For these runs, I use a loop in the park that’s 1.65 miles long. So a 5k is a little less than two laps. I know roughly where the 5k mark is, but I have to look at my watch to know when I’ve finished.
Nah, good trainers aren’t like this. Good trainers a) teach you how to exercise safely and b) make working out more fun so you do more of it. Inertia around lack of exercise is almost never overcome by having someone else force you to do it. It’s usually behavioral stuff that works - find exercise you like doing so you just do it because you want to, make it a routine so you just do it instead of having to work up the motivation each and every time to decide when to do it and how, set extremely modest goals (just do one exercise) because usually once people start something they are reluctant to do then they just finish it.
I do think there is an accountability element that even the worst trainer brings to the table.
If I’ve got a scheduled appointment with the trainer, and I’m gonna be charged if I just don’t show, then I’m definitely gonna be there. Getting in the door of the gym is half the battle.
Yes, that’s a known effect. But even that would be impaired by a “drill sergeant” style personal trainer, he or she would make it more likely that you still flake out on the appointment than if you have a personal trainer that is fun to be with.
If there’s a more active thread please let me know.
Any serious runners here? I’m trying to plan out a training routine to run a mile in like 3 to 4 months. Also trying to guess what time could be possible.
I’ve ran off and on since middle school, and pretty heavily for the last year. Was around 220 lbs a year (5’9") and now down to 185. Right now I average probably 25 miles a week at 8 min pace.
I just recently ran a 6:32 mile at pretty much full effort. I ran a full effort 10k 4 months ago at 49:50. I think I could probably better that now now though.
Aside from that I haven’t maxed out in a decade.
Is me running 545 in 3 months crazy? With diet and alcohol consumption changes I think I can drop another 15lb in the next few months which I think would help a ton since I’m super heavy in my midsection.
Also ideas for training? I was thinking maybe like 3 days a week of longer slower (8min) runs, 2 days a week of 800 intervals, and 1 day of a slow jog and yoga.
I have 2 20lb kettel bells and a spin bike that I can work in. Also live on beach with open stretch of sand so can do part of miles off the road. Unfortunately don’t have access to any trails and only 1 super crowded track that’s pretty far away.
Thanks for any assistance
ETA, I’m 38
How old are you? Ramping up and going full effort is more risky as you age, and is actually generally a pretty bad idea if you’re over 40.
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You’ll probably get more responses at the running subreddit: Reddit - Dive into anything
You’re faster than me, but it seems like doing “slow” runs at your 10k pace is suboptimal. Your mile time is also fast compared to your 10k time, so it could just be that you are built more for speed than endurance.
Quick response for now, I think an 8:00 pace for long/slow runs is way too fast for the person you describe.
@mosdef yeah my age plus me carrying so much extra weight in stomach and history of groin and lower abdominal problems has me super careful.
I’m definitely more built for mile than longer distance. Pretty thick lower body. I also think I could run a decently faster 10k rn. Probably could have then too. It was for a bet i was pretty sure I’d win and went out slow to reduce chance of getting hurt and probably left a lot on the table.
8min isn’t slow for me for sure but 6km at 8 min is something I think I can do without needing a recovery day. Though it might start feeling fast once I’m really training and have little nagging injuries.
Im just trying to find the right balance. My buddy who ran in college just says do a bunch med effort miles. But at my age I feel like I’m not gonna just be able to ran at full effort on race day without pulling something if I’m mostly training at medium effort.
I’ll check out the subreddit, thx
Here splits from 10k. Kinda lol
Just to expand on this, I feel like your post is something I would have written any time in the last 15 years, up until about 2 years ago:
- I want to get faster
- I currently can run at about an 8:00 pace for several miles, 7:30 for several miles if I’m pushing it
- My running strategy is to run several times a week anywhere from 5-7 miles at roughly 8:00 per mile.
- Thinking about adding speed days
Those aren’t necessarily wrong goals/strategies, but I think my own running significantly improved in the last year or two once I adopted some changes from those strategies/views:
-
Most mileage should be in slow runs. Significantly slower than I thought was reasonable. I monitored this via heart rate, where I try to keep at 150 bpm or less. This was enormously challenging. I think the first time I tried this (on the advice of a co-worker who was in the process of training for a marathon and just ran a sub-3 marathon), I was running at about 11:00/mile just to keep my heart rate less than 145. It felt preposterous - I could run half marathons at a 7:30 pace for Christ’s sake. But now that I’ve adopted that, my pace has gradually improved so that I can do those slow runs at about a 9:00 pace.
