Search Results for: intervals

When Brevity is in Charge: A Running Spinal Tap, Dessert Intervals, and Picking Your Pockets

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I’m not one usually short on words; if you think I’m addicted to miles then the rate of which I pound through the English language is probably right on track with what I’ve said of myself many time, “I talk like a chipmunk on crack.” Now, vocal octaves aside brevity is not exactly my strong point. I trace it back to how my brain operates; way too fast and with a flurry of a billion different things flying around at once. I try to catch them all, and am afraid I usually lose track of most of them. So I feel a bit of pressure to get all these thoughts into words and out of me as fast as possible. Though, over-explaining things has many a pit falls…mainly you lose your audience. Before I go and prove that point right now, I’m going to say that sometimes all you need is LESS. Being concise can sometimes prove your point the best and actually STICK with you the longest. “It was kind of like that movie Spinal Tap. I cranked it to 11,” was quoted from Andrew Wheating today in reference to the last 100 meters of his 1500 meter race. He just made his second Olympic Team; and the quote is courtesy of Mario Fraioli, senior producer at Competitor.com and he fired that one out of Twitter on location in Eugene. I love that quote, hilarity and relatability all rolled into one; Wheating is good with those. While the vast majority of us will never be digging for that extra gear in quest of an Olympic berth, I’m pretty dang sure we all can look fondly of times when the lactic acid, booty-lock onslaught is of epic proportions and we are grappling for one more gear. What is rarer, but Continue Reading →

Track Your Rest – What’s the ‘Right’ Way to Recover Between Intervals

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In training, when you’re running hard intervals the emphasis is naturally on the hard sessions. You want to hit the splits and push yourself all the way through to the end. True, these hard sessions are what are going to tear down the muscles the most so that they can repair themselves and come back stronger…get you fitter and in the end faster. But what does your recovery look like between these intervals? Do you cross the line and immediately come to a stand-still, a statue frozen in place relishing every second before you have to start the next one? Do you pace around a bit to collect yourself? Do you keep running, or jogging? While the focus should still be heavily placed on the hard parts of your interval sessions taking a look at your recovery time can influence the gains you reap from the workout overall. Furthermore, shifting and adjusting the ‘rest’ phases of your workout can change both the kind of benefits you’ll be able to get and actually to the degree of which you are able to boost your fitness. Let’s talk rest: * A general rule of thumb is that the FASTER you’re trying to hit those intervals the MORE rest you should allow yourself. Fast-twitch muscle fibers can only fire for a short period of time, but they fire all-out and thus need more recovery before being fired again than your endurance-based, slow-twitch muscle fibers. If your aim for the day is to improve your base speed, say you’re doing 200 repeats, give yourself enough recovery so that you can really hit those 200’s and make them fast, that was the aim after all, right? Take a really slow 200 jog between each hard 200, don’t rush the recovery here. * Active rest vs. Continue Reading →

Intervals and Hard Workouts…Don’t Avoid Them, Lie to Yourself and You’ll Love Them

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Interval workouts. Speedwork. Running hard. Pushing until your legs are on fire and your lungs burn. Sounds like so much fun, right?! I’ve said before that there is a difference between running and training. Hard workouts are the difference. They will make you faster, get you on the road to PR’s and the separate the runnerchicks and runnerdudes from the runnerbeasts…beasts being a good thing. You see, in a sick sort of way we crave that burn of lactic acid and pushing ourselves. I think it’s mainly because of the feeling you get afterwards…the feeling of accomplishment. And ya, the better times or PR’s are certainly perks. 🙂 Intervals are just as much a test of the mind as the body. Sometimes even MORE a test of the mind, a battle of the wills, a battle within yourself. Personally, sometimes the HARDEST part of hard workouts are just getting starting, putting the first one down. Yesterday I was on the precept of doing some intervals, I was watching the minutes count down constituting the end of my warm-up and getting those little butterfly nerves of getting started, “Here we go…let the good times roll.” I’ve found there are a few tricks on making bringing your best to a workout or at least gutting it out if it’s not your best day or you just are feeling ‘meh.’ One of the biggest: LYING TO YOURSELF. You read that right. I was doing 10x 3 minutes hard/2 minutes recovery and I took each one as they came. I sort of broke them into sets of two (ten minutes total) and just thought, “What is ten minutes, nothing.” This worked and when I hit six I knew I was over halfway done. Now, the middle intervals are usually even tricker; you’re feeling tired, Continue Reading →

