Tag Archives: Running

A Beepless Run

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polar_heart_rate_watchFor a while now I’ve been running with my Polar heart rate watch to better gauge the effort I exert during training runs and rides. When I first got the watch I read the manual and went through the set-up process according to the directions. In the manual it stated pretty clearly that the watch would beep whenever I was above or below my target heart rate zone. In the last six months that I have been using the watch I have become slowly tolerant to the beeping. I have had runs where it only beeps for a little bit because I quickly get into and stay in my zone and I’ve had other runs where it beeped the entire time because I was a digit over my heart rate zone. The first time I wore it on a bike ride it also beeped the whole time because I was a couple digits under the heart rate zone.

Once I wore the watch during my interval runs and then it beeped the entire time because my effort in running intervals was significantly higher than during a long or easy run. The difference during that session with my watch beeping the entire time was that I was on a track. With other runners. I was that girl. Continue reading →

Interval Awareness

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Intervals involve hard runs for short times or distances followed by recovery jogs so it's helpful to have a watch to time each interval. Photo by Michael Lokner.

Intervals involve hard runs for short times or distances followed by recovery jogs so it's helpful to have a watch to time each interval. Photo by Michael Lokner.

Until recently, the last time I ran intervals was during track and field practice in high school. I’ve read plenty of articles about interval runs and there are some great folks on Twitter to learn from whose focus is interval training. The last few weeks of my triathlon training plan have included threshold interval work-outs. According to the plan this means to run for three minutes at 5K pace followed by a three minute jog. The first session I repeated this three times and the next three sessions I was to repeat four times. Each interval session begins and ends with a little over a one mile jog which happens to be the distance from my house to the local track, quiet convenient!

The first round of intervals were eye-opening. Even though I’d been preparing my body for speed with strides and tempo runs, attempting to maintain what I thought to be my 5K pace for three minutes was much more challenging than I thought it would be. I’m sure that part of the problem is that I still don’t know my actual 5K pace. My goal pace is 8-minute miles but I have not measured that on the track. I measure my 5K pace by my form, the length of my stride, the little extra push from my arms, and my breathing. I’m so familiar with my 9-minute pace that I feel like I can tell when I’ve pushed past that to something faster and that is what I consider my 5K pace. Continue reading →

Breaking Consistency

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j0390441I have been running 9-minute miles for as long as I can remember. Every now and then there is a little variation with my slower time hovering around 9:12 which I usually see on runs of 10 miles or longer and my lower end averages 8:54 on my shorter runs. And for as long as I can remember I have been perfectly content with my 9-minute mile pace. Until this spring. After I ran my first marathon and tacked some other races onto my spring and summer schedule I got my head wrapped around the idea that I wanted to run my 10K in 8:30-minute miles and maybe even try to run my 10-miler at the end of the summer in 8-minute miles.

I ended up dealing with ITBS recovery after the marathon and wasn’t able to ramp up my training to make my 10K goal but there is still plenty of time to work on my 10-miler goal. I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a slightly faster pace, but I never sought out the ways to make it happen. Since I have been triathlon training, however, my eyes have been opened to a whole new way of training. Instead of just going out and running at my same old 9-minute pace and consistently adding miles, I have *gasp!* been training with variety! Not only have the weekly work-outs included swimming and biking by necessity, but even the weekly runs are different. Continue reading →

Running Off Days

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42-15530314We all know that rest days are important for any kind of training to be successful and learning to appreciate rest days, I’ve found, requires just as much practice as training itself. This winter when I was marathon training I would often experience various levels of guilt on my off days and I know I am not alone. Despite the anxiety I sometimes felt by not running, I knew it was important that my body get a break from the impact and stresses of running.

I’ve read many articles and heard from a number of coaches and other runners that rest days do not have to be days of complete inactivity. When it comes to running, rest days are anything from a light run to a cross-training activity to weight training to Pilates. I fully admit to having been very inconsistent in how I used to spend my rest days and more often than not would choose to do nothing rather than cross-train. All that changed when I started triathlon training. Continue reading →

The Great Shoe Debate

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An old pair of my New Balance shoes, now retired to the role of gardening shoes.

An old pair of my New Balance shoes, now retired to the role of gardening shoes.

I believe my first pair of “running shoes” was a pair of retired volleyball shoes that I used in college until they wore thin. Once I realized the value of actual running shoes I dabbled a bit with different brands. I started with Saucony and switched to New Balance, then ran in Nikes, and moved around between the three brands for a while. Most of my purchase decisions were entirely based on price. I had no knowledge base of how a shoe should fit when I was first buying running shoes.

A couple years ago, however, I started to really care about the shoes I was putting on my feet. I’ve had my share of blisters in every shoe imaginable from running shoes to high heels to flip flops so I often figure blisters are just part of the deal. After the Annapolis 10-mile run one year, I took my shoes off to find that my big toe had much more than a blister. My poor toe was bleeding, discolored, and looked just awful; it was the first time I’d seen my feet really take a beating from running. When I commiserated about this with friends, they instantly pointed to my shoes as being the culprit. They were not sized right for the amount of running I was doing and the A10 was the long run that finally took its toll on my feet.

