Peninsula Runners Coaches' Couch

Week 16 May 1-7

2010-05-05T22:46:00.001-07:00

So... you may have just completed a race. Hopefully it was a sanctioned event and measured correctly so you can use the information to plan your next event strategy. However, the first thing you should be thinking about is time off. Yes, it's rest time. If you just ran a half or full marathon, you probably trained somewhere between 4 1/2 to 6 months for and as much as 2 times a day, 7 days a week. Give yourself not only a pat on the back, but allow yourself some time off to recover on all levels; and a cookie. Too many runners come back way too quickly and only get disappointed when they get an overuse injury because they thought they felt okay.

                  The rule of thumb is one day off for every mile or even kilometre raced. For a marathon that would mean a minimum of 6-weeks of recovery. But what does it really mean? Nobody ever explained it to me since I first heard it some 40 something years ago. It's been taken for granted that it meant time away from running, but more specifically time away from racing.

                  Does this mean you can safely race a marathon every 6-weeks? I hardly think so. If you take 6-weeks of training off and figure you lose 2 - 3 weeks for every week away, than you've just lost as much as 4 1/2 months of training and should consider starting again, but at your "new" level. Every person will take a different amount of time to recover, but how much time and what you do during that recovery time remains a mystery to a lot of people? There are no set rules here. Everybody concerns themselves with the event and never concerns themselves with the recovery period, so it's pretty much up in the air as to what to do or how long it takes.

                  The sensible thing to do would be not returning to a full running program for at least 4 - 6 weeks. This doesn't mean not running at all. It means drastically reducing your mileage and avoiding rigorous speed and hill workouts for that duration of time and slowly rebuilding yourself back to where you left off before the event. Why? A little sports massage should be enough to point out the tender spots and possibly damaged areas. If you could ignore the desire to quickly return to regular training and actually listen to your muscles telling you with every step that they are still swollen and in grave need of deep nutrition. I can appreciate that people want to get back to training as quickly as possible but if you are honest with yourself you can feel that something you really need after a hard effort is a little time off. It may look and even feel like a bit of body weight loss, but deep down you subconsciously know it's more than that. You know all the pistons aren't quite firing properly. This is why it's so important to get on a sensible program that will get you back to health again.

                  You may also want to check out http://www.runtheplanet.com/trainingracing/marathon/recovery.asp. It talks about your recovery period as similar to a reverse of the tapering period. They also use a 10 miles of training for every mile raced before considering racing again. This number will increase depending upon your experience and conditioning. They suggest 260 miles of training before considering racing again which for most people will be about 6 - 10 weeks. There are also a couple of suggested recovery programs.

                  So... while you are recovering, what can you do with your race results? Most people will put their shirt in a pile, their certificate in a drawer and forget about it. Then they'll start training for a new goal the same way they did their last. When the race comes around again, they can't figure out why they didn't improve as much as they wanted to. And the cycle goes on. The best thing you can do is take your race results and actually look at them as closely as mile for mile and go over in your head the entire event. If you wore a watch that even recorded the mile splits, this would be a great help. The more you can break down the event, the better. Some questions you may wish to consider are:

1) How did I feel at the start of the event? Was I feeling stronger than ever? Was I feeling anxious, stiff, sore, lethargic, or like I just wanted to go back to bed?

2) How long did it take for me to settle into my pace? Was there certain people I was able to "key" on in order to pace myself better? Did I start out at the right pace or was it too slow or too quick?

3) Were the aid stations at the right place at the right time? Did I "gel" enough? Did I get an appropriate balance of carbs, electrolytes, and water along the way? Should I have eaten that hot-dog at 21 miles? Was there anything that nutritionally I could have improved upon?

4) How were my 5KM or 10KM splits? Were they all the same or was there a huge spread? How did the course effect my pacing? Where could have or what could I have done differently to make up more time along the way?

5) Was there ever an issue with hills? Do I need to work on them more? How did they affect my pacing or could have I pushed a little more?

6) How were my legs at the end of the race? Was there anything left? Did I tip the wheel chair attendant after being rushed to the first aid tent?

7) Where did I (if at all) feel really comfortable during the race and conversely where was it if at all really tough? Do I need more mileage? Do I need more speed work? Should I do more drills? Do I need more tempo runs?

Speaking of tempo runs. These will always going be a thorn in my side because too many people truly believe that this is the main area where they received the most benefit in their training and that's just plain wrong in my books. One coach when asked as to why people like them so much answered, "Because they're easy." There's no doubt that tempo running is a useful tool in order to help running efficiency, but most people admittedly run them far too fast. They are of very little or no benefit if they are run too fast because you are simply racing and not training. Worse yet, most people will experience at one time or another a injury during one of their way-too-fast tempos. But, despite what people go on about the benefits of tempo runs, I believe the greatest factor in everyone's running improvement at least in our group was when they slowed down on their long runs and stopped running them like a tempo run. We used to get people coming back from a long run profusely sweating and gloating about how much faster they were on a particular long run than the last time they did it. Come race day they would have little or no improvement and wonder why? It's probably because they left their best race on the road during training. There's no medal in a training run folks. Anyway...

8) Did I experience any medical issues such as blisters, upset stomach, dizziness, hip pain, back pain, shoes on fire or other shoe related issues, etc.? If I had any medical concerns, what was the reason and how can I prevent it from happening in the future? Did I dress adequately for the event or do I need to change something? Was my personal pacer able to keep up with me or did I leave him/her in the dust?

9) Was I mentally prepared to run hard? Did I get enough rest the week of the event? Was I at "one" with the Universe and was I happy prior to the race itself? Was there a need to improve my mental game?

10) Despite any program (including the one from Peninsula Runners) what would I like to do to take my running to the next level? If you had medical issues, what do you need to do to get past them? If you had nutritional needs, what do you need to change or add to your diet to improve your eating habits? If you had hip or back pain, what do you need to add into your program to improve your fitness and does it mean taking something else out?

                  If you recently raced give yourself a pat on the back, but take an inventory of your accomplishment and remember that it it can also be used as a very valuable piece of information for planning your next run as well as for getting back to full recovery and better health.

Have a great running week!

Russ and Lorne

Week 15 April 10-16

2010-04-26T06:39:00.001-07:00

"Training for shorter race distances makes the body use more fast-twitch muscle fibers and leads to better leg strength, cardiovascular fitness, and ultimately, faster times at all distances. "
Sean Coster, a running coach, exercise physiologist for the Nike Sports center, and cofounder of Run Portland

This was the emailed Runner's World "Quote Of The day" for Sunday, April 18, 2010. Experts have been saying this for years. Yet there are still people out there that honestly believe that in order to run a faster 5KM, 10KM, half marathon or marathon, you have to run more of them. By doing this you are pretty much turning whatever fast twitch fibers you have into slow twitch fibers. The end result is instead of getting faster, you begin to go the other way. It's taken several years, but we are finally getting a lot of our twice a year marathoners down to one and they are starting to see improved results in all their events, including the marathon. Now… if I can get them down to every year and a half and just focus on the 5KM and 10KM races leading into a fast half marathon once or twice a year… that would be most impressive. To get them to see the importance of the FRIDAY NIGHT MILE would be a miracle.

Now don't get me wrong, the marathon is a fabulous event. It has all the challenges both physical and mental you could ever ask for in both training and racing. My issue is that if we are ever going to see fast of times from the average runner as we did 25 years ago, it will only be because people are faster at the shorter distances. And in order to be faster at the shorter distances means that "everyone" is going to need some form of consistent interval work whether it's on the track, in the trails or on grass (lawn as opposed to garden variety). By "consistent" I am referring to a regular schedule. One track session every three or four months does nothing for you except increase your chances of getting an overuse injury.

One of the most common complaints about track is people getting injured.... it is not the track; is that they exceed paces outside of their training zone. Because they don't have the necessary leg strength or technique to maintain their current pace they break down. Then they say, "It doesn't work for me". Well duh! We can lead them to the McMillan pace tables, but we can't make them believe it. Even their average or below race times cause them to say, "The program doesn't work for me." Meanwhile everyone else steadily improves every session. Face it… there's no easy way to become faster. It takes work and it takes time. The beauty is… speed can be taught. It can be taught just like guitar lessons, art lessons, ballet lessons or any other type of lesson.

For our upcoming Maintenance Program starting May 8 and working up to the Fall Half-Marathon and Marathon Program beginning on June 12 we will be incorporating weekly drill sessions designed to increase leg strength and speed. It's a boot-camp for runners and it isn't going to be easy; but I hope you will join us. There will also be the usual run workouts for those who simply wish to participate but not compete and the Scotia Half people doing their workouts, but for the regular group.... Maintenance will be a little different this time.

Be there… or be slow!

Have a great running week!

Lorne

Week 14 April 3-9

2010-04-19T16:53:00.001-07:00

We had a brilliant workout last Monday night down at the track. When I first introduced 100-meter to 600-meter repeat workouts there was thunder in the Peninsula that has not been heard since the big white rock hit the beach. The uproar was tremendous, but since the results are in, the storm has passed and I do believe we've finally convinced a few that in order to get faster over the longer distances, you have to get faster at the shorter distances. This has been a very long road to acceptance and we still hear chuckles of disbelief from the gallery from those who either won't accept it or are too afraid to change. Let's face it; if you want to get faster, you have to work at it. It takes not only effort of body, but also effort of mind too. It's been common knowledge that speed can be taught and that is our focus for our Monday workouts. I needed some help in that area and it came in the form of masters' world record holder over a multiple of sprint distances, Harold Morioka. Harold could see right away the necessary changes in some runners that would give them the improvement they would need in order to get faster. The common factors in a number of distance runners were they were shufflers. Somewhere along the way we were all taught to keep our feet close to the ground and try for a faster turnover. The only problem was we lost our leg extension and did not drive down. We got the shuffle part down perfectly and North Americans in general became a herd of shufflers. This is one area I'm really going to tackle from now on with all our runners. "STOP THE SHUFFLE". Maybe I'll even get t-shirts made as a reminder. If you want to learn to run fast than you are going to have to make some changes in your running habits.

The first drill I learned and talked about in previous editions of the Coaches' Couch was the "step-over-drive-down" technique by sprint coach, Latif Thomas. Harold divides it up into various other drills. One is called "ankle blocking" and the other is the "knee block". The ankle block consists of driving the knee forward and consciously driving down. I say consciously because most distance runners spend too much time in the air and run more with momentum than they do with purpose. The second drill, knee blocking, consists of driving the knee upward and again driving down under the hips in a kind of a running "C" motion. The main idea here (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is to move through a fuller and more controlled range of motion. These drills are performed by running, but we find it easier for people to grasp a new concept if we walk them through the motions first. This not only takes practice, but it also takes focus. Up until now most of our group has gone through the motions of running, but now we're asking them to concentrate on what they are doing and to do it with purpose. The end results will be faster and more coordinated running movement. The cool thing about this is that all you have to do is watch children run and they do all this stuff naturally. Sometimes it's easier to watch the Ocean Athletics Track kids run than it is to grasp the same concepts by watching Usain Bolt. The problem a lot of people have watching a world-class runner is that they immediately get defensive and say, "I can't do that." Well… actually you may not do it as fast, but you can certainly use a similar technique in your own style and get much faster than you are right now. As I said, somewhere along the way we picked up a whole bunch of bad habits and now we have to relearn the proper techniques.

We start each speed workout with a warm-up run followed by strides. I've tried my best to explain strides and demonstrated the benefits of increased overall flexibility when performed correctly. Very few people understand the importance of this part of their warm up. I say this openly because it doesn't matter what group it is, there are some habits which are simply universal. Some bad habits are nearly impossible to break. All a coach can only be patient. Because when they are ready, they will start asking all the questions you have answered several hundred times before. As a coach you can say things over and over, but until someone wants to learn, it is very difficult to teach and have them grasp the concept.

Our current season is almost over and although people are prepping mentally to race, it's also a good time to prepare you for the next season as well. This also helps keeping the race-nerves in check too. We've said that if you are racing at the end of April or early May, all the training is pretty much done. All you want to do is solidify the work that you've done by beginning to taper and not get injured by pushing harder. As we said, looking towards the next clinic is a good way to examine where you think you may need to improve. Right now everybody is in great shape but we're looking to take you to the next level of running fitness and faster times.

After a tough training season we often suggest a break away from running. But with the good weather and longer daylight ahead it's also a good time to train too. What we're suggesting this year during our maintenance period is to give people a choice of either easy maintenance runs or put the effort into a kind of a long distance runner's boot-camp to improve strength and speed. This will be a first but with the really positive results we've been seeing with all the people who do our Brazil and G.I. Workouts, it may be a good chance for everyone to give it a try before we go into the fall session starting June 12. The focus on these sessions will be proper drill technique, improved running form, and increased core strength. As this will be a maintenance period, we will do a little less running except on the weekend endurance runs. The other focus will be on bringing everyone back up to a solid base in preparation for the demands of the next Marathon and half Marathon clinic. I hope you will all join us for both sessions.

Have a great running week!

Russ and Lorne

Week 13 March 27-April 2

2010-03-29T06:20:00.001-07:00

I have never been one to try and keep up with what everyone else is doing as far as training goes. This doesn’t mean I haven’t tried a lot of methods or suggestions at one time or another. Sure, I have a huge running library, read the latest publications to get new ideas or combine new and old theories and have had several different coaches. But the plan has always been done in advance and has had a reason and a purpose behind it with always the same goal… run faster than I did before. The point is, unless you are coming up to a roadblock with your training or you feel you may be lacking some element in your training that keeps getting you injured on your current program, stick to the plan and don’t change anything until you have completed your event. After the season was over you can then think about what happened that year. Personally I would first review my races and see if the results were consistent and how they compared to previous times especially if they were run on the same course in the same weather conditions. The fatigue index “dot” graph played an important part so I could see at a glance how I was feeling and (good or bad) check out why? I would especially review the injury section of my journal and see if there was a pattern according to the types of workouts I was doing and see which injuries were persistent and what I did to solve them and if the exercises performed during rehabilitation were effective.

Most often the cause of issues was found with drills. I was rather lazy about them and it showed in my performances. If I was diligent about them and did them regularly, I noticed a greater improvement than if I just did them 6 weeks before my race. (Often let them go until about 6 weeks before my race and always wished I had started them earlier.) They also increased my recovery rate after races and after tough workouts when I may have been a tad over-zealous. If I didn’t do them at all I would notice little or no improvement even though I would be running more miles than the previous season. I also had little niggles after races such as lower back issues that seemed to take longer to heal. I never truly caught on that if my body was stronger all around, my running progression was greater and I would feel better. I also noticed more injury when I did not warm up enough or properly or was lacking in some form of core routine. This is why I’m rather militant about a proper warm-up and cool-down with and especially using good technique.

I’ve been trying to get people to warm-up longer especially before track workouts. This has been instrumental in getting the muscles somewhat more warmed up so that when strides are performed, the runners are not as tensed up. They start out slower and in a more relaxed manner and therefore get a more controlled and faster acceleration and get a more relaxed look to them as they are working up to “flying” mode. A long slow warm-up followed by strides almost fully prepares the runner for what he/she is about to ask of their body. Sometimes it is necessary for an individual to work on specific areas that need greater attention (such as hamstrings) and therefore some stretching is also required even after a good warm-up run. If strides are performed correctly, I have found lesser necessity to include stretching as part of the warm-up routine, but keep in mind, that’s an individual decision which may only work for me and not everyone else. The test is, if at the end of your workout you are beginning to get stiffer rather than looser, then you are most likely pushing the paces and straining (not training) and you are simply not quite prepared in the strength department to perform what was planned. There’s no shame in that. You first and foremost have to train at your pace and volume and not that of your neighbour.

As a coach you see many different people do to try and make the workout “easier” for themselves. The only problem with that is, easier usually means taking short-cuts. Short-cuts usually mean reducing the basics. It’s very rare that a music teacher gets kids who say, “Sorry Lorne, I didn’t get a chance to work on the piece you gave me last week. I spent most of my time working on scales, chords, drills, arpeggios and breathing exercises.” It just doesn’t happen. Generally the kids either don’t practice because they were “too busy” or they just played the songs they liked and called that practicing. The same goes for most runners. They want to get at the heart of the workout and run “fast”, but they neglect a good warm-up and cool-down. A couple of weeks later, after a particularly tough interval session or longer tempo run, they begin having difficulty with some little niggle that’s on the verge of becoming an issue. The point here is that the warm-up sets the tone for the workout. I can’t think of one time in over 45 years of running where I had a great warm-up and a lousy workout. I’ve had a few really flying warm-ups that lead into injury and couldn’t figure out why until Phil Ellis told me this year during a discussion on training. But generally if you have a bad warm-up, you should consider holding back a bit in your training. This is especially true as we head towards race day. This doesn’t mean “go hypochondriac” over every little niggle, but it does refer to listening to your body.

I briefly mentioned above that a great warm-up could be a precursor or indicator to a possible injury. I also used the word “flying” several times here too. Permit me to explain. There are some workouts that feel like you are faster than you have ever been before. You have true difficulty holding back and you are setting personal bests on intervals with the feeling of little effort. This is the time to go for an easy run. Physiologically I can’t explain it, but for some reason the body is working in over-drive. Many people can relate to one day having an abundance of energy first thing in the morning and they get more done than usual and work around the house at night and still have energy to stay up a little later than usual only to be sick the next day. What is that? Maybe you can tell me. This would certainly explain a few things. But the point here is to acknowledge that something within may be different. Either stick to the plan or go easy, but don’t neglect your warm-up. If the program says to do jog a mile and a half… don’t shorten it. If your cool-down is a mile and a half and you are part way through your workout and you are feeling a bit uncomfortable, it’s better to go into cool-down than it is to force your body into something it is just not ready for on the day.

Most of us in our running group are from around the same era … when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. We grew up in the “No pain, no gain” years and thought of pain as weakness and not a warning sign that we were pushing too hard. We were told if we were tired, we were just being lazy. One of the worst programs we run through our heads is that “More is better”. And we were programmed too well in most cases because this programming has lead to much frustration in a lot of different parts of our lives, but that’s another story.

From a coaching stance it’s difficult to erase pre-existent programming in athletes unless you are willing to spend tons of time with each and every individual. With a group our size with over 150 in the Half-Marathon/Marathon Program and another 100 people in the Learn-To-Run Programs, this would be full-time therapy sessions in some cases. All as we can do is present an idea (in this case a running schedule) and tell people if you stick to the plan, you will be successful. But, who do you trust? First and foremost you have to be in tune with yourself. Only you know and can feel what’s happening inside of you on all levels. Learn the signs of what your body is telling you and make sure to take notes and review them. You will start to see patterns and become more aware of, “If I do this… this happens”. Keeping a running journal of your training is very important. The more information in there, the easier it will be to track the conditions which lead to the best results.

One of my least favourite statements, “It works for me.” More time than not, “works” is pre-programming and comfort and has little to do with actual athletic improvement. Julius Ceasar said, “Know thyself.” I wonder what his marathon time was?

Have a great running week.

Russ and Lorne

Week 12 March 20-26

2010-03-20T12:56:00.001-07:00

Last Monday we had a beautiful workout down at the track. Spring is definitely here… the weather was perfect… the mosquitoes are out… there’s the wonderful smell of people doing speed work on the track… Does it get any better? Yes… it does. We topped it off with an old running drill that I got to tell you, if you can’t perfect this, you will probably always be slow.

