Tag: coaching advice

Marathon training starts here!

It’s one month since thousands of lucky runners found out they’d landed a place in the London marathon. I’d wager that most of them haven’t started training yet. Too early? Well, it depends where you are to begin with. I believe a lot of runners make the mistake of waiting until January to start their official training. If you’re a seasoned runner, with a relatively high weekly mileage and, perhaps, other marathons under your belt, you may be fine delaying your official ‘build-up’ because you’ll be able to hit the ground running (pun intended). But if you’re less experienced, or not running much at the moment, or haven’t done a long race in a while, what are you waiting for?! I have had recent enquiries from potential coaching clients who despite knowing they are running London/Brighton/Paris, are currently only running 8-12 miles PER WEEK!

As a coach, I like people to be comfortable running 13 miles for their long run in week 1 of their plan (assuming we’re starting 16 weeks out from race day). If you can only start at, say 10 miles, you will waste valuable weeks building up to the point where you can run 13 miles – and that makes it a race against time to achieve a decent peak mileage and longest long run. The last thing you want is to run your longest-ever run (say, the holy grail of 20 miles) just once, three weeks before your longest-ever run (the marathon). It’s all too bunched up towards the end of the plan and it doesn’t give you sufficient time to recover from the peak long run. Having to squash in weekly consecutive long runs, just to ensure you can make it to a 20-miler also risks injury. There are far better ways to plan your training!

If you are doing a spring marathon, and you haven’t run 13 miles recently (or ever) – start working towards that now and you’ll be in a much stronger position come December or January when you embark on your ‘official’ plan.

One of the reasons I use 13 miles as a base measure is because it’s half the distance you’ll be racing (psychologically, you’re halfway there straight from the off). It’s also because I believe that anyone who has signed up to run  a marathon in the spring should be able to cover the marathon distance over the course of a week right from the off. Think about it: you’re going to be doing this distance in a DAY, so it seems reasonable to be able to accumulate it over a week.! And I don’t like the ‘long run’ to comprise more than 50% of a runner’s total weekly mileage. Say you start with a weekly mileage of 26 miles – that allows you to include three shorter runs (one at faster-than-marathon-pace, such as a speed or tempo session of some kind, I’d advise) along with a long run. Then, as your weekly mileage gradually increases, so does your long-run distance.

Our Master Your Marathon workshop takes place in January 2020 and offers the perfect opportunity to get some expert insights into how to set a realistic marathon goal, how to train effectively and how to prepare for the big day. It includes a guided, supported long run tailored to the needs of every participant. Find out more or book a place here.

 

We’ll be Running Forever

 

On a sunny 4th July last year, we were vacating our neat, grade-2 listed Georgian cottage for rental and moving into a hastily-purchased Decathlon tent.

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The ‘Crazy Thing’ we’d talked about wanting to do for so long was finally happening! Dogwood campsite in Brede, East Sussex, was to be our home for two months while we wound up our working lives ready to set off on the Cape Wrath Trail and explore the wild open spaces of Scotland on foot, by bike and kayak.

I’ve documented how it all went on this blog – suffice to say it was a wrench to leave and even more so to return to a grey wintry February. Nothing felt quite the same after our adventures. So in true Crazy Thing spirit, we decided – quite suddenly – to sell the house, downsize (though not to canvas this time) and start a running company together.

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Running is our passion – it’s how Jeff and I met, and it’s a thread that binds us, both through coaching and our own running antics. Between us, we have 60 years’ running experience and 13 years of coaching. We’ve pinned on hundreds of race numbers – in events ranging from one mile to one hundred miles. It’s something we hope and plan to do for the rest of our lives, hence the company name, Running Forever.

But we don’t just want running for ourselves. We’d like to help as many people as possible fall in love with running and make it a lifetime habit. Whether it’s for health, fitness, mental equilibrium, competition, personal challenge – it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we help each person who comes our way discover their own joy in putting one foot in front of the other.

We’re offering a range of running-related services, from one/two-day running adventures and retreats to running groups, bespoke coaching and workshops.

(While we build our website, you can find out more about what we do here.) We hope you’ll join us somewhere soon! In the meantime, we’ve got a neglected and rather dilapidated timber-framed bungalow to turn into a home…

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How slow running can reveal form flaws

When I am devising running programmes for my clients, I give them a pace ‘guideline’ for each of the different types of run they do. Most will have recovery runs in their schedules, where the object is to keep the pace and effort level really low. The run needs to be low-intensity enough to not require any further recovery – so going faster than the guideline pace is not necessary and may well be counter-productive. And yet, over and over again I hear the cries ‘I can’t run that slow!’ ‘It’s more tiring to run slowly’ and most of all ‘Sorry, I tried to run slow but I inadvertently speeded up.’

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I’ve mulled over this a lot – worried about it, even – because personally, I have no problem whatsoever running slow. But it doesn’t mean I can’t, or don’t, run fast when I need to. It’s often observed – with amazement – how slow Kenyan runners go in their easy runs, given how fast they could be going.

I’m starting to wonder whether running technique has something to do with people finding it ‘hard’ to run slow.  If you run with good form, then that form should hold true whatever pace you are maintaining. Running slower shouldn’t mean a slow ‘sticky’ cadence, a shuffling gait or a minimal leg lift. I suspect that people who find it very hard to run slow are doing the following: overstriding – most likely with a heel strike – running with too slow a cadence or too much tension. One of the drills that running coach and Alexander Technique teacher Malcolm Balk suggests in his book Master the Art of Running is to run very slow whilst maintaining perfect form. I highly recommend giving it a try.

The other reason runners can’t slow down is probably mental. It’s an issue of bravado – ‘hell, I can’t run THAT slow!’ – with the tacit suggestion being either ‘I’m too good,’ or ‘someone might see me and think I’m slow…’ But I’d say it takes focus and commitment to reap the benefits of any training session – and recovery runs are not excepted. Try a go-slow on your next run and you might just find that less is more.