Cross-training — Longer Intervals and Endurance Based Workout

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Cross-training. I have a love/hate relationship with it. The thing is, I know all of the benefits: cardio without the impact, a safe way to supplement ‘miles’, staying in shape during an injury…ahhh, that last one. See, that is where the hate part comes in. To be fair, it is really just mischanneled anger that gets sloughed off on cross-training…sorry, x-training. Usually whenever I’m on the elliptical, the bike, the crazy scary gauntlet-style stair climber, aqua-jogging, etc., it’s because I’m forced into it. My body is on the machine but my mind keeps drifting to where I want to be…RUNNING! But there are plenty of other reasons to be on that machine and many of them have nothing to do with injuries. You can be logging miles but still getting a workout done on the elliptical, they can go hand and hand; it’s just that even when I’m not injured I’d still rather be running. Hehe, oh me and my little running affliction. All that said; if you are going to use that cross-training to its full potential (as in it’s supposed to be a hard workout day, not just getting in some steady cardio) you can do it a few ways. A big one is with intervals. Intervals can kick your butt on the track/roads and they can do the same anywhere else…don’t believe me check back midway though a session and see if you change your answer. Intervals also help beat the boredom that can come with a stationary machine; though I will warn you that those recovery minutes seem to miraculously fly by much faster than the hard one…funny how that works! I’ve done a few cross-training interval workouts on the Workouts Tab, and here is another. This one is more strength/endurance based; you can do it Continue Reading →

The Everest Mile and Track/Cross-Training Intervals II

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I remember the day when I first ran an entire mile. An. Entire. Mile. I thought I was the shiznit, the boomdiggity. I mapped out a plan for myself, I thought that if I ran a mile every single day I could be one of the fastest people in the world. I remembered learning in grammar school math 101 that one mile was 5,280 feet, so what did i do? I busted out a ruler and set to measuring a circuit I could run inside my house. (I guess I couldn’t just find a tape measurer?) I figured out that if I ran around the dining room table and then looped around the perimeter of the living room it would only take me something like a billions laps to a mile. I told myself I should just do that every single night and soon I’d be setting world records. Clearly I was idiotic, living inside a little fantasy world bubble, and going to be really dizzy. This little confession is made all the worse because it’s not like I hadn’t grown up seeing my parents run. How did it not dawn on me that every day my mom was gone for an hour plus, did I think she was running only one mile and then shooting the sh** the rest of the time? The only point of my little moronic previous past story is that everything is relative. Then I though a whole mile was a great feat of strength (bust out the Festivus pole!) and now flash-forward and there are days I feel lazy for only putting in an hour and doing 8 miles. Funny how that works. But it’s really easy to get sucked in. Running, and other things too, has a kind of snowball effect. One day Continue Reading →

Insanity By Way of Twinkies and HATING Short Intervals

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Last night I watched a funny movie from the 90’s called ‘Trial and Error,’ I’m a cheap-o and was trolling through the free movies section available from Comcast and figured I’d give it a shot. It had Jeff Daniels, Micheal Richards (pre his freakout of recent years), and that bend and snap lady from ‘Legally Blonde.’ Anyways, long story short it’s about an actor who has to pretend to be a defense attorney for this man who is so obviously guilty. Unable to come up with a good defense they decide to plea that the client wasn’t mentally stable during the period that the crimes were committed. Reason? He was riding high off of one heck of sugar rush, years and years of junk food and sweets made him mentally incompetent. Insanity by way of Twinkies. They had a new age doc take the stand and liken the atomic structure of sugar to that of crack. “Glucose is just one measly nitrogen atom away from cocaine!” Good times. Anyways, coincidentally later that night I check out one of my latest blog obsessions, Peanut Butter Fingers, and she had JUST posted about her latest book find, The End of Overeating. You should read her explanation of the book, but in short it isn’t too far off of what this comedy had insinuated. Food manufacturers have been in the lab trying to capitalize on sugar’s addictive quality and even make it moreso. Are Hostess and that happy Twinkie Cowboy the real drug lords? Haha…gotta love that mental picture. That huge Cowboy snorting up lines of souped up sugar! Well, heck, at least it’s not high fructose shiznit, no, he’s after the good stuff! 😉 I know I on more than one occasion have found myself suffering from a sugar headache. Food baby Continue Reading →

