IM CDA: Aches and Pains, First Stop: Alcatraz

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We’re about 10 days away from IM CDA. Last weekend, my back decided to flare up. Very annoying! It set off muscle tightness in my left lower back and glute and made it painful to move around. About once a year this happens and this was not the best timing. I iced it twice a day, which I knew would remove the disc issue, and then some PT yesterday set my muscles on their way to releasing and being back to normal. I just hope that it doesn’t flare up at Escape from Alcatraz, which I’m racing this Sunday as a warmup for IM CDA.
My bike is over at Cupertino Bike Shop and ready to be picked up by TriBike Transport. Since TriBike Transport is picking up my normal race bike on Saturday, I’m racing my Ritchey Breakaway Titanium at Alcatraz.
Late last week, I took my Breakaway out of its suitcase and discovered that the Qantas baggage handlers had thrown or dropped it so hard that it bent the top tube! When I tried to put the bike together, the pieces didn’t line up anymore! I was really mad but also in a bind because I wasn’t sure what I was going to race if I couldn’t race my Ritchey.
I emailed Ritchey Design for help. Amazingly, Tom Ritchey replied to me and invited me to come over to his house where he put my bike frame half with bent top tube into a vice, and the proceeded to bend it back. Wow, Titanium is sure some strong stuff! He was putting his whole back and weight into it and bending it little by little. Titanium has this flexible quality where you need to bend it past the point you want it, and then it springs back. So we kept bending it, checking it, bending it and checking it until the pieces lined up again. Man I thanked him profusely for helping me out! It was stellar moment for me and very impressed with Tom and his company. Definitely buying more Ritchey stuff whenever I get the chance!
So now I’ve got my Ritchey ready to race, and hope the titanium didn’t weaken to a point where the bike is going to fall apart on me at Alcatraz. I’ll put up an Alcatraz race report shortly after the race.
Otherwise, my power and speed are both looking good for Ironman. Yesterday I did a Speed+Threshold workout on the bike Computrainer and got through it with no problem. Today I ran a treadmill hill+speed workout to loosen up my legs; don’t want to stress them too much as I want my muscles to calm down fully from my back issue. Biking doesn’t seem to stress it as much as running does. So lots of rest for Sunday and pray that Alcatraz doesn’t fire up my back again.
Other than my back, I’m happy that the normal aches and pains prior to any race haven’t emerged as much this year. Any kind of ache or twinge I’m really worried about because getting injured right before a race is not a good thing!

14 Days Before Ironman

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Here I sit in the middle of taper now. Feelin’ pretty good this year. Some highlights as I approach Ironman:
1. Yesterday I weighed myself on the scale at only 145 lbs! This is midday, after I’ve eaten breakfast, had fluids to drink, etc. I think I may be as low as 143 lbs on race morning. Well, less to carry with me on the race, hopefully that means more speed.
2. Last year, I was able to go up a combination of Old La Honda and Kings Mountain repetitions of up to 4 times. But I didn’t do anything special; I just was happy to make it up those hills 4x on my peaking rides.
This year, I was able to do 4 laps but I used intervals to increase their ability to make me stronger. I didn’t want to do just do the same thing I did last year. I wanted to improve on my cycling time and strength and I shouldn’t be doing the same thing as last year; I need to keep hitting my body differently. So I began doing intervals the entire way up either Old La Honda or Kings, and doing them such that I would increase effort by the last lap.
I survived this and I believe this has made me stronger on the bike.
3. Mostly I have been relatively injury free this year. I do have a tightness in my right glute and hip, which has extended down my outer hamstring. I also have tight flexor hallicuses on both legs, probably due to my constant negative splits on my long runs. Both have been managed effectively through ART and Graston technique.
4. This year, I extensively trained my neuromuscular system in all 3 disciplines. For swimming, my form hasn’t been all that great and I’ve rediscovered Total Immersion swimming to help with this. In cycling, I’ve really tuned my muscles to keep my legs cycling fast especially when I crest hills instead of slowing down. This is also true after all my interval training where I am really tired but I still can cycle my legs fast by relaxing my legs but my nerves can continue to fire. In running, I used a treadmill to train my legs to keep working at fast paces, and also in getting used to powering up grades at faster speeds. Thus now I feel pretty good at keeping my leg muscles firing even when they are really tired.
5. My recovery lengthened by almost an extra day from 3 days to 4. I did not know why at first and it was very concerning. I did know that I had increased my intensity year over year and each time, I had added almost an extra day of recovery and now I was at 4 days. This means I was left with only 3 days of working out at effective wattages or paces, which isn’t enough to stress all disciplines enough. I needed to find how to recover faster or else I wouldn’t be able to train to my max potential.
I read Dara Torres’s book, “Age is Just a Number” and she, being of similar age as me, told of how training for the Olympics at her age meant that she would intersperse more recovery workouts with high intensity workouts, rather than doing a constant string of high intensity workouts which can be withstood by younger athletes. This did not mean that she wouldn’t improve or be faster – she did set some world records after all.
So I tried this and this did help. But I was still perplexed by my lengthened recovery time. Then I got a Normatec MVP and that really helped my leg recovery. But my heart/lungs still felt very stretched well into the 3rd day, and almost the 4th. Something more had to be done. I was sure of it.
It was then I got my first clue from my physical therapist who talked about nutrition in recovery. Then I got some help from a tweet and another buddy of mine who took Glutamine to help recover.
I then began trying protein powder, BCAAs (Branched Chain Amino Acid), and Glutamine, on the theory that my body was passing food too quickly and not absorbing enough nutrients from each meal. The results were astounding; I was able to pull in recovery almost a full 2 days!
Still some workouts did stress my body too much. I normally do a workouts in the peaking phase that incorporate mile (and longer) repeats. This season, I started with some long repeats that had some short, fast sprints intermixed. These workouts were too much for my system and lengthened my recovery by an extra day mid-week. I had to pull back and just do more simpler mile repeats.
Other gadgets that I used this year was vibration, via a Port-A-Vibe, and Gua Sha tools which are similar to Graston tools. I am also lusting after a Direct Muscle Stimulator which is able to cause tight muscles to release, but this is really expensive and haven’t made the leap yet. Maybe next year.
7. I had the pleasure of guiding two of my friends on their triathlon journeys, one to her first half Iroman and the other to his first Ironman.
The days are passing quickly and my anticipation grows. I have increased my intensity this year but do not know how I will do. I hope for better than my performance last year at IM FL, but my ultimate goal is now to break 11 hours. It may be too much of a jump from last year as IM FL is a faster course then IM CDA, but you never know until you get out there.

