The 'Ladybird Guide' to running

I have bought many mighty scientific tomes on running technique, but they all fail in summarising succinctly what you need to do in order to train / improve.  They also rarely cover the reality of other life constraints such as having a job, children and so forth.

So here is my brief guide to running, targeted at anything from half marathons to 50 milers.

Training

Using your heartrate

Training above and below your aerobic threshold trains different mechanisms in your body. For most of us, if you are running half marathon or longer then you need to train both, and in order to do this effectively you need to find your maximum heartrate so that you know how hard you are pushing. Calculating your maximum from age is likely to be very inaccurate - you need to go out and run a session to try to find it.  There are plenty of suggestions about how to do this on the web - most involve running a few hill reps and then going all out on the final one.

Your weekly plan

You should aim to always do one long run and one speed session to train your faster per week. These are your most valuable sessions and if life gets in the way then try to rearrange them.

The long run should ramp up from whatever distance you are regularly running to about 40k max. It should be run slow - (keep it in zone 2 which should be roughly 60%-60% HRmax). If you push too hard on this run (which is common) then you are not training your endurance and are risking injury through putting greater (unessary) stress on your body.

The best speed session should focus on trying to get to 4 x 8 minute reps at 90% HR, but anything structured that gets you running fast is good. This session is focussed in increasing your aerobic threshold limit and improving your technique when running at pace. A treadmill is great for this sort of thing as you can set a pace and try to hold it (while keeping an eye on your heartrate). I also quite like going to a club track night as it provides a bit of competition and structure, but they tend towards shorter intervals and a higher number of reps than I believe is ideal for endurance distances.

Fill in the rest of the week with whatever fits in with life – 10-15kms here and there. If you are training for a long ultra then you might benefit from longer distances and if you are elite then you might benefit from a second speed session. Decide what you are focussing on though and either keep it fast or slow - don't get stuck in the middle. If you can't complete any of these 'filler' runs then don't worry so much about it. If you can easily rearrange it great, if not move on.

Most plans would have you running 5 or even 6 times per week for long ultras. If you are elite then this might be sensible, but based on personal experience I think that most amateurs might find the sweet spot to be closer to 4 times a week which allows for a greater amount of recovery.

Always have a rest day after the long run or the speed session.

Your rest day is important - this is where the body's overcompensation in response to the training is making your fitter. Eat and sleep well.

Tempo runs - these are typically~45mins at or around your aerobic threshold. Many training plans include these and my club promotes them as a good training tool, however, I haven't come across any scientific literature showing any benefit and my conclusion is to stay away from this kind of training, you get more benefit to your aerobic training from a proper speed session and more benefit to your endurance training at a lower level.

Longer term planning

You want to try to build your mileage over time to the point where you are running your target number of km's /week for a few weeks before you taper. Overlaid on this you want to be cyclical in your training load - divide your training up into 4 week blocks with 3 weeks ramping up your mileage and then a week stepping things back by about 30% for recovery. This is really hard to accomplish without the use of a plan that you try to stick to - once you have some visibility of your races for the year I reccomend mapping out your intended mileage week by week, even if you don't have a day by day plan. Once written down it's much easier to follow.

Gym

If you don't do any cross training (and even if you do) then some gym work is probably beneficial. I'm pretty ill informed about this, but I aim to do a couple of gym sessions per week where I work mostly on core strength and flexibility. I also keep a regular focus on my glutes and use a range of physio excercises to develop glute and specifically glute med strength - side steps back and forth with a slight squat (Space invaders). There is loads of infomation on the web about gym sessions for runners - I'm not up to speed enough to reccomend any one approach.

Technique

A minefield of opinion, but one of the key things to focus on is cadence. Most people run with too slow a cadence so they don’t recover any of the energy from their achilles, and this means that you run inefficiently. Most guidance suggests that you need to aim for around 180bpm, but I'd imagine that if you are short and light the optimum could be higher and heavy and tall would be a bit lower.  Try running with a metronome app on your phone to start getting a feel for this cadence. At first it may feel ridiculously fast, but over time it should lead you to shorten your stride which is generally a good thing. 

From there you should think in terms of having your feet land under you and then kicking out behind driving from your hips, through the glutes and then hamstrings. If you ‘reach out’ with your feet in front of you then you are slowing yourself down and also loading your quad while extending it which is very tiring (that’s what makes downhill such a killer on your quads). Critically, your knee joint should be opening as it hits the ground, not closing (on the flat at least). 

You may find with these changes that you naturally develop more of a forefoot strike rather than a heel strike, but focus on cadence first and the rest should follow.  In other words I (personally) think that a lot of the forefoot / heelstrike debate is misguided in that the footstrike is more of a symptom than a cause. The odd bit of barefoot running is no bad thing from time to time if you have a nice bit of grass to run on, but don’t take it to heart. 

One area of trail running where you have the biggest opportunity to make significant gains (particularly in longer races) is the downhill. A lot of people 'put the brakes on' coming downhills, leaning back and using lots of energy in the quads. Learning to run downhill well takes practice, but the prinicples of it are to try to keep perpendicular to the slope (lean forward) and let your feet fall under you and roll down the hill putting no energy in through your legs. You will find that you can go much faster with much less effort in this manner until the point where the slope gets too steep and your speed is uncomfortably fast - and therein lies the key clue to running downhill - it's mostly about having the confidence to let go and accept the speed that gravity is gifting you!

Eating

You can store about 1.5-2hrs of glycogen in the muscles after which you need to burn fat.  The body only produces the enzymes that break down fats into somthing that the rest of your system can benefit from if your blood sugar goes into deficit, so if you do all your training while cramming sugars into your system then you are going to struggle a bit on race day.  All the different forms of intermittent fasting are basically trying to kick the body into producing those enzymes.  

I haven't tried enough different approaches to endorse any one system over another but during training I try to limit sugar/carb intake and about one month before a big race I normally do a few fasted runs – ideally do an afternoon / evening workout then skip supper and breakfast and then go out for a run in the morning.  You’ll feel bloody awful the first time but it gets easier and on the plus side the enzymes tend to have a relatively long half life (at least a month) in the body, so you don't need to be doing this every week.

On race day it is so easy to forget to eat.  If you are doing races for longer than 2hrs then make sure that you keep eating or you’ll crash.

There you go – everything that I know about running... It hasn't made me any faster 😊

All the above comes from reading a many training sites over the summer and combining with personal experience. I have not got a handy list of references for all of the points above, but I may go back and update with links to some of the key articles or papers that I found when I get a chance. There are also a couple of point of personal opinion which I have tried to highlight as such in the text.