So, I went running today! Yes, really. No, I wasn't forced. Stop rolling your eyes. I did so! A day off work with no plans, purely to rest and relax, but also to get a little bit of exercise done: bloody marvellous. I will do this again, for sure. Or I'll use weekends more intelligently. Either way, I had a very restful day, and also managed to get out into the cold sunshine for a long run. Now, I know many people reading this won't think of 8.5kms (5.3 miles) as a "long run", but it's by far the longest distance ive done in a very long time.
I did run-walk intervals, but because I really haven't done much running for a very long time, occasional parkrun notwithstanding, I wasn't sure what I would be able to manage. Optimistically, I tried to start with 5 mins run, 1 min walk, but to make a long story short, after about 14 or 15 minutes I was down to 1-1 splits. One minute run, one minute walk. I managed, in the main, to stick to that, but there were a few points later in the run where I walkd a lot more than one minute, and in the last kilometre, I was struggling to run past 45 secs or so. All in all, I covered the 8.5kms in 73:49. That's pretty damn slow, but like I say, it's the furthest I've ran in absolutely ages, so I'm taking it. Plus I definitely burned calories from it!!!
I read a lot about people who gain weight when they're training for a marathon, and even though I've never trained for a marathon, I can actually understand that. You finish a long training run, and then when you get hungry, it's easy to tell yourself you earned "a treat". On rest days, it must also be easier to tell yourself you can eat more, because of the running you're doing the rest of the time. Yep, I can definitely see how people overeat when they're training for long distance races. Thankfully, as I'm still carefully tracking food, I got to eat a tasty, filling lunch after my run (Quorn sausages, boiled new potatoes, and baked beans!) without overcompensating for what I'd just done. Baked chicken and brussel sprouts for dinner, and salmon and couscous for breakfast, if you're interested.
I'm feeling the run in my legs tonight, actually - sounds daft, its "only" 5 miles, but like I say, its been a long time since I've ran anything further than 5kms, so it was quite a leap. The general rule of thumb when it comes to weekly long runs is that they shouldn't increase much more than 10% of the distance the previous week. Ooops! However, with the amount of walking I do when I run, I'm not too concerned about the big leap this time. Next week I'll try to go past 10km; I've set myself a target by mid-February, to decide for sure if I'll do the Half marathon mid-March, and I'm going to make sure I do the work (and burn the kcals!) to help me work towards my goals. Running will be great for my weightloss, as long as I continue to track my food intake too. It goes well with the weighttraining and resistance work I do, too. I was pleasantly surprised to not be feeling yesterday's deadlifts in my legs today, but maybe tomorrow will be another story!! Eeeek.
Walk run is a great way to push up the time on feet and mileage - smart way to start building up.
ReplyDeleteYour point about not over compensating for a long run with an even bigger meal is spot on, I'm sure it's not just the meal right after but can run into several meals if you have really depleted your glycogen stokes. What seems to help for me is keeping the pace nice and slow for long runs so that I'm burning a high % of fat per mile and can finish feeling fresh and not famished.
With building your mileage up to 10k's, this is a solid goal, you could probably do it right now if you paced a bit more evenly. As you know you struggled running for more than a minute at the end, but were able to do 5 minutes at the start, I'd suggest starting with a 3 min run, 1 min walk and making sure you stick to this. What you should be able to do is maintain the 3:1 ratio for much longer.
Another approach you could take is use your heart rate monitor to gauge the intensity. As I mentioned before go do a run by feel for a given time/distance and see how much you can run and then look at the average HR you managed. Then next time try aiming for a couple bpm's around that average. Like the the more modest run-walk from the start, what you should be able to do is run further keeping to the modest HR range.
If you know your HR when maxing out you can also use this as a guide. You might be able to run for a couple of minutes around your max HR, but if you run at 80% of this 70 to 80% you should find it much more manageable to run quite a bit further. The exact values and percentages will alter for each person so you need to try things out and find what ranges your body can handle for how long.
If you don't have a HR monitor with you then your breath is an excellent proxy - if you can talk/sing comfortably then you should be working easy enough to do longer runs, but if you find yourself ever starting to breath harder you should back off. Take special not when you hit inclines or push into strong winds as very rapidly something that was easy can suddenly become tougher, but it takes a little while for the body to respond and tell you it's working harder, for endurance it's best if you can avoid these peaks completely and slow down deliberately as soon as you hit a hill rather than try to push on.
Best of luck.