One of the most common responses when folks hear you’ve run an event, is “wow, I couldn’t run a mile! (or a 5K, or a 10k, or whatever distance is on the table…).”

Now part of that is certainly just being polite and supportive (to which I say “Thank you supportive non-runners, every one”), but many times I get the feeling folks would really like to feel differently about themselves, and based on my own experience, I think a lot of reasonably healthy people would be surprised at how they could run – if they’d just slow down.  Here’s what I would say to one of those folks:

Running is not defined by how fast you go (despite the snooty comments you may read or hear, to the effect that anything slower than such-and-such a pace is just ‘jogging’ – a word which qualifies as slander among runners).  The truth is, any time you transport yourself by picking one foot off the ground before the other one touches down, you are running. It’s that simple.

The mistake I’ve seen ‘I’m-not-a-runner’ folks make is trying to go too fast, too soon.  They blast off like Usain Bolt for a few yards, then the lungs begin to heave, the heart to pound, the legs to burn and next thing you know, a runner is a walker, or maybe even a curb-sitter.

This MPR’s advice to anyone who wants to try running – or has taken a stab and feels defeated – is first to warm up by moderate walking.  Only after five minute of that has gotten your body into gear should you start running, and when you do, focus on running as slow as you can.  Really.  Instead of the way you think it should be done – the way you feel you cannot do – shorten your strides so one foot is landing barely in front of the other, and slow them down till one foot just barely comes up before the other touches down.  The object is to cover the least bit of ground you can with each stride, while still lifting one foot before the other hits.  See how long you can keep that up, then walk a while to cool down, and get some good rest.

A day or two later, try it again, and see if you can keep it up for 5% or 10% longer.  Only when you can keep up that barely-running pace for a moderate work out – something over twenty minutes – should you start thinking about going faster.   When you do, the goal is to speed up only as much as you can sustain for the length of workout you’re ready to do ( twenty to twenty-five minutes is what I’ve seen described as the providing the basic aerobic and health benefits, longer than that is really about attaining some other specific goal).

I know that some authorities recommend run-walking – run a set period of time (could be a number of minutes, could be seconds) then walk a set period (again, minutes or seconds), repeat for the length of your workout, or event.  I’ve never done that so have no recommendation one way or the other, except to listen to your own body, and do what feels helpful to it.  My guess is even if you’re a run/walk person, you’ll be able to make your run intervals longer and your walk intervals shorter – and maybe get to continuous running sooner, if that’ s your goal – by making the effort to slow it down.

It all boils down to this: go as slow as you need to, in order to maintain a running stride, and you may well be surprised by what you can achieve.  Like the old fable of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady is the key to finding out whether you too may have a runner hidden inside!

To cross-train or not to cross-train; that is the question many runners ask themselves, judging by letters and columns I read in magazines.  For this MPR, there are several good reasons to embrace the concept:

