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.

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.

[Image by darkmatter]

Deciding on taking part in my 1st marathon this year has made me trawl through the internet like a hungry hard drive on a data rampage. There are so many things to read about and to learn amidst all the ‘Enter if you are 18′ sites.

I realize I treat the marathon training just like how I treat my gadgets; I always read the manual first, play with it, and then read even more about it online. I think it’s so much efficient this way rather then just slipping into a pair of shoes and running off without an aim and ways to collect statistics for reference. The more I read, the more I understand how similar/different of a level I am with other runners. The more I know about my own body from the statistical data I collect, the better I can plan for my future runs to ensure maximum efficiency.

There is really a wealth of things to learn if one is really interested like me. The right type of attire, the type of shoes for the type of feet, the proper diet, the training schedules, the training types, the breathing techniques, the running techniques, the appropriate running pace, heart rate zones and the list can go on and on and I am still discovering new things as I trudge along.

There is no doubt that a better runner can come along and tell me that knowing all the above is useless knowing that he/she is better/more experienced than me but the point is that by training with science and the proper knowledge, I decrease my chances of injury while maximizing my own potential within the shortest amount of time.

I will be experimenting on myself (sounds weird. I know) with everything I have learnt and share with you guys as I move along.

10km training run coming up today!

The plan on Sunday morning was for me to go to the stadium to do my interval training while KuKuNehNeh goes swimming at the complex nearby but she was feeling uncomfortable from the you-know-what. I estimated that I would take an hour at most to finish my intervals and other exercises and we would meet at the market at 10am for breakfast.

The sun was blindingly hot even at 9am that day and the training was quite the killer even when I manage to meet all my goals. The drawback was that I took quite some time to recover before proceeding to the other exercises. It’s pointless to try to do chin-ups when I am constantly catching my breath from the runs and so I underestimated the time taken and was 20mins late to the market. I didn’t have my phone with me as I packed light for the training and I saw KKNN walking towards me from the market with a face of contorted emotions that spoke of worry and anger.

“Sorry Dear~! I’m late…” I spoke and gulped for oxygen and saliva for the fear of a woman having PMS.

“Wah lau! You make me WORRIED lor! Why you so late?”

“Sorry lar, I estimated the time wrongly and I took longer than expected.”

“I waited so long lor! I thought you might have fainted from the training or got knocked down by a car!”

“Haha! Sorry lar!”

“WAH LAU~~!!! I very hungry lor~! I wanted to order first and I realize how wrong it may be if I was eating chicken rice while you were dying in the hospital!”

“WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!”

 

It’s kind of cute to see the gf worry like that but I really should start to think of bringing my phone along for runs or at least give more time to play with for my estimations. The last thing I would want is for an exhausted me to take a beating for making her worry or for me to die while she enjoys a plate of chicken rice.