Tag: parkrun

Some Benefits of Easy Runs

I see Andy regularly at parkrun. He managed a PB of close to 23-mins a couple of years ago and wants to get back there. A few weeks ago I did a recovery parkrun and he finished just behind me at twenty-five minutes but was lying on the floor gasping for breath from the effort he’d put in.

He entered a half marathon in mid-October and achieved a creditable 1hr55 despite a lack of longer distance training. The following week after parkrun, as we talked about how well he’d done, I suggested that, rather than let this fitness go to waste, he should try to get out for an hour’s run each week. That way when he decides to do his next event, he doesn’t have to build up from a base of only 5K.

A few days later he pinged me a message saying he’d taken my advice and done a 10K in about fifty-five minutes. He’d run it at a pace not much slower than his half marathon and I suggested slowing it down further and enjoying the scenery. The following week he did this, slowing it by 30-secs per mile which means the run is only 3-4 mins slower overall but feels much less exertional.

He ran it again the next two weeks and then something weird happened … three days later he did the 10K again – a second time that week. The easy running was clearly having an effect. When I saw him at parkrun he nodded as I mentioned it and then ran his parkrun as fast as he could. His time a little over 24-minutes was an improvement on the last one.

What I want to draw out of this are the benefits he’s getting from easy running.

First and foremost, he’s getting fitter. His parkrun time has got 30+ seconds quicker in a matter of weeks. And postrun he wasn’t rolling around on the floor gasping for breath this time.

Secondly, the easy 10K runs leave him arriving home feeling good but not exhausted. They set him up for the day rather than tearing him down.

In turn that is leading him to feel more motivated. He’s enjoying the easy runs so much that he’s happy to do more than one 10K in a week! It wasn’t what I set out to get him to do but all credit to him for doing the extra.

Finally, the easy runs are giving his body more time to recover from the harder efforts. When he only ran fast his body never had time to recover. Every subsequent effort became more stressful until he took days off. Invariably he was never in peak form at parkrun because his fast-twitch muscles were always recovering. Now when he arrives at parkrun they’re rested and ready for a harder run if he wants it.

These aren’t the only benefits to easy running but they are some of the most easily noticeable.

What to do when Storm Arwen hit

Storm Arwen, the first storm of this winter hit the British Isles on Friday night. While the North was battered by 100mph winds, the South coast got off lighter with winds of only 30mph and gusts of 44mph. I wasn’t surprised to hear that three of the local parkruns cancelled including Upton House. Poole parkrun went ahead and the turnout was down on recent weeks. Again no surprises there.

It had been my intention to do one more fast parkrun in the lead-up to Christchurch 10K (two weeks away) but I didn’t fancy dragging to Poole on a cold, windy day, just like many others didn’t. So I ran from home and did an interval session – 6x1km with 200m jog recovery aiming for 10K intensity. This is one of my favourite sessions for preparing for a 10K so I’d had it in mind to do this week.

I wasn’t sure how it would go with the conditions. I ummed and ahhed about routes but went for the one where I usually do this session to give me consistency for comparing where I’m at with my training and also I know all my waypoints for the interval lengths. The only doubt I had was whether there’d be trees down on route as there have been in the past. As it turned out there weren’t any other than a few small branches / twigs that I was able to high step over without issue.

The wind, on the other hand, was quite brutal. I resorted to leggings, long sleeve top, gloves and hat for the first time this year. It kept me warm and because I wasn’t aiming for top speed, only 10K intensity, the headwind was rarely problematic.

A good session and I jogged home at a decent warmdown pace to complete an hour’s running. No parkrun this week but so what? There are multiple ways to achieve your running goals and there’s no rule which says you can’t do an interval or speedwork session on a Saturday morning.

The Great Field parkrun

With Upton House parkrun cancelled last Saturday, I took the opportunity to go on a parkrun road trip. I wanted to go somewhere fast and local where I’d not been before. The Great Field parkrun in Dorchester held its inaugural run at the end of October and so it became my parkrun of choice.

The Great Field is located in the Poundbury part of Dorchester, which is famously linked to Prince Charles as it is built on his Duchy of Cornwall land and supports his architectural vision for building better towns.

The journey was a simple trip along dual carriageways and A-roads taking forty minutes and given its simplicity I was able to memorise the trip from a quick look at Google maps. So, as I drove through Dorchester and admired its historic qualities, without Satnav assistance I unexpectedly arrived at The Great Field and, well, it really is just a great, big field.

Parking was easy with a line of bays facing the field. Getting out of the car I unexpectedly bumped into SteveD, who’d parked a few spaces down, which is ironic because every week at Upton we park only a metres apart and run in together. So we jogged and chatted for a warm-up lap of the parkrun and neither of us was sure about the quality of the three lap course.

