Running 5K and 10K E-Book

David Chalfen

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Today's runners are bombarded with 'expert' opinion on how to run faster and often spend more and more money on trying to do so. Running 5K and 10K: A Training Guide is an accessible, jargon-free guide for all distance runners committed to improving their times. It doesn't offer any quick and easy answers; just tried-and-tested practical advice on how to train more effectively and shave a few seconds - or even minutes - off your personal best.Aimed at all levels of runner, from the complete beginner through to more experienced wanting to improve their times, and illustrated with 32 colour photographs and 16 diagrams.

Leseprobe

RUNNING 5K AND 10K

A TRAINING GUIDE

DAVID CHALFEN

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2014 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2014

© David Chalfen 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84797 797 7

Photo Credits

Urban Bettag, Simon Parker, Run England, Rosa Chalfen

Dedication

To my mother Diane and my sister Julia

CONTENTS

About the Author

1 Introduction: Being a Runner

2 General Principles of Training

3 The Training Plans

4 Aerobic Cross-Training

5 Running Movement Skills

6 Flexibility, Strength and Conditioning

7 Injury Prevention and Management

8 Nutrition and Hydration

9 Veteran Runners

10 Technology

11 Mental Skills

12 So You Want to Go Further?

Further Reading

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Chalfen has been coaching endurance running for over a decade and has been running for over thirty years. He is a Level 4 Performance UKA Coach and is an Area Endurance Coach Mentor for England Athletics, developing the endurance coaching network in north London and Hertfordshire. He has coached numerous distance runners ranging from national level to modest club level, and operates both as a volunteer coach – as a member of Serpentine Running Club – and via a website www.runcoach1to1.com. He has also acted as Team Manager for various international athletes at major marathons in Europe and Asia and has written feature articles about endurance running for Athletics Weekly. He competed at County level and ran ten marathons under 2 hours 35 minutes, with a best of 2.32. He lives in London. He was educated in north London and at Oxford University. This is his second book for Crowood. His first was Improve Your Marathon and Half Marathon Running..

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: BEING A RUNNER

Who is This Book For?

So who is this book pitched at, and why? Well, it’s definitely not a true beginner’s book as it assumes that the reader has gone through the newbie stage and has dealt with some or all of the basic issues and concerns that people may have about simply getting into a regular running routine. It also assumes that you are currently doing some structured, varied-paced running beyond simply heading out the door to build up ‘time on feet’ – or at least, physically and mentally you are in a state of readiness to do so. It is also intended to be of real practical use to the large numbers of new coaches, assistant coaches and leaders in running, who, having done the course and assessment, should find the book provides varied practical support as to how the theory works in reality.

The book is not targeted at advanced or very experienced club runners who are already hitting the roads, trails or tracks most days each week, and who have built up some structure of long runs, intervals, threshold efforts and steady runs and who have at least some understanding of why they do what they do.

The core of the training schedules in the book are structured around a pattern of four runs per week and hover around a range of 20 to 30 miles per week (or 30 to 40 kilometres). The training plans and advice detailed in Chapter 2 are focused on the 5k and 10k race distances, but will be very relevant to most people pursuing goals from 3k/2 miles up to 10 miles and, with some reservations, even half marathon.

In some ways this book is intended as a twenty-first century revamp of the two excellent books by former Sunday Times athletics correspondent Cliff Temple (published in 1979 and 1981 and now sadly out of print). He coached up to what was then world-class level (and indeed his 2.28 marathon protégée Sarah Rowell is a fellow Crowood author), but had very modest running prowess himself, having just nipped under a 3-hour marathon at his best. In the ‘club runner’ section of his first book, the template for basic marathon competency was a sub 3-hour target. Try that today and you immediately alienate about 95 per cent of potential readers, as this author discovered with his first running blog for The Guardian in 2013. Interestingly, Temple used a 40-mile week as the starting point for his sub 3-hour plan, which peaked with one at 100 miles. No quick wins in the late ’70s. He also included 10-mile races as staple competitive options – a nice distance which has now, sadly, become a rare event. This would be particularly handy for newer runners whose half marathon times broadly match the world’s leading runners at the marathon.