Check out the dude in the picture to your left; Waldemar Cierpinski. This is in the final meters of his 1976 Montreal Olympic victory. He won gold in both the 1976 and in the 1980 Olympic Marathons. He has a personal best marathon time of 2:09:55 set in 1976 and now coaches his son. He switched to the marathon distance from the steeplechase event. The point to notice is he was fast at the shorter distances before moving up to the marathon. In North America we seem to “start” at the marathon distance and work down after we’ve beaten ourselves up too many times. Or we switch sports. Don’t get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for any discipline from running to digging holes (of which I’ve become very adept at). It’s just that I could never figure this one out. I wonder if some decide that, “Gosh the marathon takes a lot of time and really hard work. Maybe I’ll try something else.” That’s why we had earlier this year Olympic, Commonwealth, and Pan American Games coaches Paul Regensburg and Bjoern Ossenbrink come out and talk to the entire group about the dedication it takes to be on top.

This week though I’d like to talk about the “Step Over – Drive Down” principal. I shamelessly stole this brilliant concept from sprint coach Latif Thomas from his weekly running newsletter and used it on our marathon clinic runners. I saw what I’d have to say was miraculous improvement in 3 minutes or less with the people we worked with. Unbelievable? Yah… I would have thought so too. I also watched the Ocean Athletics track kids run. You don’t have to teach them… they do it naturally. It started to make me look at everybody and what I noticed was very exciting. The faster the runner, the more naturally they did this with every step. As I was coaching this, I asked some of our runners to watch our guys and girls vs. their (Ocean Athletics) guys and girls. We were slow. They were fast. They all did the “Step Over – Drive Down” and we do not. But, the most interesting thing was, the slower the runner, the less “Step Over – Drive Down” they did. After having our guys do the drill for their first time, the comment that sticks out the most was from Maggie… “I had more trouble slowing down to hit the paces. I was too fast.”

As I watched people run around the track, it didn’t matter if they were 10 years old or 60 years old, if they could do the Step Over – Drive Down” method, they were faster than everybody else. So, what are we doing? We “shuffle”. I guess we felt we could be just as fast with not as much effort. But look what happened; we became slower and slower. Not only did we become slow, we fell off the running map. Not since Jerome Drayton (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqmTqdNvpmA) who set the Canadian Marathon record in 1975 of 2:10:08 have we arguably had a better runner at the marathon distance. There’s a fabulous story about Jerome Drayton during one of his brilliant 3 Fukuoka Marathon wins in Japan where he ran a personal best time of 2:10:05 in severely rainy weather conditions. The men’s qualifying time for entry is 2:25:00. .

Also note the picture of his “Step Over – Drive Down” style of running. So, if the fastest people in the world do it “naturally”, why can’t we just simply learn it? First of all, somebody had to tell us about it. Secondly we have to drop the myth about “shuffling” being the long run answer. And thirdly, we have to re-learn how to run and that speed can be taught.

As coach Latif Thomas says, there’s a lot of coaches and people who will maybe try this and find it too difficult and give up right away. These are the same people who believe they will never be faster than they are right now and continue to do the same stuff just to prove it to themselves because (and I truly love this line), “It works for me.” (It cracks me up every time.)

So, how do you do a “step over – drive down”? When learning anything, it is easier to do if you can see it. Therefore, here’s the link. Go to http://www.completespeedtraining.com/sodd.html. Listen to the entire video. Oh, and just in case you’re asking yourself why I’m giving this great information away for free and not keeping it a secret? Simple; at Peninsula Runners we are all about running. It’s not about winning or who is fast and who is not.

Okay… did you see it? If you haven’t and just decided to read on, go back and watch it because none of this will make sense. I can wait…

After a really good warm-up and stretch (especially the quads) the first principal of the “Step Over – Drive Down” technique is to “crack the egg”. This means bring your heel up to kicking your butt as shown in the film. It’s very much like the “C” drill except it immediately goes into the “A” drill and then you drive your leg down. Try it first standing in one spot. Don’t loop your leg back to kick your butt so that you are leaning over from the waist. Bring it up from the ground so that you crack an invisible egg at the bottom of your butt cheek. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-SxTnqCmLA&feature=related. Note during the stills how high the heel is going. Think in terms that you had just landed barefoot on a hot coal because the quicker you can bring it up, the quicker and easier it is to drive your leg down. These are how all the sub-3:00 people run. Not just the winners. If you continue to shuffle like you have been previously taught, you will always be slow, slower and slowest. Guaranteed!

Try this at first from a standing position using the right or left leg only without moving forward. Once you’ve brought your leg up and cracked the egg, you have to continue to bring the knee up in order to bring your lower leg around in order to drive down so that your foot touches down almost under your hips in the same way you would normally land when you are running. Focus on getting this to be more of a fluid motion. It helps to visualize the motion before actually doing it and also to have thoroughly stretched (not over stretched) the quads before doing this. There may be no scientific proof that stretching helps improve your running but certainly a greater range of motion for most people does help. If you are stiff, you cannot get a full range of motion and you certainly can’t “crack the egg”. Continue from a standing position to work both sides before attempting to do this in a running style like in the first video. Once you feel comfortable and confident with it, try it every fourth or sixth step while jogging. Just work one leg at a time. We used the width of the soccer field going in one direction with one leg and then switched on the return. Try this as part of your warm-up routine before your track sessions and you will see a vast improvement.

If you still don’t believe it… then while you are down at the track, watch every fast runner and you will see the same thing… dozens of eggs being cracked! It adds new meaning to the old TV ad… “GET CRACKIN’!” Oh… and just in case you are wondering about my happiness about those pesky little mosquitoes…they made sure nobody was standing around stiffening up between intervals. Bless them little critters!

Have a great running week and don’t forget about the FRIDAY NIGHT MILE.

Russ and Lorne

Week 11 March 13-19

2010-03-15T06:01:00.001-07:00

So, what’s the next panacea in running shoe technology? Which shoe is going to take you across the finish line faster and feeling better than any other on the planet? Well… if BROOKS had their way it would be them. Check out this funny film clip that certainly caught my attention: http://www.brooksdna.com/. Once you’ve seen that, check out the more scientific one they did here: http://www.brooksrunning.com/Technology/. I’ve been in the running shoe industry since September 09/1980 and this has to be one of the most innovative cushioning systems I’ve ever seen. This however does not mean that the shoe is going to be comfortable for you. It does not take overall foot shape and especially heel fit or width into consideration. After all, the shape of the shoe can change the function of the foot. Also, it appears this is only used in their neutral model (for now), therefore if you over-pronate and are not using an orthotic, the “GLYCERIN 8” may not provide enough stability for you. Despite all its boasts in technology and how great the system sounds, you just might find the rest of it to be uncomfortable. But in all, I must admit, I want to try it and that’s truly a first for me; I’m such a sceptic.

This does lead me to some of the other questions I have where the medical industry and actual consumer benefit clashes. Let’s face it, if the medical industry did not generate huge profits there would be no research and development and we’d all be taking traditional herbs, naturopathic tinctures and voodoo-like concoctions whenever something out of the ordinary happens. We’d probably have an underground medical system for profit. With the exception of the very few who are really interested in healing humanity, but have little or no scientific education. We’re in that “damned if you do…” position. Don’t get me wrong… It’s not that I’m against the medical profession. When I ran somewhat competitively, I had 11 different specialists I would see depending upon the problem. I love my family physician. Whenever I had a problem, he’d say, “Who do you want to see?” That was customer service definitely in my best interests. Sometimes he would disagree and tell me why he felt that way and we had a good rapport. When it came to prescriptions, we would discuss the latest product to come across his desk from the pharmaceutical companies. In other words, he was honest and forthright and that’s the way it should be. You didn’t have to worry about half-truths and innuendoes which invade this industry and every other.

Sell. Sell. Sell. Sure, there are a zillion products out there and one million plus snake-oil salesmen trying to get you to buy into something you don’t need, but should really try. There’s another new catch around every corner that wants to appeal to your senses to trust and believe that they are only out for your best interest. Even the most cynical person has to admit that under the entire charade there is still an element of truth. The key is to not fix what isn’t broken and don’t jump too quickly into the “hype”. Especially when it comes to running. We all want to be fitter, faster and don’t want to work very hard in order to get there and most of all… we want it NOW!

In the hit movie “WHAT ABOUT BOB?” Dr. Leo Marvin talked about his “ground-breaking” book called “BABY STEPS”. The premise was that you shouldn’t try to change everything at once. It means setting small, reasonable goals for yourself. One session at a time, one tiny step at a time -- doable, accomplishable goals. In our weekly newsletter I also include some different styles of tunes to run with if you are of the iPod generation. There’s an ulterior motive for this as well. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a runner, musician, artist, electrician or whatever skill you take up; it can’t be done in a short period of time, nor can you expect leaps and bounds in performance in a short period of time. The best thing you can do is set small and achievable goals with a short term plan and another plan over a longer period of time. Then you systematically chip away at it adding whatever you think you may need to achieve it. That’s what being on a running program is all about. Other than having a plan, you are simply running and not training.

So, what’s the next panacea in running shoes, clothing or nutrition? No matter what it is, you still have to run and better still… you had better have a plan because by simply running, it’s only going to take you so far. It isn’t in the shoes, although they can help. It isn’t in the clothes you wear, although they help a little too. And, the right food will help you go longer. There are benefits too in having a good running sports watch, but all that doesn’t mean a thing unless you have trained well and have stayed injury free.

Have a great running week!

Russ & Lorne

Week 10 March 6-12

2010-03-07T06:59:00.001-08:00

There still seems to be this “thing” a lot of new and even veteran runners don’t get. It’s really simple. Even if you are only able to run 3 times per week, you should still stay in your training zone. For long distance runners, running fast all the time does not make you a faster runner. Just ask some of our veteran runners. What it will do, eventually, is get you injured. We realize it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the moment. We realize that for most workouts the novice runner does not prepare. Even some veteran runners in our group have been heard to ask, “What are we doing tonight?” The only time most people take running seriously is the last couple of weeks just before their race and after all is said and done. I suppose that’s okay because this is supposed to be fun and relaxing. We don’t have anyone here making money from running unless Las Vegas is taking bets on the winner of a particular event. Some people feel it’s “wasting time” by running slow. We ask them, “If this (running fast all the time) doesn’t work for anyone else on the planet, why will it work for you?” If running tables like McMillan, Runner’s World, Running Times, and every other study and periodical suggest slowing down, especially for the long runs, why then on a Saturday long run do I still see some people coming in all out of breath and sweating profusely? It’s not only on the long runs do we see this as a problem (and I know it’s universal). During the week we provide information where to find your paces for each workout. But most people just want to follow their friends and when race day comes… they get disillusioned. They ask in amazement, “Why didn’t I get the time I trained for?” It’s really simple. The result on the day is the time you trained for. In some cases, it’s the time you “over trained” for. Just because you train at a certain pace, this does not give you the guarantee that you will get that time unless you were in your training zone and not someone else’s. If you are continually pushing your limits during all your training runs, you will never give your body a chance to recover properly. “Properly” doesn’t only mean in the way you feel. It also includes the proteins and nutrients that are deep into the muscles. These also have to be replaced. If you are continually using them up, they cannot be fully replaced between workouts and you no longer get the benefits of training because you are always in the state of recovery. The best way to tell is keeping a journal with a “Fatigue Index” and to make note of your paces that you are able to make, the times, and quantity of each workout.

We are, like all running groups and clinics, experiencing a few people who try to push through pain or worse mask it in order to keep up with the program instead of backing off a bit. Well, relax… this is running. It’s a lifetime activity. One clinic of 18 weeks is not a lifetime of running. It’s better to be able to run a little and be pain-free than to not run at all because of injury. This is especially true if you could have done something about it earlier. You can get rid of the little aches by resting now or you can take a few months off because of a debilitating injury. Remember, pain is not a normal state to be in. If you have to change your running style in order to make it through the workout than you are doing too much and its time to back off. Also, “Advil” is not a cure. It masks pain. It does not heal you. Rest does. If you have to continuously take pain relief medication to get through all of your workouts, you probably have issues other than running that need to be addressed. Some people say they are “addicted” to running. Well, addiction is still addiction and it’s not necessarily a good thing.

I’ve said before that I am not a medical professional and any more said on the subject could do more harm than good, so I’ll end it here by saying pain is there to tell you something is wrong. If it goes away before the next workout then it’s probably not a problem. If it continues into the next day, it’s time to take a couple of days off and either rest completely or run easy. My personal experience is that generally injuries don’t happen at the moment of pain but can be traced to 3 weeks back in your journal where you had written you had one of your best workouts “ever”. It’s usually followed by that you had pushed the pace on the last few intervals or you did a tempo at the end of your really long run and it felt okay. Any time you push the pace outside of your training zone for a specific workout, it’s called “racing”. If you race, you need time out to recover afterwards. As a precaution, for all those “gung-ho” runners out there, we are going to suggest that anytime you have stepped outside your training zone (and into the racing zone), you should seriously consider forfeiting the next speed workout or shorten your long run because you were not training, but rather raced your workout and it will be in your best interests to back off. If you are training out of your zone most of the time, you will eventually get injured. They all do. This will not help your performance in the end. It will detract from it. If you do only one hard speed workout a week and have trained outside your zone, do not expect the same performance as if you were able to get in 2 speed workouts at the correct paces. It isn’t going to happen.

If all of that said doesn’t work, consider this: You joined a running club or clinic to be not only with a group of people who enjoy the same activity, but to learn how to run or how to run more. As coaches and group leaders we really do want to see you get stronger and faster and accomplish not only your current goals, but your future goals as well. So, why not take the advice that you not only came for, but also paid for? It really makes sense and it works too.

To your running success…

Russ & Lorne

Week 9 February 27-March 5

2010-02-26T07:41:00.001-08:00

And Russ said, ”What… no Coaches’ Couch this week?”

It’s been a busy one with the Olympics and life. We should all get a gold metal for surviving the last 2 weeks. I haven’t watched this much hockey in 10 years. It’s been great! Canada’s “Own The Podium” attitude has been rather successful on an individual and team scale.

But… what about the rest of us? What commitment are we willing to sacrifice to do our best… and can we? And, should we? Maybe we are already doing our best. Our individual best is after all… ours!

Just because some little guy can run a marathon faster than I’ll be ever able to run one of his miles again doesn’t take away from the fact that I do my best with the time I have to put into it. Given a scale that could measure the level of input of physical, mental, spiritual and general life qualities (family, friends, work, other stuff); there would be a TON of world record holders out there. From the fastest half-marathoner cabbie with a wife, two kids, mortgage over 100K and going to med school during the day to the master’s marathoner single working mother with one teenage child in rehab while looking after her baby too category. Come on… there are so many different and truly awesome stories out there. All these people try to find time to run too. Most of these people are not running for anything but some kind of personal “glory”. It’s not about the competition. It’s about surviving another day.

We pick the occasional races to do something a bit different, or to get away. But the idea of training to win doesn’t fit into the schedule. I listened to what some of the National team members were going to do after the Games. One said (at 30) she’s going back to school to finish her degree. I wish her all the success in the world. It will take a super-human gold medal effort to do it if you don’t have a good support system behind you. I’ve known other people who tried or are trying to go back to school. They are succeeding but the pressures from family and friends to “give it up” and “get a job” are great. Sometimes, all’s it takes is that one person to stand behind them and say, “I believe in you” and it keeps them going when it seems like all the odds are against you. So… if you really want to do it (whatever “it” is), you are probably going to have to make some more sacrifices.

Waldemar Cierpinski 1980

So, the big question is, do you have room to move? In our case, do you have more time to put into your running? If you don’t… that’s okay. Everybody wishes they could do the stuff they wanted to all day, but that’s not the real world. We generally all have other commitments. We can alter the running program to maximize the effort to gain the most success - for a couple of years. There are a lot of successful programs out there based on limited mileages. But eventually, if you want to get to the next step, you have to put in more time on the road. I was reading a recent interview with former Olympic Marathon Champion Waldemar Cierpinski talking about his son. He was saying his son who is currently at 2:13 has to get up into the 250KM per week range if he wants to compete against the African marathon runners. I guess his son doesn’t work in a sawmill or deliver mail. All I’m saying is we have to put things in perspective too.

I look at my runners. With what they do… with all their family and social commitments… they are champions. It’s really great to see. Sure it may be kind of cool to watch somebody win a race. But even more impressive to me are the people who have the day job, the spouse and kids, the mortgage, and paying off the mini-van too - and my hat’s off to them! When they come across the line they are making a statement to me. They made a sacrifice to be away from home just to train to be able to run ‘their’ race. That’s a huge accomplishment. I like races where everyone gets a medal because they all really do deserve it.

There will always be that little thing in all of us that no matter how impossible it might seem given our busy lives; we want to be better. The “what if I…?” scenario. That takes planning. Here’s the thing about a plan… once you start it, you have to see it through to the end. Don’t start changing things mid-stream. In the beginning you chose a certain path and to change now, will change the outcome of the event you were training for at the beginning. We’re not talking about making adjustments like slight changes in training paces or modifying stretching routines to address issues. You shouldn’t be making significant changes like huge jumps in weekly mileage or pace, or swapping certain workouts for others or adding other sports suddenly. You can however test yourself to see if the program is working. There should be some ‘testing’ built into your program. If not… you may just have to put something in that doesn’t interfere with what you are doing. This was one of the reasons we (Peninsula Runners) started the FRIDAY NIGHT MILE series. A one-mile race can give you a ton of information as to where you are right now and what you have to do to either stay on track or to get back on it. Plus the distance is so short; you should practically recover over night. The big thing here though is planning and making sure you are on track.

You have to have a good idea of what your current conditioning is. You have to know which workouts are the most important for you for improvement. It takes a plan. First of all you may want to consider keeping a journal if you don’t already have one. If you can graph your workouts, this is even better. Graphing can show you the entire year instead of a one-day at a time journal. You may also want to keep track of your morning pulse-rate and weight for any indications of over-training. An increase in heart rate and decrease in body-weight at the same time could be a signal of over-training. You should have had some kind of recent race at the beginning of the clinic and an idea of where you would like to be at the end. Since most of our group is at the middle of their program, there should be a short race about now to see if you are on track. From the results, you can see what needs to be done if anything other than staying on the program.

This may seem contradictory. First we say stay on the program and then we say make changes if need be. Let me explain. In this case I am more interested in making sure people are training at the right paces. If you do a race and find you are not anywhere near your goal, then you will have to adjust your training paces accordingly. It is very rare that we would tell an athlete that he or she has to pick it up a bit. In fact, it never happens. However, telling someone to slow down is constant. This is why we have training races and I especially am going to encourage people to come out and try the FRIDAY NIGHT MILE. This may seem like a gratuitous “plug”, but it’s only a dollar entry fee, so it’s not about the money.

Let’s say you wanted to run a 3:50 marathon and your previous best was 4:03. According to the McMillan calculator, your previous best mile would have been around 7:11 (not the store chain). In order to run a 3:50, you should be around 6:48. That’s a 23 second difference. That’s not impossible but it will obviously take some effort. Since we are half way into the program that means if we divide 23 by 2 you should be somewhere around 11-seconds faster. Using the McMillan calculator, eleven seconds would currently put you in 3:56 shape. Let’s say you do a couple of the miles and you are around 7:03. This would mean you are currently in 3:58 shape and therefore on pace for a 3:53. Now, according to McMillan your long runs at 3:50 should be around 10:17 at the bottom end. We are trying to get people to slow them down another 30-seconds to 10:47. At a 3:53 marathon, the long runs should be about 7-seconds slower. I believe there is enough data there to warrant an alteration, but what if the time was like 7:06? It’s still an improvement, but take a look at the results. It looks like instead of a 3:50 finish; the runner is more likely to be looking at about a 3:57. At 3:57 the long run pace should be around 11:03. Which means he or she has been training almost 1-minute faster than what they are capable of doing. That’s significant. It means not only the long run pace has to be adjusted, but also the entire interval, tempo and steady state run paces have to changed too or the athlete is most likely to get injured.

Here’s the kicker… this little demonstration was based on all things considered equal. Well… it’s not. Generally your first 9 weeks are your most progressive and now it’s a bit harder to get the rest off. Therefore, you actually should have been one to three seconds faster on your mile time at the half way because it gets harder to take more time off as you reach your peak. But, hopefully shows you the value of knowing where you are at least at the beginning middle and at the end.

