k r i s a n d r o

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.

Related posts:

1. 2.4km Out of the Way, 42.195km to Go
2. Running with Science
3. Run Faster And Stronger With Negative Splits
4. Getting Longer And Faster With Lesser Heart
5. 11 Days Too Little To The SAFRA Singapore Bay Run and Army Half Marathon 2009