Warning. This post is going to be long.
Very cool to have a few new posters! Welcome JoeGarland, Ewen Thompson, and coachkeithsh!
@JoeG, yes, posting here has helped to keep me honest, and has helped me through this injury I’ve been dealing with, as well.
@Ewen T, that’s an interesting take. I don’t think anyone would argue that an aerobically fit person can run half-way decently off little miles running if they are getting their aerobic fitness elsewhere, but I sincerely doubt they’ll run close to their best possible on such little mileage. Specificity matters, IMHO (I’ll write more on this a little later in the post today.)
@coachkeithsh, I echo Kevin’s remarks. How awesome to have you join us. I’ll be very interested to know how your training has evolved pre- and post-treatment. Continued success going forward! Also, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up and training with a couple of your runners, as they came up to UK after their Vandy careers.
OK, on to my regular post.
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Week 172
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Salutations, 50+ers. Not quite the week I was hoping for. Work, work, work, lack of sleep, yadda, yadda, yadda….not quite the week I was hoping for. I still managed to get 35.5 miles in, but it was on 5 days and wasn’t really how I wanted to do it, and I didn’t get a “long run” in either. My weekly log reads as such:
Sun: 7.6 w/4 accel (7:14 -> 6:06) in the middle
Mon: off
Tue: 7.0 w/ stairstep workout: 400,800,1200,1200,800,400
Wed: 5.1 easy
Thur: off
Fri: 7.7 easyish
Sat: 8.1 moderate (7:29 pace)
Sunday’s acceleration run just kind of happened. It was not the plan, but the guy I was running with started picking up the pace, and I just went with him. Before you know it, we both just decided that this would be a hard run. It felt good, though.
After a ridiculous work day Monday, through mid-Tuesday, I wasn’t sure how Tuesday’s track workout would go. But was very pleased with the 83.5,2:54.5,4:36.5,4:36.8,2:53.8,83.2, these were spot-on what I was hoping for. Again, not going to keep linking to these, but thought I’d link one last one, if someone is interested in the HR curve (http://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/592340662 ). I found that I wasn’t really getting my HR back down after each rep. especially after completing the 1200’s. Good news, though, that we’ve finally got a decent 400m track to do our intervals on.
Nothing special for the rest of the week. Thursday I was completely saturated from dawn-to-dusk with classes and meetings culminating in our club meeting (I’ll talk about our speaker below.) Then I couldn’t get the long run in like I wanted Saturday, as I was tied up in the morning, and we had a science outreach event in the afternoon. Did my run at 7:30 in the evening on into the dark...but the beating I took from being in the sun all afternoon made for it feeling a little harder than the ~7:30 pace that I recorded.
OK, on to the speaker at our club meeting. Very interesting. We had a PT, DPT guy who is now working on his doctorate in Exercise Rehab come and talk with us about strength training for runners. His current area of research is trying to understand what the key components are as to why and how people’s running gait changes as they age. There was just a lot of good information out of the hour+ that we conversed with him. I’ll list just four main takeaways that I got from his talk (and note to spikez, we’re talking about distance running here, so I don’t think this applies to you, except the hamstring part below):
1) Strength training, done separately from running, won’t make you a faster runner. He said that they’ve done studies with groups that incorporated strength training into their routines to those that did just straight running, and they found that the ones that did strength training were indeed stronger, but they didn’t improve any more than those that didn’t do it. And they found in addition that the traditional strength training did not affect their running form one bit. Even if targeting muscles that weren’t firing during running, it didn’t cause those muscles to become activated during running. So doing deep squats, for example, may activate those dead glutes when doing deep squats, but that won’t translate into them being activated during running.
2) Most strength training focusses on concentric exercises, but runners should do strength training that is eccentric. Most of running has its peak loading during the eccentric phase, so doing curls and leg-presses and such is not effective supplemental training for runners. I asked specifically about hamstrings, as we’ve had many on here that have dealt with hamstring issues, and he said that hamstrings are almost exclusively eccentrically loaded (which surprised me), and that when he treats runners with hamstring issues, he never has them do hamstring curls, for example, and works exclusively on eccentric loading exercises. He was going to forward some routines to us, and I’ll share them once I get them.
3) Strength training can help with injury prevention, but can also make matters worse. But the jury is still out as to when one should do their strength training, and how much one should do, and of what type. Because most of the running issues that he sees involve knee pain, he thinks most runners need to work on hip exercises. There are arguments for doing them before running (to loosen them up) and after (to allow doing exercises to full fatigue), but there is no hard evidence which is better. His favorite two hip exercises are very simple:
a) use the elastic band around the ankles a sidle sideways, and
b) balancing on one leg, and take your opposite hand and reach it towards the foot you are standing on.
Again, he was going to send us some additional information, and I’ll share them as I get them.
4) There is no good evidence on what causes people’s gait to change as they age. It is not simply a reduced strength, or springiness affect (as I thought it was), that the research on strength doesn’t bear that out. He says that older runners tend to have bigger peak impact forces than younger runners even as they shorten up their stride and reduce the height of their “jump”. His conjecture is that this is due to a loss in proprioception as we age. But it needs to be studied, and he’s invited all of us 55+ aged runners to become part of his study, which would give allow us to have a full gait analysis done for free (but he warned us that he may not get to analyzing it right away, as its done as data collection.)
So what does this all mean to me? My take on this is a) there really is something to Magill’s drills, so I should get back to doing them, and b) once or twice a week, I’ve got to take off the trainers, go minimal, and run in the grass, even if just to do a few strides.
@spikez, curious if you feel that adding a bit of endurance to your routine has been an overall positive to your training. Seems like a “yes” so far. Good luck next week, by the way!
Quote for the week (found this online and attributed to our good buddy): “I tell our runners to divide the race into thirds. Run the first part with your head, the middle part with your personality, and the last part with your heart.” - Mike Fanelli
Have a great week, everyone! Hope to hear some good news out of your corner of the globe.
Cheers!