Have a great running week and think “MILE”.

Russ and Lorne

Week 8 February 20-26

2010-02-19T17:49:00.001-08:00

A lot of new runners logically figure that their program has to have some kind of balance between endurance, strength and speed. They do their weekend long run followed by a couple of speed workouts and weekly recovery runs and PRESTO! They have the winning formula. Well, all that work and design was only half the story because you can only truly work on one element well at a time. By element I’m referring to endurance, strength or speed. To challenge all 3 of these systems at the same time is to invite trouble. Usually this is in the form of over training or injury because while one element is recovering, another can be utilized but not to the point where you are recovering from everything at once. Now… don’t get me wrong, you can have all three elements in any program, but the intensity has to be adjusted according to the athlete’s fitness and for whichever element is being focused on at the time. This gave rise to the periodization form of training. Even the title should raise someone’s suspicion. It generally means that within a short 4 – 6 month period you are going to target all 3 basic elements and come out at the end some kind of super-star. Where this program is most successful is for elite level athletes in an educational setting because they are dictated by the competitive season. Hopefully the one thing you will learn about athletic achievement is that it can’t be done in 4 – 6 months. It takes years. Granted there are (as in music) “prodigies”, but they are very few and don’t last long at a competitive level. We have found over the years that periodization programs have caused more running injuries due to their short-term intensity and focus.

Our programs are divided up mainly into 101 through 401. The emphasis in 101 is what we call the “critical” stuff. The main purpose of this program is to build endurance and also to introduce strength. Because endurance is the major element, the focus is on slowly building up the long runs especially for the people who do not have an endurance background. We want to gradually build up the long run to the point where your longest run (22-miles in the marathon program) will take approximately the same amount of time as your marathon. We feel that most people do their long runs way too fast and never feel what it’s like to be out there for the same amount of time their race should take. We feel this is the main reason for a lot of late-stage marathon discomfort.

We encourage our runners to slow down their long runs. We call it “Slowing Down To Get Faster” and it works. As a runner progresses through our various programs (201 – 401), they will be adding on more endurance. Through training consistently and remaining uninjured we develop a type of exercise adaptation through muscle memory, if you will, that allows the program to add on more frequent longer runs and actually divert the focus to another running element. So, while you are adding on a few more miles to your weekly average through the long runs, your focus will mainly be in the following session on strength. As we mentioned, in the 101 Program, it also introduced strength. The strength is introduced in the form of learning proper running technique through various drills and exercises. In the following programs these are expanded upon and the volume of speed work is increased in the form of bulk endurance intervals. However, after 2 ½ years of people doing the program, we have yet to introduce “pure” speed work. Speed work has been defined as repeat intervals of under 50-meters or less at 90% effort with long recoveries. We may never get to that point. It depends upon the progression of the athletes. For now…. everyone on the program continues to develop at a satisfactory level. The key is to think “long term”.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have a goal or target you’d like to hit at the end of your program. You just have to be aware of what it will take to get there and what targets you need to hit along the way. Sometimes you have to work backwards in order to get ahead. Sometimes too, by working backwards you can see if your goal is still realistic. I have explained all this in previous newsletters, but sometimes another person can say it in such a way that makes it more understandable. Because goal setting is such an important part of the reason a lot of people are training, I will insert a copy of the newsletter from the International Youth Conditioning Association I received the other day from Brian Grosso.

GOAL SETTING

The whole crux of this system is reversing the direction of obtaining your goals.

That is, reversing the direction that most of us try to travel.

Rather than creating a goal and then establishing an objective or task list that moves forward, start with the end in mind and travel backwards. Establish your goal and assign it a 'due date'.

Next, itemize where you need to be in production of that goal by one month previous to its end point. Then, do the same for one month previous to that. Keep traveling backwards until you end at your current day.

What you will have established is a literal path that takes you from where you are to where you want to be in a successive manner. The key is to understand where you have to be in one month in order to obtain your goal by the target date you initially set forth.

This 'backwards chaining model' allows you to create those markers quite easily and removes the burden of developing a giant 'to do' list without cause or reason for how or when each of the separate tasks will be completed.

This is worked for me in business, in my personal life and for hundreds of my young athletes who were working towards performance goals.

Brian Grosso

As I said in previous newsletters; most people train for a specific race. But running for many of us is a life-long activity we wish to enjoy. The purpose of training is to train more and the results of training more should be improved conditioning and performance. However, if there is a specific target you wish to do within a short period of time, then you require a “map” on how to get there. This takes a little planning. So often we hear people say, “I’m going to run a Boston qualifier this year.” When we ask them how they intend on preparing for it… the answer eludes some. So, we sometimes just smile and say, “Good luck.” It’s great to have a dream. I received one of those “buy this,” emails the other day. It contained a little story that I’d like to share:

Lorne,

I was in Tampa last month, for some business meetings (kinda fun) and the usual "in your 20's" late-night debauchery (always fun and no, I'm not telling :-)

Between meetings and a killer visit to a massive Powerhouse Gym in Tampa, I found time to take a cab out to St. Pete to see Pro Strongman and occasional partner in crime, Elliott Hulse.

Cruising down I-275 with the windows down and the sun shining, I started talking to the driver.

A middle-aged and pretty humble guy, he had a slight accent on him.

"Where are you from man? That's an accent I haven't heard."

"I'm from Morocco...born and raised there. I just moved out here a year and a half ago."

After a brief laugh about my last name being pronounced the same as his homeland, he started telling me about his recent move to the US.

He told me that back home, he was a successful engineer. He had a nice car and a nicer house. He spent weekends traveling the countryside and partying on the beaches with some of the most beautiful women in the world...it all sounded like a damn good life to me, so... why would he leave?

"My younger brother had always dreamt of being a doctor, ever since he was 3 feet tall. And one day about 2 years ago, we got a letter from a school in America that was offering my brother the opportunity to study medicine and they were willing to pay for some of it too.

We had known lots of people from our area who had come to the US with promises from American schools that sounded too good to be true...like it was exactly what they wanted, only to find out that what they were promised turned out to be nothing but hype.

Even worse, they had spent a lot of money... money that they would never get back.

So my brother was naturally weary of this letter and this opportunity, but I reasoned him, "No. This is your dream, this is what you want...if you live your life ignoring and avoiding things that sound too good to be true, than you're going to end up living the exact boring and predictable life you DON'T want...you'll just end up dying 5 miles away from where you were born like everyone else here...".

Within a month, we were on a plane together to the USA. And now, a year and a half later, my little brother is loving life and moves a step closer to becoming a doctor every single day.

I knew moving would be a major change for my own life, but I learned from a young age as a little boy in Morocco that if we live our lives sceptical of the things that sound "too good to be true", we end up never taking any chances or experiencing any of the incredible things life has to share."

< Mental applause from me in the back seat >

I’m always trying to find analogies to get the point across that running takes time. Some people say that they have been running for years but they can’t seem to get any better. When we look at their program, we start to see where things can be improved. Let’s take a look at an activity that we are all familiar with but never realized the big picture and maybe this “time” thing will make sense… at least it worked for me. Let’s look at the world of push-ups. Why push-ups? Because it’s an activity most people know how to do, but aren’t very good at. They also know they need a minimum amount of upper body strength and that it takes time to develop it. If you regularly do push ups, then you may appreciate the accomplishments of other people.

WORLD PUSH-UPS RECORDS

non-stop: 10,507; Minoru Yoshida (JAP), Oct 1980 DETAILS
one year: 1,500,230; Paddy Doyle (GBR), Oct 1988 - Oct 1989
24 hours: 46,001; Charles Servizio (USA), 24/25 April 1993 at Hesperia
(new record claim, not yet verified: Jeffrey Warrick (USA), 46300)
1 hour: 3,877; Bijender Singh (IND), 20 Sept 1988 DETAILS AND NATIONAL RECORDS
30 minutes: 2,354; Rolf Heck (GER), 13 Nov 2000
10 minutes (women): 450; Alicia Weber (USA), 24 May 2009 at Clermont, Florida, USA
5 minutes: 441; Giuseppe Cusano (GBR), Loftus Road Soccer Stadium at the Fulham v. Portsmouth game on 24 Nov 2003
3 minutes (women): 190; Renata Hamplová (TCH), Record Festival Pelhrimov 1995
one minute: Record claims up to 199 in one minute have been made. We do, however, not continue to publish these record claims, because it became impossible to judge about the correctness of the exercises at this speed.
one-armed, one week (168 hours): 16,723; Paddy Doyle (GBR), Feb 1996 in Birmingham
one-armed, 5 hours: 8,794; Paddy Doyle (GBR), 12 Feb 1996 in Birmingham
one-armed, 1 hour: 2521; Paddy Doyle (GBR), 12 Feb 1990 in Birmingham
one-armed, 30 minutes: 1382; Doug Pruden (CAN), 30 July 2003 at the Body Quest Health Club Edmonton
one-armed, 10 minutes: 546; Doug Pruden (CAN), 30 July 2003 at the Body Quest Health Club Edmonton
one-armed, on back of hands, one hour: 677; Doug Pruden (CAN) at the Body Quest Health Club Edmonton, 9 Nov 2005
one-handed handstand pushups: Yury Tikhonovich (Russia) did twelve pushups while standing on one hand in June 2006 at the Starclub variete in Kassel (Germany). He repeats this feat almost every day in the rehearsal for his show VIDEO (AVI, 1.3 MB)
on fists: 5557 (in 3:02:30 hours), Doug Pruden (CAN), 9 July 2004, Body Quest Health Club Edmonton
1000 pushups on fists: 18:13 minutes, Doug Pruden (CAN), 9 July 2003 at the Body Quest Health Club Edmonton
on back of hands, 15 minutes: 627; Paddy Doyle (GBR), 8 November 2007, Stamina's Boxing Self Defence Gym, Erdington, Birmingham RECORD HISTORY
on back of hands, 30 minutes: 1386; Paddy Doyle (GBR), 8 November 2007, Stamina's Boxing Self Defence Gym, Erdington, Birmingham RECORD HISTORY
on back of hands, 1 hour: 1940; Paddy Doyle (GBR), 8 November 2007, Stamina's Boxing Self Defence Gym, Erdington, Birmingham RECORD HISTORY
finger-tips, 5 hours: 8,200; Terry Cole (GBR), 11 May 1996 in Walthamstow
one finger: 124 Paul Lynch (GBR), 21 April 1992 in London
100 push-ups with feet at a 80 cm [2 ft 7 ¹/₂ in] high table: 45.7 sec; Roy Berger (CAN), 24 Feb 2001 in Ottawa
with a 50 lb [22.68 kg] plate weight on his back: 4,100: Paddy Doyle (GBR), 28 May 1987 in Birmingham
with hands on raw eggs: 112; Johann Schneider (AUT) / a video can be downloaded here as Quicktime video (1.2 MB) or AVI video (1.4 MB)
while balancing on three medicine balls (diameter: 24 cm), 1 minute: 61: Stephan Kristian (GBR) on 13 July 2008 at the Fitness First Health Club in Telford
4 hr relay (team of 10): 14907; Gatwick Airport Fire Service (Andrew Horstead, Clwyd Jones, Stuart Coxhill, Steven Bartlett, Jerramy Davison, Darryl Graham, Albert Lawson, Luke Philpott, Darren Hollman, Ian Mclean, Great Britain) at 18 November 2005 at Gatwick Airport

Each one of these people started with attempting one repeat. It took years to get to each one of these records. It wasn’t accomplished in 4 – 6 months like all the quick “personal best” programs out there promise. Each one of us is going to progress at a different rate. Some may be quicker than others for many reasons other than athletic ability. Consistency will be the key for everybody. We can appreciate life gets in the way, and that’s okay too. It just means its going to take a little longer and that’s okay too because you have a whole life ahead of you; even if you are over sixty when you started running. This again doesn’t mean you cannot have interim goals, but you have to look at the date of what you are training for, the amount of time you have and your current physical condition.

REVISITING GOALS

JUNE 12		JULY 17		AUG. 14		SEPT. 12		OCT. 10
Current Time	Current 5KM Equiv.	¼ Way	Current 5KM Equiv.	Half Way	Current 5KM Equiv.	¾ way	Current 5KM Equiv.	Goal Time
4:00:00	24:37	3:45:00	23:05 (-1:32)	3:30:00	21:32 (-3:05)	3:15:00	20:00 (-4:37)	3:00
4:00:00	24:37	3:56:15	24:14 (-0:23)	3:52:30	23:51 (-0:46)	3:48:45	23:28 (-1:09)	3:45
4:00:00	24:37	3:55:00	24:06 (-0:31)	3:50:00	23:36 (-1:01)	3:45:00	23:05 (-1:32)	3:40

You may ask why we chose this time to talk about this subject. Quite simply, no matter what we say, you are still in control of your goals. It doesn’t matter what we say, you are still going to do what you think is best. Most runners realize as they age they are going to get slower so they have to run smarter to make up for it. All we can do is arm you with enough information so that you know you are making the right decisions and not getting injured. At least… that’s the plan.

In the above example we see our first case scenario wanting to go from a 4-hour marathon to a 3-hour marathon in a typical 18-week program. We chose the 5KM distance and times to test fitness because it is rather a short distance to race and will not take away from training. Remember too, the more you race, the more time you need to recover, and the less time you have for training. I’d strongly encourage the 1-mile distance used as a time-trial because it is even shorter, just as accurate during the conversion, and recovery would be within a couple of days at the most. You can go to the McMillan Running Tables at http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm and study the approximate race equivalent times for all race distances according to your current physical condition as you progress through your program. We also mentioned the 1-mile time trial because Peninsula Runners conveniently hosts the FRIDAY NIGHT MILE SERIES which begins March 5 and runs 40 times until November 26. It’s held at 7:00 PM at the South Surrey Track. More details and registration information can be found on the Peninsula Runners web site.

You will see that in the second and third example that the 5KM equivalent times are challenging enough in order to reduce your marathon time by 15 – 20 minutes without having to reduce your 5Km time to 18:28 or by over 6-minutes! I’m sure this looks good on paper, but the reality of it happening is practically zero. Yet, people without a plan, start off with this in mind and if they can’t hit it, they get discouraged and quit. We’re not advocating stopping. What we are saying is you may have to readjust your goal and the sooner you can do it, the better it will be for you.

Racing isn’t the only way to tell if you are on track to meeting your goal. Are your interval times during training on pace? How do you feel after your long run? When you do your steady state and tempo runs, do you feel okay or thrashed at the end? The next day after a speed workout do you feel good, or do you still feel residuals? Are you going into your interval workouts feeling fresh and recovered after a day or two off? If you answered negatively to any of these questions, then you may want to talk to your Coach to discuss what’s happening. You cannot build a program on fatigue and you can’t keep pushing through your workouts ---> you will get injured.

Always remember that running is supposed to make you feel good and not hurt.

Have a great running week!

Russ & Lorne

Week 7 February 13-19

2010-02-14T09:42:00.001-08:00

Sports Science Update: Run Less To Run Younger?

by Matt Fitzgerald

February 11, 2010

Masters running phenom Kathryn Martin.

Photo: Photo Run.

A new study helps explain why late starters become the fastest older runners.

In Lore of Running, Tim Noakes makes the interesting observation that most of the best runners over age 45 are late starters. Your typical age-group record setter in the older masters divisions only started running in his or her late 20’s or early 30’s. A classic example of this phenomenon is Kathryn Martin, who started running at 30 and then rewrote the U.S. record book in the 50-54 and 55-59 age groups (she turns 60 this year and will undoubtedly set a new batch of records).

Runners who were the best in the world in their 20’s and who keep competing past middle-age are almost never the best in the world in the older age groups. Most are still very good, of course, but they slow down precipitously after age 45 and are eclipsed by later starters like Martin. Bill Rodgers was one of the fastest marathon runners in the world in his prime, but he says that between his 50^th and 60^th birthdays his 10K time slowed by a staggering 10 minutes. Now 62, Rodgers is decidedly not among the fastest 60-plus runners in America.

Tim Noakes speculates that long-term high-mileage training causes the muscles and tendons to lose elasticity. After a certain degenerative tipping point is passed, the legs can no longer capture and reuse as much “free energy” from ground impact and consequently running economy goes down the tubes. It’s not that high-mileage running is inherently bad. Up to a point it is not only good but even downright necessary for performance optimization. All training has both positive and negative physiological effects. It’s the balance that’s important. High-mileage training appears to create a very positive net balance of physiological adaptations for a while, but there comes a point when the positive effects diminish while the negative effects accumulate, and that may be why elite runners slow way down after 45.

A new study by Noakes’ colleagues at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, provides some insight into the nature of this phenomenon. Scientists often measure the length of DNA strands in cells to assess physiological age. Time and stress cause our DNA to progressively shorten. The Cape Town researchers measured the length of DNA strands extracted from the calf muscles of a bunch of experienced runners with an average age of 42 and from a group of sedentary controls with an average age of 39. They found no difference between the two groups, suggesting that years of running had not made the runners’ calf muscle cells physiologically older than those of non-runners. However, there was a significant inverse correlation between running experience and volume and DNA length. In other words, within the group of experienced middle-aged runners, those who had the fewest miles in their legs had the “youngest” DNA.

The practical implications of this study are unclear. I do not take it to suggest that young competitive runners should limit their mileage for the sake of running better when they are older, because doing so would likely make them worse now. Elite running coach Brad Hudson advises runners to transition from a high-mileage approach to a low-mileage cross-training approach when they hit their mid-30s. This makes sense to me, because it gives runners the opportunity to enjoy the full benefits of high mileage and the opportunity to make a speed-preserving change before the costs of high-mileage training really add up.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

I’m going to take the controversial side and say they are way off base here. I’ll use my running history as a prime example as to why this is just not true. I feel this does more harm to the sport than provide informative journalism. The harmful part is that it seems to say the longer you run, the slower you get. We already know that if you do the same thing you get the same results and if you don’t use it… you lose it. Most long time runners do not do anything different than they’ve done for years. I’m guilty of that. When I ran competitively, I was not willing to start all over again. My ego would not allow it. Instead people continue to do the same old stuff, even now, because “it works for them” and they either stay the same or gradually get worse. But runners can keep getting better, regardless of age if they focus on the “elements of running”, rather than simply running; and that’s our clinic’s very successful approach.

I had spaces in my running career where I just ran but didn’t train or race. When I eventually did get back to competitive training to race (well into my forties), I was faster than in my early twenties. I believe there were several reasons for that success. After every racing season, you need time off to heal. Not only from a muscular point of view but nutritionally and, more importantly, your nervous system has to heal as well. The combination of hard training and competitive racing will eventually take its toll on the body and you will break down. That’s why I don’t like people racing often. That’s why I avoid putting races into the program or only ‘approve’ specific times and days a person “should” race and how fast they should be racing. In other words, most races should be training races and not personal best efforts. The other neglected area of older runners is strength. They believe that they can get all their strength from simply running and that isn’t the case. You have to do the drills. I’ll use one long time runner as an example who came out for less than 3 weeks in our clinic, got injured and we haven’t seen him since. I’ll call him “Amy” (not his real name).

