k r i s a n d r o

Yeah I know I haven’t been up to my usual self with regards to blogging and boring most of my usual readers with enthusiasm for my marathon training. Weird that I am seeing lesser funny, blog-worthy stuffs around. Either the weird situations have left me or I have been too busy sweating it out and being too high on adrenaline to notice the rest of the world slipping on banana peels and falling on their faces.

On the positive end of things, my knees are starting to get used to the idea of running 30km a week and I can feel my fitness levels rising steadily. It’s still a long way to beating the fitness level I had when I was 20-22 years of age but I believe that I can overcome that very soon if I keep at what I am doing. It’s still pretty amazing to think that I am now scoffing at how short a 10km run is when just a few months ago, I was having cold sweat just thinking about a 2.4km run for IPPT.

On the negative end of things, I am on the way to a career change and as bad it is to do so during such a economically bad period, it’s quite exciting to think of what the future might hold with this move.

Life changing moves with my health and career. 2009 might prove to be the biggest and potentially best year yet!

[Image by Michael Mistretta]

I usually start off my runs with lots of enthusiasm and energy and by the midway mark, I would usually lose steam and from then on, it is usually a struggle to the finish and my timings for the run would be called a positive split. That is if you section the run into halves or many parts, the earlier parts of the run are much faster and they get progressively slower as distance and time passes. Find this familiar? I am guessing that most people actually run this way as it is probably the most natural thing to do.

Of course the best way to run is to run even splits whereby one races at a constant pace throughout the length of the race but that is quite hard to do unless one was on a treadmill or has extreme running discipline.

It was with extreme interest when I discovered that many top athletes & coaches around the world train and enforce negative splits in their runs which is to run the 2nd half of the course faster than the 1st. The theory behind this is that by holding back during the first half of the run, the glycogen in your body that acts as fuel is reserved better for the latter part of the run. It is also said that it takes a couple of kilometres for the runner to get over the inertia and running too hard from the get-go wastes too much energy. Another very important aspect about running negative splits is that the picking up of the pace during the 2nd half of the race will have you overtaking other runners and this brings a lot of mental strength which is so very important in a long distance run.

So much for the above in theory but I actually put it to the test at 12.30am on Sunday morning for an 11km long run. The last long run I had was a week ago on a Thursday and it as at a 10km distance with a pace of 6mins 29secs per km and that run was a struggle from the halfway mark and it was like any of my runs before, a big positive split.

Now, to help you guys visualize better on how a negative split run looks like, here is the breakdown of my run on Sunday.

Despite running for a longer distance on Sunday, I actually improved my pace by 6secs per km! You can see how the negative splits work by looking at the columns highlighted in yellow. I aimed to run my first half of the training at a 6mins 38secs pace and the 2nd half at a 6mins 14secs pace and as you can see, I mostly ran faster than what I set out to do. I was actually struggling to hold back my speed at the start of the run. But by the time I hit the halfway mark, I realized that I was so much comfortable at this point then previous runs. Pushing up my speed for the 2nd half was hard but comfortable enough which was almost impossible to do if I stuck to my old way of running. And at the end of the 11km run, I felt that I still had some gas left in the tank compared to feeling spent for previous runs.

There is still a long way of experimenting on this tactic for running and I will update you guys as I go along my training for the marathon at the end of the year. For those runners who are interested in trying negative splits without having equipment like Nike+ or GPS watches like Garmin/Polar to track your pace and distance, you can either try running around the track where you can plan & track your lap timings or do like what I advised KuKuNehNeh to do for her 10km run for Adidas Sundown that happened on Saturday; run the first half of the race slower than your comfortable pace and try to push your pace up at the halfway mark. The race results are not out yet but I think she improved her timing by at least 10-15mins and experienced a more comfortable run to the finish. Read about her experience here!

These are some links to read up on negative splits.

The Positives of Negative Splits

Examples of Negative Splits That Worked

Calculate splits for runs here

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.

I had a nice running session yesterday, doing something called a Fartlek. Yes I know how horrible sounding it is but it’s not a condition whereby one passes air uncontrollably. It is actually “speedplay” in Swedish and when I am doing it, it looks as though someone is chasing after me with 10-inch dildo every other kilometre.

KuKuNehNeh had a 4-5km run to prepare her for her 10km run over this weekend at Adidas Sundown and after ending our sessions and a dinner afterwards, we plonked ourselves in the car, preparing to drive off and head home. By the way, she drives and I don’t. Times have changed. *wink*

She released the handbrake and proceeded to look out for traffic as her left hand reached out for the gear stick and she found my sweaty right knee instead.

Half laughing and half trying to drive, she and I started one of our fake quarrels which involve bad Singlish and the raising of ones voice with an irritated tone to it.

“Wah lau! Leg open so big for what?”

“Leg open big cannot meh? I got Dua Lumpa what!”

“WAH LAU!!! LUMPA SO BIG FOR WHAT?”

 

And then we both break out in uncontrollable laughter. Life is full of great little moments.