Warming up with Steve

It certainly wasn’t flat but it didn’t seem that hilly either. But these things can be deceptive as Strava asserts my last parkrun at Upton House had 121ft of ascent, while TGF turned out to be 123ft. The difference is at Upton most of the uphill is done in four noticeable short climbs; in Dorchester it was a longer, more gradual 300m long climb and with some other undulations thrown in.

Having warmed up we then began to bump into other familiar faces. With Upton closed, others had come here as a replacement but there were also some from Poole. We attended a Visitor briefing and then I elected to go off and do some strides for extra warm-up before returning for the main pre-run speeches.

The masses walking to the start line. Poundbury homes and business in the background, along with a play park.

It was always my intention to go all-out so I made my way to the front of the pack and discovered a very British thing. No-one wanted to stand on the actual Start line, standing instead a few feet behind it. It’s a peculiar reticence of us Brits that no-one wants to appear too keen. Imagine that happening at the Olympics! But I’m less reticence than most and I don’t see any point in losing a second running the extra so I stood plumb on the start line. The Run Director counted us down and, on the G of the GO, I was gone. First off the line and leading all the way to the photographer who was situated about 100m up the path.

First to the photographer and still looking happy

As we reached the first corner a flock of six better trained distance runners flew past me and I dug in for the long haul. I had one or two other runners go past and by the 400m mark I counted eight or so ahead of me. It was then I was passed by a young girl who was barely five foot tall and with a big, high back kick. I wasn’t having that so put in an effort to get past her and kicked on to catch a younger, bearded chap. I stayed with him for half a lap, aided by a long downward stretch, before having to admit I wouldn’t be able to hang with him. After that I was on my own.

Around 1km into the run

Early on the second lap, I was overtaken by another runner but from there onwards, I didn’t pass anyone and no-one passed me. At least I didn’t pass anyone ahead of me but, on the third lap, I caught the backmarkers just beginning their second. Fortunately the paths were wide enough for all and I got by.

2nd or 3rd lap and toughing it out.

By now, I was physically beginning to feel the strain. Breathing hard, legs filling with lactate and the body sending all sorts of fatigue signals to the brain to try and entice me to slow down. The temptation was there but I managed to resist.

Due to the separated nature of the start and finish you get to begin a fourth lap which gives you the extra joy of a fourth run up the long gradient. As I began it, I sensed a runner close behind me and was determined to stop him from passing. It’s always good to have these sort of distractions to give you a reason not to give in to the fatigue. I was aided by having all the back markers on the left side of the path to make it harder to pass.

Once we reached the highest point, I knew we had perhaps 100m to go and I kicked. At least, I tried to kick although I’m not sure my legs had much left. I was already breathing hard but at least it was a short downhill tarmac stretch which enabled me to hold him off by a second to finish in 12th place in an official time of 20:26. Fantastic. An improvement of twenty-nine seconds over two weeks ago at Upton and almost a minute over four weeks back. The First Finisher clocked 17:18 and it was a field of 325 runners on only The Great Field’s fourth event..

As usual, I went for a warmdown lap against the flow of runners. It might sound a little crazy but it’s a nice way to get to see and encourage other runners.

Once completed I stood outside the Pavilion, drank coffee and chatted to my fellow Upton runners on what was a lovely, mild November day. I can imagine, come the summertime, it will be great to sit out on the grass and enjoy the ambience. Looking around I realised the original blandness I’d perceived in The Great Field is more a lack of maturity and cold weather. In ten years’ time, all the trees lining the paths and around the cricket pitch will have grown up. It’ll still be a large open space but much more scenic with beautiful, leafy trees providing an aesthetic backdrop.

The Lull is Over

Last week’s I was bemoaning being in a VO2 lull and expecting it to last for 10-13 days. On day 10, I had my best run and my legs were pretty much back in action. To give you some hard data to work with let’s go through the days.

Day 0 – Saturday 6th November

All-out parkrun, full of surges and efforts takes 25 seconds off my time of two weeks before and puts me into the VO2 lull.

Day 1 – Sunday 7th November

Sunday morning long run fasted at 6:35am. Distance run is 11.7 miles in 1hr38 – 8:22/mile.  Fastest two miles are #4-5 at 8:04 / 7:38 on a downhill stretch but nothing else came in quicker than 8:14 and the 11th mile was a glycogen-depleted 8:56.  Average heart-rate was 133bpm and I could barely find the effort to get it above the low 140s.

Day 2 – Monday 8th November

30-min recovery run, fasted at 7am. Distance of 3.9 miles in 31:48 at 8:09/mile.

