fall asleep. I had no idea how to stop this whirlwind of thinking other than by avoidance wherever possible. But the one thing I came to realise about facing up to the unavoidable was that, despite all the scenarios I thought up, none of them ever came to pass. Never. Not once. When the actual time came to confront whatever I was scared of, it always played out in a way I’d never imagined.
I’ve read countless testimonials from runners who wouldn’t go to parkrun (“I’ll be at the back”), or join a running club (“club runners are snobby”), or even just go for a run (“people will be looking at me”). Yet when they did these things, they found it was a completely different story. Parkrun was friendly and welcoming, the running club wasn’t elitist and running round their neighbourhood didn’t raise eyebrows. All the imagined consequences never came to pass. It’s exactly what I used to experience and they follow the same self-defeating pattern I did. They get involved in their ego’s perception of how it will play out and when that becomes too much, they go with an avoidance strategy (not going to parkrun, not joining the running club, not going for a run) to stop the anxious thinking. But in the process their life becomes one size smaller as they close down an option that could open up so many possibilities.
Like I said back at the beginning I now realise there’s a better way. It’s to stop trying to predict the future and to live in this moment. When the future finally arrives, I deal with it based on whatever shows up. It makes everything so much easier. When the anxious thinking kicks in, nip it in the bud as early as possible by committing to let the future unfold and see what happens.
“Let the future unfold and let’s see what happens”
The Hansons’ Marathon Method contains an interesting approach to training for the marathon. The idea of the traditional “20-mile run” is abandoned with the longest run being only sixteen miles in their plans. Within the book they explore and compare the recommendations of other coaches and plans.
The idea of the 20-22 mile run comes from the days of Arthur Lydiard in the 1960s when he had his middle-distance runners doing this distance every Sunday! It might sound hard but remember these were runners with the capability of racing four minute miles. They’d begin the season taking 2hr35 and slowly work down to completing the runs in little more than two hours – quicker than 6min/mile, but that’s typically the easy pace of a world class runner. I don’t know if it was deliberate to create a course this long or down to the natural geography of Auckland, running in the Waitakere mountain range where Lydiard lived.
Derek Clayton, the world record holder for the marathon through the 1970s ran 150-160 miles every week. It was his belief, and he put it into practice, that he needed to run a 25-mile run every Saturday to be ready for his marathons. It’s hard to argue with a man whose record stood for so long yet Clayton suffered injuries and needed surgery eight times. Very few, if any, modern elites would do this level of mileage regularly now. Although there’s no record of how long these runs took him, given his toughness and general mileage, it’s hard to believe they would have been run any slower than 6-min/mile therefore being completed in 2½ hours.
In Jack Daniels’ Running Formula book he states a Long Run should never be more than 25% of the weekly mileage. The problem with this statement is it suggests you have to be running eighty miles per week to train for a marathon which is unnecessary for all but the best runners. This 25% limit is better applied to his training plans for shorter race distances but even with the marathon he says don’t go over 2½ hours. He makes the point that for someone only running four times per week, the runs are automatically 25% of the weekly mileage!
The 20-mile run is actually an arbitrary distance, there’s no science to this number. In Europe where they work in kilometres the Long Run is often 30K or 35K which are 18.6 miles and 21.7 respectively. People love round numbers! Of course, it’s true that runners used to say “Twenty miles is the halfway point of the marathon” as a reference to when the body starts to hit the wall and you have to dig deeper, but it’s also because they rarely trained much past it so the body wasn’t used to longer runs.
The most interesting approach to the marathon long run is the one detailed in Steve Magness’ The Science of Running. Magness coached at the Nike Oregon Project under Alberto Salazaar, himself once a world-class marathoner. The training knowledge at NOP was of the highest calibre so this method is one used by some of the best runners in the world. The first two months of a training programme are used to build up the Long Run to the twenty mile mark but then after this, there’s rarely specific Long Runs scheduled. They’re replaced by workouts that typically total the mileage. A world-class marathoner running at 5min/mile might do a Tempo run of 15-miles taking 1hr15 and when you add in a 4-mile warm-up and warmdown the session totals twenty miles. US Marathoner Josh Cox demonstrates this workout in the Training Day video.
The Hansons believe your marathon should be based on good physiological principles. They conclude that running for significantly longer than 2½ – 3 hours doesn’t provide those benefits to runners. Certainly in my own limited marathon training, I used to find that a three hour run left me feeling dehydrated whereas I happily run between 2 – 2hr15 every Sunday without taking food or drinks and arrive home feeling fine.