Tips on the Mental Aspects of Running

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A buddy of mine asked me how I go out there and just run long, day after day, week after week. Here is the email I sent him:
You have hit on a key element in long distance racing, which is the mental aspect.
Some things to try:
1. Get used to the time. If you do this a lot, pretty soon you’ll just be used to being out there that long.
2. Grow to just love running. If you love what you do, you can do it longer!
3. Keep mentally occupied, like having a set of intervals to run which require you to look at your watch, compute times and paces, etc. Pretty soon before you know it, you’re through the workout and the time goes by pretty quickly.
4. Music helps although I don’t train or race with music generally, since it’s not allowed at triathlons. I never run with music, although I do like music while on the bike trainer, but not while I’m out riding as it’s dangerous and I can’t hear cars coming.
5. Don’t focus on pain. This never works for me. I just want to quit! If anything, I try to focus on perfect form, which tends to lessen or remove pain. I never try to get out of perfect form to lessen my pain, which could cause me to hurt somewhere else!
6. Focus on repetition and perfect form for every step. I try to keep aware of each step and try to make each step my perfect step. Get used to repeating for long periods of time.
7. Focus on distance goals, like running out to a point and then back, or saying I’m going to finish this loop. Then mentally you’re committed and you will yourself not to quit and turnaround because you said you’re going to run somewhere and then back.
8. Interesting terrain helps.
It’s one of those things where you need to train this as much as the physical aspects. Most people can get physically capable of finishing a race of any distance; you just need to swim/bike/run the distances and you’re pretty much physically there. But many people don’t have the mental stamina to finish. This is the will that drives you to the finish line even if your body is screaming for you to quit.
Given all this, there are still some days when you just don’t have it mentally. At this point, you should just go home because on some days you’ll find you just won’t be able to do the workout. But make sure you’re quitting for the right reason and not just slacking because you’re lazy.
If you’re really into some of this stuff, I often use Biorhythms (http://bit.ly/6LV2P) to help give me some forewarning on days when I may not have the right physical or mental attitude for a hard workout. I will post more about this later, but it’s an interesting way of looking at your body’s energy and how to apply it to training.

Running: Why Do People Get Injured?