One of the biggest changes since the ’80s is the vast array of information about running available on the internet. In many ways this can be helpful, but, on the other hand, the sheer volume of information, much of it provided by people with modest credentials and a clear commercial bias which stresses that their product or service is the key to running progress, means that many relative newcomers to the sport can become confused about what will make the biggest difference to their running. Beetroot juice or a physiological test? Minimalist shoes or compression socks? A long, slow fat-burning run or a lung-bursting interval session? With so many runners leading increasingly busy lives, people just don’t have the time or inclination to sift through the reams of web-based content that may or may not be relevant.

Another advance that maybe clouds the picture for the ‘mid pack’ runner is the ever-increasing amount of scientific research that seems to have potential relevance to how they train. At one extreme, there is the cutting-edge élite work carried out as part of many countries’ investment in high performance sport, and the UK is one of the world leaders in this field. At the other extreme is the vast amount of research on basic cardiovascular fitness and health. This can be confusing for the average runner. How relevant or replicable is something that will shave a few tenths of a second off Mo Farah’s final lap in a 5,000m race? And what is the cost vs benefit for them, given it’s not likely to be the same as it is for Mo? At the other extreme, for regular runners trying to dip under 22 minutes in their local 5k park run, how much use to their training is something that shows ‘get fit quick’ benefits to obese people leading highly sedentary lives?

As one example, I recently saw a TV item about a Japanese scientist, who had devised a training protocol that was seen as the absolute optimum way of getting the most intense and quickest aerobic benefits in the shortest time possible, in terms of the length of the sessions and their frequency. The training was done on a spin bike. Of course, if you are a very busy person trying to improve your running and someone suggests you can achieve in 45 minutes per week what you are currently spending maybe 4 hours per week doing, you’ll be interested. This particular training method was, in essence, eight efforts of 30 seconds at your absolute maximum with a fairly short and only partial recovery in between. I’d be surprised if more than 1 per cent of readers of this book currently do any training of this nature – partly because it is intensely uncomfortable and few runners would actually be able to complete the full session; and partly because the session is very highly anaerobic, and for a 5k/10k training plan that critical level of intensity doesn’t need to be practised very often. What was slightly galling from the perspective of an endurance running coach was that the training session was seen as something new, when in fact, in terms of the structure of the session and the challenge to the aerobic and anaerobic energy systems, it would be something that every 400/800m runner, every 100m swimmer, every 1k bike time trialist and every 500m canoe sprinter would be broadly familiar with.

State of the (Running) Nation

We’ve all heard the simple mantra that ‘running is the cheapest sport; all you need is a T-shirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of trainers’. Well, that’s true up to a point, and there are indeed some young African runners who get by on not much more than this basic kit bag. However, the economics of running for the vast majority have now gone way beyond this subsistence model. Indeed, there are races (if ‘races’ is the right word, maybe ‘experience’ is more apt) where the entry fee can hit four figures, and that’s before you actually travel to the event. We aren’t talking here about a warm-up jog to the local park.

Women are the majority in most new running groups.

Even in the three years or so since I was commissioned to write my first book, the world of running, in the UK at least, has noticeably changed. Maybe it’s overstating it, but more than ever before I sometimes feel that there are two separate sports: competitive running, where people see themselves as part of a system that leads to international level, albeit for many they are just part of the system rather than likely to actually put on a national team vest; and an ever-increasing majority, for whom running isn’t a sport in the traditional competitive sense where people did it to see how good they could become at it, but more of a low-key recreational activity.

Even the usual overarching position, whereby the national governing body for a sport has some sort of stake in every participant from élite to novice, has become very questionable in distance running. If UK Athletics didn’t exist then by and large Mo Farah has enough knowledge, support networks and money to buy whatever it takes to keep him at the cutting edge of the sport. At the other end, there are thousands of low level recreational runners who can simply do their own thing, training solo or in informal groups, entering park runs for free or commercially organized road races for a higher entry fee, with minimal direct benefit from a governing body.

