Last night, before I turned off my bedside lamp and said goodnight to Mr Huggles, I was, as usual, lying in bed reading one of my favourite glossy magazines full of almost-clad women which I so totally buy for the quality, informative articles in the hope that they’ll teach me new tools and techniques to enrich my social and leisure time. Stuff like stamina enhancement (‘pace yourself’), injury prevention (‘look before you leap from the top of the wardrobe’) and ways to show you care (‘mix tapes… always mix tapes’).
I came across an article entitled ‘It’s Good To Walk’ written by former Boston Marathon winner Ambrose Burfoot which, apart from being very funny and puncturing the pompous running attitudes of some, advocated a technique which made perfect sense and clicked immediately with me. Essentially, he was describing a technique which added a little walking to a training run (‘R/W training’) and could even be used during a marathon itself…
Run a mile, walk for a minute, repeat another 25 times. Simple.
I was so enamoured with this cool new technique that I couldn’t wait to try it out this evening. I have a vague idea that I might be running an average of 11.5 minute miles at the moment but since my training plan says ‘50 minutes steady’ for today, I decided to carve it up into 5 sessions of 10 minutes with a minute of walking in between each. And it was great.
The countdown timer on my phone vibrated with an alarm in my skin-tight running pants every 10 minutes (I’ll pause here for a second while you picture that… got it?... no?... how about now?... there you go…) and I used the minute in between to either walk briskly, stretch any muscles that felt tight or drink from a water bottle, something I find quite hard to do when I’m running. By the end I reckoned I’d done almost five miles total distance so will definitely be trying out this technique again in the coming weeks.
Favourite iPod moment of the evening: Doves – ‘Pounding’ …does exactly what it says on the tin.
I came across an article entitled ‘It’s Good To Walk’ written by former Boston Marathon winner Ambrose Burfoot which, apart from being very funny and puncturing the pompous running attitudes of some, advocated a technique which made perfect sense and clicked immediately with me. Essentially, he was describing a technique which added a little walking to a training run (‘R/W training’) and could even be used during a marathon itself…
Run a mile, walk for a minute, repeat another 25 times. Simple.
I was so enamoured with this cool new technique that I couldn’t wait to try it out this evening. I have a vague idea that I might be running an average of 11.5 minute miles at the moment but since my training plan says ‘50 minutes steady’ for today, I decided to carve it up into 5 sessions of 10 minutes with a minute of walking in between each. And it was great.
The countdown timer on my phone vibrated with an alarm in my skin-tight running pants every 10 minutes (I’ll pause here for a second while you picture that… got it?... no?... how about now?... there you go…) and I used the minute in between to either walk briskly, stretch any muscles that felt tight or drink from a water bottle, something I find quite hard to do when I’m running. By the end I reckoned I’d done almost five miles total distance so will definitely be trying out this technique again in the coming weeks.
Favourite iPod moment of the evening: Doves – ‘Pounding’ …does exactly what it says on the tin.
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