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I often get asked how I can race year after year and stay relatively injury free. They remark that I am 40+ years old and wonder how I can just keep doing this and get faster each time.
It took me 7 years of tinkering with my own body, trying a multitude of advice and training, even trying a bunch of technology from shoes to straps, before I figured out how to keep my body injury free.
Recently, someone tweeted about an article, The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money? from DailyMail, which really disappointed me. It disappointed me in the fact that we often try to simplify things and try to solve our problems with one thing. But it’s not just about one thing, like running shoes as the article suggests, or even the lack of shoes which the article also suggests. Running involves a whole system of muscles, joints, bones, and coordination and how it works during running and over time. You need to address the whole system and not just one thing.
In answering the question of how I stay relatively injury free and race year after year at these long distance events, getting faster every time, I wanted to start with talking about what I have learned in what causes injury. In my next post, I will talk about what I did to address these causes of injury.
Now I will do something that I hate doing, which is to simplify (haha!). I will list a few basic things which I have found cause injury in runners:
Pounding
People talk about how the ground pounds the feet, legs, and body while running. Unfortunately, it’s true. Every step you take puts shock back up into your body, and you have to absorb it somehow through your shoes, feet, legs, muscles, bones – whatever. Over time, exceeding the shock absorption qualities of your body relative to your running style will injure you. The object, then, is to reduce and minimize the shock that your body experiences. A combination of reducing the shock experienced AND increasing your body’s ability to absorb shock will reduce the possibility of injury.
The Build Up of Tightness and Restrictions in Muscles
Muscles get tired and tight after training. It’s natural. Restrictions and adhesions form because the muscle fibers tear during training and they get stronger through this process. Lactate by-products also cause tightness in the muscles and need to get flushed out – the faster they get flushed out, the faster your muscles will recover. Depending on your age and your fitness level, your muscles can loosen up in a few hours, or require days. The intensity of the effort will also affect the amount of tightness experienced and thus also the amount of time to recover.
I have also found that muscles tend to develop a tendency to form certain adhesions or tightness in the same spots until my body adapts to a new training stress. This has happened repeatedly over the course of an entire season; very annoying!
The problem with the buildup of tightness and restrictions is that if they are not removed, they can keep building and building, causing restricted motion and potential strain of the muscles. But there is a more dangerous effect: the tightness in your muscles can seriously reduce their ability to absorb shock, thereby transferring the shock from your muscles to the tendons and ligaments, or ultimately to cartilage and bone, which causes really bad things like fractures.
Cumulative Build-Up of Injury
Related to the previous is actual injury to your body and not letting it heal. You gut your way through pain thinking that is what will build you up, but in actuality you’re just causing more and more injury. Finally, something really bad happens, like a tendon gives way, or a real muscle tear happens, or even a fracture.
Not Enough Recovery Time
A lot of people get really gung-ho about training. They raise the amount they do in trying to attain their goal, whether it’s to lose a certain amount of weight, prepare for a race, or just get to a fitness level that is consistent with their training friends. They may have gotten a coach, who just delivers a plan that is more valid for young athletes or those that are experienced, but unfortunately may not be appropriate for them. The end result is that in the midst of training, athletes’ bodies attempt to keep up but due to some factor(s), they are unable to recover fast enough given their training schedules. The result is a build up of injury and tired muscles which leads to injury.
Many training plans, or following the training plans of others, don’t account for individual needs. Everybody has their own recovery time given certain factors and the best training plans account for this.
Failure to recognize one’s own recovery needs is a common problem. It’s often not clear exactly how much one’s body needs, and sometimes not until you get injured. Factors that influence recovery time are:
1. Length and intensity of workouts
2. Age
3. Sleep, ie. did you get enough sleep?
4. Active recovery sessions and techniques
5. Fitness level, both past and present, ie. did you run track in high school or college, or were you sedentary all the way up to the point at which you started now?
Weak Supporting Muscles, Unbalanced Muscles
I never realized how many small muscles are used in supporting running until these muscles got sore during my training. In the past, I weight trained but the result focused on the big muscle groups and didn’t really build up smaller supporting muscles. Also, being right handed, my right side was used more resulting in an even bigger imbalance between my two sides.
These small muscles are the ones that maintain your form perfectly stride over stride. If these muscles are weak, then over time they will tire and then your form will get sloppy. You subtly adjust your stride to compensate and then problems can occur when your big muscles are taking on the load of moving your body and balancing, not to mention overstraining those supporting muscles in the first place.
The way I discovered my inbalance was twofold. The first was on the Computrainer on the SpinScan where I could see as I pedaled, a graph of my power output. I was clearly dominating the power from my right side! The second way was through racing. Pushing hard through Vineman, my right hip and leg got really sore, tired, and started cramping while my left leg was tired, but relatively cramp free. It became obvious to me that I was just using my right leg more.
