Long distance running: getting better, moving faster and enjoying it more.

Amateur long distance running has been my hobby since high school. I thought of it as something that I am bound to get better at just by doing occasional efforts. Initially that was indeed happening, but, after a year or so, I plateaued. I blamed my lack of improvement to failure to push myself harder during races. I never put much thought into how to get faster and didn’t really measure my progress. It was Forrest Gump’s way: “I just ran”.

When you’re are starting, “just running” alone will, undoubtedly, make you better. But once you’ve passed beginner stage, this will merely keep you in the game. To be sure, many people are content with just running and feeling good about it. It is perfectly fine to have no other goal than running itself. At some point, however, I decided it is worth investing effort to try to get better at running, since I like it so much and continue to spend about 3–6 hours per week on it. This is what I learnt.

Planning runs in advance

Consistency is the key to any improvement, and it only comes with pre-planning. Not planning rest days beforehand will likely result in having too many rest days. When you are leaving the decision about whether to run or not to run to the last, there will be thousands of reasons not to, just as you’re ready to lace up. Similarly, not planning time of day to run beforehand is making it hard to squeeze it in between other daily activities; especially ones that involve work and family. In my case I know that, if I am not finished with my run before everyone wakes up, chances it won’t happen just doubled if it is a weekday and tripped if it is a weekend. Getting out to run in the middle of day involves shuffling meetings around it or suddenly being stopped by your boss on the way to locker room with urgent matter to discuss. On weekends, as you’re announcing matter-of-factly you’re going out for a run, turns out your spouse had some chores ready for you. I found for me it required so much energy to ad-hoc plan my runs, by the time I got out the door I was so mentally exhausted, simply moving was an achievement, and type or intensity of workout became irrelevant.

The reason schedule didn’t seem like a good idea, was because, I feared, it would take fun and spontaneity out of daily run. It would become a chore I would grow to despise.

Eventually I decided to try having a schedule anyway, curious how long I would last. I went to Runner’s World magazine website and downloaded “Break 1:30 Half Marathon Plan” and then registered for a local half marathon event in 10 weeks. I was nowhere in shape to get to 1:30 half marathon in 10 weeks, but wanted to start somewhere, and was hoping that registering for a race would help me carry through with the schedule.

Next day I got up in the morning and did day #1 workout. Then day #2 and so on. Every day I would get up, check the schedule and just do what it tells me to do. I couldn’t keep up with the exact pace in the schedule, intended for 1:30 HM prep, but I adjusted the pace and went along. It could be just my personality type, but following a routine was surprisingly easy. Not having to plan every day allowed me to focus on the workout itself. Rain or shine, tired or not, I would go out and do the workout.

I trusted my old self from 3 weeks ago, who had pre-planned it for me, and all I had to do, was to move my feet.

After 10 weeks I ran the event and got 1:34, which was 5 minutes faster, compared to my half marathon PR from a year earlier. After the event I got home and noticed the schedule on the fridge — all days were crossed out. And, writing a new one seemed like work, maybe I no longer need a schedule? So, what workout will I do on Monday? Monday is probably day off, or maybe just an easy run. How about Tuesday? Tuesday is a day full of meetings at work, so perhaps I should spend extra hour in the morning doing some prep work instead. I’ll decide when I get there, I thought, but the stress of even thinking about it gave me the shivers. Not having schedule was just too hard. So I spent an hour and and prepared my running schedule for next three months. This time I didn’t bother downloading it from anywhere and just wrote on in Word, printed it out and put on the fridge.

I immediately felt relieved. I would get up every day for a new purpose-driven day.

Polarizing the workouts

How fast and how long should you run? Most amateur runners have a single gear — not too hard and not too easy, that keeps them within comfort zone, but leaves them sufficiently tired to feel you like a good meal after workout is well deserved. This is what is commonly referred to as dead zone of training. You are reaping neither the benefits of hard workout, nor doing active recovery.

I used to be always running at around 7:40–8:00 minutes per mile pace and feeling good about passing most runners. This pace didn’t feel like racing to me. I felt like I could easily go faster. And yet, when I actually tried to go race speed, even during a 5K race, I could only manage just a slightly faster pace. When you are always running in dead zone pace, all you can manage is dead zone pace. Once I realized it, the first step was to force myself to go slower during my easy runs. Then I had energy left to accelerate during fast runs.

Now the way I think about it is that, whenever I run, it should either feel hard, meaning I am pushing myself outside of comfort zone and improving, or slow and easy, meaning I am in the process of active recovery. It should never be a half-assed effort in between.