Amy had run over 75 marathons in her career to date and is very much on the competitive side. She came to us because she heard of our running success and is not too far off the world record for her age group and wanted to achieve it in Boston within the next 2 years. She had a realistic long term plan with training races and time trials along the way to check her fitness. It was a lot more planned out than most people and I suggested she come into our 201 Marathon Program and begin by slowly building up her strength. She could easily do the 203 or 204 Program because of the number of days she was training. Up until now she had been doing all the same stuff that everybody else does in the way of long runs, tempo runs, track work and hills. But there was nothing there to support the muscles that were doing all the work. She had a strong foundation, but it was like a concrete block on water and it wasn’t about to float. You’d think I’d asked her to go to the “kiddies pool”. Her response was, “No way… I’m an experienced marathoner. I’ve been running for years. I want to do your 401 Program.” I’m not about to try and convince people of anything because it’s usually futile and a waste of time. When people make up their mind they are going to do something, they usually do it whether I say it’s in their best interest or not. I explained to him… I mean her… Amy that she was welcome to try it but, please, really tone it down. Because you are going to be using muscles that have not been engaged for quite some time. My theory is… and it’s been working… when people do a full body workout they are utilizing and re-newing old muscle tissue and is therefore continually re-making their body. Let’s take Jack Lelanne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne) for example. If you attempted the feats he did well into his 90’s, you’d die trying. But, I bet his DNA was that of a young person’s because he was continually rebuilding his muscles. Where he could have gained some greater longevity is from more cardiovascular work and breathing exercises, but that’s another story. As for the article… First of all, we’d have to know whose DNA cells were used. Were they elite runners or a “bunch” of runners who have been doing the same thing for years? If they are in the latter category, I can see where the problem begins and the reason why progress is either limited or eliminated.

One of the biggest problems with a lot of people is a return to old behavioural patterns before really thinking things out. They look at the start of their career and say, “I did this and it worked, therefore if I go back to doing it, it will work again.” As one coach said, “If I told you to run 10KM a day to improve your bench-press, it would… for a while”. The problem becomes that doing anything in the beginning will improve your fitness. It doesn’t mean it was the right thing or that it was a good thing. It was “a thing”. The unfortunate side effect of training is that when you make rapid gains in the beginning you tend to associate what you did with those gains. When your gains slow down, which they inevitably will, you tend to naturally think that what you did when you started out was the “best” way for you to train and often revert back to those same workouts. We say if you want to improve your running, you have to run. What we are saying now is that by simply running, it will only take you so far and then you will have to do something different in order to get to the next level. The question becomes, what do you do and in what order should you do it? Don’t worry… That’s my job. Here’s a brief outline on how to “start” to improve your running from the beginning.

1) Walking

2) Walk - run

3) Run

4) Run - flexibility

5) Run – flexibility – strength

6) Run – increased flexibility (example: Yoga) – strength – speed

7) Run – increased flexibility – sports specific strength – speed

8) Run – increased flexibility – sports specific strength – plyometric exercises – speed

9) Run – increased flexibility – sports specific strength – plyometric exercises – speed – coordination drills

I could continue to add to the list, but you should be able to see that most novice runners get stuck on #3. Some of the more advanced runners get stuck on a modified version of #6: Run – flexibility (depending upon age as to whether they do anything or not) – strength (in the form of hill repeats) – speed (tempos and half mile repeats only), but very few get past that because they continue to say that it worked in the beginning and they don’t want to change. Then they can’t understand why they aren’t getting any better. The end result is they accept they are too old to get any better. RUBBISH!

I know… you are looking at the above examples and saying, “I don’t have that kind of time to add all that stuff in order to improve”. Who said you have to do all what you are doing now plus all the stuff that’s gradually being added on? Some of the stuff we are currently doing will be replaced by other activities and therefore it will take the same amount of time. The problem is, you have to do it in gradual and logical stages as your body adapts to the new activities. This adaptation process takes time. Amy went from a modified version of #6, which she had been doing for years (because it “works” for her) and ramped it up to #7. We suggested #5 to lay down the foundation for our program (as we do for all “experienced” runners) and she could not accept it. She didn’t want to “start with the newbies”.

Our 101 Half-Marathon and Marathon Programs are more advanced in nature than most running programs but people. don’t take it as a “critical” foundation, they see it as “beginner”. That’s really too bad. Everyone has so much potential and age has nothing to do with it nor does the length of time you’ve been running. It has to do with the quality of the workouts and recovery. If you are in one of our programs, stay on it if you want to improve. You don’t have to add anything into it in order to improve because we will be adding to it at the appropriate time. If you are not in our program, then you have to figure out what is missing in your program that is going to get you to the next step of your career!

I did a lecture the other day for a Vancouver Sun Run Clinic. We all went for our run after the talk. I was chatting with someone I knew from 20 years ago who hasn’t been running, but wants to run a 10Km or even a half marathon. She said she wanted to run the 10km in at least 48 minutes, but she thought that was too ambitious. I said she should be able to run 38 minutes and she was shocked. I said if she actually trained, she would be more in the 36 range and she thought I was crazy. What I left out was the length of time that it would take to to get there. She still feels as competitive as ever from her University sprinting days, but feels she’s “too old” to get faster than her current physical condition. I said if that is what she truly believes then it’s probably true and she wouldn’t be able to do it. But when she wants to, come and see us.

To your running success…

Russ & Lorne

Week 6 February 6-12

2010-02-05T07:37:00.001-08:00

There’s an old saying,

"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel" by Carl W. Buechner.

At this point in the program, sometimes what we need most are a few reminders of what we should be doing and the purpose of working out. We occasionally forget because we’re either too busy or having too much fun to realize we could be moving in the wrong direction. So, for all those people who may need a little “kick in the pants” motivation… not in any particular order… here it is.

“Nobody ever won a training run.” I wrote this on the “white-board” before our weekend long run a couple of weeks back to make people think about their long run pace and to slow down. I should have also included it as a reminder during the week for the people who still believe they are going to get faster if they go outside of their training zone. It’s hard to remind oneself that you are working out for tomorrow and not today. This means always holding back just a little. You should be feeling really good after your workout and that you really could do some more at the same paces. If you are feeling like you are “red-lining” during every workout, and exhausted after every workout, that will eventually catch up to you and will become an injury. Then, like it or not, you are going to have to slow down and depending upon the severity, you may even have to stop completely for a while.

Recovery days are for recovery, and not for working out more just because you are feeling good. We’re still getting emails from people wanting to add more stuff to their program because they are feeling really good. Hello… It’s okay to feel good! No… seriously… when you are starting to feel good it means the program is working. It doesn’t mean do more stuff. By adding running to your life-style, you’ve already added more than enough at this time. If you were already running regularly and have “upped” your program at the start by increasing the distance you were currently running or moving up to a faster pace group, you’ve definitely added enough at this time. We continuously add things into the program based on what you did in the previous clinic and what you need to be doing at this time. There should be no need to add any more. As we said to one person, we don’t want to be “sport-dictators” and say, “you can do this” and “you can’t do that” because it takes away the freedom to choose your free will. But we would like you to use a bit of discretion when it comes to approaching your exercise program. We’ve already built in stress throughout the program and you may want to look ahead at the distances, paces and volume of work you will be doing before deciding to take on that “Jousting 101 Program”. Because something is going to have to give either in your schedule or in the amount of energy you have.

Recovery between intervals does not mean you stand around letting your muscles contact while you gab. When you finish your current interval on the track, don’t just stand around… move around. After an exertion such as found in interval training, if you simply stop moving around altogether, the muscles used in all parts of the body (not just the legs) contract… they tighten up. It’s how they protect themselves and react to stress. They react by tightening up because they don’t know you’ve stopped exercising for the moment or they were stressed and are preparing for more. Therefore, after you’ve finished an interval… keep moving rather briskly and remember to slow down very gradually so you don’t shock the muscles. Maybe even stretch a bit before starting on your next one. Also… your running starts. Like in strides, bring your pace up gradually to your interval pace. The shorter the interval, the longer it should take you to get up to speed and the longer it should take for you to bring it back down for recovery.

It’s called a “training zone”, not a “straining zone”. Don’t attack your workouts. The times you are currently running are from pace tables based on tens of thousands of runners. They are calculated using your current fitness level and should not be exceeded. We always use the slowest end of the scale at the beginning of the clinic and gradually increase the pace as the clinic progresses, but we always stay within your training zone. Most people start at the top end(fast) of the paces and push harder thereby going outside their training zone. That’s not how you get faster but it is a sure-fire recipe for injury. The people who get the most success from our training are the people who follow it. You really don’t have to add anything (athletically) to it or try to speed up the process. And if you are running more than 3 days a week, make sure that the extra days are at recovery run paces. I’m sure some of you have been training at more than a little above your training zone pace because some of you are coming to the workouts telling me you’ve been following the interval paces but still don’t feel recovered between workouts. This means you are either working at too ambitious of training paces for your current fitness level or you are not getting enough recovery between faster workouts.

Pain is an indicator that something is wrong, but does not mean you necessarily have to stop running completely. It does mean however that something has to change in your program. We’ve always said that if you can run slow enough where you don’t have to compensate or have to change your natural stride no matter what the injury… keep running. But, you have to be honest here and be aware that if you are experiencing pain something is wrong and needs to be immediately dealt with. How you do that should be between you and your health care practitioner - as long as they are the right person for the job. If you break your leg you probably should not be going to your chiropractor and asking him to put the bones back in place so you can continue running because you have a race next week. Just because some form of therapy or drug makes a sport ache feel good at the moment, it does not necessarily mean it’s helping it get any better in the long term. We are not saying if you have a virus you can do speed work. That’s dangerous. If the virus goes to the lungs, you may need antibiotics and an even longer lay off in order to get better. There are however some things that are considered “common knowledge”. As a shoe fitter by trade, we see many foot problems. In the case of Achilles Tendonitis it’s common knowledge to put a heel lift inside your shoes so you don’t irritate it as much when active. If your natural motion is to over-pronate, you will need some form of guidance or support to ensure you are in your most neutral position throughout your gate cycle. The latest epidemic is plantar fasciitis. It has affected young, old, active or sedentary and the medical profession has been trying to find out answers “why?” this is and what can be done about it. This subject is way to long to talk about in the current discussion. But we will say that plantar fasciitis does not necessarily mean you have to stop running; and you do need to find a way to support it so that it can heal in a natural position. The best method we have found is taping. It may be inconvenient, but it’s cheap and it works. The whole point of this section is that if you have a sport ache, see someone who specializes in that area. Only look for the “exotic cure” when all other avenues have been exhausted. Otherwise, you are throwing away your time, energy and money.

Try the occasional sports massage to see if you have anything that may need to be worked out. This doesn’t mean, if it’s not broke… fix it. It does mean that even your body could use an occasional analysis to see if there is something slightly amiss before it becomes a full-blown problem. That little bit of a prod and some advice on what you can do to prevent it from becoming a problem later on will extend your pain free training regime. During a training run for the Vancouver Marathon years ago I was struck off a cross walk by a car at about 45 MPH. After doing a brief inventory that I still had all my body parts and concluding nothing was broken, I continued running for another 10 miles or so. The immediate thought was that had I stopped just shortly after the moment of impact, I would have tightened up completely and may not have been able to run for weeks. It was less than 3 weeks before the marathon and I had just registered less than a couple of hours earlier. I went on to run 2:36 something. The point is, there was no pain at the time and even for a couple of months after the marathon. However, it did eventually catch up to me by thinking I was okay and not having it looked at. I spent the next several years with a “floating pelvis” and instead of having it looked at and engaging in a little proper rehabilitation; I kept trying to continue training. I’d get to a certain level and break down. Then, I’d start from the beginning and do it all over… for years. I was young! What can I say? The other thing too… the medical profession back then was not as advanced as it is now and what we used to take a lot of time off from, today we run through it.

If you are dying at the end of a long run, you probably went out too fast. There’s a time to listen to your body and there’s a time to tell it to “shut up!” In the case of running your long runs faster than what we are saying….. if you are having discomfort, then you need to slow it down. If this is your first half marathon or your 85^th marathon there’s nothing wrong with throwing in the occasional “brisk” walk break to get you through your long run especially when it’s your longest training distance. The Peach Festival Classic was my first marathon in 10 years. In that in-between time period I had maybe run a maximum of 2 to 3 10km races as fun runs but nothing longer. I did however work with beginner marathoners in the 12:00 – 13:00 per mile category 3 times a week, but nothing other than recovery runs during the rest of the week. Getting back up to running longer distances was scary so I devised a system where I would do 5 X 18; 2 X 20; and 3 X 22 mile runs for my longest ones. 20 miles I always found easy. It was the 22 that always scared the tights off me so on the first one, I would always do a ten and one even though I always ran through the rest of my runs. Why the change? Simple. Always do things you know you can do and build from there. According to my schedule, it said logically I should have been able to run 22 miles, but my mind was saying other things. I knew if I through away the watch and mixed up running and walking, I could go the entire day, so “logically” I could easily do 22 miles. I was right. I finished feeling like I could go at least another 10 miles and I still had 2 more 22 milers left in the program. The second 22-mile run was approached in a similar fashion except there would be no walk breaks. I would not worry about pace. I would just go to complete the run. Again, this proved to be a very enjoyable experience and I finished feeling like I could do a lot more. Because I had the confidence of completing 2 previous 22-mile runs, the 3^rd was not approached with as many reservations. I still prepared for it, but I was able to run at my “normal” training pace and did not experience any problems. The end result was breaking the Master’s course record in the marathon by almost 10 minutes. The moral of the story… slow down… get faster.

Feeling good it is NOT a sign to go faster. In most cases, it’s probably better to pull back. It has been my experience that if your training is going really well, stay on the program and don’t touch that dial. You can’t speed up fitness. We have this mentality that if a little is good, a lot more is better. Well… the saying “Too much of a good thing” certainly applies to running. Generally, when you are feeling overly good, it’s a sign to slow down a bit. Phil Ellis and I were talking several weeks ago about instances when athletes that were training faster than what the coach set the targets at would be sent home. This wasn’t because they were not doing what they were supposed to do, it was because they were “peaking” too early. If they were able to slow it down and stay at the given paces, they would easily cruise through the workout and derive the maximum benefits from it. By exceeding the targets, they were running beyond what they should have been doing at the time and over-training. Over-training will only lead to injury or illness. Try to be patient. Whether it’s becoming a great painter, musician, surgeon, or runner…. it takes time. With some things we can see the results in right away. With running, the results are mainly evident in our races and the race is at the end of the “current” program. Not at the fun runs we sometimes interject into our training. Remember, if you have a race scheduled during your 4 – 5 month half-marathon or marathon-training program, you have to decide which one is the important one and train specifically for it because you cannot run 100% for every race that comes along. Even though it may be as short as a 5KM or 10Km fun-run, you still have to factor in recovery into your program or basically 1 day for every mile raced. This does not factor in micro tears that will only be discovered through sports message or a full-blown injury later on in the program. By the time something becomes an injury, the point of original trauma is usually forgotten. That’s why it’s necessary to keep a training log. In a lot of cases the precursor for a running injury was a simple training run where I said, “I’ve never run this fast before in my life!” All of a sudden they become famous last words. Simply put… if you are on a training schedule and it’s going well… stay on it and don’t change a thing.

Stretching any time during the day could be a good thing. Just because you are not working out at the time, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good time to stretch. Animals have the right idea… especially cats. They stretch whenever they have the urge too. We should be doing the same thing whether it is at the office (maybe not in the middle of a meeting) or at home during the day. Just because we may not be exercising at the time, it doesn’t mean we cannot benefit from a little more flexibility. If our muscles are always warm and pliable, when we call upon them to take action, there will be less of a need for a lengthy warm-up before working out.

Don’t build a program on fatigue. If you are tired, slow down and rest. This seems like such an obvious thing to say, but you have no idea how many people force themselves to do things because that’s what is on the schedule. Things happen during the course of life where energy will be taken away from one area and put into another. It’s just the way things are. Live with it. If you are feeling tired… back off. Never force a workout just because it’s on the program. You are sometimes better to modify the workout or take the day off completely. There are plenty of workout days during the entire program and one or four days off is not going to make a difference but pushing it might. Sometimes we hear about people who said that they didn’t feel like working out but once they got into it they felt better. Generally, this is not the case. If you are tired it’s your body and mind telling you it needs to rest. If you force it to work out, you may be either taking the chance of injury or just wearing yourself down even more. You ultimately have to make the decision whether to push through or back off, but a little discretion is the better part of valour. If you have an interval or hill workout and you are feeling a little bagged, try a tempo workout instead. If you have a tempo workout scheduled and you are a little weathered, make it a steady state run instead. If it’s a steady state run and you are not feeling up to it, try a fartlek workout. If it’s a fartlek workout and it’s just not your day, go for an easy recovery paced run. If you are just not up to that, then either go for a brisk walk or maybe you really do need a day off. As we said, the ultimate decision is yours, but it is better to have a program that layers strengths than straws.

The reason you came to a running web site or to a running clinic is to learn to run. If you are not going to follow proven professional advise than don’t invest time or money in it. It was said that some people seek advice only to hear what they want to hear. They will spend much effort trying to find someone of like mind just to have the other party agree with them. We see this all the time when it comes to running training. Although we have a “proven” method, some people try to change it in some way by either adding things or trying to speed up the process. It just doesn’t happen that way.

If you have any concerns or questions, please come and see us. We want you to be successful.

Have a great running week.

Russ and Lorne

Week 5 January 30-February 5

2010-01-29T07:14:00.001-08:00

The beauty of being on a program is that it is already done and all you have to do is: “Do it!” If you started our program on January 2 then you should know by now if it’s working for you. We’ve been through one full cycle now. The workouts will start to look and feel familiar. We add on a bit as we go throughout the program. If you prepared yourself properly, you should be feeling pretty good after your shorter long run last week. Last week was an active rest long run for everyone. We call it active rest because you are still working out, but there is allowance for physical recovery. Some people see these lesser distance runs as almost a waste of time because they seem too short. But, in the case of the advanced marathon training programs, 13 miles is still a long way to go. It’s funny how people forget that it wasn’t too long ago that the thought of running a 10KM run seemed like marathon proportions. The big rule of thumb here is to never underestimate the distance of your long run. If you do, it will not be as an enjoyable experience as your longer ones. It’s amazing how many people come off their recovery long run and say how hard it was. When they look back at it, they realize they didn’t prepare themselves as well restfully, nutritionally, or mentally. They just thought they’d go out there and do it and it felt like it took all their energy to do it as well.

The other problem is sometimes with the pacing of the shorter long runs. People still think if they run them faster, they will get greater benefits. No… by running the long runs faster, no matter what the length, you are racing or instead of doing a slow, easy long run, you are doing a long tempo workout. This will take longer to recover from and may even cut into the performance of your next workout. If you go into your next workout fatigued, you will not fully benefit from it and you may also get injured. Just because a long run is shorter in distance does not mean you can pick up the pace. That’s what some of your mid-week days are for. Again, the beauty of the program is… it’s all worked out for you and all you have to do is follow it according to your fitness level. Remember, this is all about your fitness level and not the group’s fitness level. The worst thing you can do for yourself is to try and keep up with anyone else. Going into a running program, you should have some idea of what you are currently capable of racing your goal event at. Note we said, “currently”. This is not necessarily your goal race pace, but rather the pace based on what you can do either now at a given distance or have accomplished within the last 3 months.

TRAINING PACE CHART BASED ON MOST CURRENT 10KM EVENT

Current 10Km Race Time	Equivalent 1/2 Marathon Time	Equivalent Marathon Time
50:43 (8:09min/mi)	1:52:51 (8:37min/mi)	3:58:00 (9:06min/mi)

Long Run Training Pace	Tempo Run Pace	Steady State Pace
10:36-11:06min/mi	8:16-8:37min/mi	8:37-8:52min/mi

All the above information is gathered from the running tables at McMillan Running *Our secret formula, which has garnished so much success, has been to slow down the long runs to a similar pace to the recovery runs. Note the slower than suggested paces. This way, by the end of the program you will be running as long or slightly longer than your equivalent racing time. This is very important for people around 3-hours or more. Most novice runners run their long runs too fast and never fully develop their endurance muscles. They end up crashing somewhere between 18 – 22 miles of a marathon and hanging on until the end. It also happens to some people around the 10-mile mark of a half marathon. We also start with the slower ends of all the tables. As the program develops, we not only add to the volume of the workout, the paces are also gradually increased. There is no point in running fast in the beginning because we want you to have a solid endurance foundation as we add onto your program.

