OK,
you’ve got the running bug - joined a brilliant running club and now you
want to improve!
But
how?
If
you have been running on your own, maybe for a number of years you have no
doubt found that you have peaked and no matter how hard you try, you
can’t improve your speed. Most of us have a few set courses that we run
on, so it is quite natural to set the stop-watch going every time we go
out. By doing this you
are basically encouraging yourself to run the same every time. This alone
won’t make you faster.!
To
improve your running you must vary your pace from run to run to enable
different levels of your aerobic and anaerobic system to develop and
improve. By running at near maximum all the time you will mainly improve
your anaerobic capacity, which will help you run faster, but not for
sustained pace running.
Our
club training sessions on Wednesday's and at the track on Monday's,
concentrate on speed work by making us run at a pace faster over shorter
distances than we normally would run when going for a training run or
competing in a race. In these session we obviously don't encourage you to
run slowly. These sessions are brilliant at improving your pace, but to
improve even more you need to do some longer slower run's too.
When
we hold a training session at the weekend it is often an endurance run
designed to give you better stamina. These long slower run’s give you
time on the legs to enable you to run for longer and enhance your aerobic
system by lowering your natural resting heart rate. This is one of the key
factors in being able to run faster for longer.
To
understand what happens can be explained fairly simply. If you were to
monitor your heart rate at a set pace (say 130 beats per minute) and keep
it at that pace throughout the run and also time how long it took you to
finish the course this would give you your base time. For the next couple
of long slow runs keep the heart rate at 130bpm. What will occur is the
time taken will get quicker, This means that you are running faster for
the same effort! Looking at this in another way – next time you go out
to do your normal run you will reach your usual heart rate, but you will
be running faster at the same effort as before.
OK,
so when we put the weekday and the weekend training regimes together,
the improvement gained means you will be to be able to run faster for
longer. You have raised your anaerobic threshold enabling you to run
faster and you have improved your aerobic capacity enabling you to run
faster for longer. Cracked it!
Howard
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