Search Results for: drills

Hip Flexibility Drills: Why runners should channel those Latin dancers (Also the Road ID Winner)

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While being quarantine to the elliptical I’ve made it my mission to watch every bad movie sequel possible; it’s been so long I’ve long ago burned through the good ones…hehe. Anyways, today on the agenda was ‘Dirty Dancing Havana Nights’…and what I do have to admit is that any time I see people who can actually dance it makes me wish I had just an OUNCE of rhythm or the ability to move in any way that could be considered dancing. I run in a straight line…it’s a stretch to turn left. But dancers aren’t just coordinated they are also flexible, another glaring weakness of many runners. Getting back to the good old ‘Havana Nights,’ the hip area (dare I say the groin!) is a commonly overlooked area where runners get tight and never do anything about it. They may stretch out the quads, hamstrings, and calf muscles, do the foam roller on the IT band, but not many of them think to make sure they gain flexibility in the hip region. But if you don’t work on this area not only will you not be able to salsa and flamenco, but if your hip area is too tight you’ll be limiting your ability to get full extension in your running stride. What this means is you’ll be short-changing yourself with a shorter stride and that translated over miles could mean losing out on precious time and finishing places. Here are some moves to regain some mobility in that hip area: * Hip circles: We used to laugh doing this one in my running group, especially the guys doing them in public, but we’re runners so be awkward proudly! Standing with your feet about shoulder width apart, place your hands on your hips and then circle with your hips leading; Continue Reading →

Waiting Can Suck, But the Patient Runners Win Out

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Being patient sucks. Waiting for what we want isn’t fun, but the reality is that often times we are forced to wait. Even more often is it that rushing things will ultimately leave us more frustrated in the long term. As runners, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just lace up and make our next race/workout/run a PR? If only, right?! The natural tendency to want those faster times and better fitness TODAY is the breeding ground for injuries, overtraining, and slowed progress. Beautiful irony there, right? Every runner has been guilty of it, and hey, some things you just have to learn yourself the hard way. (Sometimes a few times to really NAIL that lesson home.) Being patient sucks…but we need to learn to embrace it. Yikes. Where’s the spoonful of sugar to wash that down? Well that comes when you actually ARE patient and watch your goals materialize…eventually. The sweetest victories only come after enough struggle and work, after all. Convincing yourself to wait it out and be patient is tough and often an on-going battle. Incidentally a large part of being able to stay patient comes from confidence. How so? Being patient means BELIEVING in yourself, what you’re doing, and the process. A runner who lacks confidence is the one who tends to rush things, an example of that is going out way too fast in a race. It takes MORE confidence and patience to go out controlled and then pick up the pace, and close fast. A runner who tries to ‘make a buffer’ by going out too fast is subconsciously affirming they are going to slow down. See how that’s not a good way to think? It takes more confidence to be patience, wait, and then respond to your competitors (or go faster) as Continue Reading →

Embracing Discomfort: True rewards are only met when you’ve been pushed

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Running is all about dealing with discomfort. It teaches us that we are capable of handling more discomfort than we think and it always increases our tolerance for pain discomfort. Running strengthens us and skews our perception of just what is uncomfortable. A non-runner complains about a stomach ache, a runner doesn’t start complaining until they are projectile vomiting. But the reason that runner’s complaining is probably because it’s in the middle of a long run and they NEED to keep that gel/drink down because they need the energy, not because it hurts. 😉 Pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone is the only way to keep growing as a person, as an athlete, as a runner. In FORCING yourself to push, you’re setting yourself up to achieve more. The beautiful thing is that whether you wind up hitting XXX goal or not (if there’s not the danger of failing then you’re not setting high enough goals!) you’ll no doubt have improved in some way. You’ll have made progress. The journey to progress is just as important as the end results. Now I said it was a beautiful thing, fancy that, discomfort being beautiful. It may yield beauty but living through it is hard, painful, grueling at times. Discomfort tests us. But when you open yourself UP to that feeling of discomfort you’ll discover that it DOES get easier. And you’ll be inching your threshold to withstand discomfort ever forward. Running teaches us so much about life, and one of the strongest lessons is that, yes, we are much more resilient and tough than our minds want us to believe. It’s a coping mechanism, our brains don’t really like feeling uncomfortable. So we have to just trick it, PUSH, and force it to keep going. Pushing yourself to step outside Continue Reading →