Unfortunately some people have to experience discomfort before they listen to the voice of reason. So for those that weren’t hearing this vital advice at the beginning of the clinic listen now. Slow your long runs down! Chances are you can easily make the necessary pace adjustments in your training schedule before you cause injury.

This same rule applies to your running warm-up, workout and cool down. Most novice runners approach the warm-up as a waste of time. They just want to get to the “good stuff”. Instead of taking the time to gradually warm up and prepare the muscles, they race through their warm up like it is part of the workout session. For a lot of runners there seems to be “one gear”… race pace! The thinking seems to go, “If I am not running hard, I’m not going to get faster”. You must understand that the benefits you get from training are during your recovery. What we try to teach is that there are layers of fitness, which have to be built up over time, and this will not be accomplished in one or two 5 month sessions. Instead it takes a period of years. You simply just have to develop patience and think of it like building a house, then you will enjoy the experience a lot more.

The last point of this week’s sermon is that you have to run your own paces. Many people are so used to playing “follow the leader” that they forget that come race day, they are going to be out there on their own so they better develop self-focus now. It’s one thing to have a leader run the intervals at a certain pace and it’s totally another that it’s the pace you should be running. That’s why it’s so important to know as closely as possible what your training paces are and if you haven’t raced in a while, then an immediate 5KM race or time-trial is in order. And, for all of you in our program… that would be this Wednesday. We have a nice relatively flat and fast looping course planned out so you can pace yourself and see if you are actually in the correct group. Just remember, like in accounting, “figures don’t lie, liars figure”. We’ll be providing splits and finishing times at the end of the run. So, we’ll see you at the starting line…

Have a great running week!

Russ & Lorne

Week 4 January 23-29

2010-01-21T08:00:00.001-08:00

It always seems about this time in the clinic that there is a group of people who find the workouts “too easy”. Well… guess what? Your workouts are supposed to feel easy and that you can do more! This tells us you are doing the perfect amount of load= volume + intensity.

The other night we did hill repeats. We have a slightly different way of doing them that has really improved a lot of people’s strength, speed, and coordination on the hills and translates to greater speed on normal terrain. It’s no big secret… we do “drills up hills”. We don’t want to simply run up and down at the same pace all the time. Doing the same thing all the time generates the same results in events. This applies to all of our works – they are designed for improvement. One of our programs does not include the hill drills portion because the program itself has a different agenda. It’s designed to increase a runner’s overall endurance base and to add strength (at this time) takes away from the benefits from each workout by adding more to the recovery time. If you are continually pushing the limits of speed, strength and endurance, you have a recipe for disaster. Anyway, the point is if you look at the program now and look at it a month from now, you can easily see it’s a lot tougher therefore, don’t make it tougher now. Enjoy it and use that energy to do other things than exercise.

We had a couple of awesome guest speakers last weekend. Paul Rasensburg and Bjoern Ossenbrink came and did a talk on multi-sport and endurance training. They train a lot of athletes at an Olympic and professional level. As I’ve said before, I’m not a certified coach; I have, however, found a few ways of making people faster than they've ever run before. The interesting point is that Paul & Bjoern drove home the same point as we do; it’s as much about the recovery as it is the exercise. They gave an example of Simon Whitfield’s triathlon success began when he was introduced to “Nintendo”. Playing video games forced him to rest instead of trying to do more. We find that people are motivated to exercise, but are not motivated to rest and it’s in the recovery stage that you gain the benefits of the program. This has been by far the toughest concept to teach because of the “more is better” mentality that constantly invades our environment. The simplest cure is to look several weeks ahead and see that the volume you will be doing, is beyond you now.

If we give you a current workout routine, it’s supposed to be within your fitness levels according to quantity and speed and it is sufficient in itself at this time. If you can do more, we do encourage one or two more reps. You should be monitoring how long it takes to recover - you can use your HR monitor, if you have one. It should also take you the same amount of time to complete each interval. Once it starts taking longer to recover between intervals, or your interval times start to slow – your workout is done. Move on to your cool down & stretching routine. Sometimes your body feels good, but the HR (heart rate) is up. This means you haven’t quite fully recovered. Remember our motto, “It’s not how fast you are, it’s where you go for breakfast!”… Oh sorry… that was my old club… ahem… “It’s not how fast you are, it’s how fast you recover to do it again.”

Phil Ellis and I were talking about interval training the other night. Specifically mile repeats. He was saying they (Richmond Kajaks) were doing pre-season repeats at 4:30 per mile with a 3-minute recovery. As the season progressed they would either increase the number of reps or decrease the recovery time. The idea was that if you could run 5 reps of 4:30 with a 1-minute recovery then you should be able to pop off a 10KM run at 4:40 pace with little effort. My thinking for half marathon and marathon training, for more endurance, is to probably increase the number of repetitions and keep the recovery around 2-minutes; or recovery according to HR within the 2-minute range. So, for our faster guys, the rep may be at 4 X 5:55 with a 2-minute recovery and slowly build up to 8 – 10 reps. The goal right now is “4”. Let the future take care of itself.

I still like the old days of running. You’d show up to track practice and it would go something like this…

Me: “Hi coach! What are we doing today?”

Coach: “Junk”

Me: “Okay… What do we do first?”

And then the practice began. Half way through if you asked how much more we were doing, the answer would be, “Just a few more.”

Today, many people want to know what’s happening next week… next month… by the end of the program… and some of our practices take longer – often it’s the recovery periods that add to the total time. This can raise the question, “If it takes this long now, how much more time are they going to take by the end of the program?” Well… all components are important. You can't remove one or trim something without affecting the other – or the end result. Occasionally, if on a particular day you have a time constraint we would rather see you cut out an interval, repetition, or set to shorten the total workout time than see you rush through the workout at faster than prescribed paces or by shortening the recovery periods. If time becomes a frequent or long term concern… we offer several different progressive programs depending upon personal goals and available time. You need to choose the program that fits both your time and personal goal expectations. Often people run into issues when their personal goals vs. available time are miss-matched. Simply put, if you want to find out what you really can do, there are no shortcuts.

To your running success…

Russ & Lorne

Week 3 January 16-22

2010-01-15T19:11:00.001-08:00

Someone surprised me the other day. It was a Saturday and everybody was leaving the store to do the long endurance run and somebody turned to me and asked, “How far are we going today?” That particular Saturday was a building week and, as such, the run was slightly longer than usual. I knew this person would have no trouble completing the distance, it did make me think about how long it took me to even prepare for even a 3-mile run let alone 13-miles?

For a 3-mile run I would have reviewed my calendar at the beginning of the week. I’d make a quick note of what I was doing the day before and the day after. This would give me an indication of the pace I would plan on running. If it were a tough interval workout the day before and an easy longer run or tempo run the day after it would mean this 3-miler would usually be performed at a recovery pace. If it were an easier run the day before and after, then the 3-miler would be a “sub-max” run and depending upon the time of year and the projected weather conditions, I would decide several days in advance what time of the day I would run. If it was the middle of summer, I would chose the hottest time of day to do this run so I could acclimate my body to running in the heat. Summer was always the best time to race because the weather conditions were more predictable than any other time of the year. If for some reason my schedule didn’t allow me to run mid-day, I would decide a day or two in advance the time I would run (generally late in the evening) and that I would probably wear extra clothes to increase my core temperature and simulate running in the heat. If this was going to be a harder effort, I would be mentally be preparing myself days in advance for it. You see, back in the medieval times when I raced, the majority of runners had two speeds for training… fast… and slow. You only ran slowly when you couldn’t run fast. What can I say? The night before my run the next day I would consider my fuel and hydration needs. It wasn’t so much what I would need, but rather when I would require it. A recovery effort may not require much in the way of fuel, but if you have stomach issues fuelling up on a long run, would it not make sense to practice fuelling on shorter runs to get your system used to ingesting liquids and solids on something shorter? I found this especially helpful, but like everything else I’ve done in the past, I took it to the extreme. I would on frequent occasion eat a full-blown 3-course protein and fat laden meal and immediately leave the table for a training run. This is more a formula for cardiac arrest than a well thought out training plan, but still, my point is it was thought out days in advance as to what I was going to do, when I was going to do it, and how I was going to prepare for it. And… that was for a mere 3-mile easy run. Crazy? Or preparation? You can decide. The point is a bit of thinking should go into every run you do.

Interval workouts were usually worked out several weeks in advance. Even as far back as the 70’s I had “hammer” days that I would mentally prepare 3 – 5 weeks in advance for. And, if it came to the day and I didn’t feel up to it, I would postpone the run to the following week. “Hammer” runs were solo races to see what king of condition I was in. Now I would liken it to a kid picking at a scraped knee to see it it’s healed underneath. As I’ve said in previous “Coaches’ Couch” editions, I’ve experimented with many different types of training to find out what worked and what didn’t. On the plus side, when I did find something that worked, I was in a new age category. The other thing I realized was as I got older I also had to get smarter because you don’t recover as fast as the younger guys. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be just as fast!

Week 2 January 8-15

2010-01-08T16:43:00.001-08:00

George Washington said, "It's wonderful what we can do if we're always doing."

This is a really excellent quote for a runner who has “patience”. The key to running is not to try and always do more as quickly as possible. Good things take time. New programs for some people may generate new pain because people want to get the end results fast. I always find it somewhat amusing when people look at a running program. They look at the start and say, “That looks easy”. Then, they immediately look at the end and say, “That looks hard.” I was up in the attic last weekend and found some old training journals from the 70’s through the 90’s. Like everyone, I had goals of always obtaining “running success”. This will have individual definitions, but for me it meant racing success. I had minimum weekly mileages I wanted to obtain quickly and certain amounts of speed workouts I wanted to do at desired paces and a goal number of really steep hill repeats I “had” to do. All the rest is very similar to what you are doing now and will be doing in the future with the exception of several key factors.

o Weekly increase was 10% but…

o No active rest

o What are your speed work parameters?

o Were the goals realistic?

Everybody accepts the rule that you can safely increase your weekly average 10% per week, but is that for 3 weeks… 8 weeks… 10 weeks… 52 weeks? You may want to read http://www.best-running-tips.com/increasing-mileage-safely.html. This formula applies well to people who are doing a pure endurance based running program. How high your mileage goes depends upon your ability to recover in their program by using a 3-week cycle very much like ours. The primary goal is to increase mileage and although a bigger base is important to distance running, it is only one element of the sport. Some other elements are strength and speed. You need to work a bit on strength to handle the extra load and to recover faster from the increases in speed. I find a program that works in the parameters of 10% to be generally acceptable, but the attention should really be focused on the addition of quality as opposed to quantity. This unfortunately does not fall into the 10% rule. If it did, the average 4:00:00 marathoner would drop to 3:36:00 or from 9:10 pace to 8:15. This is an uncommon occurrence and there are usually logical reasons for it if it does.

Once we start talking quantity (more miles), we get into the realm of “too much too soon” territory and the author of the above article falls back on the “listen to your body” application. About 15 years ago I came across a method that appears to safely increase intensity “forever”. For me “forever” was about 4 years. Being primarily self-taught, without the regular guidance of a coach or mentor, and going through various states of employment and finding places to live made training a challenge to say the least. Life does occasionally get in the way of our playtime now and then. I did however in that time period go from 213 pounds to 168 and won the 1998 Penticton Marathon in 2:46:15 breaking the masters record by some 9 minutes on a very hilly course after not running one for more than 10 years. Now I much prefer working with novice marathoners and hopefully getting people on the right track to achieving their own running success.

One of the key factors in any training program is built-in rest periods. If you don’t build them into your running program, then I find enthusiasm over-rides logic. People will tend to run until they drop. This is why being on a running program of any type is so important. Back in the 70’s, I believe it was running author Joe Henderson who made the popular phrase, “too much too soon”. It seems at one time or another every runner will attempt to push themselves that extra step only to find it was one too many. I’ll tell you now one of the biggest secrets I’ve learned in running… “It’s okay to go back!” Everybody is going to physically react differently to exercise. Even with a built-in active rest period, some people may have to drop back one cycle to let their fitness catch up. This is why we work with increases in intensity more than we work with increases in miles. Theoretically if you are running your endurance runs at the correct pace and are experiencing problems in your program, the difficulty you are having is within the rest of the program. You’ll have to look at your journal to see if all of the paces during the week were performed correctly? This is why in our program we give you the paces you should be doing at this time and build from there.

Speed is always a killer. It seems people still believe either ends of the scale. They simply run or run fast. The other popular “success” formula is to mix it up. One day run fast. The next time run slow. They don’t define fast or slow. It’s either “too fast” or “should be slower”. That’s where good coaching and being on a good program comes in. We refer a lot of people to the McMillan Running calculator to find their proper paces. It’s an excellent resource and they offer online coaching too. We’ve had some people sign up for their program and found it rendered similar results to ours. I guess the big difference would be that although we have a group program that works with over 100 runners at a time, you get to run with a group of runners as opposed to running alone. There seems to be more commitment from people in a group than running individually. When you run by yourself, it can be easier to miss workouts or lack intensity and enthusiasm. In the group and with an enthusiastic group leader you have the potential to come to a workout possibly not feeling the best and then after all is said and done realize you had a great run. The other point here is you can be going along very nicely with your program and then you hit a “wall”. There will come a point while although you are increasing at a “normal” rate, your body is saying that it can’t keep up with the levels of increases. For whatever physiological reason you have plateaued. Don’t get discouraged. Don’t lose faith in your program. Don’t change your program. Just drop back one or even two cycles of intensity while maintaining the long run levels and continue. Generally, in the previous cycle it will be less intense in the speed and strength work and therefore you will have no trouble accomplishing it and surpassing your current level of fitness.

The lesson here is that you’ve reached a kind of physical saturation point where you are no longer progressing, but it is my serious belief that anyone can be a world-class runner, it means you just have to step back in order to go forward. By stepping back you are repeating what you know you can do therefore is both physically and psychologically acceptable. You have not stopped running, but are retracing your steps. When you get back to the point you were at, it will seem like there should have been no reason to have stopped in the first place. Even with as much active rest periods we have built into the program, there will always be some people for either physical reasons or missed workouts that cannot keep up. This should never be discouraging. You should never be trying for huge leaps in performance. You will find that your 10% weekly increase will not necessarily end up in a 10% increase in performance every time. Even if it happens once, it would be extremely rare happen a second time. It’s better to not think in that arena and not be discouraged than to make it a goal and become injured. Keep your goals realistic.

When starting a running program I find a lot of people look to the advanced programs as being their key to success. We have our programs labelled RUNNING 101 thru RUNNING 402 at the moment. Most new registrants will come in and say they are experienced marathoners and immediately sign up for the 401 or 402 program. I have run a 2:27:58 marathon and yet… I would start at the 101 program if I decided to compete again. For me it takes 3 – 4 years to return back to racing form even though I still do a little running on the side. Running and finishing a half-marathon or marathon at this time may feel like a monumental task, but if you take it step-by-step and don’t rush it, you’ll finish and have a great experience over the next 16 weeks. After you train for a year, and stay uninjured, you will notice a significant improvement. After a couple of years of staying uninjured and sticking to the program, you will notice even greater improvement and so on and so on. What I’m trying to say is to take your time. You can’t rush fitness and even if you could the gains would only be temporary. Some people have equated it to cramming for an exam. Sure, you may pass, but in a couple of days you will forget. In running, some programs get you through to the finish line, but you may need an extended recovery time because of a periodization kind of program. Ours is developmental. Although it has garnished a lot of success for new and veteran runners alike, it is meant to build a solid foundation should you wish to do more or get faster.

Russ & Lorne

Week 1 January 2-January 8

2009-12-31T11:19:00.001-08:00

Here we go! It’s the start of a brand new clinic and we’re all excited about the prospects of training hard for a spring event or two… or three… or…

Each year new people decide they want to run a long distance event and they have an idea or two on how they want to proceed. Maybe you are an experienced runner? Maybe you are not? Maybe you have a plan on what you need to do or maybe you want to pick a program out of a book, magazine, online, personal trainer, or one like ours; a running store program?

Just like shopping for any item, you should pick one that suits your needs. Maybe you know what you need? Maybe you have a good idea what you need? Regardless… the best thing to do is trust that whatever program you choose will take you from the start to the finish. You can’t really tell in a couple of weeks whether it’s right or not because you have not allowed the physical adaptation process to take place. It takes almost the complete program to really tell how well it’s going to work.

Here are a couple of questions (in random order) you should ask yourself when deciding upon a program:

o Does it fit your running style?

o Does it fit your schedule?

o Does it meet your athletic needs?

o Is it logical?

o Does it allow for recovery?

o Does it look like fun?

o Does it offer a guarantee?

o What are the leader’s credentials?

o Who wrote the program?

Committing to a running program is a big decision. It will affect your family, friends, work, and will cut into some of the other things you currently enjoy. Such as other hobbies and other interests. This can be a positive or negative experience, but it certainly takes preparation and forethought. This is due to the fact that whatever event you chose, the workouts progress in the length of time it takes to complete them as your fitness progresses.

New people always ask, “How long will we be running each session?” At the beginning it may only be 45 minutes to an hour. As it progresses, the mid-week workouts may be up to two hours plus and the long runs as much as 4 hours or more. This of course depends on your goal and what pace group you are in. It takes a lot of commitment and the understanding of all those around you.

When looking at any running program you have to see whether or not it has everything in it you need in order to safely get you through the program. You certainly don’t want to choose a program that will not challenge you athletically if you’ve already have experience; and you don’t want to waste time and effort doing a program that is beyond your capabilities. In the first example you would be under-achieving and with the second example, you will probably find yourself over your head and get injured. In our program, for example, we have multiple options from novice to the experienced athlete depending upon your current fitness level. Many people who have run for a number of years disregard the novice as being too easy and have the preconceived notion that they are beyond it. They immediately rush to the “12^th floor” and believe that’s where they should be. Our first time program is what we call “critical fitness”. If you have completed several full marathons but have never done speed or strength workouts, you may find this a challenging program. In our program we provide the paces for all intervals including the hill repeats. This way you are always in your training zone from short sprints to long runs. There are minor adjustments in the various paces, as we get closer to race day.

If you have been reading the “Coaches’ Couch” for a while you will note that we work on a 3 week cycle as opposed to the many different types of programs available. This is a unique program that revisits various types of workouts once every 3 weeks. It was discovered that given the parameters of your training zone, you could safely increase the load of any individual workout every 3 weeks as long as you are training consistently. For example, in our program we increase the number of hill repetitions every 3 weeks to a maximum of 10 reps. We’ve found if the hill workouts are done further than every 3 weeks you begin to lose the positive effects. We found the same for increasing the long run mileage. The previous 2 or 4-week long run cycle created a lot of fatigue. It lacked sufficient recovery. Both types of programs lead to overuse injuries in a lot of people.

Many other programs available are finishing programs. They are designed to safely take you from the start to the finish of the event. That’s great the first time. But if you have completed the program before and do it again, you could get the same results. Some people are fine with that and we have no issues. However, if you would like to improve on your previous effort, is the program you are going to be doing going to get you there and what are you going to do that’s different? Some people still believe that they should run their long runs faster in order to get a better marathon time. In effect, all you are really doing is racing every weekend up until your event. If you complete your program, you will probably be so tired or injured that you may not even finish your event. Some people find they should simply run more. Although this can work, often it leads to over training because people generally don’t understand that it’s not about how far, how fast or how many repetitions you can do. It’s about how fast you can recover to do it again. Our programs balance distance, speed, and strength in a cycle to make sure you not only improve, but that you are challenged in your workouts for life. Ask about our running improvement guarantee.

