Intro to Running

Introduction

This guide is written to the person who is new to running regularly. If you have been running for a while I would still encourage you to read it, you may find new information.

Running Speed

Three Speeds

When most people start running, they get out and try to beat their personal record every time they put their running shoes on. Unfortunately this isn’t a sustainable way to build running fitness. Generally speaking, our first goal is to make most of our runs easier and do them more consistently. You will find you feel better rested and ready to tackle the next workout.

In this training plan we’ll generally have three speeds:

If this is your first structured training plan, you’ll spend all of your time at first doing easy runs. It may be boring but it will build a strong aerobic base and lower your chance of injury. If you’ve been doing structured training for awhile, you’ll still have the vast majority of your time spent doing easy runs.

When I started training with a majority of my runs easy it was very difficult to run and keep my heart rate down. I would think “I feel fine” and my heart rate would be through the roof. I did a lot of walking with very light jogging between and had to fight my ego. After a few months I was able to run a few minutes per mile below the pace I started at, with a heart rate 20+ bpm lower. Do not hesitate to walk until your heart rate or perceived effort lowers enough to start jogging again. Your first easy runs may be 14 or 15 minutes per mile, and that’s OK. It’s very frustrating at first but well worth it in the end.

I cannot stress enough how boring it will be, but how well it will work if you have faith and follow the plan. The plan starts simple on purpose, so it’s easy to follow, and to build the habit of just getting the shoes on and getting out the door. You will want to run faster (and maybe farther) but I would urge you to stick to the plan.

The reasoning behind the easy running is well documented elsewhere. For an excellent physiological explanation, see Chapter 2 of Training for the Uphill Athlete. For historical context, the method is generally credited to Phil Maffetone, creator of the Maffetone method.

Heart Rate Data

Collecting heart rate data is very useful but not strictly necessary. After some time, you’ll find a heart rate range that’s comfortable for the easy runs, and probably a very small heart rate range that’s comfortable for the tempo runs. Heart rate data from wrist borne sensors is generally inaccurate enough that it should be discarded and not relied on. If you want to use heart rate data I would recommend a chest strap. The Garmin HRM is popular and reliable; I’ve gone through several Polar sensors that stop working correctly after a month or two.

Without heart rate data you’ll have to be honest with yourself about your pace on easy runs. Can you really hold a conversation right now? When they say “conversational” that means you can talk to someone on the phone and they won’t guess you are working out. Another gauge is that if it’s really easy, you should feel as if you could do the whole effort again once you’ve finished. I found that using an online pace calculator isn’t very accurate and has the “easy” pace far too fast for most runners.

Without good data to fall back on, a good starting point is the Maffetone method mentioned above. Simply subtract your age from 180, and keep your heart rate below that for easy runs.

The Run/Walk

Another tool we will use if you’re starting a structured plan from scratch is the run/walk program. This is often used by physical therapists to help runners return from injury safely, and run/walk ws more generally popularized by American Olympian Jeff Galloway.

The PT method is as follows:

  1. Run for one minute and walk for four minutes. Repeat five times. If tolerated well, progress to the next step for the next run.
  2. Run for two minutes and walk for three minutes. Repeat five times. If tolerated well, progress to the next step for the next run.
  3. Run for three minutes and walk for two minutes. Repeat five times. If tolerated well, progress to the next step for the next run.
  4. And so on until you are running the entire 25 minutes.

Jeff Galloway proposed that taking a short walk break every 8 minutes or 1 mile in all training runs helps keep your legs from overuse, helps you recover faster, and helps you tackle the next workout better. I do this on almost all of my training runs, and recommend it as well. Your training runs are not a race!

Injuries

Running is a very injury prone sport. Common injuries include knee pain, achilles tendonitis, shin splints, and IT band pain. Part of this training plan is to shift into a long term view that running is something worth doing for a long time, and therefore the primary goal should be to avoid injury.

One of the benefits of easy runs is that they stress the joints and tendons less, and you are less likely to become injured. Tempo and speed work should be very carefully introduced after several weeks once the tendons and ligaments have had time to adjust.

There are many “short” couch to 5k/10k/whatever plans out there, and I urge you to be skeptical. There is a dangerous trap in the common novice timeline:
Weeks 1-2: Muscle soreness and difficulty motivating to complete workouts
Weeks 3-4: Muscle soreness starts to dissipate and workouts become easier to start and complete. Cardiovascular system starts to improve and fitness gains are noticeable.
Weeks 5-8: Muscle soreness goes away and fitness improves. The runner begins to look forward to the workouts and feels good after finishing them.

The trap is that in weeks 8-10, your tendons are at their weakest when your muscles and cardiovascular system is at its strongest. They have not had time to strengthen as much as your muscles, heart, lungs, and mood. This is the danger zone, and any temptation to drastically increase training load at this point should be tempered. My personal history can confirm every time I have gotten tendonitis, I can look back 8-9 weeks and find a large increase in training load.

For perspective, here are the lengths of a few marathon plans from well known runners and coaches that suggest you start the plan after conditioning the skeletomuscular system and can run 3 miles comfortably.

We will also incorporate strength training once a week to help prepare the tendons and ligaments for the increased load that comes from running regularly and prevent injuries.

Taking Care of Your Body

Some things will need to be attended to outside of the runs themselves. Namely, sleep, nutrition, and muscle recovery.

