Some group of researchers are doing some critical analysis on why humans were able to run with bare feet and avoid injury. Which part of the foot touches the ground first is apparently a critical factor – modern running shoes encourage the heel to the ground first, while barefoot running has the forefoot striking the ground first.
The first day of the “week 7″ schedule asks for a 10 minute run, 1 minute walk and repeat this until you’ve done it 4 times or have run for 5 kilometers. At the treadmill pace of 6.6 miles per hour, this works out to about 28.4 minutes of running. The last time I attempted this was back in December 21 and it failed miserably. This time, I fared better. I did the 30 minutes of running, with the observation that exactly after I started the 3rd 10-minute leg, that my calves started getting tight again. It wasn’t bad, but after the 30th minute, my feet really started feeling numb. It didn’t affect my running performance.
I wanted to continue onto the 40 minute of running mark (an “extended mission”) so I lowered the treadmill down to 3.0 miles per hour and walked 4 minutes, and my feet felt a lot better. Then I ran another 10 minutes, but the feet got semi-numb when that was concluded.
I have no idea what is going on in my legs or feet, but it was better than last month. I do historically note that I tend to run better when my feet are numb during the actual race day, but this probably isn’t a good thing.
A positive note, however, is that my cardiovascular performance seems to be quite good – I was never out of breath throughout the entire running procedure.
The last note on the training session was that they had the Food channel on one of the televisions and they had a show of this guy making his own fresh pizzas from scratch with various toppings on it and sprinkled with fresh Mozzarella cheese – and baked inside a wood burning oven stove (which is the only true way to make pizza, in my opinion). It looked sooooooooooo good while running. I love the Food channel, but the only problem with it is that while watching it you get so hungry even when you’ve just eaten!
My “week 11″ (based on the week 6 training schedule) began on January 16th. The January 18th session was done outdoors because it was a sunny day, which was my first outdoor attempt. As I pointed out earlier, I will have to make sure that my shoes are “correct” since I suspect they make a huge difference while running.
This was a four-session week with Saturday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday being run days – I wanted to get back to the Monday-Wednesday-Friday cycle. I just repeated Wednesday’s run for Friday (January 22). I noticed my legs on Friday’s run were a bit more “tired” after running, specifically with the feeling of tingling on the bottom of the feet, but it was not severe. What was a little more disturbing was that my legs still felt noticeably sore for most of Saturday, but this went away on Sunday. I am wondering whether this is normal or whether I’m doing some sort of real damage to myself – I hope it is just regular soreness, but if it continues I will do some more research on it.
I hope after resting for two days that Monday’s (today’s) run goes well with the Week 7 cycle. I suspect that the pounding on the feet and legs is amplified with increased body mass over the past few years, so I am fairly conscious of the holistic nature of running – if I shed 5 pounds, that’s 5 pounds less that my legs have to carry with every step. And since the ideal pace is 180 steps per minute, each 10km race ideally should be 10,080 steps. This implies that each step should be a meter!
Although the beginning of January was disrupted by vacation plans, I resumed running at the regular three times a week schedule and started off again with some maintenance running, with about 30 minutes of total running load, dispersed with 1 minute walks every 3, 4 and 5 minutes. I started to go by “the book” again, starting at week 6 on January 16th, a Saturday.
The runs have been proceeding fine with respect to cardiovascular impact and also the feel of the feet.
Yesterday, however, it was a nice day outside and I attempted to run outside for a simple 3 minute run, 1 minute walk, repeated 7 times. I was wearing a different set of shoes (I was not at my usual location on the treadmill) and noticed around the 15 minute mark that my calves were feeling very tender. It could be either due to me not wearing these shoes for awhile, or that I am not too accustomed to running on asphalt (opposed to treadmill rubber). I will be experimenting with this by wearing my old used shoes that I normally train with and see if it causes as much trouble. I am also curious whether my actual pace is the normal 6.6 miles an hour that I keep the treadmill out – I would suspect I am slightly faster than this outside.