4 Steps to Getting Through the Grind

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Long runs and long workouts tend to scare people. It can feel intimidating looking down the barrel of a double digit run or mulit-mile repeats. We’re distance runners, we love this stuff, but large quantities of miles (especially faster miles) still intimidate us. Running and that mental component, can’t escape the mind games. Our bodies are apt to surprise us and prove our limit-setting minds wrong…BUT it’s a matter of pushing past the mind crap (doubts/fears/discomfort) before we can be ‘pleasantly’ surprised. The best thing about running into new territory, be it your longest run, the most number of long intervals, or the most volume of hard running, they’re all scariest before you do them. Once you’ve conquered the best you’ve proven you’re capable of it and you get a new frame of reference. Example: You’re afraid of running 10 miles because you’ve never run that far. You then run 10 miles and flash forward a few weeks and 10 miles doesn’t scare you at all. But 14 miles does…sooo, you run 14 miles and the cycle continues. See how DOING something takes the fear out of it. Let’s up the ante. You can run 10 miles but now you’re supposed to run them hard. EEK!!! New challenge. Time to fight through it: 4 Steps to Get Through the Grind 1) Relax: the first part is you gotta stop building the run or workout up into epic proportions. Say with me, “it’s just a workout (or race), all I can is my best, so that’s the goal.” Deflate some of that pressure and take the power away from the workout…give yourself the power by realizing that you’re going to give it your all and THAT is all that can be expected. Times are there for guidance and motivation to push…but 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 →

Embracing Speedwork: Why running faster is mental AND physical, how to shift your thinking to run faster

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So one very hot singer has crooned, “Speed kills…” Well any runner can tell you that one! It’s a little two-fold though, speed kills your opponent and if you consider the lactic acid factor it probably feels like you’re killing yourself too! 😉 Remember THIS cartoon?? It’s true, us distance runners, of the slow-twitch muscle fiber realm would most likely opt for a 10 mile tempo than sets of 800’s or 200’s. Distance logic right there. The thing is though, while you can’t inject your distance running legs with fast-twitch muscle fibers you CAN hone the ones you’ve got and it’s quite remarkable how malleable that muscle make-up can be with proper training. But here’s the thing, for long distance runners, GETTING FASTER takes both a physical and mental component. Physical I’ve written a few articles on the specific physical training tips to run faster. Distance runners SHOULD embrace those horrid 200 repeats, choke down those shorter intervals because speed translates up. You need to reverse ‘common’ distance logic and build from the bottom (aka shorter distances) up. The faster you can sprint, the faster you can comfortably hold a ‘slower’ pace and longer. That reads as faster 5k’s, 10k’s, and marathons. Do those shorter intervals, add some hill sprints, anything that involves explosive power. That’s the muscle-building and training factor. Mental Here’s the thing, if you’re like me you HATE that short running stuff because you ‘feel’ like you suck at it. You feel out of your element and get stressed more for the short stuff because it feels awkward, doesn’t come naturally, and thus gets a little frustrating. ALL those thoughts create is PHYSICALLY impossible to run your best sprints. Crazy how the MIND can once again stop you from being the best runner you can be. The Continue Reading →

Treadmill Running: Fear Factor Sytle

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We’ll call it crossing past the comfort zone on the treadmill and into the fear zone. This is my face when the intervals on the treadmill are just TOO SHORT and FAST for my liking!!! Hang on, Dear Runners. When doing speedwork on the treadmill, there’s always the extra incentive to keep up or risk turning into a treadmill causality. ——– Tips and training for all things treadmill running HERE!! ——- 1) What mph or lenght of intervals on the treadmill is your comfort zone to fear zone barrier?? 2) Have you ever been hurled off the back of the treadmill? I decline answering. 3)What’s going on for you this weekend??