It is a way too long time since I wrote something here. I have lots of material, but have not really gotten around writing something in a long time. I have had this post halfway written for several months, so I will try to get it out of the way before moving on to something closer to what I usually write about.
Everyone knows how to run – right? One has done it since childhood and it is just to gather up enough willpower and get going, isn’t it. That was more or less how I did look at it until roughly half a year ago. This will be a long text about my first steps into the world of running, with no picture or video content. I have no idea if it will be of any interest for anyone else…
Until the end of last year (2019) I had never been that interested in running. Running has felt exhausting and painful, for small results in terms of speed or distance covered. The main reason that I even bothered with it at all was the medical news of cyclists having poor bone density that tend to surface at irregular intervals. My main sports are cycling in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter. Running was something I did a handful of times in the time between the seasons suitable for those two sports and very seldom during the rest of the year. I would guess that my total running distance in a year was substantially below 100 km.
The end of last year did follow the same pattern as previous years. The weather became colder and the roads became slippery and as a result I stopped cycling outdoors. There was no snow for skiing either jet, so I started some half-hearted attempts to run. I did run my usual route of about 7 km a couple of times, perhaps once per week. It didn’t feel great but I did manage. Then I saw a 10 km challenge on Strava and in a perfect example of manly stupidity I decided to try it. I guess that the result cannot come as a surprise to anyone – I got injured.
The injury wasn’t really serious; I didn’t have to get any treatment for it. However I did walk with a limp for the next week and felt a slowly residing pain for almost a month. My first reaction was to accept that my body clearly isn’t made for running and conclude that I should try to avoid it completely going forwards.
After a couple of weeks with the traces of the injury slowly receding I started rethinking that. I realised that it is quite pathetic that I can cycle over 150 km in one go without any real problem, but could not run 10 km without serious consequences. That was when I decided to give this thing with running one more go and try to learn to run, beginning from the basics.
After some searching on the internet I decided to start by scaling down the distance a lot and instead do it more often. I started by trying to run 2.5 km two times a week. I also tried to increase my cadence to get close to 90 and shift the landing of my running step out of the heel region and more into the midfoot region. The results of my first runs were inconclusive. They did not cause any pain or other problems and the injury did not come back. However, the runs also felt rather pointless. It was like only doing a warm-up and stopping before putting in any real effort.
A huge disclaimer! I have no idea if my approach was optimal or even close to the correct one. In this post I am only telling what I did and the results of it.
After about four runs at 2.5 km without any problems I started extending the distance slowly. My goal was to add 500 meters, run that distance two times and then repeat the procedure. This was in November or December of 2019 and I set a goal for myself to get to 10 km before the summer of 2020.
In reality I didn’t have enough patience to stick to the plan completely and the distances did increase a little bit quicker, at least until I did reach 5 km. I also wasn’t able to stick to the schedule with running twice each week and it morphed more into three runs and one session of indoor cycling per two weeks. I had expected cross-country skiing to eat up even more of my training time, but this winter turned out to be one of the warmest in recorded history here in southern Finland. As a result we never got any snow and the only available skiing track was a couple of hundred meters of artificial snow that was kept open for a little bit more than a week. From a skiing perspective that was really sad, but for my running experiment it was a huge advantage.
I was at about this stage in the process that I did notice that there was something strange going on. I can ride my bicycle for long distances at a phase that is relatively good for an amateur. However, when I was running I felt completely out of breath after a couple of kilometres and I was not even running fast. I could not understand why it seemed like nothing of my cycling fitness did transfer to my running.
This led to some more searching on the internet. The conclusion seemed to be that it was related to heart rate, stemming from that more muscles and consequently a larger blood volume is needed for running than for cycling. Trying to understand this I bought a cheap smartwatch (Honor Band 5) that could measure heart rate from the wrist (with a not-too-impressive accuracy).
I did a couple of tests training as usual while wearing the device and got fascinating results. Cycling on rollers (this was in February) my heart rate stayed steadily in the 135-145 bpm range. Only when pushing really hard (highest gear and cadence over 100) did the heart rate climb out of the zone 2 region. When I went for a run something completely different happened. My heart rate almost immediately went to the 165 bpm region, during the warm-up, and stayed there for the entire run. No wonder that I felt so out of breath.
Armed with this knowledge I set the watch to warn at 150 bpm and tried running again. At first it was really confusing, I did not even get 200 meters into the warm up before the watch warned for the first time. Keeping the heart rate low turned out being really hard. Even when I tried running really slowly my heart rate kept going over the limit. At moments it felt like I was only moving slightly faster than a fast walk. As a result I felt no exhaustion and felt like I could have kept on going for hours. However, as it was the first attempt I did only run for about 5 km. Having stopped and saved the run in Strava I was really surprised to see that my running phase had only increased with about 30 seconds per kilometre.
After the first attempt to run to heart rate I knew that I was on the right track. However, it still took many runs to learn how to run slower. In the beginning my heart rate seemed to follow a triangle wave-form. I did run to fast, the watch did vibrate, I reduced the pace too much, the heart rate did go down too much, the pace increased too much again and so on and so on. It took me a humiliating long time to learn to run slightly below 150 beats per minute, but when I finally got the hang of it the results was impressive. Suddenly I had access to the same endurance as when cycling. Running suddenly feels easy and I have to make sure to not get carried away and overdo it. The running pace I could hold at the same heart rate also improved quickly in the beginning. I would guess that this was probably mostly due to improvements in technique not improved fitness.
After that I could increase the length of my runs rather quickly. It didn’t take long to reach 10 km and I set a new goal at 15 km. However, I increased the distance too quickly and after a run of about 13 kilometres in April I felt that something was wrong. I would not call it an injury, but I realised that I had to go back to 10-11 km and get more used to that distance before continuing.
That is more or less the end of this story. I am now running 12 km rather easily but I have not tried expanding the distance further yet. The main reason for this is that the cycling season started. Because of that I switched to a plan with two cycling sessions and one run per week. The goal with that was mostly to maintain the progress I have made with my running. With the autumn slowly approaching I have started think about focusing more on running again. I have some hope to be able to get to 15 km before the end of the year.
I am really happy that I gave running one more attempt. With the things that I have learnt, in a little more than half a year, running has turned from something I do mostly because I think that I have to into something I look forward to. Running slow enough and with a proper build up made a huge difference. One huge advantage I see with running is that it is possible to get a proper workout in a relatively short time. My short standard training-ride is about 60 km and takes two hours or a little longer. Combining that with the time needed before and after the ride (switching to cycling clothes, showering etc.) it is on the limit for what I have time to do in the evening of a work day. Trying to do longer rides than that quickly becomes really cumbersome to fit into a work day and is mostly restricted to weekends. On the other hand a relatively long run (for me) of about 10 km can be done in less than a hour. That is why my usual weekly schedule, during the summer, has been one run of 10 – 12 km and one ride of about 60 km during the Monday – Friday part of the week and one longer ride during the weekend. Another advantage I see is that I easily can take the running shoes with me on a trip, while bringing the bicycle on a trip takes a lot more commitment. The negative aspect of running seems to be that it puts a lot more strain on the body. I have felt much more stiffness and soreness after runs of about 10 km than after touring rides around 200 km.
Hobby Cyclist 