This wasn’t a bad run in itself but then I did some run drills after and a 40-min core session which may have tipped me over the edge. Average heart-rate similar to yesterday at 134 and only just hitting low 140s.

Day 3 – Tuesday 9th November

A 9-mile Steady run at the beach taking 1hr14 and averaging 8:10/mile.

Conditions were great for running when I set off – nice and sunny. Legs felt ok to begin with and after a half mile warmup the first mile came in at 7:29 followed by 7:34, 39, 49. But when I turned round it was a little colder and my legs faded to the extent I was running at 8:40/mile.

Heart-rate reached high 140s on the outward leg but dropped as the run went on to end up averaging 142bpm.

When I arrived back at the car I found my feet were covered in spots and blemishes, I believe it was a sweat rash.

Day 4 – Wednesday 10th November

Recovering run of 4.4 miles taking 40:39.  Average pace 9:10/mile, fastest mile 8:47; HR-avg 124 and barely able to reach 130s.

The sweat rash was still present when feet got hot and woke me in the night 3-4 times. It’s probable I’d gone into anaerobic overtraining and was over revving the Central Nervous System.

Day 5 – Thursday 11th November

Improvement over yesterday. Same route with a little extra tacked on to make it 4.7 miles in 41:02. Average pace was 8:44/mile, heart-rate only 2 beats higher at 126 but still unable to find any power to push it up beyond 135bpm. Fastest mile came in at 8:22.

Day 6 – Friday 12th November

A repeat of Tuesday’s 9-mile run. A real lowpoint. The wind was 18-20mph and the run took 1h23 – an average pace of 9:11/mile for a heart-rate average of 129.

Even with a tailwind, the outward leg got no faster than 8:06 but on the way back, into the wind, I was over 10min/mile with a trudging 10:29 mile towards the end as I could barely lift my legs. The sweat rash had all but gone now and I had a night of nearly unbroken sleep.

Day 7 – Saturday 13th November

Back to parkrun. I ran 26mins for the parkrun with my fastest mile coming in at 8:15.

Day 8 – Sunday 14th November

Standard 11.7 miles long run, fasted at 7am. At last an indication of the legs beginning to feel better. The run was three minutes quicker than last Sunday at 1hr35 and averaging 8:07/mile for a HR-average of 138bpm. Note how I couldn’t even reach this heart-rate on some of the runs earlier in the week. Fastest mile was 7:35 (downhill) with three more sub-8s thrown in.

Day 9 – Monday 15th November

Early morning, fasted run with legs beginning to feel better. Distance was 3.8 miles in 30:44 – an average of 8:04/mile with a fastest mile of 7:36. On paper very similar to last week but legs were feeling more like running.

Day 10 – Tuesday 16th November

The game changer! Legs felt great and there was an early indication as I waited for GPS to lock in. My standing heart-rate dropped quickly from 50+ beats per minute to 37-38. That’s always a sign I’m ready to run.

Once again the 9-mile route at the beach and I found my legs were propelling me forwards with each stride. Where I’d run this route in 1hr14 and 1hr23 last week, today I ran it in 1hr05 – an average of 7:11/mile. More importantly that’s an improvement of 8-secs/mile from two weeks ago before the parkrun. My heart-rate ended up averaging 152bpm for the run and peaking at 161bpm. I pushed quite hard on the run back and managed to run the last two miles at 7:15/mile each – no dropoff.

Yet while I think my legs are back, I’m not sure there isn’t a little more to come. My fastest mile was only 6:53 and the next fastest was 7:01. Two weeks ago, I ran the first two miles in 6:47 and 6:46.

So there we go – a detailed look at how I recovered from an all-out parkrun, a VO2 lull and possible anaerobic overtraining by listening to my body and letting my legs run only as fast as they were willing. I’m sure had I wanted to I could have pushed harder on some days but I’m not sure it would have done me good. Most likely it would have delayed the recovery process and possibly trigged an injury – strain or otherwise.

If you go through again you’ll see the legs generally had noting extra to give in the early days and this reflects in the low heart-rates. Low heart-rates suggest I’m burning mostly fats and less glycogen. As the fast-twitch muscles (which use glycogen and will have taken longer to repair) became available again I was able to start going faster and the heart-rates rose. When they had really regained their oomph, I found my legs were much bouncier and I was popping off the pavement with each step.

Now I’m going to take a few more easy days as I look to improve on my parkrun time on Saturday.