Using my right leg more also resulted in more problems for my left leg, showing strain in my calf and IT band, and quads, while my right leg exhibited less issues. It was an issue that has taken a long time to address, and it’s still not fully solved.
Inconsistency in Training
In observing friends who train, I find there is a huge inconsistency in their training. They all say they go out and run, but when you ask them daily if they ran, you start to realize that they train only intermittently. Some weeks they’ll run 3 times. The next week they run once. Then the week after they don’t run at all. The week after that they’ll run 2 times. And then it’s two weeks of no running. And so on.
Consistency is key in training. Your body does not adapt to something by doing it occasionally. You need to do it regularly such that the body will recognize it needs to adapt to a new level of activity and stress and will do so accordingly.
If you are inconsistent, then you’ll inevitably set yourself up for pain and injury as you’ll constantly think that you can do more, but in actuality your body hasn’t even adapted to what your mind thinks your body can do.
Bad Running Form
I watched my kid run and she has perfect running form. Great body lean forward, arms pumping, barely a thump on the ground for every step, floating on the balls of their feet.
Then we get older and something changes. We get heavier so it takes more effort to run. We don’t run constantly enough any more and enjoy sitting in front of the TV or computer screen more than going out and running. We drive cars and take elevators. Our bodies forget how to run efficiently and either we go out for track and train during high school, or we spend those years in high school letting our bodies forget how to run well.
Go out and watch other people run. You’ll see people leaning or hunched over. They swing their arms back and forth across their bodies. They pound down the pavement and you wince with every thump on the ground as you imagine the stress their bodies are absorbing. Some lean back while they run, resisting the pull of gravity backward as they try to move forward!
Bad form means body parts don’t align when you run. You’re putting stress not along the strongest muscles, but against the weaker muscles of the sides of your legs. If you’re heel striking, you send the maximal shock up into your leg bones. If you wave your arms across your body, you’re not taking advantage of the balancing movement that swinging arms forward and back brings. If you’re hunched over, then you’re adding stress to your shoulders and back and you can’t move efficiently if you’re all stiffened up!
All this leads to wasted effort and energy, and can lead to pulled/strained muscles because you’re not relaxed and not running efficiently.
Doing Too Much Too Soon
Enthusiasm in runners is great. But many don’t listen to their bodies and just do too much too soon. It is often hard to know exactly what our bodies can take before we try. But sometimes, we just exceed what our bodies can do or recover from and that’s where injury occurs. We go for a marathon when we should have trained for a 10K and a half marathon first, and over a period of years.
Or, in our competitive zeal, we go out and try to become the fastest humans we can first time out and we get hurt because we didn’t get our bodies up to adapting to the stresses yet.
Or we have someone driving us too hard, like an army sargeant coach, or friends who are more faster and experienced who egg you onwards when you go out and run with them. These are people who make you feel bad for going too slow, and you try to rise up to their challenge. Don’t get me wrong; some people need this kind of motivation. But it’s bad when you try and you don’t listen to or know your body and you hurt yourself simply to save face.
Doing Something New
Related to doing too much too soon, doing something new that your body is not adapted to can also lead to injury. Suppose you’ve never run before. Then your friends tell you it’s great and they run, and they want you to go out and run with them. So you do it. Then after a few times, your legs are aching. Now why is that?
Probably because in your desire to keep up with your friends, you go out and try to keep up with people who are used to running more than you. Then your body protests because you’re trying to do something that your body is not used to. If you continue to gut your way through it, you might make it to adapting, or you might go downward into injury.
My Painful Path to Ironman
On my path to Ironman, I chose to start with an Olympic triathlon first, working with Team in Training. Then I raced a half ironman, swam the Waikiki Rough Water Swim (2.5 miles), and also ran the NYC Marathon. I did each stage of the full ironman before I did the full thing. But still, it was too much too soon.
Before my first Olympic tri, I had not done any running at all. I cycled intermittently and didn’t really know how to swim. My body was not damaged from a previous injury thankfully, but my lack of a history of athletic pursuits, and adding in my age of 37, and the fact that my body adapts to physical stress at a certain rate, all meant that as I built up towards my first triathlon, my body was just not able to keep up.
I was constantly getting too tight and stretching could not alleviate the tightness. I tried to keep up with my Team in Training buddies on the training schedule but that was even too much for me. I kept getting sore legs and my IT bands were really sore. My knees were also getting sore from all the tightness in the surrounding muscles and the shock of my poor heel striking running form. I just thought that I would follow the plan and everything would be all right. It was definitely not, but I did make it through my first triathlon although I thought it really sucked.
After this episode, I resolved to figure this whole thing out. I tried everything and read up on everything I could get my hands on. I found out that most doctors don’t know anything about running. I found out that a lot of research has been done, but a lot of it has turned out to be false. I tried technology and that worked sometimes but not all the time. I went for another 2 years of training, gutting through my first half ironman and other Olympic triathlons until 2004 when I left my company and could spend a lot more time trying to figure this out and how to remove all these nagging aches and pains that I experienced.
The journey I went on to solve all this is my next blog post – stay tuned!