I’ve got roughly 15 weeks to get to the point where I can run 55 minutes straight and to also try to improve my speed such that I will be able to do it at an average speed of 6.7 miles per hour, exactly.
The Christmas holiday is always disruptive to exercise schedules for two reasons – travel and food. I basically have written off trying to keep to the schedule during this time and just get to the gym whenever I can and do my “maintenance running”, which I try to keep to a 30 minute load, and in 5-minute chunks space by 1 minute walks. The first disruption was during Christmas Day where the gym was closed, and the only opportunity I had to work out was on December 28th. Surprisingly it felt fine on the treadmill although I encountered the same issue with the right calf, but it wasn’t that much of a hindrance.
I also missed the December 30th run due to some other commitments, while on January 1st the gym was open and I was able to run again – this time I ended the run with 10 minutes of straight running. Oddly enough I did not encounter any difficulty with the legs or even on the cardiovascular side of things, so it appears that maybe resting my legs on a light-load schedule might be worth it.
I will not be around for the next few days and as a result I will not be packing my running shoes. However, I will be very close to a swimming pool so I will attempt to at least keep in aerobic shape by swimming in a couple days before resuming my running on Thursday, January 7. I will be starting from week 6 of the schedule again and hopefully build up to the point where I can reach week 12/13 and be able to increase my speed. It will be interesting to see what an effect this will have on my endurance.
I started with week 7 last Monday, and the schedule said to run 10 minutes, walk 1, and repeat this until 5 kilometers of running has been achieved. Ignoring the distance obtained from walking, that works out to about 29 minutes of running at 6.6 miles per hour.
I got through the first ten minute part, but my right calf felt extremely tense, and was not able to make it through the next 10 minute run. I did not want to risk injury, so instead I just went back to walking slowly for a couple minutes, and went back up to running speed again, and then my calf got sore, so I slowed down again. After about half an hour on the treadmill, my calf felt better again while running, but it wasn’t a good session. I did not feel cardiovascularily challenged, but the lower part of my legs obviously were not sufficiently warmed up or stretched for the warmup period. At a minimum in the future, I will stretch for half a minute on each calf before going into my pre-run walk routine.
As a result of failing to do this week’s regimen to the letter, I will be repeating it again next week.
Today’s (Wednesday’s) session was supposed to be a run 4 minutes, walk 1 minute session, repeated 6 times. I did this, and experienced similar soreness in my right calf (despite stretching beforehand), but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the previous session. I also did a modification of my running step, where I took more frequent steps and this seemed to alleviate the problems that I was having. In fact, in the last run, I decided to go for ten minutes straight just to see how much energy I had – and I did make it.
I think this issue with my calf can be resolved with proper stretching and a proper warmup routine, perhaps longer than the five minutes of walking that the Learn To Run 10k program suggests.
Complicating the matters somewhat is that I have not skipped a training session since I started in early November. Unfortunately my next scheduled session is on December 25, 2009. This means that the gym will be closed and I will consider running outside in what will likely be nearly freezing weather, albeit sunny. I recall during the first year that I trained for the Sun Run (2005), I did everything outside, whether it was raining, sunny or dark!
Compared to my training report just three days back, I am consistently mystified by my energy levels on the treadmill, which seems to be random. I basically got up from an afternoon nap and headed to the gym, and felt kind of tired. However, once on the treadmill, I proceeded to blaze through 24 minutes of running (3 minutes run, 1 minute walk, repeated 8 times) before calling it a session, without any leg issues or cardio issues. This is part of my “refresh” cycle before I continue on.
I didn’t write about Week 5′s training – it scaled up to a start of 3 minutes of running and one minute of walking repeated 9 times for a total of 27 minutes of running volume. I thought transitioning to this would be rather difficult, but all three training sessions for the week went extraordinarily well – I didn’t feel any cardiovascular pressure nor did I feel any pressure on my calves or feet. It was actually the most smoothest training I had yet this year.
