k r i s a n d r o

I had a great week of marathon training last week, hitting 30.13km of total mileage and meeting all my training goals except for a very disappointing Tempo run yesterday. I could blame it on the weather, the lack of breakfast, or the absence of babes on the jogging track that day but it’s probably all due to my bad planning and unrealistic pace for the run.

Setbacks like that are very good for my analysis and besides, the rest for the 26km ran that week was better than what I have expected.

It’s now week 7 of my marathon training with 25 weeks remaining to the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009 and although my margins for improvement are starting to get smaller, it is still quite apparent that I am getting faster and longer. Faster in terms of pace and longer in terms of distance of course. You peeps don’t get dirty now.

Besides the improvement of my resting heart rate from 66bpm (beats per minute) to the current 60bpm, I can see from the logs of my Long runs that even though my pace and distance has increased, the effort perceived by my heart rate has actually lessened!

It’s quite exciting and interesting to see my body improving and adapting to my exercise regime and that makes me look forward to the next run as I can predict and plan my pace much more easily than just running by pure feel and intuition. So I highly suggest that everyone who is training to collect as much statistics as you can about your runs. At the very least, invest in a watch that has a lap function. And I believe the same applies to training for any sport as well with reference to collection of statistics.

Grab your shoes and a watch and head out to run peeps! Feel alive!

I usually start off my runs with lots of enthusiasm and energy and by the midway mark, I would usually lose steam and from then on, it is usually a struggle to the finish and my timings for the run would be called a positive split. That is if you section the run into halves or many parts, the earlier parts of the run are much faster and they get progressively slower as distance and time passes. Find this familiar? I am guessing that most people actually run this way as it is probably the most natural thing to do.

Of course the best way to run is to run even splits whereby one races at a constant pace throughout the length of the race but that is quite hard to do unless one was on a treadmill or has extreme running discipline.

It was with extreme interest when I discovered that many top athletes & coaches around the world train and enforce negative splits in their runs which is to run the 2nd half of the course faster than the 1st. The theory behind this is that by holding back during the first half of the run, the glycogen in your body that acts as fuel is reserved better for the latter part of the run. It is also said that it takes a couple of kilometres for the runner to get over the inertia and running too hard from the get-go wastes too much energy. Another very important aspect about running negative splits is that the picking up of the pace during the 2nd half of the race will have you overtaking other runners and this brings a lot of mental strength which is so very important in a long distance run.

So much for the above in theory but I actually put it to the test at 12.30am on Sunday morning for an 11km long run. The last long run I had was a week ago on a Thursday and it as at a 10km distance with a pace of 6mins 29secs per km and that run was a struggle from the halfway mark and it was like any of my runs before, a big positive split.

Now, to help you guys visualize better on how a negative split run looks like, here is the breakdown of my run on Sunday.

Despite running for a longer distance on Sunday, I actually improved my pace by 6secs per km! You can see how the negative splits work by looking at the columns highlighted in yellow. I aimed to run my first half of the training at a 6mins 38secs pace and the 2nd half at a 6mins 14secs pace and as you can see, I mostly ran faster than what I set out to do. I was actually struggling to hold back my speed at the start of the run. But by the time I hit the halfway mark, I realized that I was so much comfortable at this point then previous runs. Pushing up my speed for the 2nd half was hard but comfortable enough which was almost impossible to do if I stuck to my old way of running. And at the end of the 11km run, I felt that I still had some gas left in the tank compared to feeling spent for previous runs.

There is still a long way of experimenting on this tactic for running and I will update you guys as I go along my training for the marathon at the end of the year. For those runners who are interested in trying negative splits without having equipment like Nike+ or GPS watches like Garmin/Polar to track your pace and distance, you can either try running around the track where you can plan & track your lap timings or do like what I advised KuKuNehNeh to do for her 10km run for Adidas Sundown that happened on Saturday; run the first half of the race slower than your comfortable pace and try to push your pace up at the halfway mark. The race results are not out yet but I think she improved her timing by at least 10-15mins and experienced a more comfortable run to the finish. Read about her experience here!

These are some links to read up on negative splits.

