A few weeks ago a training partner and I decided to do a 3k time trial on the track and to try and get close to 9 minutes. A couple of friends agreed to pace us at 72 seconds per lap. There are actually plenty of opportunities to run 3k races, as our club organises as series of open meetings every summer. This one was quite a late one, so we decided to give it a miss, as well as benefitting from perfect pacing!
My PB was 9:19 from last summer, and I felt that I would be happy with anything below 9:10. We set off at 9 minute pace anyway though. Might as well give it a go. That’s the good thing about doing a time trial rather than a race; it doesn’t matter if you screw it up. The obvious down side is that it isn’t an official PB if you run faster than you have before, but I don’t really mind. For me this was just a chance to see what I could do, regardless of whether anyone else is there to see it. As it happened though, there were people to see it. The first was Mark, who paced the first kilometre in 2:59. Rob took over for the second kilometre: 3 dead. I suspected before hand that if I could get to 2k in 6 minutes then 9 minutes was probably on the cards, but it took a lot of concentration. We’ve done time trials before but usually over greater distances, where you can afford to switch off a little in the knowledge that it’s easier to make up a few seconds here and there. 3k is right at the bottom of my racing range so I find it hard to vary the pace. At least I only had to focus for 3 more minutes.
Mark took the next lap, giving me something new to focus on. My legs were getting really heavy by this point but his 72 kept me right on pace. Rob took over for the next 400 metres and I just about managed to hang on, only dropping a few metres back. This meant I got to 2800 in 8:25. I had to pick up the pace to break 9, but I could see the finish line. With lungs and legs burning I took off and sprinted down the home straight, crossed the line and collapsed.
I lay on the ground for a few moments trying to get my breath back and then looked at my watch:
Tim crossed the line shortly after, not feeling 100% after a week’s holiday. He was disappointed not to have run closer to 9 minutes but I know he’s got it in him in the right conditions. It’s always hard to feel sharp after a week off.
I know I can do it now. Just need to do the same in a race. After all, if it’s not on Power of 10 it never happened.
As reported on this blog last week, Yuki Kawauchi, a cult figure on the world marathon circuit, took part in a 50k race over the weekend. Kawauchi, best known for his third place finish at the Tokyo Marathon in February, started the Okinoshima Ultra Marathon on Sunday.
This was surprising news, given that elite marathon runners tend to steer clear of Ultra races, so many were intruiged by Kawauchi’s potential capability over the distance. Leading from the gun, he raced hard over a tough course and collapsed in the final kilometre. Perhaps this is no surprise. The Japanese athlete is well known for pushing his body right to its very limit in the marathon, having required medical attention after 5 of his 6 marathon races to date. The extra 8 kilometres may have been just too much for the 24 year old.
Kawauchi’s ability to push himself harder than most athletes is what sets him apart. It is also a perfect case study for students of Tim Noakes’ Central Governor theory. The central governor is not so much a tangible part of the brain, but a system in the brain that prevents overexertion according to the brain’s perceived physiological limits. In other words, one’s ability to exert oneself is governed centrally. Your body stops you before you stop it.
Noakes’ theory that the most successful athletes are those with the ability to override the central governor, to push the body to its limit. The signals from the brain to the muscles to slow down are just not as effective in elite athletes, a result of years of hard training. This immunity to pain is what drives these athletes to great success, but it can also be the downfall of some athletes. Literally, in Kawauchi’s case.
Of course, this time the central governor won, and the fact that he collapsed just 600m short of the line shows just how hard he was able to push himself. Of course, I hope that Yuki Kawauchi never fully wins the battle against his central governor because according to Noakes’ theory, this will mean he has died. But then again, to quote Kawauchi himself: “every time I run, it’s with the mindset that if I die at this race it’s OK.”
And us runners wonder why people don’t understand us…
Note: Credit for this blog post is due to the Japan Running News blog, an excellent Engligh language blog on the running scene in Japan.
High levels of intense training, coupled with good diet and plenty of rest may have performance enhancing effects, a new study has shown.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Academy of Research in Sports and Exercise (ARSE) has shown there to be an overwhelmingly strong correlation between the volume of training undertaken and the performance level of a sample of both elite and non-elite athletes. In this groundbreaking piece of research, athletes were given a 6 month training schedule devised by the world renowned coach, Dr Gillian McKeith, before undertaking a 5km time trial. The results were staggering. Around 98% of participants showed an improvement over the half year period, whilst the other 2% made some excuses about the conditions not being right on the day.
This news comes after the recent Prefontaine Classic, where Mo Farah beat a world class field to win the 10,000m in a new European record and Moses Mosop broke the world record for 30km. Asked afterwards what the main factors in his success were, the Kenyan Mosop replied “I just run 200 miles a week no slower than 5 minute mile pace and when I do this for a while I feel quicker,” whilst Farah said “Usually I train 4 times a day, except during Ramadan when I cut it down to 2 sessions a day. Oh, and when Wimbledon’s on the telly.”
When questioned about the project, McKeith said “I am extremely proud of the whole team at ARSE. This is a huge discovery and will forever change the way sports scientists view elite level athletics.” Her claims have been supported by a number of high profile former athletes. The former world record holder at 10,000 metres Haile Tergat, now president of Eritrea, said “In our day it was all blood doping this and EPO that. No one ever said anything about training hard. Yeah, we used to run a bit but it was mainly about who could inject the most oxygen-rich blood into their bloodstream before a race without getting caught.”