The VO2 lull

I’m currently going through what I term a “VO2 lull”. It’s something I’ve encountered across my running years but taken a long time to understand, and even longer to recognise when it’s happening. Last Saturday I ran a good, hard parkrun at Upton House. Combining efforts up the hills with surges to try and catch runners ahead of me, as well as bursts to stay in front of those behind me, it was an all-out effort. With fresh legs going into it, from three days of easy running, I found an extra gear whenever I needed it. While I felt fairly good immediately afterwards, my legs have had nothing all week. I’ve lost a good minute off my easy run pace and this is what I’m calling the VO2 lull.

First off I need to explain the V02 part. Exercise physiologists like putting runners on treadmills and measuring the effects of running at ever-increasing speeds. One of the key measurements they take is the amount of oxygen breathed in, as well as carbon dioxide breathed out and heart-rate. When they measure the oxygen (O2) intake and utilisation it is correctly termed V̇O2 with a little dot over the V indicating it’s a rate but most people refer to it as VO2 partly because how do you pronounce a dot? It’s partly because it’s too onerous for them to figure out how to get the dotted V̇ on a word processor!

In chapter 8 of Build Your Running Body, Pete Magill details the growth cycle of mitochondria which are fundamental to producing aerobic energy. Mitochondria are often described as the powerhouses of the cell as they convert oxygen to energy which then powers your exercise. The importance of mitochondria to any distance runner cannot be overstated enough – they are the source of your aerobic ability which itself is key to distance running success.

Magill explains that it takes 4-5 weeks for mitochondria to fully grow but there’s a problem. “When mitochondria first begin adapting, they can’t contribute to aerobic energy production … this phase lasts from ten to thirteen days and creates an “oxygen utilistation problem” … you can expect to feel sluggish doing workouts that were easy the previous week” (p.142)

That’s exactly where I’ve been this week. Last week I was running a 20:55 parkrun at 6:45/mile pace; the next day my legs could barely achieve eight minute miles on my long run. This might have been due to recovery factors but it’s continued on through the week. My Tuesday Steady run which I was running at an average of 7:20/mile last week came in at 8:10/mile this week. Wednesday’s recovery run averaged 9:10/mile; today’s, five days after parkrun, came in at 8:44/mile. My legs have got nothing – no bounce, oomph or power. I’m barely getting out of the fat-burning zone on these runs.

So I now just have to wait for the mitochondrial adaptation to take place and in the meantime, plod along. This isn’t the first time I’ve been here but this phenomena is so poorly known that, in the past, I would start to take action to try and get back ontrack. I might rest (not a bad option if it’s only a day or two), do some strides (poor option as legs are already tired), do less mileage (not great as you won’t necessarily reinforce the growth), or try to continue doing what I usually do at the usual paces (effectively overtraining which usually led to injury). When it happened to me after marathons, it usually led me to quit running for six months or more. It’s only now I realise you just have to jog until the legs splutter back into life as they eventually will. It’s quite a remarkable experience because one day running feels awful, the next it’s like you’re running on bedsprings as the adaptations finally kick in.

Postrun recovery

Whenever we train the body has to go through a process of recovery. How long it takes depends on how hard you worked and how long it lasted. You could be able to run again later in the day after a genuinely easy run whereas a full-on marathon takes the better part of a month to recover from.

While I don’t pretend to understand all the details, the recovery process broadly breaks into four areas:

Refuelling

If it lasts long enough even the easiest-paced run will eventually lead you to run out of fuel. If you’re very well-trained you may be able to get by on fats but for most runners it’s their glycogen stores (sugar-based fuel) which needs to be replenished.

Usually eating some carbohydrates e.g. a banana, sandwich, cereal, bagel on arriving home helps the refuelling. The body is geared towards restocking its fuel supplies within an hour of finishing exercise. After this it will take longer to fully effect. There is a loading rate of how quickly the body can convert food into glycogen and for the hardest training athletes it’s slower than they can use it up! But, for the average runner, just eating sensibly after a run should be enough.

Muscle damage

The process of training is all about putting the body under stress so that it has to repair stronger. The harder you train or race, the more muscle fibres are torn apart to be rebuilt. Anyone who has done a hard race or a big interval session knows about the aches and pains it leads to.

Often training hard doesn’t express itself as soreness for long, certainly later in the day or a struggle on the next day’s run but not for days on end. Yet a good Threshold run can take 4-5 days to recover from, speedwork 10-14 days. As I say, there may not be any obvious aches or pains but if you’re attentive to your running you can find there’s something missing for a while. By then it’s certainly not a case of being underfuelled, it’s just waiting for the muscles to repair and other adaptations to take place.

Ramped up sympathetic nervous system

High levels of anaerobic training and the waste products it creates can lead the body to rev up the sympathetic nervous system – it’s the equivalent of being in ‘fight or flight’. You can have trouble sleeping, concentrating, feel thirsty or hungry without realising why. The body shifts from being in a mildly alkaline state to a mildly acidic one and takes time to recover back.