The England Athletics document mentioned below presents a county-based snapshot of this diversity. Using the sparsely populated county of Wiltshire, it shows almost fifty running groups. The traditional stalwarts such as Swindon Harriers and City of Salisbury Athletics and Running Club barely get a look in amidst the posses of Trotters, Sisters, Beginners, Violets, All Stars and Hounds, though, thankfully, Runners still seems to be the most frequently used collective noun for the activity they all offer.

It’s hard to articulate this without being misinterpreted as élitist or old-fashioned; and it’s all tied up with a load of social, cultural and even political contexts. To illustrate the latter, a couple of anecdotes. ‘Regular participation’ is now measured as 1 × 30 minutes a week. Many ‘retention’ programmes count eight sessions as ‘retained’. When one spends a good proportion of coaching time dealing with people running 50 miles a week (say, 7 hours) as their norm, and a few others running close to double this, it’s sometimes hard to really empathize with this sort of approach. It’s also true that the novelty event profile has moved on in some ways. In an environment where PBs seem less of a pursuit for many, and it becomes more about the buzz, it’s not obvious to the author why – to quote two examples – having the start and finish of an event marked by a London Routemaster bus is a particular cachet, or why doing a 5k (which actually wasn’t even 5k) while receiving a load of multicoloured paint thrown over your kit en route is an enticing attraction. However, let’s be clear on this: as separate options both buses and paint have their own merits and society would be a poorer place without them. If you’ve actually bought this book, though, I presume you are perched on the performance side of the recreational running perspective.

Group warm-ups can be part of running’s social side.

At the time of finalizing this manuscript England Athletics produced A Nation That Runs, probably the first publication of this kind focused specifically on defining and quantifying the ‘market’ segments for the sport. It found that 5.95 million people in England have run at least once in the last twelve months, so they are the current running population. It is, to say the least, a rather loose frequency of participation and, for the purposes of this book, in those 364 non-running days they are perhaps letting their 5k/10k potential drift a tad. One in three runners has what is officially a ‘frequent running habit’ – that is, at least one bout of 30 minutes per week – and about 8 per cent (475,000) people run in organized running events.

Running and Shopping

There is an ever-growing array of technological equipment and event options that even twenty-five years ago, when the recreational running market was fairly substantial, didn’t exist. And of course the crusty old purist in me can’t help but mention that as the array of ‘runner as consumer’ products and services grows ever more diverse and numerous, not to mention costly, so the average performance of everyone involved in actually doing the running is on a gradual downward trend. I’m definitely not claiming a cause and effect link – it’s more complex than that – but the words ‘woods’ and ‘trees’ come to mind.

Having coached many scores of runners across a very wide range of performance levels, I have noticed a strong trend that the highest performers and hardest trainers tend to go fairly light on buying into the full array of technology. They have the simplest, most old-fashioned training diaries – indeed several actually have pens and paper on the go for this purpose. While they check out products that may make a very small but worthwhile gain in performance without them necessarily having to train further or harder, they distinguish these from a ‘short cut’ or ‘quick win’ mentality. From experience, and speaking generally, I would suggest that, shoes and kit aside, you should prioritise something for sports medicine at the forefront of your running budget. Whether it be medical insurance and/or regular physiotherapy/ massage/osteopath treatment, the icing on the cake options for fine-tuning are not much help when the cake is a set of fractured crumbs.

For the large majority of people reading this book, the high performance aspect won’t be their particular passion, but hopefully there will be a few who have that combination of commitment, curiosity to test their limits, capacity to train hard for some years and maybe some good genetic luck to make bigger waves with their running.

Running Groups

With the growth of running at most levels, and because national governing bodies seeking ongoing government funding need to show that their work is having a direct impact on raising participation, England Athletics has developed its officially branded programme which has been very successful in helping grow the scale of recreational running. Its Regional Coordinator in the West of England is Charlotte Fisher, who says:

‘For the absolute beginner, putting one’s trainers on and heading out of the front door for a run can be a daunting personal challenge. Will I get to the end of the road without getting out of breath? What if someone sees me out running? What if I look silly? What if I need the loo? What do I do with my arms? What if I have to stop and walk? – are just some of the many questions beginner runners ask.’

