Building UP Your Running
Building up running, whether that’s getting back to running or you’ve been running for a while. This is your guide to increasing your enjoyment of running and also your capacity to run. Strength exercises will be provided in the near future.
Running is about your Aerobic system and the ability to generate enough energy through this system to maintain running, then comes the capacity of the tissues to withstand that force over the period of time.
Cadence makes sense logically - if you take smaller steps more frequently you will run faster. But in practice it doesn’t make a difference. You have to factor in tendon health and elasticity, ability of the lower limb to generate power every step, the health and capacity of the cardiovascular system.
Some runners naturally run with a lower cadence others with a higher cadence. Is one wrong or right? No. The reason I say no is some people can run faster with a slower cadence. “But wouldn’t they run faster with a faster cadence?” Also no. However you will get good at whatever you train. So if you modify you cadence because you running coach said so, after an initial decline in performance you might find you run faster. But is this due to the consistency of the training or the impact of your cadence? I’d argue it’s just the training consistency.
One of the proposed benefits of increasing your running cadence is decreasing the peak impact force (which is meant to reduce injury), however this research article found that cadence didn’t have an impact on vertical load rates, what they did find was the injured group had significantly higher vertical instantaneous load rates.
The thing that helped me run longer and feel better physically was MAF running. Take 180 and minus you age, that’s going to be the maximum allowable Heart Rate for your run. You use 12 mins to slowly elevate the heart rate and then after 12 mins go for a run and try to keep your heart rate below (180 - your age) plus or minus 5bpm. It’s harder than it looks, and hills won’ help so find somewhere flat to run.
A nice test you can use is a set time frame after the 12 min warm up. If you can run for 2/5/10/20 mins straight, pick a time frame and start your lap on your watch after the 12 min warm up. Now run or walk keeping you heart rate below (180 - your age) plus or minus 5bpm, don’t worry about your cadence, your technique anything apart from keeping your heart rate around 180- your age plus or minus 5bpm.
Once you complete the time frame, stop the lap and do a cool down of your choice.
Now this figure should look something like this,
Lap 1 Time: 20 mins
Distance: 2.55kms
Avg Pace (min/km): 7:50
This is now your aerobic baseline. This is the best determinant for your running capabilities without thousands of dollars of technology. Heart rate, time, distance and pace.
Then you can either choose to train 80/20. Where 80% of your runs are in Zone 2 or (180 - your age) plus or minus 5bpm, and 20% of your runs are in Zone 5. This can be as micro or macro as you want. If you only run twice a week, then use the month to calculate the 80/20 divide between your runs. If you run 4 times per week then that’s enough to do 3 runs at Zone 2 and 1 at Zone 5.
You should leave the Zone 2 runs feeling awesome, and energised. Now lets talk about muscular capcaity.
If you are running and you feel something start to niggle you are at an important fork in the road. 1. You push on and see what happens, or 2. You slow down, or walk.
No one can give you a right answer for this, it’s a lot of trail and error and getting to know your body and it’s niggles. Usually if it’s a 7/10 pain you won’t be able to keep running without it getting worse, and 1-3/10 pain you can push through and sometimes you’ll get away with it and it goes away.
However a nice rule of thumb is, if you’re doing a MAF or Zone 2 run and you start to feel a niggle early, try to see how it unfolds, if it gets worse it’s probably best to just walk back home and do some rehab exercises. If it’s a niggle late on in the game, that probably means you’re running for too long and pushing into the pain zone which should be a nice healthy buffer before tissue failure. Pain isn’t a sign of tissue damage, it’s a protective signal about load capacity. Listen to it with an open mind. Don’t think “Oh when I was 10 years younger I could run for 2 hours so I should be able to do that now.” tell that competitive part to give you a bit of space and not overwhelm you. Your body isn’t a machine and it isn’t as young anymore. You are working on getting back to running and an injury won’t help that.
I dare you to give it a go. I bet you can’t run slow because you’ll want to smash yourself. Your use to running be hard and feeling like shit, why bother trying to run slow? “It will be a waste of my precious time!”
To which I say you need to have a good long chat to that part of yourself. Find out what it’s afraid will happen if you waste time, and it feels good. Why is it so afriad to let you enjoy running and working out? Why is it afraid to believe that getting fitter can actually be easy?
Journal about it. It’s time you became Self led. This means bringing your Self to meet these parts and help them relax and unburden. They don’t need to be the boss anymore, your Self is here to do that, they can return to a better role. Instead of beating yourself up, they can become your biggest fan. Instead of bullying yourself they can become your best coach?
You’re never going to know if you don’t talk to them. If you need help doing that you can get “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz or my “Meet Your Parts” pdf.