• Cross-training can help maintain high motivation for your runs.
  • Few of us are blessed with an endless supply of new routes, new goals, new strategies to keep every mile of every run engaging. When interest flags, so does motivation, leading to mediocre efforts, or even missed runs. Employing cross-training for some of your exercise days can keep your running workouts fresh and exciting. A long stationary bike workout often leaves me more hungry to get outside and run, where I get to create my own breeze and move thru a constantly-changing environment.
• Cross-training can exercise muscles or reflexes that aren’t emphasized in basic running, but that will still improve your running.
  • Swimming is great to build core–body strength (which becomes more and more important the longer your runs are) and also upper body (which is essential for uphill running, but doesn’t get built on the flats). For me, skiing steep terrain and moguls in the winter builds quickness of foot – which translates into higher running cadence – and also dynamic balance – which is absolutely critical for fast, technical trail running (especially bombing down-hill!).
• Cross-training in a less–intensive form of exercise may be a step in transitioning to a runner’s lifestyle.
  • It can be pretty intimidating for a beginning runner to hear about people who run every day, tallying thirty-, forty-, fifty- or more-mile weeks. Starting out by running once a week, and walking three times, can be a lot more approachable. Over time that balance can shift to two runs and two walks, then three (or four) and two, as running comes to feel more natural and satisfying.
• Cross-training can fit in where running doesn’t.
  • Like that quick overnight stay in an airport hotel, where running around the parking lot and access roads may not be appealing enough to get you out of bed on six hours of sleep, but half an hour of bike or elliptical in the exercise room may be just the thing to clear out cobwebs and stimulate muscles so they do not regress.
  • Here in Colorado, where winter days are awfully cold and dark at both ends (and fall and spring mornings contain roaming bears!); getting on a stationary bike at 6 AM is a lot more reliable than trying to carve out an hour in the middle of a busy work day.
• Cross-training allows you to build/maintain cardio-vascular and muscular capacity with less risk of running-related injury.
  • Almost by definition, most running related injuries come from some specific physical strain inherent in the particular actions of running, so exercising in almost any other form is less-likely to cause or worsen them. CT may actually provide a rest and healing opportunity that helps you recover from the injury. Swimming is often cited for this, as are yoga and the seemingly infinite variety of health club workout programs. For me, it can be as simple as a half-hour of stretching and calisthenics on the bedroom floor, that leaves everything feeling limber and refreshed while allowing that hamstring that made itself known during Saturday’s big run to fall back into blessed silence.)

Like nearly everything about running, cross-training is an individual choice, but to me it seems a no-brainer.  CT has the potential to increase most any MPR’s enjoyment and success at running, so I say, go for it!

I was talking with a young lady recently who had a strange running problem – after a few miles her right foot would start to go numb – always her right foot and never her left.  She’d tried lots of different shoes, socks, and other ideas, but nothing helped, and it was severely limiting her running. Pondering her dilemma reminded me that even though running may seem like a totally symmetrical phenomenon (it’s pretty hard to get away from left, right, left, right, left….) the reality can be more complex.

Some years ago I was plagued with a wonky left knee.  Every time I ran it got sore and sometimes swollen – not enough to keep me from running, but enough to hold down my enjoyment and therefore my mileage and progress. Since I’m flat-footed, I tried arch-supports and they helped somewhat, but it wasn’t until I ran with the arch support in my left shoe only that the problem seemed to lessen. (Eventually, after a couple of years running and cross-training, I got to where I don’t seem to need that support any more, but it took a one-sided solution to get me there.)

Anatomists tell us that human bodies are never perfectly symmetrical; many people have one leg slightly longer than the other, bones more or less curved, or one knee may angle differently. Lots of us have bunions, callouses or other features that differ between our two feet – some even fit a different size or width from side to side!

Perfect symmetry is just as hard to find outside the body too:  if you happen to run on roads, you may have noticed the pavement is usually ‘crowned,’ higher in the center of the road, so water drains to the shoulder.  That means if you run against traffic, your right foot is treading a slightly higher surface than your left. It’s not much of a difference, but miles of running means tens of thousands of steps, each one of which puts slightly different loads and stresses on the two sides of your body, maybe even translating up into how you hold your torso or head.  Pound your body asymmetrically like that for hour after hour and day after day and you may well generate a chronic pain that seems to come from nowhere.

Run on a track instead, and you may be curving to one side a lot more than the other, which could cause its own issues.  An Indy race car’s chassis is specifically designed for counter-clockwise turning, a runner’s is not!

The point of all this is:  If you have a running condition that affects one side of your body differently than the other, it may help to look for asymmetrical causes, and consider asymmetrical solutions.

p.s. – in the case of that young lady, I offered two suggestions:

– experiment with different types of insoles and inserts, but in one foot only; try something in one side one day, then another day try the same device in the other…

– check out asymmetrical breathing. Instead of an equal number of steps on every inhale and exhale, make it three steps inhale and two out, or two and three, or any other pattern that totals to an odd number.  Our core muscles do different things inhaling and exhaling, and create different stresses and tensions.  If you breathe symmetrically, you’re always putting those stresses on the same side of your body.  Asymmetrical breathing distributes them more equally – at least it’s worth a try!

