On running
A few steps taken
I had run before; towards things, away from things, in school. But it wasn’t till my mid twenties that I became a runner, when I actually decided to devote my own time to running for longer than five minutes. In no small part, two coincidences turned what may have been a passing fancy into a life long practice.
A relationship came to an end around the same time that a friend convinced me to sign up to a marathon with him. This gave me plenty of free time and something to do with it, not to mention the somewhat bizarre luxury of eating half a kilo of pasta on the couch in my running kit. Along the way, I have made mistakes, learned from some of them and am here to tell the tale, many years into my running journey.
Did wrong
Speed
Arms
Circles
Roads
Learned to do better
Listened to my body
Focused on the breath
Alternated direction
Ran on trails
Got lucky with
Barefoot running
Lessons
Speed
Running is fun, running fast is more fun, at least in the short run. Going too far and too fast too soon is the single most common mistake people make when embarking on a running journey. It’s a combination of having externally set expectations of what is an OK distance to run: people think they need to run 5km or 10km, arbitrary numbers that sound nice but are fictions of our imaginations. As well as externally set expectations of what is an OK pace to run, fast, or at least faster than that old dude jogging in front of us. Pace, coupled with distance are entirely personal, and shouldn’t be tied to any external expectations, beyond what you planned to achieve based on a reasonable ramp up plan.
The short version, run slower than seems reasonable at first, starting with shorter distances.
The best approach is to rely on the zone system to pace your effort, and ramp up distance ~10% a week. The simplest form of the zone system is the talking test, zones 1-5.
Z1 Rest - Can hold a full conversation
Z2 Recovery - Still hold a full conversation
Z3 Tempo - Incomplete sentences
Z4 Threshold - Odd word or two
Z5 Anaerobic - Talking is hard
If you have a fitness tracker that can tell you what zone you are in you can be a little more precise with sticking to your zone, especially if you are running alone and don’t want to talk to yourself the whole time. For the first couple weeks and ideally months you want to do all your runs comfortably in Z2. This will build your base fitness. Then you can start to regularly introduce Z3, and push into Z4 and Z5 for focused training.
You really should do more Z2 then at first feels comfortable, not physically but mentally. Mentally you will want to go far and fast, sticking to Z2, at least at the start will not permit that. Over time you will be able to go faster at Z2 and as a result will go further in the same period.
Arms
People do all sorts of different things with their hands and arms. Generally they should be at your sides and not be karate chopping the air in front of your face. Keeping them swinging around 45 degrees, without crossing your chest allows your chest to be open wide and ensure maximum lung capacity. Pumping them any harder is just wasting effort, unless you really are climbing a steep incline, in which case it can help to provide momentum. Focusing on optimising breathing, and slowing down breathing lets you run more relaxed and as a result better. Letting your arms loosely swing by your hips, allows them to be more in sync with your breathing, rather than being in kung fu boxer mode.
Circles
In addition to camber, there is also the problem of a loop. Loops are great in principle as you can ensure unique scenery and a predictable route. The problem is, humans being creatures of habits we tend to do loops in the same direction, we spend much of the run, and each time we do our regular loop turning in the same direction. Further contributing to the imbalance caused by the road. It may just be dumb luck or a feature of the slope but I tend to find myself running clockwise on right sloping roads and counter clockwise on left leaning ones, this makes sense from a car sticking to the road surface perspective but is unnecessary when running.
If roads are the only option for you, there are two strategies to reduce the strain they cause. Run closer to the centre of the road, as it is typically more flat than the edges. And varying direction every other run will help distribute the load across sides of your body, you can also look at figure 8 loops that provide variability of turning direction though they are harder to ensure a perfect balance of side so even with those direction should be varied.
Roads
Roads are designed primarily for 4 wheeled vehicles, which also support other numbers of wheels. They are also designed to avoid water collecting or running down them, as a result they tend to have a crown which is tallest at the centre and slopes downwards to the sides, alternatively it is sloped from one side to the other. Either way, they are slopped. Due to this slope or camber, we tend to walk or run on a slope, with one leg more extended than the other and hips uneven. If we alternate sides to run against traffic, we are running both ways, slopped to the same side. After multiple runs, always on the same slope you will most likely develop some sort of pain or injury due to this imbalance.
Though my personal choice is to try and avoid roads all together and run on trails, they aren’t a panacea and you can still suffer from the loop problem but the slope tends to be more dynamic and variable which helps avoid over straining a single side. Trails are also typically a lot more fun to run on, not to mention generally softer than running on asphalt.
Barefoot
Mcdougall’s book “Born to Run” had just come out and shoe companies were responding with minimalist designs, so I got a lucky with timing. It would have been a lot harder to start barefoot style running a few years earlier or later as big shoes are fully back in vogue. I suspect I would have eventually gotten there as I tend to gravitate to the more minimal forms of most things. E.g. I’ve ridden a fixed gear bike for some 20 years, and could fit my whole life into two bags till relatively recently.
Minimal shoes or fully barefoot running, forces you to strengthen your feet and improve your technique, otherwise its bloody uncomfortable. If you’ve never done it before, start small, really small. The last 100m of your run home, do that for a week, then perhaps double that distance each week for a few weeks in “barefoot style” shoes. Fully barefoot, should be taken even a bit slower as you need to literally toughen your feet by building up thicker skin.
In my time as a runner, I’ve had two injuries, just two. Both due to running too much without enough ramp up and forgetting some of these proceeding lessons; one in the first few months, whilst still figuring things out and the other a few months ago after doing a 21km trail run with 2km of elevation at pace, with hardly any running for the proceeding six months, due to life getting in the way. That is with years and years of doing over 60km a week of running.