Neuromuscular fatigue

Neuromuscular connections are simply how the brain communicates with the body. Some of it is conscious like putting out your hand, others of it is automatic like breathing.

Whenever you train, the brain and the central nervous system has to rewire itself to integrate the changes. For example, if you do balance on one leg, the brain has to figure out and store the new ‘motor programmes’ that enable you to learn to balance better. Likewise if you run quicker the brain stores new ‘motor programmes’ detailing which muscles fire, what sequence they fire in and how strongly. This is, of course, a simple overview with much more deeper ‘programming’ going on as the heart speeds up to pump more blood, sweat rates improve, lungs breath deeper among many more.

There’s an overlap between this point and the previous one. If you train very hard, especially in ways you haven’t done before, there’s more for the brain and sympathetic nervous system to reprogram and adapt to. If you do too much then you feel tired and overloaded until it calms down. This is one of the reasons why sprinters don’t do too much sprint training in each session.

Summary

Most of the effects of training are recovered from within a day or two of the training session. This is typically why we only train hard 2-3 times each week – taking at least one easy day in between. A good recovery run shouldn’t be using up any significant fuel stores and because it’s low-intensity it won’t do much, if any, muscle damage. The “hard-easy” combination is a simple rule of thumb because people know they can’t train hard every day.

Of course how much time you actually need to recover depends on how hard and how long you trained for. JackD estimates you need one day of recovery per mile of racing. That fits with the traditional advice that you need a month to recover from a marathon. In my experience a 10K (6.22 miles) takes a week to fully recover from. Muscle damage is the thing that takes longest to recover from which is why we never push training sessions all-out but leave it for race day.

Ultimately when you’re in the middle of a training plan, it’s a collection of workouts, easy run and long runs which each overlaps with the others and from which you’ve rarely fully recovered. This is why a good taper into a race boosts your racing ability. You finally give the body enough time to recover from all the different workouts and be at its peak!

Update on my 800m training – Oct 2021

The time had come to run another 800m time trial and find out whether JackD’s plan was working. 

A quick recap – last December I ran 2:58 to set a baseline. In April, after following Jack’s plan for a cycle, it reduced by only five seconds to 2:55. I then did six weeks of endurance training and it reduced a little more to 2:53 in early June. This was where I started my second cycle of Jack’s training from. The summer was then spent following the plan as best possible allowing for hamstring strain in July and a fast parkrun in August. I did all but three of the scheduled sessions.

So here I was back at Poole Park and having gone through my usual pre-run routines, this time I ran 2:50, maybe 2:49. Still no significant improvement. This was highly disappointing given I thought I was capable of breaking 2:40. Back in early September I ran 1:58 for 600 in training – that’s 2:40 pace so I should have been faster on the time trial. But it wasn’t to be. Realistically when I got to the October time trial I’d already passed my peak and was on the way downwards hence the poor showing on the day.

There’s no doubt I’ve generally got faster and fitter from the training but it’s not resulting in faster times over 800. If anything all I’ve done is brought the average of training up. I’ve not got significantly faster in the top-end speed – I ran 37-38secs for the first 200m of this time trial, back in December it was 39-40 secs. That two second per 200m improvement simply reflects what’s happened in the time trials.

World class 800m runners are easily capable of running twenty-five seconds for 200m – even the women. I’m nowhere close to that, maybe thirty-five seconds at best. So I’ve got to find a way to improve top-end speed because if you start running 200 quicker then the subsequent sections all get quicker. Even with a drop-off 400 is covered in under a minute and so on.

Endurance rebuild

Following the time trial, I knew I needed to let my legs recover. I spent a week doing very easy jogging. And that’s all it was – jogging. I’ve come to realise that when I’m past my peak it’s because my body has begun switching Intermediate fast-twitch fibres over to anaerobic mechanism and these can only be rebuilt through endurance training – lots of easy running, no speedwork.

My first Sunday run of the rebuild saw my heart-rate barely going over 130bpm during the entire run. Yet it still felt effortful in its own way which always highlights a drop in endurance. In the following days the pace picked up but I was still only barely running 8-min/mile until my legs came back. Yet by end of month I was beginning to see some miles closer to seven minutes and even putting in a couple of 6:50s on Steady runs. My final Sunday long run of the month was close to where I’d been in late August. Theoretically I could have picked up the 800 training again but I want to spend the winter on endurance as all world-class runners have a large aerobic base.

Form drills

Recognising my top-end speed isn’t good enough, I started looking at how to improve my general sprint speed without resorting to hillwork which usually overpowers my endurance. As I detailed in Stride Length, I’ve been thinking about how to improve this and started doing more drillwork – marching, A-skips, B-skips and straight leg bounding – to try and improve my running form. And boy, did it improve.