Uphill running is tough.  It’s like… well… like running uphill. It’d be hard to get much argument there.

But downhill?

Some folks love it (put me in that camp – I’m happy to take gravity’s help any time I can), and some folks hate it; say it’s hard on the legs, busts up their toes, scary to go fast if it’s steep.

If you’re in that latter group, here are a few things that seem to work for me.

• When things start going downhill, resist the impulse to stretch out your stride and bound along; that increases impact (read: potential pain and injury), which is already exacerbated by the fact that the ground is slanting down in front of you, so your foot (and your entire body mass) is going to travel farther (and therefore faster, since gravity is an accelerating force) on every footfall, just to reach the ground.
• Stretching your stride can also lull you into reducing your level of effort and relying on gravity to maintain your normal pace.  Instead, lengthen your stride only moderately (if at all) from what it was on the preceding terrain.  Keep your footfalls under your body, not way out in front of you (a foot landing out ahead of you has a braking effect!) and take advantage of the downhill by increasing cadence as much as you can, keeping your breathing rate and level of exertion as high as they are on level ground.  This will   allow you to exceed your normal pace, maybe making up time lost on any uphills.
• A good way to achieve this is to picture yourself as Road Runner (the one in the cartoon, not the real feathered one).  Imagine your feet whirling around in tight circles like wheels, beneath a body that is rolling downhill, pulled by the force of gravity which, for once, is on your side.

Oh yeah, about that ‘scary when it’s steep’ feeling, two suggestions: one, think of your upper body being just a little back of vertical, your hips out front a touch.  That way your mass doesn’t get ahead of your feet and make you more vulnerable to tripping.  And on rugged or really steep descents, turn your toes up, pressing their tips against the tops of your shoes, and let your feet strike more to the heel than usual – it’s no fun to catch a toe and trip on level ground, but on the downhill, when you’re going fast and the ground is falling away from you – meaning you have farther to fall – it’s even less desirable (voice of experience again…). Since the ground is angling down toward the front of your foot, heel striking is almost a necessity on downhill, which may be part of the reason many folks find downhill so painful if they haven’t trained for it, working gradually up to longer and steeper grades.

Chances are, you earned your downhill – most come with at least some amount of climbing – so take advantage of Mother Nature and father Newton’s laws:  tip back, spin your feet, maybe hook your toes, and enjoy the pull of gravity.

Confession time – I drive a Prius.

I know;  that marks me as a tree-hugger, a global warming acolyte and probably a radical-liberal (though my official registration is with the other party…), but the reason my ride is relevant to this blog is not my politics, it’s the car’s groovy digital dashboard display, which shows the gas mileage you’re getting at any given moment.

On level ground, this is about as entertaining as C-Span (unless you enjoy seeing the mileage drop precipitously when accelerating away from a stop light). In hilly country though – of which I encounter more than a little, seeing as how central Colorado is in the Rocky Mountains, not the Rocky Hillocks – it can be an eye-opening experience. Driving Interstate 70 up to Vail Pass, for example, I’ll see my mileage cut by a third or even half, depending on the lead-iness of my foot. Crest the pass and start down the other side however, and the mileage-meter quickly tops out at 100 mpg.  A nicely clear illustration of one of the basic truths of physics – that hauling any ‘body’ (whether mechanical or biological) up a hill is vastly more energy-consuming than rolling it downhill, or even along plain-old level ground.