From TI Blog: How long can you sustain Fast Swimming?

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I just read this off of the Total Immersion blog and had to comment immediately:
How long can you sustain Fast Swimming?
I found it to be extremely interesting in its discussion on adaptation and about neurological training. He states regarding adaptation:

These days, the coaches of elite swimmers are far more likely to give a moderate training load, let the swimmer adapt to it, then give a slightly more demanding load, adapt to that, etc. Rather than one major peak per season, they’re looking to produce a prolonged series of carefully-calibrated smaller advances in capacity and performance.

I’ve always thought that shocking the system as in the past was only going to wear somebody down and I’ve adjusted my own training to reflect an approach that is very similar to what he describes. I up my training load, then spend about 3 weeks to cement that adaptation into my system before raising it again.
The other important point is here:

The seldom-acknowledged weakness in this approach is that, while it may work reasonably well for the metabolic systems (aerobic capacity, muscle strength, etc.), neurological capacity was poorly served. A swimmer who is barely surviving workouts, because of prolonged intensity or volume, is far more likely to “practice struggle” in their movements, hurting the neuromuscular imprint needed to swim fast.

Lately, I’ve really come to realize the importance of neurological training. This is not only practicing and imprinting proper form in swimming, but also in the way my legs move in running, and also getting my nerves to fire faster so that my legs are more comfortable in cycling fast, even when tired.
Driving your system to exhaustion so that you can’t even focus on form is just dumb. I’ve discovered this as well where I would get to a point of tiredness and can’t even maintain form while running. The result is that I start stomping more, heel striking, my legs start moving slower and slower: this is all bad not only for racing fast, but increasing the likelihood of injury.
This is why I am mentally extra focused on maintaining form in all 3 sports. It’s super important to practice this, especially when you get into tired states because the body just gets lazy as you focus on “keep moving” versus proper form. The worst thing that can happen, as the TI blog entry suggests, is that when you get tired, you start imprinting improper form or you never gain the ability to imprint proper form because you’re always tired and you can’t.
Love this blog entry and love how it validates some of my own personal discoveries.

Starting Out with Pose Method and Switching to Forefoot Running

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A buddy of mine was trying Pose Method running for the first time, and was having problems with calf and shin pain. I sent him these tips on starting out with Pose Method, which is changing to a forefoot runner and improving on form, strength and balance and thought that these tips might be worthy of posting to my blog as well:
1. After watching the Pose video (my buddy also bought and watched the video), I tried some of his drills. Personally I felt that I could get there without many of the drills. The essential take-away from Pose Method is to run more forefoot and to stop heel striking.
2. The static drills I found most useful are those that involve balance and core. These involve standing on one leg for a period of time, standing on one leg and moving the free leg through a running motion, etc. They improve your balance and stability and build up both the large muscles (ie. quads and calves, etc) and the tiny muscles that you never hear about. Often its the tiny muscles that are involved in efficient balance and you want them to be stronger. But if they are not, then they tire out and transfer the stress to the big muscles and once they tire out, your form goes to hell and you eventually can get injured or strained.
3. Form is key. You need to now change the way you’re running to a more forward stance. So Pose’s leaning concepts and the way they say you should move your legs under you work well. You have to burn this into your brain and body until it’s natural. This is what takes time and practice.
4. This unfortunately means some possibly very sore calves, and it sounds like shins, in your case. Pose says this should last about a month. For constant runners and young people, I think this may be true.
But I will tell you that I am an edge case because in the first year it took months for me to adapt, plus weekly physical therapy to work out tightness in my calves. Then each year, after my off season, my calves would become sore again for some months before adapting, with PT working out the tightness. I think after my 3rd year into my 4th my calves FINALLY stopped protesting, although this year I have tightness with my flexor hallicus which is one of those small muscles that runs along the achilles tendon and under the bottom of the big soleus calf muscle. The unfortunate thing is that I can only manage it with PT and never give it time to fully heal; I am training every week and hope it doesn’t get worse, which as long as I go to PT it does not.