However, as with any new discovery, some sports scientists remain cynical about the new research. It was previously thought that talent was the key factor in determining the potential of an athlete and that training had a negligible effect of performance. Most leading academics used to believe that it was God who would determine who would win a race, but this theory was called into question earlier this year after Richard Dawkins’ scientifically rigourous proof that God doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, amateur runners all over the world are taking to the roads and tracks in order to try out this new ‘training’ phenomenon. Roger Hammond, caretaker at the athletics track at the University of Hemel Hempstead, said “the place is packed now. The university has doubled my hours because of the demand. We used to just get the odd skinny middle-distance type down here knocking out a set of 400s, but now it’s the world and his dog. Literally.” Hospitals are now at capacity due to the number of runners who have been struck by cars, thought to be linked to the increase in the number of people training on the road.
It remains to be seen what the long term impact of these new findings will be, but it is widely believed that the athletics record books will have to be rewritten to reflect the huge leaps in performance that are now inevitable.
No, this is not a music blog. I’m not referring to the Kate Bush song, excellent though it is, nor am I referring to Placebo’s equally brilliant cover. This is about some of the training I’ve been doing recently.
Having fallen on a run a few weeks ago, I have been suffering from some muscle tissue damage in my right knee and have gradually been trying to regain strength in it and not lose too much fitness. Two weeks of almost no running were followed by two more of some jogging combined with massage and icing on my knee. I have not been able to train on track but have realised that running hard up hills has a similar training effect but is much less punishing on my knee.
Hill sessions were an element of my training that I had neglected in the past, prefering to do either speed or endurance sessions on the track, but as I stood breathlessly slumped against a wall after my 8th and fastest hill rep on Thursday evening, I realised that hill sessions are the real deal. You get the same anaerobic workout as you do on the track and a nice long recovery as you jog down the hill.
My particular favourite is shown below, a hill that starts flat and gets steeper and steeper as your legs fill with lactic acid. It is also exactly 400m, so although you can’t compare your times to one lap of the track, you’re doing well if you can get close.
Even once my knee heals, I’ll still be running up that hill.
Yesterday evening I had a catch up with two of my closest running friends, the core of my training group and the guys I do several of my training sessions with every week. It was good fun. We sat in Mark’s living room, ate some pringles and popcorn, put our feet up and watched the full 3 hours of footage of the London Marathon. Ace.
Apart from our unanimous agreement that, amongst other things, Mary Keitany is a running goddess, Emmanuel Mutai is a machine from another planet, and that British men can’t run marathons, we were united in our view that none of us had really achieved what we had set out to at the start of our most recent marathon training cycle. First there was Mark, the evening’s host, who had got into great shape leading up to the Two Oceans Ultra Marathon (56km) in South Africa. He managed to run a 2:06 20 miler and a 16:12 5k in the two months leading up to the race and was well on course to break the 4 hour barrier and claim his first silver medal at the event. Illness in the weeks leading up to the race caused him to miss his target time, and he ran 4:17. Whilst this is a very respectable time for a hilly 35 mile race in the heat, Mark is the first to admit that he could have run quicker in different circumstances.
The second of the trio was Gracie, also afflicted by illness in the two weeks preceding his race, the London Marathon. A tough and strong willed man, he started the race despite not feeling 100% and began to struggle soon after the gun. To his great credit, he continued to the finish, running a time of 3:36, over half an hour slower than he had trained for. He had done the miles, done the sessions, but wasn’t able to cash in his banked mileage on the day.
Which leaves me. Readers of this blog will know that I had a bad day and didn’t even finish the London Marathon, having to be scraped off the pavement by a police officer somewhere in the Docklands. After four hard months of specific training, I don’t even have a marathon time to show for it. Not even a bad marathon time. No time.
Now it’s easy to view these setbacks as proof that our training was wrong, that we did the wrong work, that we were not adequately prepared to run the times we were claiming to be capable of. This might be true or it might not, but my personal view is that different forces were at play. Don’t worry; I’m not going to start making the classic mistake that losers make and start making excuses. I do feel, however that this was just a bad day. Well, three bad days.
What running teaches you is that you are not always going to be successful. You can have the perfect build up but still not deliver on the day. For every 5 great races you have, there will invariably be one stinker of a race, and it is more often that the one bad race of the six is the one that you remember the most. We spent a disproportionate amount of time reflecting on the bad things that happen, whilst forgetting to reflect on our successes. Arguably, this is what makes a successful athlete – the ability to learn from setbacks and build upon them. But I do feel that you must learn from the good as well as from the bad. Was it the mileage that helped you to that half marathon PB? Was it the hill sessions that gave you the strength to dig in on that last climb of the cross country race? Was it the extra rest day that you took the week before that helped you to the great 5k time?
This is one of the many ways in which running is a metaphor for life. Sometimes you fail. Sometimes you do not achieve what you had hoped. Sometimes you are disappointed. Admittedly, it is the hard working and the fortunate who are disappointed the least, but everyone has a bad day sometimes. Mine was on April 17th, and I am going to learn from it.