-
I basically don’t do any “in between” runs. It’s either speed work or slow runs, where speed work varies from short intervals to longer race-pace segments. This is about once a week, but I don’t have a strict schedule and I usually go by what my Garmin is telling me to do.
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I try to do core workouts and stretching at least 5 times a week. I also try to lift 20-30 minutes a day. I also use a Peloton bike a few times a week.
All of these changes have led to improved running results with less actual mileage. (I ran a 1:33:30 half marathon in October, which was 2 minutes faster than my previous PR.) More importantly, I haven’t come close to injuring myself (knock on wood), whereas in the past I’d typically hurt myself/overtrain at least once every few years. It’s hard to attribute that outcome to one single factor, but I’m sure it’s a combination of core and leg strength training, lower mileage, and a much shorter running stride.
So if I were writing a letter to myself 10 years ago, I’d say:
- Run slower. No, seriously, slower than that. No, really really slow, to the point that you’re not even sweating. Not every run needs to feel like you’re pushing the envelope. Most runs shouldn’t feel like that.
- Increase your cadence and shorten your stride. Long strides place too much force on your legs in all the wrong places.
- Stretch often.
- Focus on core strength and strength for your legs. Squats, dead lifts, lunges. Even if you’re only using dumbbells. You’ve got to make sure your entire chain is strong, and that your entire chain is engaged while you run, rather than just pounding your quads.
Good luck!
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I assume when you do this you trade speed for injury avoidance.
Not really (in my experience), for two reasons:
- If you pick up your cadence enough (say you go from 165 steps per minute to 175-180), you’ll offset the shorter stride.
- Even if you do end up running more slowly in that particular training run, you’re not necessarily sacrificing any speed in terms of your goal (e.g., running a certain 10k pace), because longer slower running is ultimately the way to accomplish faster race times.
Would love input from @EmpireMan, who I think has much more experience than I do.
I don’t know anything, but it seems all the pros have noticeably long strides.
I’m getting ahead of my skis here, but the issue (for me at least) is how you’re landing on the foot. When I overstride, I’m landing on the heel of my foot well in front of my body, with a relatively straight leg. So when I land like that, it’s doing 2 things:
- putting a whole lot of pressure on my knee, in the non-bending direction
- serving as a brake
When you see professional runners taking long strides, I think you’re likely to see them land with a decent amount of bend in the knee, so that when they hit the ground they’re immediately powering their leg back (as if they’re flicking a piece of paper under their shoe backwards). As opposed to thudding their heel straight into the ground.
This is a cool Usain Bolt video:
It looks like he’s taking a really long stride, but you can see that his front leg is already moving backwards by the time that it hits the ground. So the act of hitting the ground isn’t braking his forward momentum at all. When I take a long stride, I’m hitting the ground at the point when my foot is farthest ahead of me.
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This is all 100% accurate. Your average weekend warrior, even the ones that grind out reasonable impressive half and full marathon times, will be prone to overstriding and heel strike if they try to speed up by lengthening stride. Usain Bolt can do it, but we ain’t Usain Bolts.
Chiming in from my rowing experience.
My way of thinking about it is that theres a certain amount of hard training you can do in a week and successfully recover from. For me this was 3 per week. Then you can basically add as much long slow stuff on top of that as you like. (Within reason)
That way you train your fast energy systems as much as possible, and put as many hours as you can on your long slow energy systems as well.
Another caveat is that you shouldn’t be ramping too much work or volume too quickly. So build up slowly over time.
only have a minute and this will be a dry post but in short I think @spidercrab is posting a lot of good stuff here. Imo the most common form mistake that runners make is overstriding. The best way to stop this—to run more efficiently with a more efficient stride length—is, a little weirdly maybe, to increase your cadence. For my own running, I get a little antsy when my cadence is below 180 strides/minute (which I count in my head as 90 because it’s easier just to count one leg). I think most runners who haven’t ever thought about this should initially shoot for anything like, eh, 174 and above, i.e. if you’re running at an easy pace and your left foot is hitting 87ish times in a minute then you’re more or less good to go. If you count and see that you’re at 83 or something then don’t try to fix it all at once, instead just try to slowly nudge your cadence up over weeks and months. When it’s dialed in then you should feel light on your feet and sort of quick and you shouldn’t be clomping around, good runners are generally quiet. But don’t cut your stride short just to hit a number—i.e. don’t understride either. Take your time and get to 174-180ish strides per minute, but do it while always checking in with yourself that you feel relaxed and natural. Yes your turnover will slow down a tiny bit at slower paces, but there actually isn’t a huge variation across paces; olympians running the mile and the marathon have roughly the same stride rates, it’s just their stride lengths that change.