From the first day of drills I could feel my left glute hasn’t been working, my knees haven’t been lifting enough and my lower legs (the calf) have been inhibited in extending the stride. That inhibition has come from previous attempts to improve form where I looked to get rid of heel striking. There is so much conflicting information out there, most of it by people who are interested in very, long distance running rather than speed.

Given it’s ten minutes after an easy run twice per week, I’ve really enjoyed doing the drill work. I think it’s a new challenge and I can feel it’s going to help. The disappointment of the time trial has quickly gone.

Pistol squats

When I was researching exactly how to do sprint drills I came across heptathete Chari Hawkins doing a pistol squat.

Trying one I couldn’t get anywhere close even hanging onto my kitchen counter! It occurs to me that at the bottom of the pistol squat is very much the sort of position sprinters push out of from the start blocks. Developing it must be useful for getting faster especially as Chari Hawkins can run a 24.4sec 200m.

So I’ve begun doing daily squat work and discovered my left leg is weaker than my right. Much of that is related to muscles around the left hip which has impacted my running stride in the past. Doing the squat work has begun to strengthen this.

Combined with the drill work, my running form has changed massively in a couple of weeks. I’m feeling stronger and more balanced in my running. I’m sure my stride length is increasing simply because I have a stronger push off.

Coming up

The next block of dedicated 800m training is a long way off. I’m going to use this winter to build endurance. I feel that’s also holding me back. The best 800m runners in the world all have big aerobic systems which reflects in their easy runs being in the 6-7min/mile range – currently that’s top end aerobic running for me; not easy. I need to build mine up while maintaining contact with my speed.

I’m hoping to maintain speed through a fortnightly fast parkrun (as well as drills and strides). It’s a long time since I went to parkrun and ran fast regularly. I feel sometimes I’ve got so focused on training that I don’t get the reward of actually racing fast. My first fast parkrun on Oct 23rd came in at 21:20 at Upton House. While it was a four second PB over August, I know there’s much more to come as the legs were fatigued from a big week of running.

The other thing I’m looking forward to is Christchurch 10K in mid-December. While I’m not intending to do any specific 10K training for it, I am focusing on it and will taper for it. After that I will probably look to run a decent half-marathon next spring before resuming 800m training again. It’s all a long way off and yet it’ll fly by!

Bad loser

As a kid I was a bad loser. I know this because my parents would point it out when I went stomping off with my arms crossed, a big scowl on my face and tears streaming down my cheeks! Certainly there was much whingeing and while I don’t recall any particular moments, I know I didn’t enjoy losing.

I played all sorts of sports over the following years, some with more regular commitment than others. I played badminton for a year, squash for two, volleyball for many years as well as basketball and 5-a-side football with work colleagues and it didn’t really matter which I was playing, I never enjoyed losing.

That “hate-losing” temperament powered me to try and get better at any sport I tried. If it was a team sport, I would stew for hours about how we’d lost. I’d pick holes in my own play and that of my teammates. I could never understand how they took losing so lightly and would turn up to the next training session and put in low levels of effort. I guess some people are better at rationalising and making up excuses.

Watching televised sport, I’ve often wondered how I would come across if I had to face a post-match interview. Very badly I suspect. Somewhere along the way I at least managed to find the social grace to say and do the right things after matches. I could shake hands with the opposition and congratulate them if they’d won. But if you were actually to ask me to talk about my thoughts and feelings after a match it would be messy and miserable. Once in a while we could lose but if I saw everyone had given their utmost, I could accept losing with good grace.

This hate for losing died down over the past couple of decades. For one thing, I learned losing was an essential skill for getting along with others in life. You can’t win every argument without breaking relationships. Taking up golf helped because the competitive aspect isn’t immediate enough to trigger my competitive instincts. With running I knew I was never going to be good enough to win so my expectations were always low and I always knew I’d run the hardest I could.

Now all of this suggested that being a bad loser was mostly genetic and a state of mind, but as I got further into running I came across an interesting fact about speedwork. If you do too much of it, it turns your system more acidic. Now, we’re not talking like the Xenomorph in Alien whose blood dissolves the floors in spaceships just mildly acidic.

If you ever studied Chemistry at school, you’ll know of the pH scale which runs from 0 – 14 with 7.0 being neutral. Acids are 0 – 7, alkalis are 7 – 14 with the extremes being, as you would expect, very acidic or alkaline. Usually your body usually has a pH value that is the alkaline side of neutral which is something akin to chalk.