As a runner, you experience this same truth quite viscerally, and the reason is simple – every foot of elevation you gain in running uphill is the mechanical equivalent of lifting your body one foot off the ground –and that’s hard work when you’re already pushing that self-same body thru the dense atoms of earth’s atmosphere while overcoming the inefficiencies of transferring chemical energy produced inside your muscles into forward motion of the rest of you. Even a moderate uphill grade greatly increases your effort.  (And yes, a downhill grade decreases it, though for some reason the trade-off never seems quite equal…)

After sweating up some gnarly hills, I’ve developed a strategy for making the best of them, and it’s all about turn-over. For uphill running, shorten your stride in order to keep your cadence high and level of effort consistent; don’t allow the hill to run you out of breath. Yes, your pace will be reduced, but that’s a necessary fact – and as long as you keep a running stride you’ll cover ground and build conditioning. The steeper the hill, the shorter the stride, but the goal is to keep a running stride for as long as possible. If the grade is just too steep – or too long – for you to do that, then switch to power-walking: still with short quick steps. Be careful to maintain a healthy level of effort though, and pay careful attention to the steepness of the route. As soon as it levels out enough, you’ll want to switch into running mode again and work on getting back up to your desired pace (a stretch of power-walking doesn’t have to mean giving up on your run).

Uphill running is a necessary part of many events, and also a great conditioner. Best of all, it often leads to a juicy payoff – downhill running.

More about that, in future.

Distance running is, in large part, about restraint; finding that magic pace which gets you to the finish as quickly as possible, but not so fast you fall apart before you get there. The first time you complete any particular distance, you’re likely to be staggering and stumbling across the chalk, but after a few times, you may begin to feel that surge of adrenalin when the banner comes into view, and be tempted to pull out the stops and surge across, the theme from Chariots of Fire resonating inside your head.

While some running authorities discourage a final sprint, I say ‘go for it.’ Reward that restraint by finishing strong – after all, as a mid-pack runner, your most-likely pay-off is in your own feelings, not a podium, so why not live the dream?

If you Divided and Conquered your run, you’ll know when you’ve reached the last 10% (about 1/3 mile for a 5K, half a mile for a 10K, 1 to 1 ½ mile for half marathon, and 3 miles for a full). When you do, think about building the pace gradually from there to the finish. To avoid injury (or an early flare-out), avoid a sudden shift to full-on sprint. Instead, accelerate gradually, moving those tired feet just a bit faster, then another bit, then faster still, so that in the final hundred feet or yards, you’re splurging every bit of energy you’ve got left, soaking in the cheers and applause of strangers, and knowing you have given it your all.

A slow, gradual start, a steady-state cruising speed for most of the distance, and a gradual acceleration to the line, can make for personal satisfaction, whatever the clock reads!

Before I got a GPS watch, I imagined they were all about the summary – how long was a run, what was the total time. Now that I’ve had one for a while though, I’ve realized sometimes it’s the interim information that makes them really worthwhile.

This past Saturday, for instance, I did a long event that was well laid-out (a surface-measured course is plenty-accurate to know your overall distance) and very well managed (chip timing is definitely more accurate than punching buttons on a watch as you navigate the start crowd, or trying to remember to do the same at the moment you cross the finish). There was no need at all for a GPS to tell me how I did overall, but boy did it help me make my goal – especially after my water-bottle kept popping out of my belt until it’s drinking lid shattered on the pavement and the thing got tossed in the gutter, from which point I stopped in at nearly every aid station to hydrate.

Thanks to GPS, I could see in the middle miles that I was running about fifteen seconds faster than my overall goal pace, so that should allow for slowing down and drinking – but I could have figured that out with a stopwatch and mile markers.

What I could not have figured out that way though, is that my perception of my pace got totally skewed after every aid station. I’d get my drink and toss the cup, and a hundred yards or so down the course I’d feel like, ‘OK, I’m back up to pace’. Looking at my GPS though, I’d see that what felt like the right level of effort and difficulty, was actually one or two (or more) minutes slower than I had been doing just before the aid station. And with every passing mile, that false sense of pace seemed to get more drastic (nothing surprising there – it’s called fatigue…).

Once the GPS gave me that news, it also helped my do better. Each time I looked down and saw a number that put the lie to how I felt, I’d focus on cadence – visualize my feet moving back and forth as fast as possible below an upright and stable torso. After I’d done that for a ways, I’d visualize my heels coming up higher and my strides stretching out a bit, but still snapping just as quickly. Time and again, I was able to get back up to pace within a fraction of a mile, and as I got used to ‘The Aid Station Effect’ I made that recovery more and more quickly, knowing what was happening and what I wanted to do about it.