Totally one zillion percent agree with spidercrab’s thoughts on making the (vast) majority of your runs slow and easy. This can be really tricky; it’s really tempting to get sucked into a mental merry-go-round of feeling like you’ll get more out of your regular workouts if you go faster and get more tired. But running is backwards that way: you’ll get better at running if most of your training is very easy than you will if the training is hard. We could talk about this for hours, but for runners building a base, most if not all of your runs should be truly easy. By easy I mean that you should be relaxed and comfortable, you should be able to listen to a podcast and concentrate on it and have a non-gaspy conversation with your dog and/or imaginary friend if you want. Sure your brain should be quietly focused on just the running sometimes (imo everyone should force themselves to do at minimum a half hour of weekly running with no audio happening), but keep things easy. A few years ago there was a trend in running where people were trying to only run three days/week and all three days were hard workouts. They weren’t totally wrong and there were some lessons to take away from their doomed experiment, but the main result was that they mostly ended up getting hurt or sick.
Fwiw I think that as runners get more experienced they become more likely to build their program around minutes spent running rather than miles covered. I think this is mostly a mental posture thing: arranging things by miles and paces tends to make people focus more on objectives & details, which are totally important, but at the day-to-day level they can be misleading. Shifting the focus to time spent running can tune some people more into how they’re actually feeling on the runs, which is a way more durable/trustworthy barometer of things and leads to a million other downstream benefits. Yeah it’s super necessary & good to set goals along the way and check them off, but tethering the goals to mileage can super easily spiral off into a smorgasbord of training nightmares.
In general the 80/20 thing seems good for running (80% of your total running as absolutely easy runs), but imo 80/20 is only a decent ratio for the periods when you’re actively training for something (that are generally 10-20 weeks long). If I’m just building a base then for me the ratio is more like 95/5. Again, it’s weird, but so many of the good training effects of running (e.g. more efficient body movement, better fat burning as opposed to carb burning, more energy-related enzymes and more mitochondria aka the powerhouses of the something something, so in other words a better ability to use oxygen e.g. more literal blood + more stroke volume + more capillaries that sprout and envelop your relevant muscles in a way that seems sort of enchanted + “better” blood in general i.e. more red blood cells to shuttle oxygen)…all these things are happening at the easy paces too. If you don’t balance your hard workouts with lots of easy stuff then you eventually you’ll overtrain, which you’ll experience as getting hurt or sick or just plain glum
Typical scenario: runner has a bad day or week and then they get bummed and they think they’ve blown their whole program, which makes them either blow off their next few workouts or alternatively to dig in ten times harder in their next few workouts, which then makes them get even more bummed and torpid, and then after two or three weeks of this they’ve given themselves all the excuses they need to bail. Totally understandable, but it’s too bad, because the truth is everyone has bad days running, it’s impossible not to. It’s partly a rando biochemical thing probably, sometimes bad days just plop in from the moon, no one knows why. Just don’t overreact to the occasional clunker and you’ll be fine. Successful training is much more about cultivating a habit over months than it is about any single thing that ever happens during those months. And again this works both ways: the line between being perfectly trained and being overtrained is crazy thin and once you’re even a little bit caught in the tractor beam of overtraining then it usually sucks you all the way down the drain, which is to say that there’s some inherent danger in getting too chipper about your good days too. So, steady as she goes and just keep showing up. Sorry I’m writing so much about this but man the surest way to burn out is to turn every workout into a race and/or some demonstration of will, instead you have to mentally shift your daily idea of toughness into being consistent.
About form in general, eh I dunno, my first thoughts are (1) run tall. All kinds of good things happen when you run tall. You don’t slouch and you don’t jut your head out and you don’t stick your butt out. No need to think about all this stuff piece by piece, just think run tall (2) run relaxed, i.e. relaxed and balanced and not feeling like you’re fighting physics, (3) for the last decade the world has been really obsessing about footstrike, heel-striking vs midfoot striking and so on, but tbh I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. The important thing is that your foot is landing more or less under your center of gravity and under your body. Don’t think about reaching out in front of you with your feet, instead think about pushing yourself harder on the ground, from behind you—when you drive yourself forward, it should feel like the energy and drive is happening behind you. (4) related: people in general don’t run with their butt muscles enough. Especially on hills, but on flats too. Unfortunately trying to train yourself how to habitually engage those muscles can be totally baffling and borderline impossible to describe in words. But if you wonder if you’re using your butt enough then you probably aren’t.