Hansons may limit the Long Run to sixteen miles but they include a run of eight miles the day before which results in a total of twenty-four miles over the two days. As they describe it, those sixteen miles then become the “last sixteen miles of your marathon” rather than the “first sixteen” which runners who set off fresh legged typically do. This is a method called cumulative fatigue and is used by ultrarunners to train for their races which can be in excess of one hundred miles. On a training weekend they might run for 5-6 hours each day to enable them to compile a total closer to their race distance.
When I was marathon training because I was capable of a 22-min parkrun I could reach twenty miles in three hours, it happily coincided with my 9-minutes per mile easy pace. For a slower runner, I would look for them to improve their pace and to use the principles of cumulative fatigue to help them prepare for a marathon. I’ve met far too many 5-hour marathoners focused on reaching the mythical 20-mile run in training because that’s what the guys who were capable of running four minute miles in the Sixties did. The problem is, as they build up through fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty miles they start tearing themselves down Sunday after Sunday with demoralising trudges lasting four hours or more, often in unpleasant winter conditions. Motivation sags, they can’t wait for the taper and end up walking large chunks of the marathon anyway. If you must build up to twenty miles get it done early interspersing the progression with less-taxing two hour runs on alternate weeks to give the body a chance to recover.
This far I’ve focused on the marathon distance but I find many runners don’t believe a Long Run is necessary for anything other than half or full marathons. This is a mistake and maintaining a weekly Long Run is an important part of building your aerobic base. By running further once a week you dig out muscle fibres that would otherwise lie dormant. Does it need to be 20-miles? Definitely not unless you’ve reached the capabilities of the Lydiard crowd.
Middle distance runners typically do a run of 10-12 miles and it goes up from there depending on the distance being raced and the runner’s capabilities. But it’s equally important to think in terms of time. I always aim for a minimum duration of 1½ hours for my weekly Long Runs and a maximum of 2½ hours. Of course, this distance needs to be in proportion to my other running, I wouldn’t do that if I were rebuilding after a layoff and only doing thirty minute runs the rest of the week.
Whatever your event, whether it’s parkrun, 10K or longer don’t neglect a weekly long run. It’ll keep you positioned to pick up on a half or full marathon at short notice while helping you get fitter and faster for your chosen distance.
Just before Christmas, I was lent a copy of Ron Hill’s two-part autobiography “The Long Hard Road” which is packed with detail on his life and running up to when he wrote them at the start of the 1980s. I talked briefly about it in my Marathon Speed post. Coincidentally the latest issue of Runner’s World (February 2021) contains a feature on Ron which, of course, goes nowhere into the same level of detail but does give an outsider’s view of what he was like.
The legendary Ron Hill adorns the cover of Runner’s World – Feb 2021 issue
Ron’s famous for his fifty-two year run streak and I’ve read analysis elsewhere suggesting he overtrained prior to big races. But let’s rewind, as I’m two hundred or so pages into part one and still learning about his early training and racing. On page 91 he details a week’s training which was the general schedule he began to follow from August 1961 and on through the next couple of years.
Details of a week’s training from Ron Hill’s book “The Long Hard Road” Pt. 1
About two weeks after formalising the schedule he won his first marathon, Liverpool, in 2:24:22 which gives us an indication of his level of fitness. Up to this point his training had been irregular with weekly mileage varying between 50-80 miles. He even took days off at that stage!
The training week I’m analysing follows the format he used throughout 1962-64, averaging 85-90mpw. His diary begins on a Saturday before Christmas …
The first thing to note is while 91½ miles of training sounds daunting, he’s actually only doing about 1hr – 1hr15 of training each day. The morning sessions are 25-30 mins; and the evening sessions tend to be eight miles of faster training which I’d estimate took 40-45 mins. The Sunday ‘long run’ of 11 miles will be just over the hour. What makes the 91½ miles achievable is being a fast runner – the majority of his running is done between 5-6 min/mile so he’s covering 10-12 miles per hour.
Saturday Dec. 16th
Morning – 4 mile course – 24:27 (6min05/mile)
Evening – 12 miles total.Ten mile race – 1st in 49min59 (5min/mile)
My thoughts – the 10-mile race is 5min/mile. According to Jack Daniels this gives Ron a marathon pace of 5:20/mile – which fits with his first marathon being run at 5:30/mile.
This 5:20/mile gives us a boundary for the 80-20 rule modern elites follow – 80% of their training will be slower than this. This 10-mile race is definitely in the 20% category.
Meanwhile the morning run is in the 80% category. JackD suggests an easy pace of 5:55 – 6:40/mile for someone at Ron’s level of development, so at 6:05/mile it looks about right.