Runners Three Tip Tuesday: Work on getting faster in tri-fecta form

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Good things can come in threes, but then again plenty of awesome things come in twos and fours. Runners have two legs, four laps make that perfect mile…though do those four laps REALLY feel all that perfect when doing mile repeats?? 😉 Brain: “FOUR laps, let’s call a mile one lap!” Juuust kidding. Well good things can come in any number but today you runners are getting a three-pack. Here are some Training Tips in Triple for your Tuesday: 1) Runners Who Skip: Runners can become a little too linear for their own good. Example is looking only at their running workouts to improve and taking that little metaphor to the literal: running is a repetitive, linear, single-plane action. If you don’t work your body in a variety of ways it gets tight. Tight will equal restrictive, bring you injuries and impede your speed. Offset that by doing things OTHER than running: core work, flexibility, and agility drills. Move in the horizontal, even do some skipping to ‘dilly around’ with your neuromuscular thought patterns. Your brain actually has to be ‘played with’…it gets stuck in a pace/pattern run with just running. So as crazy as it sounds doing things like skipping, backwards skips, crazy feet drills give it a little ‘reset’ and make it more ‘sharp’ when you come back to running steps. Oh, and those fast feet, like chili pepper jump rope things, those will help your neuromuscular training too…get those feet conditioned to FIRE off the ground faster = faster speed and sprinting. 2) Be Quiet I’m Sleeping: Sleeping should really be an Olympic sports…or at least one of everyone’s favorite past times. Want to have a sleep-off? Just kidding. But seriously, for the runner in training you should guard your zzzz’s with just as much ferocity as Continue Reading →

My New Love Affair With Stretching and How it’s Rocking My Running

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I love running (duh) but you may recall I’m not entirely in a Ménage à trois with stretching AND running. Don’t get be wrong, I KNOW how important regular stretching is to prevent injuries and improve your running performance. Heck, I write about it tons HERE and HERE…oh and I harp on it in my Competitor and Running Time articles. But do I love it? Eh…we’ll say I would choke it down. Then the world shook. You probably felt it actually. Remember THIS post where I talked about the BEST MASSAGE THERAPIST in the world?? Al Kupczak (aka also my BFF…all runners should contact him: 303-817-9961) literally solved a string of 3.5+ years of injuries stemming from my car accident. Side-not, getting hit by a car and almost losing your leg isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Well I mean I was able to run…but it was ugly, it never really felt like it used to, I couldn’t go faster than an easy pace without getting injured to where I couldn’t run at all. I saw lots of docs, tried lots of things…yada yada yada…finally got my butt up to Boulder, CO. “Cait, you’re tight as h*ll.” “I know, Al.” “It’s not all your fault, there’s lots of scar tissue and calcifications stopping you from being able to stretch.” “I’ve been TELLING PEOPLE!!! See, it’s not my fault, stretching doesn’t like me!!” “Well now that I’ve broken all that up you CAN stretch now.” [not verbatim but you got the gist] It was an intense 12 days, saw Al Kup every other day, hours on the table, and then…miracle beyond miracles check this out: First day in CO…I’ve never IN MY LIFE touched my toes before. This is only four days later after 2 treatments. I was able to Continue Reading →

Distance Runners Getting Their Speed Work On: The multi-level approach to getting faster

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Getting a runner to be faster is an interesting undertaking. It’s actually a concept that coaches and athletes have been trying to perfect for centuries. As science has improved, training has evolved, we’ve created training phases and workouts that push the runner and train their body. Simplistically it’s easy to sum it up like this: if you want to run faster, run faster. This is true of course, doing speed work and improving your base speed, is going to enable a runner to run a faster pace as the distance gets longer. As in, if you improve your mile time you’ll be able to run a 5k and 10k faster. If you don’t do speed work you’ll never improve your speed. Though as I said, that’s overly simplistic, and if a runner is truly wanting to see how fast they can be they need to open their eyes and expand their training logs to include ALL of the factors that make a runner faster. You see, the body is an interconnected machine, you can’t just concentrate on straight running workouts. I’ve been working on a series for Competitor.com tied to speed work and the other techniques that enable a runner to, well, run faster. There are drills, strength work, and a neuromuscular component to getting faster. Check out the series so far: What Distance Runners Can Learn From Sprinters The Neuromuscular Component to Speed Work Distance Runners Staying SHARP During an Injury In reading each of them you’ll see that the first step to getting faster is working on your shorter-repeat speed. You shouldn’t avoid those 200’s even if you’re a 10k and above runner. But that’s ONE step in the process. After that you’ve got to build the synapses and teach the nerves to fire faster; your brain is Continue Reading →

The Distance Runner’s Warm-up: Get your body and your mind prepared to run FAST

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The runner’s warm-up is a unique time. Before a hard workout, and even more-so for a race, there’s a lot that needs to happen both physically AND mentally. A warm-up tells your legs to ‘wake up’ because they’re about to start running fast. Gradually notching down the pace, starting with the relaxed running, prepares the legs, rather than a complete SLAP in the face…the shock of a hard 400 off the bat. Got a bit of the lazy bug or backwards thinking towards the warm-up? (ie: Thinking that you’re ‘saving energy’ for the workout/race is backwards logic…hehe) * Physiologically: Those super expensive cars can brag about going 0-60 in seconds, but your body doesn’t work that way. Sort of like you wouldn’t want to get ripped out of bed and chucked into the middle of a tempo run, your legs need time to adjust to, “Okay, time to run,” then “Okay, time to run FAST!” The science behind it can get wordy, but basically muscle function and glycogen burning (sourcing energy) works most efficiently when done through negative splits. Start slow (ie: running a warm-up) and work into those faster paces. * Feels ‘easier’: Thanks to that science, your muscles, once introduced/eased into that pace, will make the same times feel relatively easier. You will be able to then run faster off of a proper warm-up. I think all runners are down for that. * Mentally prepare: The warm-up is also a time for runners to get their heads on straight. Visualize what you want to accomplish during the workout, quell those nerves and keep them in check. Remember that you will stay relaxed and controlled when the pain is setting in. What is a ‘real’ warm-up? Studies are proving there should be more elements to your warm-up routine than Continue Reading →