The Positives of Negative Splits

Examples of Negative Splits That Worked

Calculate splits for runs here

It’s week 4 of my marathon training and my body is starting to show signs of the beating I am giving it. Both my knees, quads, hamstrings and calves are sore and the inside of my right sole is in pain. Not surprising that my body is in this state as I’ve stopped jogging and playing football regularly for the last 2 years but for this month so far, I have covered 68km and out of that, 35km have been ran during the last 7 days.

There a many lessons to be learnt as I approach the end of a one month cycle with regards to running and these are some that I want to share.

Read. Read. Read.
There is a wealth of information out there with regards to training, scheduling, running posture, diet & nutrition and many more. Don’t leave it to pure trial and error, make use of the knowledge that can be found easily online and in books.

Adapt.
This lesson acts as a counterpoint to the one above. As important as it is to read up on the knowledge of running, it is even more crucial to adapt to your own conditions of the body. Everyone has different levels of fitness and adaptability. Just because a source says that runners should start to clock 50km a week doesn’t mean that you should too. Just because some schedules say that you should run 6 days a week doesn’t mean that you should too. Know your limits and start small. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

Plan but don’t over plan.
Case in point is my own scheduling of my training plans. I have actually planned my workouts all the way to December… twice. But I realized only yesterday that I should not plan so far ahead and instead, I should listen to my body and plan about 1 to 2 weeks ahead at most. There will be weeks when one will struggle or overcome easily with what that has been planned and it’s important to adjust the following week’s workouts accordingly.

Have a goal and split it up into bite sizes.
Without a goal, one will lose direction. Having too big a goal and not splitting it up into manageable sizes, one will lose motivation if it’s a long journey.

Rest.
As important it is to push your body to new limits, adequate rest is crucial to an injury free and progressive training. The human body is such an amazing thing. Every time you push it to its limits or near limits, it breaks down to the molecular level and it tells the body to heal with the nutrients you provide and makes it stronger; and the cycle continues till you reach your potential.

The problem with most fitness enthusiasts is that they fail to rest adequately and go for their next workout and fail to perform and worse, risk injury. In a perfect world, the most logical thing to do is to go for a workout at 100% fitness with 100% effort and resting till one is 100% again which produces maximum improvement of one’s maximum potential in one workout cycle. But we are not living in a perfect world and it’s too hard to tell how long does one need to rest to get to 100% fitness without underestimating it and failing to perform or over estimating it and failing to maximize the gains of the last workout.

So, apart from obvious signs like fatigue and sickness, I feel that the next best thing to be able to judge when one is over training is by comparing the current workout to the last similar workout. You should be running faster or longer each time for the hard workouts or at least have similar results as we all hit plateaus once in a while. If you find that your workout is very much poorly performed than the previous one, it’s a sure sign of inadequate rest. And this applies to body builders as well I think (Even though many will disagree with me).

Don’t forget that apart from the muscles you are training, your internal organs like your heart, lung, and liver also need time to recover. 24hours in between each workout is sometimes just not enough.

Take a longer break and don’t worry about under training. If you have been putting in effort previously, the longer rest period will do nothing but good for you. And to practice what I preach, I am taking an extra day off to rest my tired legs.

Cheeseburger buffet anyone? I think I lost 1kg for the last 2 weeks.

[Image by darkmatter]

Deciding on taking part in my 1st marathon this year has made me trawl through the internet like a hungry hard drive on a data rampage. There are so many things to read about and to learn amidst all the ‘Enter if you are 18′ sites.

I realize I treat the marathon training just like how I treat my gadgets; I always read the manual first, play with it, and then read even more about it online. I think it’s so much efficient this way rather then just slipping into a pair of shoes and running off without an aim and ways to collect statistics for reference. The more I read, the more I understand how similar/different of a level I am with other runners. The more I know about my own body from the statistical data I collect, the better I can plan for my future runs to ensure maximum efficiency.

There is really a wealth of things to learn if one is really interested like me. The right type of attire, the type of shoes for the type of feet, the proper diet, the training schedules, the training types, the breathing techniques, the running techniques, the appropriate running pace, heart rate zones and the list can go on and on and I am still discovering new things as I trudge along.

There is no doubt that a better runner can come along and tell me that knowing all the above is useless knowing that he/she is better/more experienced than me but the point is that by training with science and the proper knowledge, I decrease my chances of injury while maximizing my own potential within the shortest amount of time.

I will be experimenting on myself (sounds weird. I know) with everything I have learnt and share with you guys as I move along.

10km training run coming up today!