Sunday Dec. 17th
11-mile long run. No time given but run with two others at a “very gentle” pace
My thoughts – at over an hour, it’s slightly longer than an ideal recovery run from yesterday’s race but it certainly falls into the 80% category.
I find it interesting Ron had now been running over four years and his long run was only 11 miles. He managed to win Liverpool marathon without any specific build-up – there was no 20-mile run. It suggests he had natural talent for distance running but, as you’ll see, he ran hard almost every day and in doing so he used the same principle of ‘cumulative fatigue’ that ultra runners use to train for their big races.
Monday Dec. 18th
Morning – 4 ½ mile course – 26:51 (6min/mile). Says he “pushed it a bit”
Evening – 8½ miles – 6 laps of fartlek including fast lap (4:49)
My thoughts – the morning run is slightly longer and faster than on Saturday but Ron’s Sunday was easy by his standards. Falls into an 80% run.
We have few specifics on the how long the fartlek efforts lasted but due to the fast lap, I’d classify this as a 20% run.
Tuesday Dec. 19th
Morning – 4½ mile course – 28:36 (6min20/mile) – “fartlek” “pushed intervals along a bit towards the end”
Evening – 8½ miles – at Firs – 4 laps at race pace (19:35 – 4:54/mile) + 2 laps fartlek
My thoughts – once again, while the average pace suggests it falls within the 80%, by doing a fartlek and pushing along the intervals, this begins to get into the 20% zone.
The evening session is definitely a 20% run, in modern terminology you’d call this a 20-min Threshold or Tempo run.
Wednesday Dec. 20th
Morning – 4½ mile course – 28:08 (6min15/mile) “pushed it where I could”
Evening – 10 miles – 20x440s in 1min10 with 220yd recovery
My thoughts – once again the pace of the morning run is under 80% but Ron isn’t allowing his legs the recovery they need from the race (80% session).
The evening session is the 6th consecutive session where he’s putting in effort rather than simply running easily (20% session).
Thursday Dec. 21st
Morning – 4½ mile course – no time given – “fartlek” “legs tired and leaden at the end”
Evening – 8 miles – “number stride fartlek” up to 60 and back down twice over
My thoughts – finally we see the results of hard racing on Saturday followed by trying to push things on Monday to Wednesday. I’m guessing the legs felt particularly tired because the previous evening was five miles worth of interval work. Yet Ron wanted to do a fartlek that morning. It would probably qualify as an 80% session on average pace but it’s another hard one in my book.
In the evening he did the “number stride fartlek” workout he invented:
“I ran 10 double strides hard effort, counting each time my left leg pushed off then jogged 10 double paces, then 15 double strides with the same number of paces jogged, 20, 25, 30, and so on, up to 55 or 60, then back down again to 10. Half mile jog, then repeat the sequence again. The bursts were relatively short, but it meant a lot of hard work in the acceleration phase each time, and I found it very tiring.”
Ron describes his “number stride fartlek” session (p.73)
I calculate this to be over twelve minutes of all-out hard running. First effort of 10 double strides only takes around 5 seconds, the second effort about 8 seconds. By the time he’s on the 60 double strides it’s taking over 30-seconds for each effort and he’s still got to come back down the ladder again. In total there are 21 efforts ranging from 5 – 30+ seconds. He’s packing in a lot of acceleration and hard running here. When you add it all up he’s totalling over 6-mins of all-out hard running on one of these efforts. That’s a session in itself for sprinters and he did it twice over.
Now compare that to the recommendations of Jack Daniels who would suggest doing eight strides after an easy run and describes them as “light, quick 10- to 20-second runs (not sprints) with 40 to 50 seconds of recovery between” (Daniels’ Running Formula 3rd ed. P.152). That’s around 2-3 minutes worth and not all-out. I begin to wonder how Ron ever survived running all those years – definitely a 20% session.
Evening – 7 miles – ran to Firs and back for six laps of field
My thoughts – at last we see a day of easy running. After the “number stride fartlek” his legs probably weren’t able to do anything else in the morning (80% session).
No time is given for the evening session but it was probably an easier run (80% session).
To summarise, what I’m seeing here is almost constant pushing to run fast. The only days where this doesn’t happen are Friday and Sunday. He raced every Saturday so probably took things easier on Friday to give himself fresher legs and recovered on Sunday.
In terms of the 80-20 rule, it’s hard to know for sure which category sessions fell into I’d estimate he was closer to 50-50. The rule relates to doing training 80% of the training at an intensity where no waste products from anaerobic metabolism are being produced. Their presence upsets the body’s chemistry, uses fuel stores quicker and fatigues muscles thereby leaving the body less able to perform effectively in the next workout.