also totally agree with spidercrab about stretching / mobility stuff in general. And crosstraining. Another thing I’ll bet he’d tell his younger self is to add in regular rest weeks (where you dial things back a bit, seriously as often as every three to four weeks). In life by nature I’m not an especially conservative risk-averse person, and in sports I’m definitely not that way, but running is just weird. The main challenge is being consistent. Everyone everyone everyone gets hurt or burned out from running sometimes, there’s no dodging that, but by building a training program around being good to yourself and having discretion be the better part of valor most of the time, you give yourself the best chance to stick around and cultivate a potentially fun superhealthy habit while all your friends and family keep popping in and out like quantum beer foam. jesus this ended up being a long post, sorry just typing.
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PS just reread and a couple clarifications:
running tall does not mean running with your body straight up and down like a protest sign, it’s more just the idea that you’re relaxed and long and balanced, so you’re leaning forward a little (but not from the waist; it’s more like youre straight and tall and relaxed and then tipping forward a bit from the ankles. Not forward from the hips or the shoulders, it’s from your ankles. It’s not a big move, it’s subtle.) Whatever, if you just think about running relaxed and tall and naturally then much of this stuff will take care of itself on its own.
also wanted to add something important:
When you start off running, it legit sucks, and this sucky running feeling is something folks are pretty familiar with, and it understandably makes most people stop running, and fair enough. But what doesn’t get talked about much is the first phase of running sucks for absolutely everyone, it sucks for you and it sucks for me and it sucked for whatever three east africans podium the marathon at the next olympics and later if those three ever take a few months’ break from running, then it will suck for them again. When a person starts running then at first their brain fights back by flooding them with fatigue feelings in all those first runs, I guess because our brains don’t want us to use all our hard-earned calories on something that seems so gratuitously exhausting and weird, especially when it notices we’re not actually running down a mammoth or away from a sabertooth monster. The good news is that if you stick with running, then around two months after you start, all those miserable feelings just sort of…go away. It’s a surprise every time it happens, but it always happens, the cloud just lifts. Your brain accepts that this is its new life now and decides to start helping. Sure you still get tired, but the feeling of being tired starts feeling completely different, it stops feeling like exhaustion and you absolutely stop having the whole inner monologue of ugh, wow, this is terrible and I really feel like stopping now. As long as you keep the pace easy and as long as you stick with it, then yeah, one day you’re out there five minutes into a run suffering and dreading even just another five minutes, and then a month later you realize you just ran forty minutes and never even really thought about it. Breaking out of this initial mental cage is a major part of starting out and then building a base.
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Sorry still learning to multiquote but great posts from @EmpireMan and @spidercrab.
Spider you nailed me. I can do 8m pace without pushing hard but I definitely feel it after 4 to 5k. Whereas 6k to 7k at 830 is more relaxed. And I usually go for the former.
When I started jogging again it was partly functional. Jog to atm and back, jog to store and cab back. It took the 10km bet for me to start taking it more seriously.
I appreciate the advice. I’ve always loved running but never taken it really seriously. I ran competitively in middle school, 8 and 1500. Ran around 220 and 510. No real training just run to x landmark and back. By hs I was filling out and lifting for football/too lazy to run so switched to jumps and never did anything over 400.
Jogged off and on for exercise but didn’t do anything until a 5k at age 24 in like 20:25. Ran a 150:23 half marathon at 31 with non serious training.
In the last 7 years I let myself go. I’ve jogged off and on and lifted and played basketball and tennis. But being an online poker player and age caught up and I really let myself go. Was over 220lbs at 5ft9 last December before I turned it around.
So with the advice I’m thinking to start
3 6km runs at 830.
1 days of interval training
1 day heavy leg/core work with kettel bells/med ball/weights
1 day short light run with maybe some bounding or jumping stuff.
Maybe try to introduce core workout stuff first thing in morning or before bed?
I know training to run a mile at my age is dumb but honestly having something competing to train for is really motivating.
Found my half marathon splits. Didn’t pace myself well in that either. Only had 1 run over 4.5 miles training for it.
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Great post. The part about running gradually sucking less is very relatable. I remember how long it took me to be able to run 3 miles without stopping and how demanding those runs seemed at the time. Now, after another year or so of consistent running, I do an easy 3 or 4 mile run as recovery the day after a hard workout and it’s no big deal.