Inadequate sleep can negatively impact heart rate and add undue stress to a workout. I’ve suffered from sleep apnea and other sleep issues and will not hesitate to cancel or shorten a workout part way in due to an unusually high heart rate. Non REM deep sleep is when the body repairs muscles and tendons, chronic sleep deprivation can cause a host of musculoskeletal issues when combined with the stress of training.

Nutrition is obviously an enormous topic that I won’t go into here. The key points are make sure you’re getting enough protein, don’t skip any meals, and ingest carbohydrates and protein within twenty minutes of any workout over 30 minutes. I’ll add that I often time my runs so that I am running right before my next meal, and I’ll have a small sugary snack like a banana before the run. This ensures I don’t have a full stomach of food ready to come up, and I get nutrients immediately post workout. Of course that’s a personal preference.

The best brief nutrition advice I’ve heard is from Michael Pollan:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

The first part makes reference to “real food”, e.g. Cheez Its and Oreos are examples of not food. If someone two hundred years ago wouldn’t know what it is, it’s probably not “real food”. I’d say that making sure you eat enough while running is very important though, trying to cut calories while also training can be extremely difficult mentally and physically and is far beyond the scope of this document. Aiming for something like 80-90% of your food from real food is an ambitious and lofty goal for most, so be realistic and make small changes over time.

I’m happy to provide more individualized nutrition advice as needed and within my ability.

Muscle recovery can be more helpful than most think. Foam rolling, lacrosse balls, and massage guns can all be helpful. Mobility and recovery work is covered in a separate document here.

The Workout

Form

There is a lot of information out there about form, so I’ll keep this brief. Don’t worry too much about form when starting out. The main culprit to look out for is overstriding, or reaching your foot out in front of you.

There is a lot of foot strike info out there, saying you have to land on your forefoot. Ignore all of this. There is no evidence that landing on any part of your foot is better than another. Forefoot strikers are prone to achilles injuries, and rearfoot strikers are prone to knee injuries. Foot strike is an urban myth that can be ignored. The main issue is that when your foot lands, it should be under or behind your knee and not reach out in front of your knee.

Another common issue that is discussed a lot online is cadence. Cadence is how many times a minute your foot hits the ground. Many years ago, famous running coach Jack Daniels did a study on Olympic athletes and found that when they were racing their cadences were almost all right near 180. This is interesting, but the community has since decided that everyone should always be running with a 180 cadence, which is ridiculous. There are a few things to set straight here:

  1. Cadence naturally increases with pace
  2. Taller people have a naturally lower cadence, and shorter people have a naturally higher cadence[1]
  3. You do not need to match the cadence of an Olympic athlete who is racing while jogging around your neighborhood

That said, if your cadence is quite low, increasing it may naturally help with your form. As a reference point, I am 6’3” and I try for a cadence in the 160s when jogging on an easy run, and about 170 or so for a tempo run. With poorer form my jogging cadence used to be around 150 (and sometimes still is if I’m not careful). With a lower height, yours will likely be a bit higher, Shooting for close to 170 on easy runs is a good target (in the absence of more personal info).

Some watches will tell you your cadence, but one way to practice is to play a metronome. Spotify and Youtube have some available. You can also find music playlists where the beat is at a certain cadence.

If you really think your form may be that bad (it happens to the best of us), there are some good basic tips in this article.

Additionally, Intermountain in Salt Lake, and many healthcare providers, offer in depth form and running evaluations. Often you will be hooked up with electrodes and video taped on a treadmill. These can often be worth the time and effort.

Warming Up

Even for easy runs, warming up is important. Sometimes that’s walking for a minute, sometimes it’s stretching your hip flexors because you sat in a chair for 10 hours, and sometimes it’s doing some quick band exercises to get your glutes firing. This will probably look different for everyone, at least for easy runs. A good go to warmup is a set of leg swings in all directions (a variation on the Myrtl routine). You can add on any short resistance exercises that may be useful to warm up muscles that you know may be tight or hard for you to activate.

For tempo runs I typically do a 5-10 minute warm up and cool down consisting of an easy paced jog. Warm up routines become longer and more complex for speed work, and mine involves several minutes of plyometric work such as skipping and bounding, and a warm up jog, and usually takes 15-20 minutes.

Collecting Data

You may want to collect data on your activities, and I would encourage it. There are a few useful ways to do this:

  1. With a sports watch or phone
  2. With a spreadsheet

Coros, Garmin, and Suunto are the most common sports watches out there, and there are pros and cons. Garmin is likely the most popular, and Coros often has the best battery life. They all have mobile apps that allow you to look at the data collected in great detail, and will sync activities to apps like Strava.

A spreadsheet may sound cumbersome, but becomes quite nice to have as time goes on. You can look back and see progress, find out why you might be struggling with training, or recall if you did a light week for your strength training last week, or was it the week before? Mine is set up as a Google Sheet, and I have a tab for each month to keep it from getting out of control.

The columns I use are:

Finding Time

Running on top of an already busy schedule can be difficult. It’s an extra stress, and it’s important to consider existing stresses such as work and family commitments, and other activities such as climbing, skiing, biking, or other team sports. It’s also important to consider the real time cost of running. A 30 minute run still requires time to get dressed, shower, and possibly drive to a gym or trailhead. You may also find you need a bit of extra sleep that night too, or a few minutes on the foam roller. Quickly the 30 minute run can take 90 minutes from your day.

Some ideas to help make time:

More Reading

  1. Tall for an elite male runner is generally over 5’9” and short would be under 5’4”, and similar but slightly lower ranges for a female. Here are some Olympic runners’ heights. ↩︎