But beyond the anaerobic metabolites, there’s a question of muscular recovery. When racing or running at high speeds, the muscle fibres get micro tears that have to rebuild stronger. Without adequate recovery this mending doesn’t occur. Ron has it going in his favour that he’s in his early 20s so he’ll still be recovering quickly, but even a young person is only capable of doing three workouts per week – maybe more occasionally. If I’m sounding critical I’m happy to admit when I was Ron’s age, I had no respect for the recovery process either. I used to play sport hard almost every day. It wasn’t unheard of for me to play an hour of competitive basketball then go to volleyball training for another hour. Or play a game of squash at lunchtime and another in the evening.
On p. 108 Ron provides the bare bones of his schedule … (“It was hard training, but as I was seeing improvement and success, I didn’t mind it. Morning sessions rotated on a weekly basis. Evening sessions on a fortnightly basis. I had a card in my training log and I ticked off each session as it was done.“) … it’s a lot easier to see the pattern and intensity of sessions:
MORNING
(4½ mile runs)
EVENING
Mon
Fartlek
Week 1
Mon
Fartlek with bursts
Tues
Fast
Tues
Four laps of the Firs (3½ miles) at racing speed
Weds
Fartlek
Weds
20 x 440 (usually around 68sec)
Thurs
Fast
Thurs
“number stride” fartlek
Fri
Easy
Fri
7 miles easy
Sat
Easy
Week 2
Mon
20 x 440
Tues
4 laps at racing speed
Weds
20 x 440
Thurs
4x repetition laps at the Firs
Fri
7 miles easy
Saturday would have been a race later in the day and Sunday only one longer run
Ron is doing four specific workouts plus a race each week. He ran 64 races in 1962! And he’s pushing it on four mornings. His body is under a huge amount of stress and it’s no wonder that, after a year of it, he was eventually forced to back off and take three easy weeks (30-40 miles) in December 1962. As he recounts his year, he’s usually trying to run through some kind of nagging Achilles, foot or quad injury.
I’m certain if he had simply jogged the morning runs each day he would have been in a much better position (but still not an optimal one). Some people can handle more intensity and training than others and it’s clear Ron could. But it’s also clear from how his body reacted that his training was too much even though it helped him get faster over the next couple of years. More recovery sessions would almost certainly have allowed him to do stronger workouts to make the same gains and possibly even run faster.
But enough of the analysis, Ron says he was seeing improvement and it’s certainly the case. As he started this training he won the Liverpool marathon in 2:24:22 in August 1961. A year later he won the Polytechnic Marathon in 2:21:59. It led to him representing Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the European Championships in Belgrade. He didn’t finish the race pulling out at 30km five minutes down on the leaders. In 1963, he tried to defend his Polytechnic title and, while running faster (2:18:06), he came 2nd to Buddy Edelen. In 1964, Ron ran his fastest time yet with 2:14:12 at the Polytechnic which would have been a World Record had Basil Heatley not been beaten him. It gave them both a place at the Tokyo Olympics but Ron could only finish 19th in the marathon (2:25:34) and 18th in the 10,000 metres – a distance he’d been ranked at 3rd in the world in 1963. Nonetheless in three years he took ten minutes off his marathon time with his training regime. At other race distances he also saw improvements – his 2-mile time going from 9:12 to 8:50; his 3-mile time from 14:08 to 13:29; and his mile time down to 4min 12.5sec.
This is the question mark against Ron’s training methods. He was capable of winning one week, struggling the next. He won the Boston Marathon and Commonwealth Games in 1970 but then failed to even secure a medal at the Munich Olympics when he was the favourite.
I believe more recovery runs each week and fewer workouts would have allowed him to find the consistency to be a winner more frequently. Maybe I’m being unfair to him and as I get into the later parts of his autobiography, I’ll find he did what I suggest but his hard-working reputation leads me to doubt it. It’s instructive that as he prepared for the AAA Championship 6-mile race, key to selection for the Olympics, he was still running in local races. Modern runners are more selective about when they race. Constantly pushing his body meant it had to give out at some stage, so it often happened when everybody else was rested, at the top of their game and able to push harder.
Regardless of the results, I believe Ron got the best out of his talent and had a career to be proud of. His best marathon time was 2:09:28, only a minute or so behind the world record in place a decade and a half later. As a coach, you love people who are committed to their training and willing to work hard so there’s no complaints there.
Part two of Ron Hill’s “The Long Hard Road” – 400 pages each
Big Red Running 