Non-tight calves and shins are essential for shock absorbtion and the return of spring energy back into the stride so that you are light on your feet and you are running fast. Otherwise, it will feel like your stomping around in army boots, which basically means you’re not lightly and efficiently running but transferring a lot of force into the ground, which returns that force back up into your legs, knees, hips and body as pounding stress which will lead to injury.
Other form tips:
Run with a head that is always level and not bouncing up and down.
Move your legs under you as if they are just brushing off the ground and you’re not stomping into it. Your stride should feel light and fast. Leg turnover is the name of the game, not lengthening your stride to compensate. Thus your heart rate will rise as more leg turnover raises your heart rate but you will get used to it.
You also want a slight body lean forward to enable gravity to help you in the run, not lean back so that gravity pulls you backward as you’re trying to go forward.
Your arms should be held loosely by your side, swinging only forward and back, not side to side across your body like you’re trying to do the watoosi (sp?). The arms help you maintain your balance as your legs are moving under the body. Don’t hold them stiffly down by your side or tense them.
Your body should be upright with your chest presented proudly, but not overly forward. This helps in the forward lean and also keeps your head up and not hunched over. You should have a slight tension between your shoulder blades to pull your shoulders back slightly; not too tensed but just a little. This also helps in opening up your chest for better breathing and maintaining posture.
5. If you can find an ART practictioner in your area, I would go weekly to work through your calves and shins if you can afford the time and money, until they adapt. Once they adapt you can back off to once every two weeks or once a month plus on demand if things pop up.
6. If regular PT is not for you, then I would get a foam roller (you find one at amazon) or better, the TP Massage Roller. I would get the longer one which is more versatile and gives you more room to roll different parts of your leg. You can then roll your calves and your shins (the meaty muscle part, which are the peroneals and anterior tibalis, not the shin bone). The rolling will help take out the tightness in a big way, and it’s also a great way to warm up which is to roll before you stretch and go out and run.
7. Stretching is always good, but often you’ll find that you can’t stretch out some of the tightness. But keep stretching nevertheless as it’s good for you, even if the protesting muscles won’t stretch out.
8. I would also start out more moderately. For example, in the balance exercises, he says to balance on the ball of the foot immediately. I think this may be too much for beginners. You can start by just standing there with your foot flat on the ground first. When you get used to balancing, then you can lift the heel up. Also, I would start being more conservative on the time you balance, maybe so short that it feels dumb, like 10 seconds. Your body may need more time building up the strength in a way that doesn’t leave you with sore calves and shins. So you can start with 10 seconds for 3X a week for maybe 1-2 weeks and then add 10 seconds to that for another 3X week for 1-2 weeks and so on. Jumping to 30 seconds may be too much.
9. This also goes for running, especially if you’re not used to running. You can go to a flat surface like a track and then practice keeping your Pose method form. Run and walk so that you give your calves a break from holding your body up, like run for 20-30 seconds and then walk for a minute. Later you start adding to your run time and reduce your walk time as your strength and fitness builds.
Also you can start out very low in time, like 10 minutes total for running (or run/walk) straight through not counting some drills time. Then keep the 10 minutes for a 1-2 weeks, and then add 5-10 minutes every 2 weeks. I know it sounds so short, but I found during my early days that my body would just keep getting tighter and tighter until something really got sore if I ran normal workouts so early in my training. You really have to listen to your body and do what it needs, and we also have to remember we’re older now and recover slower, and build up muscle slower too.
10. Doing core exercises are really good also. I am trying to find a good book which shows a lot of good exercises but don’t know of any that are really great. You can try Idiot’s Guide to Core Conditioning which is pretty good. I would stick to bridges and planks and avoid the twisting exercises which can stress the discs in your back. I would also go to the section with the medicine ball which has some really great exercises to build up both your stomach and back muscles. Having strong core muscles allows you to hold your body upright and not slouch during running, which ruins your form.
Or you can find a personal trainer as most of them train core these days, if you watch them work with others in a gym.
11. Don’t forget to take a day off in between working on this stuff to rest. If your calves are overly sore now, then you might want to take enough days off to make sure they are finally not sore, and then start again. Hopefully this will be in 2-3 days of not running. If you find that after a week they are still sore, you might want to find a PT person to help you out.
Hope these tips help all you beginning runners too!