Without GPS, I’m pretty sure I would have relied on that (false) perception of effort, and my pace would have gotten slower and slower thru those late miles. With it, I had the data to push through discomfort and momentary sensation, and ask of my body what training told me it was capable of. I was able to finish strong and make my goal, thanks in large part to the nearly-instantaneous feedback from that little electronic marvel on my wrist.

Now, if I can only do something about that water bottle-belt….

A few years ago I had a difficult run – colder weather than expected and headwinds that seemed to come from whatever direction the course was headed, no matter how many ways it turned. After battling intermittent showers and my own head-trips, I finally reached the home-stretch, laser-focused on one last chance to feel good about my morning by finishing strong, and found myself pulling-up on another runner who didn’t seem to have much ‘oomph’ left. Inflatable arch in sight, I huffed and puffed and managed to pass the guy with less than a hundred feet to go, feeling really proud of myself. It was only later, when the results came out, that I discovered the gent was over twenty years my senior! He’d been ahead of me for 26 miles, and if he took any notice at all of me passing, it could only have detracted from what was a far more impressive performance than mine. Suddenly that last-minute pass didn’t feel so glorious.

Since then I’ve become a lot more conscious about who is around me in that last hundred yards or so.

It’s one thing to challenge yourself to catch some person up-ahead in the middle of the race – that’s a great way to keep up the concentration and intensity, and for all you know, she or he might find it a useful spur to try to keep ahead of you.   I know I’ve felt that way – the “I’ll be darned if she’s going to pass me going up this hill…” kind of thing. At its best this turns into a team effort – two runners drawing each other on so that both excel. With a few friendly words tossed back and forth along the way, I’ve had this lead to a new friendship in the cool-down pen – exchanging names and histories, and even sweat-soaked hugs. (Nothing better than those slippy-soggy, salt-crusted, post-race hugs….well maybe a few things).

Nor am I saying a finish line push is never justified. If there’s a chance to catch some big young fella’ you’ve been playing leapfrog with all the way – and he’s still fighting as well – that’s part of the game. But if I find myself approaching the finish line neck-and-neck with a 14 year old kid (yup, it’s happened) or if it feels like one more hard push with two strides to go might allow me to pass another runner who’s clearly run out of gas, my rule now is to back off and seek satisfaction in clock-time and how I executed my game plan.

Running in the middle of the pack is about how you run, not dodging your “would’a, could’a, should’a’s” at somebody else’s expense. The best events are run against the clock, not the other MPRs around you.

If you’re a Mid-Pack Runner, then by definition there are folks finishing after you, some of whom may be radiant with achievement, some of whom are likely to be struggling for all they’re worth to achieve their goal.

Now I don’t want to take anything away from front runners – those Dionysian souls whose ability to take-in and process oxygen makes the rest of us look like we’re sucking atmosphere through a sippy-straw, but a part of me says if it takes a person more than twice as long to complete the course as the leaders took, then that person has probably worked way more than twice as hard.

Unfortunately though – and especially in small local events – by the time these dedicated souls come around the last turn, there may not be many spectators to greet them, and that’s a shame.

My suggestion is, after you’ve finished your own mid-pack run and taken a few minutes to catch your breath and grab a drink of water (and maybe free those tired toes from their running-shoe-captivity), consider spending some time standing ahead of the ‘Finish’ line, clapping and cheering for those who come in behind you. You don’t need to think up anything brilliant to say – most runners will be so focused on toughing out those last few strides that all they’ll register is the general hubbub – just make some noise with your hands and your voice, or by banging on something handy, and trust that they’ll appreciate it.

I’ve done this many times, and find it can be downright humbling to realize just how hard some runners push themselves, in full knowledge that they are finishing toward the end of the pack. Spend a few minutes shouting “Way to go runner!” or something equally banal, and chances are good you’ll find yourself gaining enthusiasm for your next Mid-Pack Run.