Running is Repetitive, So Avoid Reinforcing Bad Habits

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If I’m on an easy run I usually get something random stuck in my head. A phrase, a word, the same song lyric running a loop over and over until the run is over. It can sure drive a person mad when it’s of course a song you hate. Be it as it may, I usually can’t get the lyrics to most songs right anyways, so why not make them up? It all plays in time to the music, I mean that’s all we really care about, right? 😉 “(S)he’s going the distance…(S)he’s going for speeeeed!” Won’t lie, Cake you have my heart and I don’t care what music comes out until the day I die this will forever by my favorite song. It’s not about racecar driving either. “Don’t you worry, don’t you worry, Child…the track has got a plan for you.” This is a newer one and it comes on the heels of two thoughts: 1) I need to get something other than radio in my car and 2) overplaying a song leads to psychosis. True fact. Whatever it is looping through your brain to get you through those miles is just fine and dandy. Running couldn’t get any more repetitive…haha…but that’s got to be a part of the reason we love it! Some not so hot things that come with a repetitive motion: 1) Body Adaptation: The body is sneaky and starts to adapt, meaning if you’re running wonky, with bad form that just get ingrained in the body’s ‘muscle memory’. Keep practicing a bad habit and over time it will bite you in the bum. Probably literally. 2) Wandering Mind: Having random thoughts through easy runs is totally fine, a nice distraction. But you don’t want to be counting blades of grass during hard repeats at Continue Reading →

Running Patient Keeps You In the Sport and WILL Reward You…In Time ;)

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Running is wrought with the ‘two steps forward, one step backward’ tests and trials. I’d call it logic, but let’s be honest, most runners lost all logic about 5,000 miles ago. 😉 Progress forward is HARD fought, once you’ve been running for awhile it then come in seconds and tenths rather than minutes. Each new PR ushers you into another realm, and in order to break through and run through to that next level it takes more work than before, and the cycle continues. Eventually you’re working to improve by 1 or 2%, and by that time it takes more than just running harder and running faster. One must run harder and faster of course, but also SMARTER, be more ATTUNED, and then PATIENT. All that patience sure does wear on a runner’s mindset. Typically we want those rewards, those PR’s NOW…but failing to be patient and look long term usually winds you up either 1) hurt or 2) limited. * Hurt: By running harder and faster smartly that means allowing the body to recover between those hard and fast workouts. If you don’t recover on your easy days then you start greying the line between HARD and EASY. You might think that going harder more often will help, but in fact you wind up being too tired to really NAIL those hard workouts. A bunch of grey running just leads to a bunch of grey racing, not sharp, quality races and workouts. Well, that is if you don’t wind up injured first. I’ll include overtrained under the hurt category, because watching your times slip really does hurt too. * Limited: By limited I mean you’re not looking at the BIG picture. To gain those ‘little’ percentages forward means you need to widen your scope beyond just running miles. It Continue Reading →

Review: The Complete Guide to Minimalism and Barefoot Running

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When minimalist running turned from a concept into some kind of near-cult ideology, I’ll admit to shaking my head. More correctly I was soured that with the launch of the Vibrams and ‘Born to Run’ book release the masses became obsessed with immediately running barefoot. Everyone wanted to jump headlong into this running trend with no other reason than they thought it was the cool thing to do. I mean “Waaaaaaz up” was the coolest thing to do for a time too, no? Misinformed runners were getting hurt, and THAT was really what I was stuck on or against. Well, and in all honesty I think the Vibram toe-thing is silly. I’m not anti-minimalist, in fact I began implementing Nike Free running in 2004 in order to increase foot strength and mobility. The key word there is IMPLEMENTING. Scott Douglas, multi-running book author and editor for Runner’s World, just released “The Runner’s World Complete Guide to Minimalism and Barefoot Running” for which I was given a copy to read and review. I was nervous at first only because of that buzz word minimalism but I also have read enough from Douglas to have faith that rather than just glorify barefoot running the book would be true to name and act as a manual. There IS sound reasoning and logic behind minimalist running, it then becomes a matter of ensuring enough runners learn and understand just HOW to go about running in ‘less’ without just getting themselves hurt. I was relieved because right off the bat because Douglas tackles the logistics and starts not at the aspect most minimalists and runners begin, the foot, but instead explains that the running body is a package. A runner’s body is an interconnected machine, you can’t take a single injury or problem at face Continue Reading →