A Survey of External Recovery Aids

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These last few years I’ve been thinking about proper recovery in between workouts a lot, and how it affects my ability to increase my performance. A lot has been written about recovery and how improper recovery can really detract from a race result and lead to injury. As I have explored recovery, not much has been written about some of the other aids to recovery that can speed it up.
Recovery really became important for me as I discovered that, at 40+ years of age, I would require up to 3 days of recovery after my long bike and long run days. Conventional training wisdom states that 1 full day of rest would be enough, and that by the day after I’d be able to hit workouts at normal paces and wattages with no problem. This wasn’t the case for me!
The other piece of wisdom that people fear is that you need at least 3 workout days for each sport to improve in triathlon. I’ve also found this to be false as I increase my long run and bike days, I still improve with only 2 days per week per discipline (not counting recovery workouts in those disciplines). But this is under specific conditions as I would love to move to 3 strong days during my build and peaking phases and not just during the base phase. Those conditions are the fact that I’m 40+ years of age and I don’t recover fast enough, that I never was an athlete in my youth so I can’t draw upon early years of athletic conditioning and ability, and also because I started so late to build my body and we just don’t build strength as fast as we do when we’re younger.
So if you don’t match those conditions, you should still go for 3 good workouts per discipline per week to try to improve and not just move to 2 simply because you’re lazy.
One of my aims became finding ways of recovering faster from my long bike and run days. I’ve also discovered recovery happens in the aerobic system, the muscles in both healing tissue damage and relieving tightness, and there is mental recovery as well. There have been many instances when recovery has happened separately in these areas and not all at once. For example, I may feel good in my lungs and body, which is a sign that my aerobic system has recovered, but my legs still feel tired and tight, which is a sign that my leg muscles have not.
Mental recovery is when you brain needs time to recover from mentally focusing on a long ride or intense training session. Doing hard workouts over and over can fatigue your ability to want to sustain a long and/or intense workout and sometimes you just need a brain break so you can hit the next workout with proper determination and not weakened willpower.
With respect to muscle tightness, many researchers are now working on the neurological basis for recovery, which is to figure out how to get the nerves to stop firing and to let go, which reduces or eliminates muscle tightness. This is tightness that you can’t stretch away; it stays around despite stretching. This tightness is also very dangerous in that if you don’t remove it, over time this will transfer shock and stress to the ligaments and joints which don’t absorb that very well and cause further damage to your body, leading to injury. Muscle tightness also prevents the transport of blood flow to your muscles, so exercise by-products stay around longer (hence soreness), and hinder the flow of nutrients back into your muscles for healing and energy replenishment.
In the last few years, the techniques and devices for recovering have become more sophisticated. While this survey is by no means exhaustive, I will talk about some of the ones I’ve encountered and have used here now:
Time and Rest
The easiest and cheapest way to recover. You just don’t do anything until your body comes back, besides sleeping, resting, taking lots of vitamins, and eating properly. My issue, of course, that just sitting around isn’t good training practice for the 3 days I need, even if it does work.
Ice Baths
This is one of my favorites. Immediately after my long bike or run, I jump into the bathtub and fill it with water and ice cubes and sit in it for about 10 minutes. The ice stops the muscles from creating more exercise by-products and also numbs any pain from training. Then when I get out, I hop into the shower and the hot water restarts blood flow and helps flush any remaining exercise by-products from your muscles.
The one downside is getting enough ice to do this. I need probably around 15 lbs in the summer time when the cold water coming out of the faucet is warmer, but only 9 lbs in the winter time. So either you gotta run to the supermarket after training to buy some bags of ice, or you have to fill up plastic bags with ice cubes during the week.
Compression Clothing
I love wearing compression socks and tights. I do find that these are very effective at helping fluid move through my legs and increase circulation, while reducing that swollen feeling when fluid pools in my legs.
Massage
I did do this once or twice but I don’t do it very often. Massage on tired muscles does help blood flow through those areas, creating recovery. It also feels good having someone loosen them up in the process. But it is expensive and I don’t find many massage practictioners do the right thing on the muscles as there are many forms of massage and not all work well on specific muscle recovery.
Active Recovery
This is a great way to increase blood flow and loosen up tight muscles. You just do very light workouts in any discipline. While just going out for a light swim, bike, or jog is good, I also think you can train while practicing active recovery so you’re actually getting some benefits beyond recovering. I am a big proponent of neuromuscular training, so active recovery sessions are a great way to train the neuromuscular system while not stressing your overall physical system. This is doing track drills while out jogging, or doing one legged spinning drills and practicing perfect form during fast spinning on the bike, or doing swimming drills. I also find that stimulating the muscles to fire fast again after getting all stiff and tired from a hard training session is crucial to making sure you don’t slow down, so I like to do fast turnover running/swimming and fast pedaling to get my muscles back to firing fast again.
Physical Therapy, ART, Graston
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big proponent of weekly physical therapy sessions with ART and Graston to help remove tightness and smooth out muscle adhesions to get the muscles functional and loose again. I have found nothing better to get my muscles prepped for another week of hard training than ART and Graston.
Foam Rolling, TP Massage Rollers and Balls, Lacrosse Balls, Softballs
Another form of massage is using these tools to help get into muscles and knead out tightness and soreness, as well as promote blood flow to those areas. Foam rollers are great for overall massaging and can be used for warmup as well. TP Massage Rollers from Trigger Point Performance are excellent for deeper massaging of muscles, as foam rollers can be too broad in surface area and too soft to really get deeper into muscles. TP Massage Balls and lacrosse balls are even better to get into specific points in muscles. Sometimes I also use a softball to massage my quads and to get into my psoas. The idea is to press hard into those tools and move the tool or the muscle underneath to help smooth out adhesions and make the muscle functional again.
Port-a-Vibe and Vibration in Recovery
Newest in my collection of toys, I bought a Port-a-Vibe which is a consumer version of some of those larger much more expensive vibration units you find in big gyms. Researchers have found that vibration stimulates the nervous system, increases metabolic rates, and promotes circulation. I stand on this unit for 10 minutes and it’s great for increasing circulation to my muscles and help with recovery. I have also used it to warmup. Many other benefits are cited, like working out while standing on the unit has shown to increase muscle stimulation and performance enhancements occur.
Deep Muscle Stimulator (DMS)
This gizmo has been around for a long time. The Deep Muscle Stimulator (DMS) is a heavy duty unit weighing about 5 lbs and vibrates at a certain frequency found to be optimal in affecting muscles neurologically. Specifically, when you direct the gun-like unit to your muscles, it pummels the muscle until the muscle’s nerves can’t keep up their firing, hence tightness, and the nerves just tire and relax. Not only does it do that, but it also has normal massage benefits like stimulating circulation to the applied area. I am lusting after one of these, but it costs $2500!!! My PT guy uses one on me and I love it.
Normatec MVP
Check these out – Normatech Sports originally created these out of a need for patients with medical conditions involving poor circulation, or healing after surgery. After giving some units to sports teams, they started using these for recovery and have found some fantastic results. The booties work by using air to create a pumping action against your legs (there are booties for your arms too) that increase circulation. This accelerates the movement of exercise by-products out of your legs and brings in new blood faster. Athletes use these for 20-30 minutes and have apparently achieved amazing results. The Garmin cycling team have used these and they love them. I am also lusting after a pair of these – they require a doctor’s prescription and they cost $5000 a pair! Sometime next year, they intend to create a more consumer version which will cost somewhere between $1000-2000 a pair. Not sure I can wait that long…also the consumer version has less control over the frequency of the pumping against the legs.
Technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. It’s all we can do to keep up with these advances, but us crazy athletes who want to get faster can only continue to lust after these fantastic techniques and devices.