After skimming through lot of material online available on the subject, a couple of books and trying out a few things, I settled with 3 workouts, that is actual hard workouts where I go outside of comfort zone, 2 active recovery days and 2 days off. I found, that order doesn’t matter, but weekly consistency (for example, doing intervals on the same day of the week) helps. For example:

• Monday: active recovery (Jog/slow run/bike commute,walk)
• Tuesday: hard workout #1: speed work / intervals
• Wednesday: active recovery (Job/slow run/bike commute, walk)
• Thursday: hard workout #2: tempo run
• Friday: day off or active recovery
• Saturday: hard workout #3: long/hard run
• Sunday: day off

Making active recovery days truly easy is not as simple as it sounds. At first I had to constantly remind myself to slow down. It took some time, before I developed a low gear, some sort of internal switch, that I can activate and just start moving effortlessly, gliding along without any strain. At first my active recovery pace was somewhere in the range of 8:40–9:00 per mile pace. Over time it gradually went down to 8:30. The right feeling after even longer run at this pace is, that you’re fully warmed up and ready to race if necessary. It builds reserves and provides physical and mental recovery to go fast during 3 hard workout days per week.

Hard workout #1: speed work/intervals. For my interval workout I start with slow one or two miles to warm up on the way to the track, followed by speed intervals, followed by one mile to cool down. When there’s no track around, I just run along flat route ideally without street lights. For me interval runs are at about 1 mile race pace (meaning if I raced 1 mile, this would be the pace) for 200 and 400 interval distance and at 5k race pace for 800 and 1600 intervals. I take 200 or 400 meters slow jog in between intervals. These are some typical interval workouts that I do:

• 800m or 400m repeats with half distance slow jog in between, for example 6x800m with 400m recovery jog in between.
• Mile buildup and its variations, for example 400,800,1600,800,400

Hard workout #2: tempo run. Sandwiched between 1 mile warmup and 1 mile cooldown, tempo run is 20 to 35 minutes run at about 10k race speed, i.e. about 10 seconds per mile faster than your half-marathon race pace. It is still a workout, not a race, so the key for me is stay in control and feel like I could go a little faster if I was racing.

Hard workout #3: long hard run. While, this can be simply long run and slow run, death march, as they call them, much more benefit can be derived from long run with one or more target pace portions in the middle or a progressive run, where you accelerate to your target pace and then back to slow. For example, training for half marathon, for my long run I would start by doing 3–5 miles at easy pace, followed 3–5 miles at target half-marathon pace, followed by 3–5 miles cooldown at easy pace.

During longer distance event like half-marathon or marathon, there’s this virtual wall that you hit somewhere around last third of the way. I distinctly remember feeling great at mile 17 during marathon race and battling the desire to stop and start walking at mile 20. Long training runs teach your body to use slow twitch muscle fibers more and burn fat for energy more efficiently.

Healthy weight vs. racing weight

If you look at a standard BMI chart, there will be a wide range to a healthy weight. For me, for example anything between 130 and 170 pounds is healthy.

While healthy BMI range is good guidance for general well-being, for your optimal long distance racing weight, you would want to be in the lower half of the range.

This is as sample as that — losing 5 pounds will shave 20s improvement off your 5k race time.

While this post is not about weight loss, I only wanted to mention that one thing that I found doesn’t work for me is exercising more. I easily gain those calories back and my workouts become less intensive. Things that do work for me:

• eating less sugar (notice, I didn’t say anything about carbs)
• not eating 2–3 hours or occasionally even longer before going to bed, which means having early dinners or simply skipping dinner once in a while

All-nighters are for losers

For me, lack of sleep continues to be, hands down, the biggest detriment to my running speed improvement.

One reason sleep discipline is so hard is because human body is generally forgiving and resilient. As long as you you are getting your 7 hours (or whatever it is you need) most of the days, it can tolerate occasional 3–5 hours and you won’t even notice, and, probably, if you are not doing any speed work, you will be able to always handle a long slow run without much difference to how you feel. However, for me, for example, it is a slippery slope. Not having enough sleep the night before makes me so tired by the evening of the next day, that my productivity slows to a halt. It also impairs my good judgement causing me to crave sugar for short bursts of energy. This would keep me awake and cause me to go to bed late and consequently have another night of not enough sleep. After a few days like this, I try intervals or tempo run and feel as if someone has replaced my body with a poorly made sluggish fake of what it used to be on Monday, even though I kept my regular training.

I am learning to break the vicious cycle by just forcing myself to go to bed, no matter how many unanswered emails are there and deal with it in the morning after run.

To summarize

It’s been 9 months since I stopped “just running” and started deliberate pre-planned training. Schedule, diet and sleep form the foundation, while polarized workouts push me forward. My fear of planning causing my running hobby to start feeling like a chore didn’t materialize: if anything, I am feeling much less stressed and better about myself than before, while I am spending about the same number of hours on running than I used to. If you are considering taking your runs to the next level, I hope this was helpful. Best of luck!