Friday, July 20, 2012

Its Friday, end of week, rest day before another 10km race on the weekend

We spotted a 10km 'Fun Run' that is on in our local area on Saturday 21st July 2012, the 'Its Not OK'  run. It seems it is a fund raising and awareness event organised by the CityPoint Church on Child Trafficking.

We decided to enter it, it is rare to be able to jog from home to the start of a race so we are in, my third 10km race in less than 2 months :)

This week was reasonably hard - I did the Jetty to Jetty 10km race Sunday, and ran four days in a row after that, 10, 12, 10, and 6km. All runs were sub 5min/km, and I was carrying a bit of fatigue and muscle soreness all week. The 6km run I did yesterday I also ran up and down the GoodWill foot bridge several times. Last night I felt really tired and ill, so I took it easy, bed early. And no running today.

I have had a little bit of a revelation, a methodology that may be of use. What I realised is that you can easily find out what muscles are worked hardest at speed by simply doing a multi rep 400 metre session. Do say a 10x400 or 12 x400 session running _fast_  but not completely flat out. Take note of the muscles that fatigue the most and are sore in the next 24 to 48 hours. Keep those muscles in mind. When recovered, take a long slow run, and take note of the muscles that are fatigued. For me I notice that the particular muscles affected by 10x400 repetitions at speed are NOT particularly affected by my long slow running form and posture.

This comes back to my thoughts on how to run fast and efficient, and the full body aerobic capacity. IF all your long runs are done so slowly as to avoid affecting the muscles that are typically worked hard at SPEED, how could you possibly optimise your fast aerobic running pace? So I have begun running in such a way as to make sure I use the form as closely as possible to how I run at speed in my slow runs. It seems pretty simple and bleeding obvious. This ends up in my hitting 4:50-4:55min/km pace  consistently.

I anticipate that one day my easy pace for long runs will be about 4:50 pace when I swing back to proper marathon training.

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