Personally, I started running in 1962 at the age of 5. Running for me has always been more of a form of therapeutic escape than about competition. It has always been about the experience. Although I had my share of winning and made several Provincial teams, it was the feeling I got from running itself that was infinitely more satisfying than any medals, personal bests, or course records I achieved. I remember far more “perfect” training runs than I ever will of events that I’ve run. What I teach to others though is far different. I leave out all the “hammer” runs. The wicked-crazy-steep hill repeats. Then there was the 3 X 30-milers per week runs that also included tempo and track work on top of the 3 long runs. There is however a multitude of things I will eventually add as people’s fitness increase. These are all personally designed to be sport specific and have proven to be successful for others, and myself but like all things; they must be added at the appropriate moment. Our program is progressive in terms of being developmental. It’s not the type of program you take once and then “that’s it… thanks for coming”. We know that if you are on a good program, it will challenge you now and for years to come and you will keep getting better. Our goal is to ensure you have a fun learning experience while you take the running experience as far as you want to go.

Our clinics have proven to be one of the most successful with over 50 Boston qualifying times and 17 New York City Marathon qualifiers last year alone. One of the biggest area in people’s performance has been in the little amount of recovery time necessary after running a marathon. Even though I had previously posted faster times, my recovery period was several times longer. We have taken steps to ensure this would not be a part of this program. Even first time marathoners were saying they felt good throughout the entire event and look forward to doing another. As we said in previous newsletters, our program has been called “competitive”. It seems that when something works very well there must be some kind of a “catch” to it. Some people think we have only high performance athletes. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The question I have is: if you are always training within your own physical limits, how is this difficult? If anything, it makes it easy. But mostly, if you take away all the qualifiers, medals and personal records of those who followed the program, we still have 150 people who like to run and like to run all year round.

We at Peninsula Runners extend to you our very best wishes for the new running year and may all your miles go easy and your successes be great.

Russ & Lorne

Maintenance Week 12 December 26-Jan 1

2009-12-27T07:24:00.001-08:00

Here we go again! Last week’s Runner’s World “newsletter-slash-buy our latest book” email is promoting yet another “run less, get faster” scheme. When are these types of issues going to come with the Surgeon General’s warning that this is designed for people who either are just starting out, doing too much, or don’t know how to put a running program together? They say theirs is “more guaranteed than any other program”. Hmmm… I guess they never heard of the one we do, which is not a bad thing. Have I read their book? No. Should I? Probably? Why? Because it really could very well be the ultimate panacea of all running programs or a marketing crock! They talk about a personal best marathon by 19 minutes. Great! We had one of 28 minutes… Does that make our program better? No. Is theirs it the same as ours? I dunno. And, I don’t care either. Why? Because if you are really interested in running, you should be on some kind of running program and not just running how you feel mixed with a long run. Basically it must contain some sort of road map-like structure that looks like you are working towards a chosen goal. There are many programs out there and even a 40-year-old program is better than winging it. However, if you want to get better, you should join a club with people who share your interests, enthusiasm and goals. If you are honest and serious about getting better at your running, then you should be in a club with a long-range vision as to where you would like to go; and not just for the immediate future, but also for years from now. Guess what… we do that, and more, and our guarantee is just as good as theirs.

I had someone tell me again that they heard our program is “competitive”. Why is it when a program consistently yields really positive results, it’s labelled “competitive”? We have 1:30 half-marathoners. And, we have 2:30 half-marathoners. We have 3:00 marathoners. And, we have 5:00 marathoners. These results sound to me like every other club or group in the world that I know of. Where our reputation comes from is from the success of its members. It has been argued that it’s not so much because of the program and more likely due to people changing their running habits over the last couple of years. Absolutely! That’s what good programs do; Train people to wisely change their running habits for improvement. Still don’t believe it? Talk to the participants. It’s been quoted numerous times that people feel that if it wasn’t for “our program” they wouldn’t have achieved the time they did or be in the physical condition they are currently in. None of this has to do with competitiveness. It has to do with being on a good program and you sticking to it.

Where people go wrong is cherry picking workouts and coming up with a program that has no rhythm or logic. To use a popular analogy it’s like mixing orange and apple juice. Although this may possibly work for some people, we have found over the years that it has mainly lead to injury. With many runners it will also create confusion on many physical and psychological levels. Our program is built around “recovery” and therefore, it’s not about competition. It follows our philosophy that it’s not how far, how fast, or how much you run; it’s how fast you can recover to do it again. Trust me, it’s very difficult to teach people why they should be slowing down in order to get faster. This goes against everything most people have learned and even some of the veteran runners in our group still get caught up in running their shorter Saturday long runs too fast or their hills too long and too fast. It doesn’t help either when you have outside “expert” books telling them it’s okay to do it. If you are progressing at a satisfactory rate and you know you can’t rush fitness, why change the rules. Story time!

Years ago I went back to night school and took Algebra 11 because I only received a C- in high school. This was only because, for those people who didn’t pass, we were told all we had to do was show up for the exam we would pass. At the time, despite this “Godsend’, I still wanted to pass on my own accord and ended up with 38%. This always bugged me. The question for me was, did I not pass because I could simply not do it or did I have a bad teacher? I had to know. I was about 25 when I went back to night school and find out.

Karma has a funny way of giving you everything you ask for and I soon found myself with a strangely similar situation as to the one I was in years before. With any manifestation or affirmation, the rule is, “Be careful what you ask for…” The instructor may not have been the same person I had in high school, but the teaching style was strangely familiar? This made for an interesting class on many levels, but I was determined to learn. The plan was to learn Algebra in 2 of the 3 methods being taught at the same time. This way, I had a method of checking my homework before looking up the answers. The other habit I wanted to get into was to not take any shortcuts and workout each step of the equation so that I fully understood how I either came to the right or wrong answer. This also meant that I had to do all my homework at least two times before the next class. I didn’t care. I wanted to “ace” this algebra thing. After all the reams of paper for homework and telephone discussions with the instructor, it came down to exam time!

As the exams were passed around and I looked at the first question, my mind went blank. Here I had spent the last 4 weeks learning algebra in 2 different methods and I looked at the first question and my mind was a blank slate. I started to have doubts about myself and after a couple of minutes decided to approach this from a different angle… cheat! No… just kidding. After a couple of minutes I got the idea to try something easy. I flipped the paper over and started to do an easy algebra equation that I knew the answer to. Then I tried the same method on the first question. Success! I got an answer I felt was correct. I was only able to remember one method and one method only, but at least I remembered something. I slowly and methodically went through the entire exam using the same formula with every problem. I knew I had a few wrong, but I also knew I would pass. As it turned out I got about 68%. That was later bumped up to about 93% because we were graded on a bell curve. Most of the people in class failed the exam.

Now, here it is, an adult night school Intro-math 11 program and almost everybody fails. That just didn’t sound right. I knew the exam was tough and I choked. But for a beginner’s exam to be graded on a bell curve…? there was something very wrong with that. I took the exam to the school board office which was in the same building, told them the situation and asked them to review the exam and tell me whether it was a legitimate test of where we should be at this time. I said if it was, I will accept their answer and admit that I’m not that bright. But, if it wasn’t, I’d like someone to speak to the instructor. The next week the teacher began his speech about the exam. In his own self-defence he said the exam should not have posed a problem to anyone because he gave us all the right tools to answer the questions no matter how hard they were. Several of them nobody got correct. He said that everybody seemed to have difficulty with it and that one of us even complained to the school board about it. He looked around the room and focused on the person he thought did it. I corrected him as to the identity of this culprit (me) and said that he was forgetting several things. This was our class. We paid for him to teach us algebra 11 and that he had appeared to fail at this task. I said his methods and reasoning were unsound. I said exams are more to show that we have grasped the concepts and not to make it near impossible to pass with college level questions. His final exam 4 weeks later was more in line with the level of the program and everybody passed. It took almost 10 years to find the answer, but I finally found out the problem wasn’t with me.

So… what does this have to do with running? Answer: everything. First of all, it says a running program isn’t very good if only very few people will do well. For me it showed that by learning algebra two different methods was a waste of time because when it came down to exam time, I only remembered one method. Similarly, if you try to learn how to run from 2 different philosophies, you will only get confused and in the end up doing only one method anyway. Will it be the best one? Who knows… You are just as likely to have a really good or bad day too. However, like algebra, there may be 3 different ways to get the same answer to a problem, but you really should only do one at a time. This sets a pattern of training habits.

In our program, we try to instil good form, technique, and training habits and improve conditioning; it’s all about layering things one step at a time as your physical condition improves. If you can master one step before moving on to the next, you will see greater improvement than mixing it up with a bunch of different approaches. During your Learn-To-Run stage of training you are introduced to several different training philosophies. As you further your scholastic development you begin to specialize. Once you get past the Learn-To -Run, the rest is algebra and your approach should be more specialized as well. Giving any program 30 days is simply not enough. You have to give it 6 months to 1 year in order to truly appreciate it.

One area of major concern for us has always been the long run pace. Some people insist that the long run should contain a bit of race pace tempo running. If this were a periodization program I would probably agree, but ours is not and I’ve proven our method works slightly better several times over. I believe that race pace tempo running during a long run will cause most people to be either over trained or injured. So far, in our group, I’ve been correct on both accounts. First of all, many of the people who use this method are either injured or exhausted. This is mainly due to people not running at the correct pace; generally too fast. Even if they say they are following our program, most people run their long run too fast and closer to a race pace tempo run than a long-slow-distance run. This means that recovery takes a longer period of time. The faster the pace, the more recovery is needed. This lessens the positive effects of the training run. Trying to drive home the concept that they must get their body feeling relaxed at a slower pace and also guarantee that they will be successful come race day, is no small task. The effect we’re trying to accomplish is eventually getting them comfortable being out on the road in training the same length of time they will be racing but at a training pace. We try to tell them that the work they do during the week on either their speed days and on active rest days are the ones that will improve their overall race time and not simply the long run. The long run enables you to stay out a long time. It is our belief that runners fade in the final miles because not only are they lacking in the physical conditioning to run at that level, but they’ve never been out there in training that long either. Most people collapse at the same place or time as their longest run. We always look at the end result of a good runner and not the number of years that it took to get them there.

I read an article this week on finding the right program for you. It went something like this. You first had to decide if you felt more recovered after long runs or interval workouts. Then, you would choose the program according to your strengths because, “Why would you want to pursue the things you feel are too hard?” Similarly, this logic can be like the guy who goes to the gym and works on his abs, arms, back and chest. He gets them looking the way he wants, but has toothpicks for legs and can never wear shorts. Legs were too hard and didn’t work for him. Runners do this all the time. Even high performance athletes. One well-known distance runner’s coach had said that his runner was more comfortable doing tempo and longer endurance interval workouts. When he did short interval workouts, it took him several days to recover so it was implied that they were not often in his program. Many coaches use this same philosophy yet all of us here believe they are doing their athlete a long-range disservice. Because if you are not also working on your speed, how do you expect to get faster? To me, it would seem if the athlete was tired for 2 days after the workout, then the intervals were either performed at the incorrect pace or there was insufficient recovery between each interval. Remember… it’s not about how fast you run, but how fast you can recover from that run. Everyone is going to differ here… even elite athletes. So the key here would be to discover if the length of the interval was too long and too quick with insufficient recovery for the current physical condition for the athlete? Was this one of those failed “do less, get more” schemes?

When it comes to elite athletes, it’s difficult to know whether they are treating their running career like a business, or do they love running more? Either way is personal choice, but as a coach who searches for ways to make his athletes better, it makes for interesting discussion. However, it seems to me, for the long haul, you can’t have both. It is well understood that the best way to make money in business is to build it up over a period of 2 - 3 years, show a profit and then sell it. This is similar to the way some athletes mold their athletic careers. In running, you used to have to be a marketable success story by winning an Olympic gold medal or set a World Record in order to make money. Runners would get appearance fees, there’d be winners’ and course or world record bonuses. They’d be at the top for a few years and then seemingly disappear. In the movie Chariots of Fire, the Sam Mussabini character told Ben Cross (Harold Abrahams) that after winning the gold it was time to get on with his life. Some athletes after world-class competition continue casual running and others quit completely.

The great success of our program has been to start the program based on recovery from the long run. We start with the long run because it doesn’t matter how fast you are, if your legs do not have the endurance to carry you from start to finish, at any pace, you are either not going to go the distance. At the least it’s not going to be a very comfortable experience. Some coaches feel that all you need, then, is a faster run and a recovery run. But here’s where we differ and why our results are better. We work with a 3-week cycle by balancing short and long intervals, tempo runs, and hill workouts. Interval workouts are designed to work specific muscle groups while allowing other muscles to recover. Again, the paces and distances are balanced with each group according to their available time, ability, and their long-range plans.

This brings me to another misunderstood part of our program. “Intent.” Everyone has the ability to improve their performance should they choose to do so. Even the world’s fastest runners know that if they change a little something in their training, they will get that desired personal best time. We all understand and appreciate that the more time you can put into something, the better you will get, but we also understand some people simply don’t have the time. There are many reasons for this from family to career and other commitments, or you just like to run and are not interested in competition.

If you go to an aerobics class, they put you through a workout that works nearly every part of the body. Some instructors target certain areas of the body each class and revisit them in rotation so that you don’t lose the training effects. People in the class may ask for extra abdominal exercises or leg exercises, but the routine is planned in advance and people do it more for the general workout and social atmosphere than they do to be great athletes. We appreciate that. Running however is a more specific sport. Some people not only run for fun, they train. They train to improve. Some people train because they like the feeling of training not only for physical reasons, but psychological reasons as well. We simply encourage people to run. We offer several programs for people who either want to train to improve or just like to run. What we ask is that you chose one of the many options we provide so that the training is consistent with our recovery philosophy and you do not create any confusion by mixing our program with outside programs. We respect that, like algebra, there are many ways to get to the same ends. This is ours. This is the one we provide. Please respect that not only because our system works really well on its own, but also because we as coaches and group leaders need to monitor progress for those who wish to get better using our system. This way we can add the necessary ingredients into the next program. The outlines of the schedules extend into the future but the specifics depend upon how much progress is made.

Have a great running week! Lorne

Maintenance Week 11 December 19-25

2009-12-21T08:25:00.001-08:00

The thing about the “Coaches’ Couch” is it is one person’s opinion (mine) about the sport of running and geared primarily around our marathon and half-marathon clinic. Often the topics I choose are controversial – sometimes on purpose to provoke thought. Sport certainly has its share of politics. Coaching at times can be even worse.

I’m going to share a story with you I received in an email the other day:

Two Choices

What would you do? You make the choice. Don't look for a punch line… there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?
At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: 'when not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does, is done with perfection… Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?' The audience was stilled by the query. The father continued. 'I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.' Then he told the following story:

Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, 'Do you think they'll let me play?' I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps. I approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, 'we're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.'
Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. The boys saw my joy at my son being accepted.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as I waved to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.
At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game?
Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher. The game would now be over.
The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all teammates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, 'Shay, run to first! Run to first!' Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled. Everyone yelled, 'Run to second, run to second!' Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base.

By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball. The smallest guy on their team now had his first chance to be the hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, 'Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay' Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, 'Run to third! Shay, run to third!' As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, 'Shay, run home! Run home!' Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team
'That day', said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, 'the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world'. Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

This is a beautiful true message about life choices. There was a question asked at the beginning: “What would you do?”, “Would you have done the same?”

My first reaction was, “No.” But then I thought about my similar situations in the past. I realized I had at times done basically the same thing; usually because it was always one game or competition out of an entire season. I guess because they were unimportant events to me in the grand scheme of things. In one time, at a “News Conference” track meet, I had won 7 first places between individual events and relays. When the athletic achievement award was given to someone else who had far less points than me, I just walked away. My dad asked me why I did that. I said that I knew I had won and that’s all that mattered. Plus in a few years from now, nobody would remember. Strangely, now I can think of many instances where I walked away.

I started off by talking about politics in sport and I see at times as seemingly unpopular a decision is, only time will tell if it’s the right one.

Approximately 47 years ago I started running. I discovered at an early age that running and walking seemed to be a natural escape for me. I was able to “go places” for a long time and just get away. I then discovered a few years later I wasn’t too bad at this “running thing”. I convinced my parents to let me join the South Fraser Track Club. I managed by the end of one season to make the provincial team and do a little traveling. I eventually I had to quit competition but I still ran as much as possible with the dream of one day doing well.

At this time, in the 70’s, there was very little information out there for the general public other than a few “esoteric” running books like “Run, Run, Run” by Fred Wilt or Joe Henderson’s “Jog, Run, Race”. Knowledge came from experimentation and recording what worked and what didn’t work. Like Edison said about discovering the light bulb, “I didn’t fail 10 thousand times, I just simply found 10 thousand ways how not to do it.” They say a wise man learns from his mistakes. Similarly this meant I took lots of time off to figure out how I injured myself “this time”… Often something may sound good and look good on paper, but until you try it you just don’t know if it will work.

Today we have volumes of training programs available built from the early experimentation of coaches and athletes. The programs that didn’t work are long forgotten. The ones that still exist have common threads.

Running base(experience) pays dividends. You have to run, to run.
The body reacts positively when you apply loads. Regular training.
Strength allows you to improve and avoid injury.
The benefits of training are realized on your rest days.
It takes time to grow. Train within and at your current level(paces) and have patience to let your body adapt. There are no short cuts.

I’d like to expand on that last one as it is a point often missed. You can’t build a castle on quicksand. Most magazine running programs are like that. I’d love to say “all” magazine running programs are like that, but I’ve never read every one of them. I’d also venture to say “all” well-respected coaches would say that these programs are good finishing programs for beginner runners and that they also will say they (magazine programs) contain no foundation or future. What I mean by “foundation” is that they have no lead up to the program to form a proper running base. This is especially true of programs that misleadingly talk about doing less running and getting better results. To get more you have to do more. You can do it with less running but when you run you have to do more. A much easier path is to run less, but more often. It spreads the load over more days.

I work for approximately 150 novice athletes of varying abilities. Like everyone, there is a great deal of potential to get better. How far everyone goes depends upon many factors that have been discussed in previous newsletters. In those discussions we talked about what it takes to go from beginner to Boston and beyond. When I first started coaching this group my methods were immediately questioned by some. We continuously adjusted the various pace times to suit the wide variety of pace levels for the current condition the runners. Often this meant the pace groups would break into smaller groups. Questions were asked why the pace couldn’t be set so all could run together. “Watering down” the program just because someone was slower or that during the week the half marathon program was different than the marathon program wouldn’t benefit everyone. Just as there are varying running abilities so too should there be different training. This is the best road to improvement – train within your zone.

As improvement began many started making the biggest common mistake. I call it; “If a little bit is good, more must be better” syndrome. That is running every workout with an intensity that only allows you to recover from workout to workout and gain very little or nothing from them. In this way, most of the athletes would be always working beyond the point of receiving any benefits from their workouts. We saw this in races too. Many enjoyed successes when they raced; and wanted to race more. I confused them when I asked them not to race. There was an incorrect assumption that we didn’t like races. The point was any success comes from training and if you are racing you aren’t training. There is such a thing as a training race, but for many of our runners pace discipline is still in development. Most of our runners were consistently setting PR’s, or within a minute of a PR, race after race – those results are not indicative of a training race.... Instead we encouraged our runners to pick a goal race, hold off racing during training, stay focused and train for their goal.

The importance of running your long-slow run slowly was being missed by most. Perhaps it was the generation we grew up in. “If you want to get better you have to try harder.” Many believed that in order to get faster you have to run faster. This in part is true, but not at the expense of your endurance training. To run your long slow run at paces approaching your race pace will require more recovery – taking away from the benefits of next week’s training. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.

When introduced to the concept of an active rest day, it was like I was totally speaking a language not heard on this planet; and interval training less than 800 meters was considered not to be done by half and full marathoners.