My Favorite Neuromuscular Treadmill Workout

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I’ve been doing this workout for a long time now. I do it through my offseason to keep my legs moving fast, and I also do it as a recovery workout since it’s of such short duration. It incorporates running drills on the treadmill, and then uses the treadmill relentless speed to get your legs moving and get you used to moving them fast with less effort:

0:00-4:00

Walk to EZ jog (~4 MPH)

4:01-6:00

:20 (:10 right leg kickbacks, :10 left leg kickbacks), then :20 EZ jog, repeat 3X

6:01-8:00

:20 both leg kickbacks, :20 EZ jog, repeat 3X

8:01-10:00

:20 (:10 high knee one leg skipping right leg, then :10 left leg), :20 EZ jog, repeat 3X

10:01-20:00

Option 1: :30 high speed, :30 EZ jog recovery, every repeat increase by .5 or 1 MPH until you reach your max that you can still recover with :30, and then repeat at max until you hit 18:00

Option 2: :30 high speed, :30 EZ jog recovery until you hit a speed that you need more recovery to maintain, then do :30 high speed, 1:00 EZ jog recovery until you hit 18:00.

You can also take either option out longer for more repeats, but probably not more than 30:00.

18:01-20:00

Cool down

This is a great workout to stimulate your neuromuscular system in your legs and get them used to moving at faster speeds. You also practice relaxing so that you move your legs fast but don’t burn out your aerobic or your anaerobic capacity.
When you first start out, do Option 1. You’ll find that maintaining high speeds is really tough and that your heart rate is leaping to your lactate threshold fast. This is OK and natural. You may find that you have set it too fast to get to 20:00. Keep dialing the max speed until you find that you are able to do repeats out until 20:00. Once you have done this workout at these speeds a few times, then try increasing the max speed.
I found that it has taken me 2-3 years to get to a point where I have maxed out the treadmill. The first time through I could only get to 11-12 MPH by having a 1:00 rest interval. But another year passed and now I could get to 11-12 MPH with only :30 rest interval.
Other details:
1. You may find that your legs feel restricted and that you’re having problems moving them fast. If it’s a physical problem, you may need extra rest before doing this workout, or it could be a more systemic problem where you have restrictions in your muscles. This was my issue, and I solved it by having a competent ART specialist work my psoas, hip, and glutes to remove the restrictions that have been there for decades and my speed naturally increased once the restriction was gone.
2. In order to gain high speeds, you may find that you want to start doing :15 or :20 intervals at super high speeds – speeds that you can’t maintain a :30 interval with. So perhaps an Option 3 would look like:
:30 high speed, :30 RI, keeping increasing the speed until you reach a speed where you can’t do the speed for :30 but you can only do :15-:20 with a :45-1:00 RI.
Alternate this workout with workouts that maintain a max speed for :30 only for the entire workout.
Remember: you can’t run fast without actually running that fast (if that makes sense).
Once you get into the groove of doing this workout regularly, I guarantee you will find that your normal running times will increase dramatically as your legs and your aerobic system get used to moving your legs fast with minimal effort.

Neuromuscular Training and Hill Climbing

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A lot of focus on hill climbing in either running or cycling is on building leg strength, and aerobic capacity to support a strong push up the hill. Hill climbing for me has been a real challenge; I have been training constantly to increase my leg strength. However, I did discover another piece of training that is also important to hill climbing on both running and cycling. This is neuromuscular training.
Ever go sprinting up a hill and you’re going anaerobic? Your breath is heaving and your legs are burning. You’re using up all that strength and energy to accelerate up that hill and once you get over it, your legs collapse in energy output, just happy to not be exerting any more. You find that as you crest the hill, you have no more left and you just let the back side of the hill accelerate as you coast down the hill. Or worse for running, you find that you can’t even move your legs because you wasted them and your aerobic capacity going up the hill and now you can’t take advantage of the down hill to speed up because your legs are wiped out.
In the last few months as my leg strength has increased, I have found that neuromuscular training has played a nice role in maintaining and increasing speed as I blast up the hill and crest it. How is this so? It mainly comes from training the legs to continue their movement even while you have used up some anaerobic/aerobic capacity going up the hill. Most of the time, after we crest the hill and after a hard effort, our legs are so wasted that they can’t even move any more. But this is bad. They need to keep moving so that we don’t lose speed and we can accelerate on the downhill.
Neuromuscular speed training helps us to relax and become accustomed to mvoing our legs very quickly. It becomes second nature to move our legs very fast and we learn how to do it with minimal energy expenditure.
Thus, as we crest the hill, I have found that I can relax the legs to rest after the hard effort up the hill, but keep my neurons firing to cycle the legs and either keep revolutions going on the bike, or keep my legs moving and running downhill. When I relax my legs, they recover from the hard effort and it also lets my aerobic system recover as well. I don’t slow down, which is the key thing. I can maintain speed or accelerate but also recover.
It has reinforced the need for neuromuscular training for both the bike and running. Fast one legged sets at 100+ RPM, and super fast short running sets on the treadmill – both of these really brought me some unseen benefits in hill climbing.