Today was a little different – I started week 6′s training which was a scheduled 5 minute run, 1 minute walk, repeated 7 times for a total volume of 35 minutes of running. Due to some rather bad timing, I got to the gym rather late. I wasn’t going to run outside since it is below freezing at the moment (and even worse when factoring in wind chill). So I managed to get 21 minutes of running in, at a 3 minute run and 1 minute walk interval. I also felt out of energy during the training, and my right calf was not hurting, but it definitely felt sore. It just wasn’t my day, so I will be calling this week a “recovery week” and run an abbreviated schedule similar to Week 5 before moving onto the “real” week 6. I figure this will maintain my fitness and better prepare me for the next week.
Fortunately I am starting the training program so early that I can afford to take a few weeks like this and slowly scale up my running.
I am also mystified how my energy levels can change so radically between training sessions – last Friday I was done the 24 minutes of running and felt like I could have done the whole 10 kilometers right there and then. Today, I ended 21 minutes feeling like that I was running up a 15 degree inclined hill. I guess the whole point at this stage still is to get your heart rate well above 130 beats per minute (mine was at around 160) and keep it there for as long as possible, and to get your leg muscles in shape for running.
Week 4 is one of the so-called “easy recovery weeks”, which scales down slightly the amount of running that has to be performed. It is designed to put less pressure on your body, but I personally don’t notice much difference. Week 4 is also the last week where you are supposed to take 2 minute walks between running periods. After this, it gets a lot more difficult – the most difficult transition is going from 2 minute walks to 1 minute walks between running cycles.
Today, I paid careful attention to what Declan posted in the comments on the previous week. Although it is very difficult to self-assess (I will be doing a video of myself running on the new iPod Nano soon), I measured how fast my running was in terms of paces per minute. The video said that 180 steps per minute is the “sweet spot” for running, so I counted steps for 15 seconds on the treadmill (when going at 6.8 miles per hour) and oddly enough, it was close – about 46 paces over 15 seconds, which translates into 184 steps per minute.
Now my timing was not that precise, but when repeating the counts over and over again, my running frequency is every so slightly higher than what the recommendation was, so I will attempt to slow down my frequency (and subsequently this would imply a larger stride).
I know one of my big energy-wasting issues deals with balance and I have also been a lot more conscious as to where my feet strike the floor in relation to the rest of my body (it should be directly underneath the center of gravity and not in front of your body). Quite frankly it didn’t feel a heck of a lot different than my normal stride, but I think once I see some video footage of myself running, I will be able to diagnose whether I am swaying left-to-right too much, and also where my feet are striking the ground with respect to my body.
Finally, I also notice that I am running into an issue which I had encountered in my previous runs in previous years, shin splints. I need to also be rather conscious with respect to my stride and make sure that this won’t kill my running ‘career’. Historically, whenever I have felt the tingling of nerves on the bottom of my legs (which I have encountered in each and every Sun Run I have been in after roughly the 6km mark), it has not impaired my performance, but all the reading suggests that I am doing genuine injury to myself by continuing to run with them. The nerve tingling always goes away after walking for about 5 minutes after the fact.
I always find the transition when going from 2 minutes of running to 3 to be the second most difficult part of training up your endurance from scratch, and the most difficult is going from 2 minutes of walking between runs to 1 minute.
Since my week 2, session 1 training was a bit difficult, I was worried that I would have not have enough stamina. It is very difficult to predict the energy level you will have before stepping onto the treadmill – sometimes I have dragged myself out to the gym feeling like I could sleep 11 hours and then proceed to have a great training session, and sometimes I have felt so energetic, but when hitting the treadmill I completely run out of gas.
Anyhow, it turned out to be the former yesterday, and I breezed through the session consisting of 21 minutes of running and 14 minutes of walking. I actually felt like cranking up the running speed, but I will only be doing this after I am well established in a training routine.
I always wonder what the variables are involved in terms of how much energy you feel on the treadmill, and sleeping, diet and the time of day probably have huge roles.
At my usual speed of 6.8 miles per hour running and 3.8 miles per hour of walking, this was 5.2 kilometers distance covered.