Catching up

Okay, I missed a few days posting about my running, so this is a catch up post. I also wanted to answer a great question from Spyderella regarding how I end each Couch to 5K run. First a quick catch up on my running.

Sunday was an awful day for running. My knees finally got to me and it was painful to get started running. I was my last week 3 run, and I had to force myself to do it. It helped that I am in a few competitions through Nikeplus.com with other coolruners.

As I pushed through my first 90 second run, my knees where screaming. I really hurt to run. But, about the middle of my 3 minute run, they calmed down and i was able to make it through the entire run with a respectable time. I extended my walk time to help stretch out my knees and it seem to have worked. While they where soar later that day, they are feeling pretty good today, the day after.

Now I start week four with 3 minute runs followed by 5 minute runs. I am really looking forward to the first challenge Tuesday.

As I start week four I am going to try to incorporate some of the pointers in "Chi Running" regarding foot placement. Because my knees hurt, I thought I would see if my form was good running. I found that I am extending my leg out to far and (1) putting to much of the force on my heel and (2) actually placing the leg out that far acts as a minor breaking action, so in essence, my knees are acting as brakes and shock absorbers. So the first thing I will try to incorporate into my running style is lifting my legs a little higher (no more shuffling) and placing my foot down at mid-foot directly below my hip. I'll let you know how it works.

From The Comments
Spyderella writes regarding my Couch to 5K podcasts:

"I think you're combining the final walking interval with the 5-minute cool-down walk"

She goes on to ask whether I think this is what cool running intended in their program or whether I am combining their final walk with my cool-down?

Well to be honest, I looked into whether coolrunning intended a last brisk walk or not and found little consensus on the coolrunning forums. Some thought they did, but others quickly pointed out that the walk periods start to disappear in week 5. However, coolrunning also advocates both a warm-up and cool-down for all runners so for my podcasts I went with an always included 5 minutes for each.

How I use it is to briskly walk the entire cool-down period. I noticed that many runners will still run during their cool-down, but at a reduce effort, dropping from maybe 80% to 40%. So a cool-down does not mean a slow walk, just a reduction in effort. For example, try to bring the breathing back to normal conversational breathing.

I hope that clarifies my reasoning a bit. If you have another opinion, or would like to make a suggestion on how I could improve the Couch to 5K podcasts, please write me a comment either here, or on the podcast page (I got that fixed) or feel free to email me.

Monday, August 7, 2006