Thankfully, there were many in the group game enough to try it and listen. As their personal success grew, a few more heads turned and decided to give these “different” workouts a try. But, you see, I never saw them as being “different workouts” because this was the way I was taught to run. In South Fraser I had a coach… Graham Cooper. In the Burnaby Striders, I was coached under Rick Scambler. With City Track, I worked with and listened to a coach (Mike Lonergan) who trained Olympic athletes. Between my coaching duties I had a chance to run with the big dogs too. At 41, I joined the Human Performance Centre at 8 Rinks in Burnaby to help rehabilitate a reoccurring injury and train for the 1998 US Master’s Half Marathon Championships in Las Vegas and finished 13^th in a time of 1:13:49. Not great, but not bad either.

And there is more to come as we build layer by layer. As our athletes continue to improve and get stronger they become able to accept new things and changes – both physically and mentally. This is our multi-year approach. That is nothing to be afraid of. Most in our group have been doing it anyway – running for multi-years. We have put direction and future planning into our program unlike nay other program I am aware of.

So why doesn’t every one do future planning? Perhaps some coaches feel it’s because a lot of people may adopt running as a lifestyle, but very few want to make long-distance running performance a goal at a later stage in life. They will try it and move on to something else. That’s acceptable I suppose. But what about those who want to get better? The danger then is they end up trying to run with elite groups who are far above them, or try and run on their own, or never get a chance to reach their potential. Everyone has a different reason for running and what they want to get out of running. The bottom line is, if you want to discover how good you can be, you need some kind of a long range plan and give the plan it’s time and not rush it. As wine gets better with age under the right conditions (and more expensive too), so do runners.

Here’s a summary:

o We have a program for first time runners. It is not only a basic endurance program, but it also adds in elements of speed and strength to give anyone a foundation to move to the next level; if they choose to.

o We run 3 days a week. Everyone is usually doing the same program. On certain workouts one group may be doing something different than the other 3 programs. For the majority of the workouts, everyone is going to be running together.

o We are inclusive. We have 150 participants including 10 group leaders for different pace groups. If the group leaders cannot answer your questions, there are several people including myself who are available by email, phone, before or after clinic sessions to help you. All the workouts and paces are previously discussed via the workout program spreadsheet, weekly newsletter, and the pre-workout talk with time given to answer concerns.

o The program is based on a recovery philosophy. It’s not how fast, how far, or how much you can run. It’s how fast you can recover to do it again. The program is based on your current physical ability. If you are a 5-hour marathoner and you put yourself in with a 3:10 group you are going to have problems - clearly. But if you are a 5-hour marathoner and you run your 5-hour training paces, you will find it very manageable. Plus you will be running considerably faster by the end of the program. Some people think they will be faster by working harder and that the more they put into it, the faster they will be within the time-frame of one session. We neither encourage nor promote redlining. We give you the paces you should be training at.

o Our programs are clear. You should be focused only on the program you have chosen. We ask you early to set your goal; including your program. Indecision and confusion go hand in hand. Speak to Russ or myself before the clinic if you need help setting goals or deciding which program to do. Russ will also be giving a clinic tutorial to everyone around the January 2, 2010 starting date. Even though we encourage questions from participants and group leaders alike, we found there were many people who didn’t understand some of the basic operations of the spreadsheet in relationship to features to help you with your individual pacing.

o Our program takes time for athletic development. It is the safest way. You may be able to get what resembles a hamburger in a short period of time, but running doesn’t work that way. If you had never played before and picked up a violin today and started playing, it probably would not sound too good. Six months from now, it certainly would sound better, but still not as good as if you gave it a year… 2 years… 3 years, etc. If you took lessons, your progress would probably be faster and you’d learn a few technical tips that maybe you wouldn’t necessarily read about.

o You can start at any level you want. But… if you have never been introduced to our training program it can be likened to learning a different style of the martial arts. There are certain techniques that are critical where the basics have to be taught, but we start you at the paces, number of running days and the level that you are currently at and build from there. We have had “experienced” runners who have completed as many as 50 plus marathons around 3 hours get injured on our program because they didn’t respect that there are areas we work on to improve technique and form that have to be built up to.

o We do more than just run. Many runners feel that running is a complete exercise in itself. Although it is true that if you only ran, you would still progress. How many miles per week will it take before you realize that strength is also a big training element that allows you to run less and still progress? And, as one coach said, if these people who just ran added the strength element to their program, how much more would they improve? There is no formula for every single person out there, like if they do “this” they will get “that”. There are however more than 10,000 ways of not to do it. We left those out of our program. The biggest problem is when we have people who may have been running for years but have not done any sports specific training. They always want to start at the highest level and soon become discouraged or injured because they never trained the same muscle groups.

o For any plan to work well you have to include all elements external or internal. If you do more than just run you must integrate all your programs for greatest success. We may suggest that you choose other days to do some types of workouts or “de-tune” our workouts to allow sufficient recovery and avoid injury. We have a specific rotation that works specific muscle groups at specific times in order to allow a series of stress and recovery and still continue to train. It’s similar to a body-builder who targets specific muscle groups on specific days. They are still lifting weights, but targeting different areas in rotation. For example; we do short speed or strength intervals on Mondays and endurance intervals on Wednesdays. You would not be getting any rest if you are doing a heavy leg workout on the Tuesday. The problem we continue to experience is that there are certified personal trainers out there who say this isn’t a problem and the participant very soon gets injured.

There are probably 10,000 other questions other people have. These are some of the one’s that are frequently asked. Please feel free to email, phone, or come on down to the store. We have a new program starting January 2, 2010. If you have any questions, we are here to help when you’re ready to run.

Have a great running week! Lorne

Maintenance Week 10 December 12-18

2009-12-11T06:47:00.001-08:00

I’m too excited about this to wait until January and I want you to get started too. There is a saying, "People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds. It is something one creates." (Thomas Szasz)

People run for many reasons. Some say it’s for stress release. Others use it for weight control. For others it’s a social activity whereas for others it’s a primal challenge of discovering one’s self. One way to express them through running is to race. Sure, you can simply say, “I’m going to do Boston!” You will probably go and run Boston and come back and say that the “downhill’s” got to you. Maybe it was the crowded roads and weaving through the herds at the aid stations. Maybe it was the early cool temperatures during the long wait before the start. I see the illusions people create for themselves every year and I have to ask, “How are you going to prepare for these things?” It doesn’t necessarily have to be Boston. It could be Vancouver. If you’ve done Vancouver before, where were your areas of concern? What was it that held you back from doing better? And again, “What are you going to do to prepare for it this year?”

You can start by making a list of the various components of the course and other problems or take a look at the checklist below and see if any of these apply to you.

COMMON RUNNING OR RACE ISSUES

Downhill running	Going out too fast	Pre-race food
Uphill running	Too much left	Pre-race accommodations
Road camber	Last 4-miles	Pre-race toilet issues
Running in crowds	Feet hurt	Nausea
Cold weather	Knees hurt	Headache
Hot weather	Back issues	Sleep pattern
Upset stomach (before)	Blisters	Daily Hydration
Upset stomach (during)	Shin pain	Mental Issues

This is simply a partial list of some of the things that can either go wrong during a run or a race. How you handle them is really up to you. But why wait? If it’s an issue that flared up last season, the question becomes, “What can you do to prevent this in the future? For example, some people complain about hills. Is this an aspect that is sufficiently covered in your training? We offer 2 programs a year. One is for Vancouver, and the other is for Victoria. If you are doing another event, have you viewed the route? Some of the major marathons are recorded online and you can see where you will be running. If weather is going to be a factor, are you prepared for heat or cold? These should be added into your training now, not a month before. If you have muscular aches or backaches, what are you going to do about it in your next training session? Do you have a plan for this? If you had some training issues during your last event such as fading in the last 4 miles, how are you going to solve this? Do you know why this even happened? People will have issues with aid stations, the running surface, nutrition, or even lack of sleep. If you don’t have a plan for this and are not working on solving any of these issues now, what are you waiting for?

All these issues have solutions. Some of them, such as accommodations and pre-race sleep can wait a few months. Bbut medical issues must be resolved or worked on starting now. In the case of running marathons or half-marathons on hilly courses, we know most of you do hill work, but do you also work this into your long run plan. We work on a 3-week cycle and week 2 of each cycle would be perfect for additional attention to details in these matters. As for road camber, you may have to forgo the tangent running and stay more in the middle of the road except when running into a corner. You can use even a slight downhill to your advantage but again… this takes practice.

If you had nutritional issues, have you seen your doctor regarding allergies or deficiencies or talked to a nutritionist? You want to know now so if you have to try something different, you are not trying to do it at the very last minute. And let’s not get started on people who try new stuff the night before or the day of an event they’ve been training 6 months for. Just remember, a salesman is interested only in making a sale. Should you have any issues or problems, please feel free to call or email. If we don’t know the immediate answer we work with many facets of the medical community and can either answer your question of refer you to a medical specialist.

RUNNING REMINDER:

"My friend, the philosophy I always follow has been to give my athletes a plan for progress. Sometimes you see, people ask me about what my great athletes do for training. This question is not bad. But a better question in my opinion is 'how did your athletes make progress to what they train now?' 'How many steps did they take to achieve this result where they can handle my training plan'. You see, great training programs, they always have progress plan. Many people wish to have advice that makes them better in just few weeks. You want some magic workouts that will make you run faster results in just few weeks. No my friend, training does not work like that."World famous distance coach Renato Canova answering a LetsRun.com reader on the Message Boards.

The above quote from Running.com was a link to the complete discussion. It really is worth a read for anybody who ever had doubts about our program(s); or needs some reassurance that you are on the right track with us; or thinking about doing another program. What it really does is reinforce for you that we are doing everything right and more. (Personally, I find that scary.) This is why I’d like everyone by January to be on one of our programs. It’s also why we are offering your money back if you don’t progress or if our program doesn’t work for you. We’ve already proven many times over that the program works. Here’s a guy (Renato Canova) with a stable of sub 2:10 marathoners and it‘s by pure coincidence that we do all the same stuff. Our program is not some modified carbon copy like everything you’ve done in the past. If we are doing all the right stuff and you are doing things either out of a periodical you are certainly not going to get as good results. Whether you are here to do your best, just running for fun, training for a triathlon or have another coach, this program is certainly your best chance for success. And while on the subject of other personal trainers, it would be very much appreciated that you ask them to give Lorne a call so we can ensure your athletic success. It disheartens me that some of our clinic members have got injured from doing too much too soon when simple modifications could have been made in their combined programs. If you have trouble finding the link to it, I will send you a copy of everything I was able to copy before it disappeared.

RUNNING ARTICLES AND VIDEOS OF THE WEEK:

Here are some interesting running related items for this week:

o Training Theories: The Simple Math Behind Running Faster - Latif Thomas (info@athletesacceleration.com)

If you want to improve athletic performance you have to make your athletes faster. That's pretty straightforward.
So let's break the process down in very clear terms. For the sake of argument, let us assume that an athletes' one rep max for deadlift directly relates to how fast they can run. (It doesn't, but for the sake of this argument, it will make things clear.) So, The Athlete has a max deadlift of 500 pounds. Therefore, if everything is done perfectly, The Athlete can apply 500 pounds of force to the ground with every step.  In a perfect world, if the athlete runs a race taking 50 steps, they will run their absolute 'best case scenario' time if they apply 500 pounds of force for all 50 steps. But we know from working with young (or developing) athletes that things don't go perfectly with every stride… or anything close to it.

So let's look at the first 5 steps of the race and see where things break down (keeping in mind that 500 pounds of force is a 'perfect' step/stride.

STEP 1: Athlete doesn't push into the ground/blocks

hard enough, so only applies 400 pounds of force.

Result: Only 80% efficient (20% of potential force

wasted)

STEP 2: Athlete's foot lands heel first, so only applies

350 pounds of force.

Result: Only 70% efficient (30% of potential force wasted)

STEP 3: Knee angle opens up too much and foot strike

takes place in front of Center of Mass, applying 350

pounds of force.

Result: Only 70% efficient (30% of potential force wasted)

STEP 4: Too much backside mechanics, so Athlete can't

recover swing leg quickly enough to drive foot down into the ground, applying 300 pounds of force.

Result: Only 60% efficient (40% of potential force wasted)

STEP 5: Athlete recovers from bad start, gets foot down

under hips, pushes the ground back and away, applying 450

pounds of force.

Result: 90% efficient (10% of potential force wasted)

Now… plot this out over the course of the entire race/distance (let’s say… oh… a half-marathon or marathon) being run and think about how much potential 'speed' is wasted simply due to lack of efficiency or running skill. In just 5 steps, The Athlete applies an average of 370 pounds of force per step, out of a possible 500. This means The Athlete has an efficiency rating of 74%.

Bottom Line: If the athlete had better running form, better understanding of *how* it should feel when running, better coaching feedback, etc., they would be more efficient with each step and, based on simple physics, would run faster.

So, you can make athletes (in any sport) faster just by making them more efficient. How?

1. Regularly practice speed drills (with perfect technique) so athletes understand what good running form FEELS like.

2. Give technical feedback. If you, the coach, know what the athlete should be doing, you can help them clean up their form. But if you don't tell them what to do (and give them correct information) they're not going to figure it out on their own. If you don't give them good technical feedback, they're just going to keep practicing bad running and it will keep getting worse.

3. Improve general and absolute strength, hip and ankle mobility and coordination. Core work, weight training and body weight training will improve the inter and intramuscular coordination required to maximize force application/speed.

Now, let's say you improve average efficiency of The Athlete (by using the above methods) from 74% to 84%. Average force applied per stride goes from 370 pounds to 420 pounds. Again, simple physics tells us the Athlete MUST get faster. So, if you want athletes to improve, you must make them more efficient.

Here's the next thing you need to focus on:

Let's say you improve The Athlete's absolute strength from 500 pounds to 600 pounds. But you *don't* make The Athlete any more efficient. So they stay at 74% Efficiency, but based off of a greater ability to apply force to the ground. So the athlete now can apply 444 pounds of force per stride (74% of 600).

Think about it: By improving maximum strength, but not touching Efficiency, The Athlete goes from 370 pounds of force per stride to 444. That's a HUGE improvement in terms of athletic performance.

So two identical athletes with identical Efficiency Rates step on the starting line. But one can apply 600 lbs. of force and the other 500 lbs. The physically stronger (yet otherwise identical)

Athlete wins the race Every Single Time! The moral of the story? Get your athletes in the weight room if you want them to perform better! Now, let's say you improve absolute strength from 500 to 600 pounds AND you improve average efficiency from 74% to 84%. The Athlete now has an average force application of 504 pounds per stride (84% of 600). Again, think about it. The stronger, more efficient athlete applies more force to the ground (runs faster) at only 84% efficiency than an otherwise identical athlete with 100% efficiency but significantly lower strength levels. The numbers don't lie!!!

What's my point?

You can get ridiculous results with your athletes when you focus on improving strength*and* efficiency.This is where the argument that speed can't be coached breaks down. Sure you can't turn kids into Usain Bolt. But they're generally so weak and inefficient (even the 'good' ones) that they can make 'night and day' improvements by becoming more well-rounded athletes.

All you have to do is look at the numbers and put a (long term) plan into place.

COACHES’ FEEDBACK: Excellent article written for sprinters but apply to us as well. At this point in your running career, unless you have a sport specific weight-training program, you are probably only building general muscle and may even be hindering your progress with exercises like bench presses and two-leg squats. This is another example of why we’d like to speak to your personal trainer. Are they just providing you with the same generic program they give all their clients or is it running specific and do they really know the difference? And… what’s their long range plan for you?

Lorne

Maintenance Week 9 December 5-11

2009-12-04T21:24:00.001-08:00

In our newsletter a couple of weeks ago we talked about compression clothing. The conclusion was that there is no scientific evidence either way that it benefits an athlete or not. Reebok was in the other day talking about a new energy return system in their shoe that allegedly will allow you to run farther. Ryan Lochte says about the Speedo “Fastskin LZR Racing Suit”… "Putting on the suit kind of makes you feel like a super hero." My main concern in working with athletes is preparation for execution. Along with that comes recovery. Our motto is, “It’s not how fast or how many repetitions or how far you can run, It’s how fast you can recover to do it again”. All these new technologies are very creative, but the bottom line is, if they really work they also allow people to do more than what they should be doing and to that I say, Oh boy… here’s another product that’s going to get some people injured”. Manufacturers will ask athletes what they want and if there is money to be made, they will make it! We previously quoted Dr. Ben Kim as saying in regards to manufacturers not making certain prescription drugs because there was no money in it. What I’m eluding to here is the world is revolving more and more around marketing. It’s not so much if the product works or not but the belief that it will and… you have to have it.

You already know that if you train properly, despite the most expensive shoes, the compression socks, shorts, top, and an aero dynamic helmet, you will run much faster than if you didn’t train and bought all that stuff. When I first started club racing in 1970, all the “good” kids had spikes. I didn’t. I also didn’t feel disadvantaged because the times I was running at that point didn’t matter in comparison to the times I would be running in just a couple of years with or without them. Even though I work in retail and my job is to “sell”, I still don’t believe in over-selling. My customers may not necessarily get what they came in for, but they will always get what they need. Don’t tell my boss that.

This week’s topic is regarding the art of layering. As the temperature begins to drop, many of you are going to need to add another layer or two in order to stay comfortable. The trouble lies in going to your local running establishment and getting confused as to what to buy. There appears to be far too many choices and too much information out there from all the experts. Having a basic knowledge of technical clothing will help ease some of it. But, the color is another matter. First of all we’ll answer a few basic questions:

What’s wrong with cotton? Cotton is an awesome fabric if you don’t sweat. It has a wonderful feel to it and provides a certain amount of warmth when it’s cooler and is comfortable in hot weather… until you perspire. As your internal temperature heats up and you begin to perspire you will only cool down if the sweat evaporates on the skin. The problem with cotton is that it acts like a blotter and holds the moisture against the skin and it either turns to warm water against the skin, which promotes sweating or chills off in cold temperatures and you begin to freeze.

What about wool? Wool has great thermal properties and is also known to be cool during warmer weather too. Some of the “super-wool” fabrics on the market today have a wonderful feel to them and don’t feel like a turn of the century horse blanket. Wool is better than cotton because it takes a droplet of perspiration and spreads it out over a greater surface which allows the heat you give off to evaporate it. It is only when the perspiration evaporates that you begin to maintain a regular temperature. In addition, wool can absorb up to 35 times its weight in water without feeling damp, and indeed, continues to keep you warm when it gets damp. In here lies the problem. You continue to carry the weight of your perspiration and if you perspire a lot, after a while it will feel like a ton. On the plus side it is anti-microbial and doesn’t smell. We reviewed a clothing line called Icebreaker this week (http://www.icebreaker.com/site/index.html) and they say there’s has been worn as many as 196 times before becoming odiferous. The biggest problem is the cost. A long-sleeve polyester t-shirt may cost $60, but the same shirt in Marino Wool is $150.

What’s with polyester? Polyester is basically made from oil. Oil and water don’t mix. The polyester is wooven in such a way that the perspiration works its way through the fabric, sits on the outside and does not stay against the skin allowing the remaining film to evaporate and therefore you stay a constant temperature. That is, until the fabric gets saturated. Until that point you will feel much more comfortable than the natural fibers. It will also take you much longer to over-heat or chill off.

What’s a Base-layer? A base-layer is the one that goes against the skin. Depending upon the temperature, you may want either one or several layers depending upon whether you get very hot or very cold. If you tend to overheat, you may stick to one layer and have a variety of thicknesses depending upon the outside temperature. A base-layer can either be skin tight or loose. It can be very thin or an “expedition” weight which is all of personal preference. Some people find it comfortable to put a cotton layer over their polyester base-layer top to absorb the excess moisture and although the cotton may be saturated, the polyester shirt is relatively dry and you don’t notice the second layer. This second layer also acts as a thermal layer because it traps a bit of heat between your body and the second layer.