It was time for a new pair of shoes. Continue reading →

Six-Mile Sentiments

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j0150073I’ve found a sweet spot lately with a five mile loop. It seems to take just the right amount of time, it has the right amount of hills, and each time I finish the five miles I feel a little better about it than the last time. As nice as it’s been, you might say I’ve been in a five-mile rut. If I weren’t planning to run a half marathon the first weekend of August it might not matter that I’ve been stuck at five miles, but I am. So I finally upped my mileage and it’s been several months, since the Cooper River Bridge Run to be exact, since I’ve ran more than five miles.

One of the reasons I love MapMyRun is for my archived running routes. I think I could do my five mile loop with my eyes closed but I needed a quick refresher on my six mile route. I “dusted off” the routes and looked it up. For some reason, those six miles looked a lot longer online than I remember them being. Knowing I wasn’t going to give myself a chance to get out of the run, I switched mental gears and focused on how nice it would be to run a little longer than normal and planned to let my mind wander. Continue reading →

It’s Tempo Time

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Tempo running requires focus and concentration to keep pace; just like the tango. Photo by Tango Store.

Tempo running requires focus and concentration to keep pace; just like the tango. Photo by Tango Store.

There are any number of ways to label a run and of course, you don’t have to label a run just to go running. However, in training, it’s very helpful to understand what the labels mean in order to get the most out of each work-out and maximize your performance. When I first started running the only terminology I recalled where words leftover from high school track–sprint, relay, and cross country. Until recently, my running vocabulary has been minimal at best. At some point I plan to put together a glossary of terms that I have come to understand and that seem to be an integral part of any article, website, blog, or coaching program related to running.

For now though, I’d like to focus on tempo runs. There are five types of runs on the Runner’s World triathlon training schedule and they each have a relatively helpful description. Some of the runs have the same descriptions as what one can select on many online training logs, interval and tempo for example. Even though I’ve trained for a number of races over the years, this is really the first time I am making a serious effort to follow the suggested variations in running. Rather than stick with my 9-minute pace, if the schedule tells me to run strides, I run strides. If it says hills, I run hills. And now most recently, it said to run tempo. Continue reading →

Training Log Review: Runner’s World

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rw_summaryFor the last month I have been using the training log on runnersworld.com both to log my work-outs as well as to experiment with one of the many available online training log programs available to athletes. It was a few months ago that I decided I would use and review as many logs as possible and I had started with the log on Race Nation‘s website before moving on to the Runner’s World log.

When I started with the RW log, I was slowly building my running routine back up from my marathon recovery and have since begun training for my first triathlon, so I have multiple kinds of work-outs that I need to track. I already had a profile on rw.com, but if I hadn’t, that would have been the first step, just like for any other site that stores your personal information.

The RW log has one button to enter a new run and another button that drops down with options to enter a bike, swim, strength session, walk, health note, or generic ‘other’ work-out. I found entering the first few entries to be tricky because not all fields of the log format were super intuitive to me. For most type of work-outs, standard data fields are: date, time, heart rate (rest, average, and max), route, distance, time, weight, and environment. There is also a standard notes box at the end, which I love, as well as the option to rate the quality and effort of the work-out on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best or hardest. And, as you may know, I am a big fan of measuring the quality of my work-outs. Continue reading →

Sorting Out Strides

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strides_uncgradmanThe Runner’s World triathlon training program I’m using calls for five different types of running throughout the 12 week schedule: Foundation, Strides, Transition, Tempo, and Threshold Intervals. A rather in depth article about how runners can train for a triathlon preceded the program but it didn’t go into detail about the various types of running (or swimming or biking for that matter) as there are definitions in the sidebar of the program. All of the work-outs made sense to me except for the description of Strides, which happens to be one of the first running work-outs on the schedule. The program defines it as “Run 20 seconds at 5k race pace; jog 40 seconds after each stride” and each run work-out says how many repetitions of this to do.

In my mind, a stride was the forward movement of the leg. I was baffled as to how I was to jog for 40 seconds in just one stride. But I knew what 5k race pace meant, so at first I would just sprint for the designated number of repetitions and not worry about the 40 seconds of jogging. The more I started to read about triathlon training, however, the more the term “strides” came up and the more I wanted to know the true meaning. Continue reading →

It’s All Mental

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Getting to the top of the mountain or getting out for a run--it's all mental.

Getting to the top of the mountain or getting out for a run--it's all mental.

You know that feeling when you’d rather do anything but put on your running shoes? You’re tired, you’re busy, it’s drizzly, it’s too cold, it’s too hot, you have to write thank-you cards, the excuses you can come up with are endless. And yet, you love running. You know you won’t skip this run, because you have to do this run, you need to do this run for one reason or another, but you still have to get motivated.

This feeling has hit me on days when all I’m doing is an easy 3 mile run, on my favorite 5-mile days, and on the long run training days. I imagine it’s inevitable that at some point we all have to muster up the motivation to get out there and run. Part of my motivation is having a training schedule and a race in sight. If I’m not signed up for something, I’m much more likely to talk myself into staying put instead of putting on my running shoes. What is it that motivates you? Continue reading →