Typical pH values for fluids within the human body are 7.35 – 7.45 for blood; 7.4 – 7.6 for saliva and 4.6 – 8.0 for urine. Quite why the latter can be more significantly in the acidic range I’m not sure other than urine involves fluids which have passed through many other areas of the body including the stomach where there are high levels of hydrochloric acid involved in digestion.

If, however, you do high levels of speedwork you can push the body across to the acidic side. The pH value of blood can drop towards the low sixes (e.g. 6.3 – 6.4) and be part of a general imbalance within the body. This is one aspect of overtraining identified by Phil Maffetone. While I don’t like his age-based training formula, his book highlights these sorts of issues with the body and anaerobic training revving up the central nervous system and all the issues that can bring.

Now the whole point here is not to know exactly what pH value your body is at, only to understand that it usually runs in a mildly alkaline state but repeated high intensity training can push it into an undesirable mildly acidic state. This is one reason why recovery runs on the day before and after speedwork, or any other effort session are recommended.

When I ran my first 800m time trial last December it was tough. By the end, I was breathing very hard and I coughed for almost an hour afterwards due to acidosis. But I also found I was in a very bad mood for the rest of the day. When I did my next time trial in April, while I didn’t have the postrun after effects quite so badly, I did get into another black mood. For sure the results of the two time trials weren’t too my liking but they didn’t specifically bother me. The first was simply setting a benchmark, the second was so below expectations that I couldn’t get angry at it. Yet I was grumpy following each of these big runs.

Back in August when I ran my first all-out parkrun for two years, I once again noticed I wasn’t happy afterwards. I’d offered to write the Run Report and fortunately, having pre-prepared it, needed only to fill in a few details before sending it off for publishing within a short time of arriving home. It was strange though because I’d been so enthusiastic earlier in the week with it and then simply submitted it with the minimum of remaining effort.

It would be tempting to put all this down to disappointment at the runs but the depth of moods hinted at something more. When younger me got moody, I assumed it was down to hating to lose and not understanding how to handle it. With a more mature outlook and the rarity of these recent moods, it was clear they were more physiological than psychological.

This came home to me over the past weekend. Once again I ran a fast parkrun. Again I wasn’t overly happy with the time but my mood was ok. I chatted to a couple of friends then nipped into the supermarket to pick up some items on the way home. There was no mood until much later in the day. When I think about it, I did some strength and conditioning when I got home which seems to have tipped me over the edge. I slept badly for the next two nights – another sign of possible overtraining.

When I think back to my black moods in the nineties, I always thought it was down to immaturity and poor psychology. I’m sure to some extent this is correct. But I cannot escape the fact I used to train and play sport a lot harder than I ever do these days. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be playing sport on a lunchtime and again in the evening. Sprinting up and down a basketball court, jumping up and down at a volleyball net, lunging around a squash court or simply doing thirty minutes worth of high intensity effort at circuit training. I was constantly revving the engine playing sport, working a 9-5 job and socialising at clubs and bars on evenings or weekends. No wonder I would sleep for ten hours or more on a weekend. I could be moody, depressive and unable to snap out of it.

I’m sure I was guilty of pushing my pH values into the acidic side of the scale regularly. I was probably young enough to cope with it to some extent. given the younger body recovers quicker. And by training so hard, so frequently, I expect my body had learned to cope better with it. At least able to cope with it until it couldn’t and then my mind would go off down the rabbit hole and see things through the worst possible lens.

Comparing natural talent

The more I look this year, the more I realise what natural talent for distance running is. And I don’t have much of it! But that’s not to say I can’t develop into a decent distance runner with good training.

Let’s talk about three runners. There’s me – whose talent is for speed and building muscle. There’s Slow-twitch Sam– who I believe has talent for distance – he’s light and thin. Then there’s Intermediate Ian who sits somewhere around the average – he’s got decent speed and endurance but doesn’t excel one way or the other. (Names have been changed).

Both Sam and Ian ran a half marathon last weekend. Ian ran sub-1:29 while Sam ran 1:24. My Personal Best – dating back to 2012-13, when I was at one of my running peaks, is 1hr31.

I’ve seen Ian’s training on Garmin and he generally trains five days per week.  Mondays and Wednesday are some kind of workout, either short intervals at fast paces, or longer intervals lasting 5-10 minutes at threshold or marathon pace. On a Friday he runs a 10-mile long run. On the days in between – Tuesday and Thursday he usually does an easy 5K. That’s it.

I looked back at his run training over the past year and he’s totalled 1,219 miles. Here’s the monthly totals from November to September, notably there’s only two months where he exceeded 100 miles.