How many layers do I need? The number of layers you need depends upon your tolerance to cold or how much you overheat. Years ago while running with South Fraser Track Club we used to venture to Stanley Park in Vancouver every Sunday morning. As usual we’d see the same people either working out on either the circuit training apparatus or people running. There was this Swedish man (I think he was Swedish) who was impervious to whatever the weather was. It didn’t matter how cold it was or how raining it was, he always ran in nothing but shoes and shorts. Even if it was snowing, freezing rain or icy winds and we were all bundled up, he’d wear just shoes and shorts. What we’re saying is what may work well for you will not necessarily work for everyone else. But, I would rather error on the warm side than being cold. You can also get cold even if you have lots of layers too. This can happen when the garments closest to the skin are damp and you are not generating enough heat to stay warm probably due to dehydration. At this point the outside temperature is cold enough to penetrate your outer layers and because you are not able to produce enough heat, you begin to get hypothermic.

Do I need a water-proof top? If you tend to overheat, this type of jacket however breathable “Goretex” may be, is annoyingly warm. However, you may get to the point where you just get tired of being wet from the outside. Either way, you will be wet. As a rule, the higher the price, the greater the water repellancy. As to whether you need it or not, the faster the runner, the less need there is for it because you will be generating enough heat to stay warm even on the worst days and a shell jacket is fine. For endurance runs it may be of benefit if on a stormy day you are out there for several hours otherwise the majority of runners prefer something more breathable.

Should I wear tights or nylon pants to run in during the winter? This is an area more to do with fashion than function. Tights offer a greater range of motion, eliminates drag yet still provides warmth or in some cases water resistance. They come in a variety of weights from light-weight to fleece-lined thermal with wind-resistant panels on the quads for warmth and water repellancy. Again the weight of the fabric is dependant on personal preference and the weather. The lycra or spandex mixed in with tights keeps the fabric against the skin for thermal properties and the wicking of perspiration. Nylon , polyester, or wind pants do not offer the same flexibility or thermal properties as tights. They may also stick to the sking from either perspiration or from nature’s elements. Nylon pants are somewhat annoying due to the “swishing” sound they make when running. Polyester is almost noiseless and is mixed with a minor amount of stretch fibres, but does not necessarily provide the same warmth as tights. Again, on a tempo run or track workout, tights are the preferable leg garment.

But I like my cotton socks! Once you have tried a wicking sock, you will probably never go back to cotton. The main reason is your feet will feel drier, warmer and there is less chances of friction or blistering. You can even get Marino Wool socks mixed with polyester to better wick the moisture and keep your feet drier than just the polyester fabrics. As we said about cotton garments, they hold the moisture in one area against the skin and you get cold. In this case… cold feet. Some people have commented that they get a lot of slippage in their footwear due to the synthetic brushed lining in the shoe and the slippery texture of the synthetic socks. Although there is alternative lacing for heel slip, some people find this irritating due to pressure on the tendon running up the top of the instep. In this case some people have found cotton to have almost velcro-like properties to eliminate the heel slip. Again, this is probably fine on dry days and on long runs where you may not be generating enough heat to perspire. You will have to experiment with this to find out which combination works best for you.

The big thing with all of this is, no matter how good your clothing is, if you want to get better at running, you are still going to have to run. The clothing will be more of a psychological advantage than a physical one, but technical fabrics offer greater comfort than most natural fibers and that’s the bottom line. It’s really an experimental process and as we’ve said, you may even want to mix garments as in wearing a cotton shirt over your tech shirt to absorb the excess moisture from it. Or, on really cold, or windy and rainy days you may even want to wear a light pair of tights with a shell pant over top which is similar to a tech shirt and jacket combination. It will take a few runs to figure out what works best for you. Talk to some of the veteran runners in your group as well should you be in need of suggestions.

Lorne

Maintenance Week 8 November 28-Dec. 4

2009-11-28T11:38:00.001-08:00

We were asked recently by a local resident to give a friendly safety reminder to all runners who like to “share” the road.

You’d think most people would like a long and prosperous life. That’s why I get confused with runners who challenge motor vehicles and bicycles to what they feel is “their space”. Let us make one thing perfectly clear, “GET OFF THE ROAD WHEN A CAR OR BIKE IS COMING TOWARDS YOU!”

Legally you can be fined for running on the road. I would rather see a runner served a $250 ticket than be given a eulogy; I’m sure all your friends and family would agree. I can appreciate the elevated rate of endorphins that are going through you or maybe you are in a state of “La-La Land” as the cause for your lack of judgement. But the fact remains that the risk is too great to not give way. Every time you don’t get off the road you could easily be the next victim. Do not think for a minute that the driver will move rather than hitting you; for then you are assuming that they can see you.

I can’t begin to understand what the anguish would be like or for how long it would last for all involved in a vehicle/pedestrian accident. Certainly longer than the time it took for a person to either get killed or permanently disabled because they decided to (in hindsight) do something that was easily avoidable.

In this instance, the runner chose the road over the sidewalk and expected all the cars to go around. Is this message getting through or does somebody always have to get hurt before something is done? This isn’t only a local problem. There are lots of people who think there is safety in numbers by running in a pack several bodies wide. The runners on the outside refuse to speed up and go single file to the front or slow down and tuck in at the back because they don’t want to “ruin their pace”. After being hit by a car or truck at 45 mph, flying some 20-plus feet through the air and hitting the pavement like an old rag-doll; you probably would have second thoughts… if you live. You probably would wish you hadn’t run on the road. You’d probably ask for another chance to make things right. You might even get that second chance… if you’re lucky. I could go into the morbid consequences of what would happen if you didn’t survive and the impact it leaves on all those around you, but I hope I’ve made it clear… you really have no business running on the road. You have even less business running on the road when there’s traffic. And don’t get me started on the left-hand side of the road thing!

That said, we wish to continue our community service announcement and also remind people to wear plenty of reflective garments and flashing lights especially during the evening when it’s dark. If you really want to be annoying, carry a small (but powerful) flashlight with you to remind others you are out running around. Please remember that, despite all the reflective apparel and paraphernalia you may carry, nothing will ever replace common sense…be ALERT! Do not wear anything with headphones such as an iPod or other portable music player. You will not be able to hear cars. Survival on the run depends on being able to hear cars coming up from behind, around the corner ahead, backing out of a driveway, or just coming over the hill. Also, don't run alone if possible. Bring a cell phone or whistle in case you fall and need help. Make sure others know where you are running and how long you expect to be gone and if there’s nothing wrong and you change your plans, let somebody know. Be smart and be safe.

Have a great running week! Be safe!

Lorne

Maintenance Week 7 November 21-27

2009-11-20T09:30:00.001-08:00

Last week we discussed Goal Setting and Planning. What we’ve shown you so far is like asking you to pick a vacation destination by showing you where it is on the map. This week, we’ll discuss how to actually get there. Another consideration is, we are fast approaching the winter season and that means snow. However great that is for the Winter Games, it may put a crimp in some people’s outdoor running schedule due to icy road and track conditions. For track, some of you may want to consider spikes and also using the outer most lanes to lessen the chance of knee pain. Should there be snow, we have alternate speed drills that are specially designed for deep snow rather than on an open grassy field. Some examples can be found in earlier editions of the Coaches’ Couch. The point here is that as good as it is to plan ahead, it’s also good to have a contingency plan just in case. There are of course alternatives. You can do fabulous workouts on the treadmill or take a long desert vacation or at least somewhere sunny. Having a contingency plan not only goes for training, but also for racing. In this year’s Kelowna International Marathon, we saw less than favorable weather and race conditions and adjustments had to be made. Minus temperatures meant more clothing, which generally adds to your finishing time. Had it been warmer and people wore shorts and tank tops times would have definitely improved for everyone. How well a race is organized can also effect time. A training can yield the same challenging situations. As we saw last week, “Jake” had his 6-month and 2-year running plan and we have the workouts all planned out to get him there. But, what if we get 3 months of continuous snow? I hunted the web and couldn’t find any outdoor speed workouts for snow and I even emailed “Let’s Run” and received no reply. Because of my work situation, I never had time to put the question to their blog to see what others do, so we created our own. We are not going to sacrifice the quality of a workout due to conditions unless they are too ridiculous and reduce safety.

One of our big focuses for 2010 will be on training paces in all groups and if people keep a journal, we’d like to review it every 3 weeks to ensure you are on track. We’ve seen the greatest results from those people who stayed in their training zone. Whether you are doing a long run, interval training or tempo runs. And, to my surprise, this was even true in our endurance-building program (RUNNING #301). I have always stressed that sooner or later everyone is going to come to the crossroad where in order to get faster; they are going to have to do more miles. You can either do it now, or later. The difference between a pure endurance building program and ours is that we do not sacrifice speed for distance. We’ve continued with the hill repeats (at a given pace), as well as mile repeats. There are also more tempo runs with more adherences to proper pacing. All of these elements have been present; Now we ask you to further individualize or tailor them and move away from the group type workout it has been in the past. People will continue to do their warm-ups together and some of the paces may be similar, but the stronger runners will be adding onto the quantity as long as they are pacing properly. The main focus of the endurance program is to safely build an endurance base. Therefore, the primary concern is meeting the overall distance of each workout for each week and do no more than scheduled.

Let’s get back on track here. “Jake” has decided he is going to take 2 years to drop his Marathon time 1 hour and 10 minutes. We’ve already said that he is a prime candidate to do this because the biggest issue for him is weight reduction, the need for more distance and the main key element we see lacking in many novice runners programs… strength. Over the last few weeks we described each of our programs in detail. Running 101 is a “critical” training program for those new to marathon running. It introduces all the basic elements in a rotational format with gradual increases every 3 weeks. Although the program is sufficient in itself and is designed as an introductory type of program, it is still challenging. There is room, however, for individual progress for those people who have done it as a previous clinic. For “Jake”, we’re going to suggest the RUNNING 201 Program because he has some marathon training experience and there is much more room to manoeuvre depending upon the number of days per week he previously ran.

As outlined in a previous Coaches’ Couch the RUNNING 201 program is a veteran program and this program combines building endurance by beginning with a higher mileage than the RUNNING 101 program and adding another training or active rest day. There can also be a change in the way hills are performed to increase strength and running efficiency depending upon running experience. The largest change to all our programs will be in the way the track and interval workouts will be run. The minimum number of repetitions will be given for each program, but the number of repetitions will be dependent upon conditioning. In this manner, the stronger or faster runners will get a more productive workout, which will better enhance their end performance - more so than the group program it has been. The amount performed is governed by recovery and if there is a fluctuation in pace.

In the RUNNING 201 program Jake will be increasing his endurance base by starting with more miles per week than the RUNNING 101 program and also adding an extra running day if his personal schedule permits. The interval workouts have additional intervals added to it, but if he is running stronger, he can benefit from adding on and will be encouraged to bring in his running journal for review every 3 weeks to make sure he stays on track for his goal time. We can also review at that time his pacing for his interval, steady state, and tempo runs to ensure they are all consistent with his pre-goals and working towards his ultimate goal. It will be at the end of this clinic that we will then again review his work and decide what is the best approach to move up to the next level.

We appreciate that most programs that are run out of retail stores are one-size-fits-all-cookie-cutter group programs that have limited structure and results. They are generally built, unbeknownst to the participants, around a principal of survival of the fittest. Often they are either designed by elite runners who were superb athletes or enthusiastic recreational runners with knowledge to build a ground breaking introduction to beginning or novice runners. Whether you simply want to enjoy the “Marathon Experience” or wish to take it to the next level and test your metal (physically and mentally), we provide a friendly and safe running environment for you. What we are presenting is over 25 years of analyzing and testing recreational runners in order to provide a program combining running conditioning and a guaranteed method of continuous performance.

Recently I read a coaching article. It said…

The most successful coaches possess three fundamental skills:

1. Knowing which workouts to do and when
2. Knowing how to teach the technical elements of the activities involved in those workouts (speed drills, technical feedback, strength training, drills, etc.)
3. Getting athletes to buy into training so they give their best effort all the time

The last one on the list I personally find the hardest to do. Although I’ve been involved in retail sales since 1980, and have been a top record setting performer in a major company on many occasions, I am not a salesman. What I do is simply offer the very best choices in order to let the customer make an informed purchasing decision. I’ve always given my customers an “out” so they don’t feel trapped into buying. The main reason is, I’ve always wanted the purchase to be their decision… not mine. This is not in any way so I don’t have to take responsibility. It’s always been about freedom of choice and the same applies to my style of coaching. I am not selling a running program; I am giving people enough information for them to make an informed decision on what is in their best interests. The various alternative programs we are offering are all leading eventually towards a single program (with individual variables) for all those who continue on with the training, but it is a progression. And as you can see in the above example, it’s a progression over time and you must proceed in a logical manner. Remember too, that as tough as some of these workouts may appear, it’s all based on recovery and our philosophy will always be, it’s not how fast you can run or how far you can run, it’s how fast you can recover to do it again.

I remember when someone kept telling me, “This isn’t rocket science.” It isn’t baking either. But why if you use the exact same ingredients to make the same product, do some things taste a lot better than others? Similarly, if the average person goes out and does a magazine program or a combination of various mixed intervals and long runs, why are they not getting similar results to our program? The answer is in how the complete program is put together, when the ingredients are added, and the intent of program.

The body doesn’t know what day of the week it is; it only knows when it feels like going fast or needs to rest. Most programs underestimate the need for recovery. They continue to build until such time you can’t handle it and eventually have to back off or breakdown. The other problem is, some programs allow too much recovery and even though they increase in distance and speed, the long recovery causes muscular atrophy and again the runner gets tired or breaks down. We’ve solved that problem by developing a program where you may momentarily peak, but you will always continue to progress. For myself, it was only when I tried other methods or started racing competitively again, the progress halted.

The biggest question on everyone’s mind in our clinic right now is: “What program should I do?” Over the last 4 weeks we put in an expanded definition of each one of the programs we offer and each one essentially does the same thing… it provides endurance, strength and introduces various speed elements according to your athletic background and needs. If this is your first clinic or you struggled a bit in your previous clinic, you need to continue to work on the basics; including strength, form and technique. That’s RUNNING 101. RUNNING 201 takes what was done in the previous clinic and builds on it. RUNNING 301 is for people who may have struggled with the strength element of the previous program, or do not like track work because it was physically uncomfortable. Again, this would point to a generalization that people do not like what they cannot do. Still… if you want to run faster in races, you will have to run faster in training. The biggest point of the RUNNING 301 program is that there will come a time when you will find out that you will need a greater distance base. So, while you’re building that base, we are taking a back roads path of building the strength you will need in order to handle the speed work you will eventually need to do in order to get even faster than you are right now. This is a step-by-step approach that still produced some impressive results, but was mainly designed as an endurance builder to work up to the RUNNING 401 program and beyond.

RUNNING 401 combines all the elements of endurance, strength and speed and continues to physically and mentally develop everyone with the addition (and substitution) of a variety of different types of workloads. It has many more rigid constraints because of its progressive physical demands. But all results are easily measurable either by load or suggested event. It is now going to be a restricted program. Because although it yielded the highest success rate, it also yielded its share of minor injuries. Typically because people did not have the muscular maturity, strength, patience, and discipline to strictly adhere to the workouts. Once people have gone through the first 2 programs and begin to understand what they really need to do in order to progress and understand the amount of time it truly takes to physically develop (i.e. its not an overnight success story) they may want to consider stepping into this program for one trial session. At the end of the session, they can either continue or alternate between 2 X RUNNING 301 to 1 X 401. RUNNING 402 & the future 403 (2011) or the 501 ELITE (2012) is only open to the people who have completed RUNNING 401.

We offer more choices and have the most progressive and guaranteed program available anywhere. We can fill pages of testimonials, but you’ll still have to run. Come join us and ask about the December 2009 early programs or the January 02, 2010 programs. It’s all good stuff!

Have a great running week!

Lorne

Maintenance Week 6 November 14-20

2009-11-13T07:24:00.001-08:00

Goal Setting is one of the most popular and grossly overused phrases; yet the failure of most everything we do from careers to family is from lack of planning. It’s much easier to dive into what “seemed like a good idea at the time” and… let the chips fall where they may. The idea of having a long-term plan, being committed to something, and having checkpoints along the way doesn’t seem to sit well in our fast paced world. Probably the very last thing we want to do is take something we really enjoy, like running, and make it complicated by saying, “Where do I want to be 5 years from now?” But everyone wants something from something. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. If there were no return on an investment, would you put your money into it? Even a philanthropist is cautious where he will give his money.

Whether you are running for fun or have a long term goal in mind, in order to get the maximum benefit out of each workout, it’s good to have a plan. “Something” is better than nothing. Because you can review it at any time and check on your progress, even if it’s only to say, “Are we having fun yet?” If you don’t have a plan, start from where you are right now. Several newsletters ago, we described in detail how long it would take someone to qualify for the Boston Marathon. We’ve also outlined in the previous newsletters the minimum amount of work it takes to reach your maximum potential. Now we’re going out on a limb and going to try and put it all together. For some, this will be a personal challenge and for others it could mean a wake-up call, but for most… they’ll let the chips fall where they may and we’re totally fine with that too. Our concern is that if you want to improve, you will have the best options available in order to do so.

In our training program we support everything we do with the latest of findings not only from our own current and training history, but through confirmation through some of the best coaches in the world who are producing world best performances. The days of a weekly long run, some tempo runs and a few hill workouts are long gone. Most of the modern running world is way past that and are about to change again. We’ve worked very hard and have proven that for the last 2 years and our goals for the next clinic are even higher now.

We’ve also proven that in order to get better in running you need a long-term plan. Sure, you can just jump into anyone of our programs and find out what works best for your current fitness and schedule. We have no doubts that you will improve nonetheless; which, is why we’re now saying, if you do the work and you don’t improve, we’ll give you a full refund. We believe that strongly in what we do here. This may be your pass-time, but it’s our passion and commitment to you and running. But we need you to do it responsibly. By that we mean you need to state your current performances and have a future goal. Then we want to make that happen for you in a safe and logical manner. We will also be realistic as to how much time we feel this will take based on your current fitness and how it fits into your schedule. We will still provide the basic weekly/monthly/yearly outline but we’d like to tailor that to your individual goals based on your homework. This will mean you may want to keep a training journal to track your progression.

In the movie, “CHARIOTS OF FIRE” Harold Abrahams approached Sam Mussabini and asked him for help. After watching him run, Mussabini says, “I can find you those extra two steps”. Personally, I don’t want two steps, especially when we’re discussing the marathon. I want 20 minutes. Everybody in our clinic who’s training for the marathon has the potential to take 20 minutes (or more) off his or her marathon time and that to me is exciting. They may not believe it… but it’s true. How do I know this? I’ve had to start from square one too many times not to believe this and trust me on this one; there, “Ain’t nothing special ‘bout me”. The thing of it is, it takes time and it takes a plan and it means sticking to the plan.

In a previous Coaches’ Couch we outlined in detail how to get a Boston Marathon qualifying time. Goal setting is more general. Let’s take a look…

Situation: Jake is a 4:10 Marathon runner and he’d like to run 3:30. How long will it take?

Variables: (not in order) Body type and weight; athletic history including number of injury free running years; medical history, number of current training days; is 4:10 a recent time?

Considerations: If Jake is middle aged and 25 lbs. overweight who recently ran 4:10, it will take him less time than if he was in good health but doesn’t have an athletic background. At the moment we’re looking at 2 – 6 years, but we won’t be sure until after the first session to see how well his body adapts to training as opposed to simply running. Just because you are running, it doesn’t mean you are training. I’ve done enough garbage miles in my career to know the difference.

JAKE’S 2-YEAR GOAL SETTING PLAN

Jan. 1, 2010

Jun. 1, 2010

Jan. 1, 2011

June 1, 2011

Jan. 01, 2012

Marathon

4:10:00 (9:33)