New running groups are emerging in big numbers.

Fisher continues: ‘The traditional club environment can unintentionally be an intimidating place for a beginner to start their running journey. The vision of packs of club runners in very short shorts and vests or Lycra-clad kit whizzing along the pavements at anything from 8-minute miles to 5-minute miles is an intimidating one. “Run England” (www.runengland.org) is the recreational running programme from England Athletics and provides a great starting point for beginners, as well as improvers, through a supportive group environment. Groups vary from small friendly groups of eight or so runners to much larger groups with several sub-groups for walk/run, beginner and improver sessions. There are over 2,000 registered Run England groups to choose from and they all come with a UK Athletics licensed leader. The leaders are trained to understand the barriers that stop people running and to provide appropriate sessions for beginners. There are groups all across the country to meet the needs of the beginner runner, with weekday and weekend, evening and daytime sessions, meeting in parks, community centres and workplaces.’

Run England at work and play.

Fisher is herself an interesting reflection of the current diversity and evolution of the sport. In a voluntary capacity at the ‘traditional’ athletics club in Taunton she coaches an increasingly successful squad of national level middle-distance runners in the Under-17 to Under-23 groups, while earning her living in the less performance-focused end of the sport.

The worries that new runners have can remind established runners and coaches that some of the things that we treat almost as instinct do have to be learned at some stage. This brings to mind an anecdote from Olympic Marathon medallist Charlie Spedding, who was asked by a newcomer at a training forum for his views on breathing. ‘Highly recommended,’ he replied.

There are numerous individual and group case histories which show just how motivational the group environment can be for those coming to the sport without any background in it, and often without any sporting experience beyond school PE lessons. Run leader Angie Tiller from Falmouth, Cornwall, says: ‘Some of the trainees admitted that the warm-up was in itself the most exercise they’d done in years… I’ve been astounded by what people are capable of achieving in a group setting in a relatively short period of time.’

Run Dem Crew are a fast-growing group of young adult runners in London.

Moving into the gritty urban environment of inner London we find a slightly different variation on the running group theme. Notably, Run Dem Crew, whose name sounds like they should be knocking out heavy bass lines in a darkened nightclub, but who are in fact an organized and fast-growing running group with, at the time of writing, a main base in Clerkenwell, just north of the City of London, and a west London section near Paddington Station. The particular traits of this group are that the runners are predominantly young – on the night the author ran with them he was by some margin the oldest runner, and about 95 per cent of the group of about 40 were younger than 35 years old. They were split about 50/50 by gender, and the ethnic diversity was much closer to the London demography than most running groups have yet managed to achieve.

Despite perhaps being unaware of the history of the sport, they have in effect become a ‘third wave’ running group, following first the athletic and harrier clubs and second what we should probably no longer call the ‘new breed’ of running clubs that sprang up in the wake of the first London Marathon in the early 1980s. That said, the RDC seen ‘at the coal face’ do not seem that radically different from many urban or suburban running clubs. They run regularly, they have training sessions with some structure and intensity to them, they do races, they have a social element, they are genuinely welcoming to people who want to take part and improve, they have some qualified run leaders and new coaches, and they too are affiliated to England Athletics. It was interesting that in such an informal social setting virtually every runner doing the group session worked very hard at it, suggesting that in essence nearly everyone who tries any kind of structured running has some sort of performance and improvement ethos motivating them.

Regrouping between some urban interval efforts.

Goal-Setting

This will sound a bit like fence-sitting, but until you have some sort of history of shortterm running progression and/or some sort of transferred aerobic base from another endurance sport, the precision of goal-setting against the clock is just number-crunching, and usually round numbers. Overstating the theme somewhat, it seems that every 10k runner between 40.30 and 44.59 has sub-40 as the next goal. At the slower end of the spectrum, that’s a 12 per cent increase. For many that will be achievable, and in some cases there will be plenty more scope for progression, but do look at things in context.