I used to be a low volume runner barely eking out more than one hundred miles per month, same as he does now. A decent, concentrated block of training in 2010 reduced my half marathon PB from 1hr50 to 1hr38. I ran a decent marathon in 3hr41. The next year I upped my mileage to 150 per month, worked on my endurance and set my half marathon PB (1hr31). I had to do more mileage to get there.

The most notable thing about Ian’s ability to run a half marathon in under 1hr29 is that he never did the distance in training. His long runs topped out at ten mile runs. By comparison, if I don’t doing my long run for a few weeks, I’m struggling in the final miles when I next do one. Some years ago Ian’s first marathon was 3hr25, the next 3hr15 then he ran close to 3hrs a few times before finally breaking it.

Sam took up running again in April and got down to nineteen minutes at parkrun in six weeks. In July he ran a 1hr32 half off a total of around 500 miles training. Since then he has trained harder with back-to-back 200+ mile months in August and September but still hasn’t totalled a thousand miles this year. Yet he’s running even faster than Ian. And much quicker than I have ever even though I run close to two hundred miles every month with a variety of sessions. Of course my training is dedicated towards the 800m so I wouldn’t necessarily expect to run great times in a half at the moment.

What all this begins to show is how natural talent helps out at the beginning of your running career.

My early half marathons were 1hr51, Ian’s is 1hr29, Sam’s is 1hr24. But, due to my lack of natural talent I’ve been forced to figure out what needs to be done to get quicker. I’ve improved from 1hr51 to 1hr31. Ian has only gone from 1hr29 to 1hr25; Sam from 1hr24 to 1hr21. I’m sure they’ve trained hard to achieve what they have but what I’m seeing is how easily it comes with natural talent. Of course, that IS the definition of natural talent.

Short sprint – Big Goals

As I completed my long run this morning, I was thinking about recent televised races. In particular I was thinking about Charlotte Purdue running 2hr23 in London to become the second fastest British woman ever. What does she do now? That’s what goal-setting is all about, giving yourself and your training a direction.

I’m sure she will sit down with her coach and come up with a plan towards running at the next Olympics in 2024 given that she missed out this year. And in the intervening three years there will be other championships and races to focus on. Each of these will be used as goals to chase.

What I was also wondering was whether she’ll target becoming the fastest British woman ever. To do that she’d have to run 2hr15 to outdo Paula Radcliffe. Knocking eight minutes off your marathon time at that level, especially in her thirties will be almost impossible but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t target it.

My belief about goals is somewhat existential. It’s not necessarily the achievement of the goal that matters but the act of setting it and going after it. Because having a goal, and a tough one at that, forces you to go to your limits. It forces you to explore all the options.

Let’s say Purdue does decide to try and get down to 2hr15, it’s such a big goal that she’s going to have to look at every single aspect of her training. If it were me I’d look at the coaching, the diet, kit, shoes, strength training, running form. I’d look for gaps in my training e.g. altitude (or hypobaric chamber in place of it); hills, psychology, aids to recovery and so on. Every single aspect.

This is how Alberto Salazaar ran the Nike Oregon Project to try and create success. Unfortunately while it looked to be innovative (e.g. ice caps at aid stations in hot marathons) it also tested the “grey areas” which eventually resulted in Salazaar’s four year ban for overseeing doping.

At the same time as trying to find the untapped potential, you can’t get too far away from what has been successful. In Charlotte’s case, she needs to ensure she can still perform in races to earn her living as a professional. Too much change could see her getting slower or missing her athletic peak.

For us lesser runners you wouldn’t necessarily try every avenue of opportunity. After all, most couldn’t afford to go altitude training or train in the latest shoes every day. But there could certainly be simple changes which leverage into big benefits. For example, getting a coach or even simply following a plan.

Bear in mind that if you have big goals but aren’t logging the miles to begin with, there’s little point in trying the stuff which makes 1% difference. Regular and frequent training is first and foremost the thing that gets you fast. Someone at Purdue’s level is looking for the just noticeable differences that could give her an advantage.

Returning to what I said about it not mattering whether you succeed in achieving big goals, it’s because while Charlotte might not reach Paula’s 2hr15 standard, she could end up breaking 2hr20. That would be a great experience and achievement in itself. Note: Charlotte may not go after Paula’s record because she decides on other goals, I’m just using the suggestion for clarity of writing this.

If you only set goals which are easily ticked off*, you have no reason to explore and investigate all the options. That’s how most people operate, they keep setting achievable goals a little above where they’re at until they repeatedly fail to achieve one. At this point, they believe they’ve reached their potential and go in search of new vistas which have fresh, new easily-achievable goals to accomplish. Think of how many runners quickly move from parkrun to 10K to half marathon to full ones.

* When you set a major, longterm goal it’s important to have milestones on your plan to achieving it. Those milestones are what most people consider to be goals.