So he sent an email out to everyone at my work inviting us along to a session with him last night. He was going to discuss running gait, and showing us how to incorporate specific drills and strength exercises to improve the way we run. The ultimate result of this hopefully will make us faster and help us to run longer, and most importantly to improve our running gait will make running easier for us.
I'M UP FOR THAT !
Although the day before I was sitting in the mess room and John happened to join me and in our lunchtime conversation I stupidly asked him if he'd ever run a marathon. Oh doh! He's run over 40 marathons and a couple of ultra marathons. And of course the penny hit me square in the face when I remembered yep last year he (and one of our other workmates) did a 24 hour run on a treadmill to raise money for local cancer charities.
Can you even imagine running for 24 hours (I think they had a 5 or 10 minute break every hour). I remember going down to the village green cheering them on Friday night, and heading in on the Saturday morning and yep, they were still running.
So I was eager last night to hear his words of wisdom. You've heard me bemoan the fact that my legs give out way before my lungs do. I need to fix that. It was great too because we could invite friends, so the fact about six of our local 12wbt girls came along was testament to the fact we are wanting to embrace running and get better at it.
He had us run around the oval as a group so he could watch our form, thankfully he didn't pick on any of us, because I came last !! Well good thing, I didn't need the boys from work running behind this lycra clad body and seeing all my jiggly bits.
After watching him demonstrate 3 different gaits, I believe a lot of my problem has stemmed from the fact I run with a walking gait, striking the ground with my heel first, adding a lot of pressure to my legs and making me make more of an effort to propel forward because I'm almost on a slight lean backwards.
So I'm now making a concerted effort to hit the ground mid-foot and the minute my heel touches the ground to spring off. In turn this means I'll be slightly leaning foward as I run, which will propel me even further forward. Oh so much to think about.
He went through some drills - bum kicks and hot coals. Yep, I'm going to look a bit silly if I start out my jog like that but it's all for the cause right.
And the biggest revelation was he doesn't get caught up in the kilometres. If he's going out for a run he doesn't say "okay I'm going out for a 5k run", he would rather say "I'm going out to run 30 minutes". Because it's all about endurance, not distance. Although me being the check-list-tick-off kind of person I am, I like to know how far I've run. It's kind of like a badge of honour. But I'm going to try to turn that thinking around.
I'm willing to take anything on board to get me fitter, stronger, faster, run longer, actually finish a fun run with no walking involved :-) I'll get there I know, but I'm impatient!
We really can never stop learning can we.
Weigh in Wednesday
I lost a fantastic 600 grams today, I was jumping for joy. This takes me to an even stevens 28 kilogram loss (61.5 pounds). I'm over the moon happy.
1 comment:
'Endurance, not distance' - great tip! I hadn't really thought about it this way but it does make sense - the first time I ran 5km (see, more 'run dropping'!)was while doing running-group homework. The task was to run 30 minutes without stopping. I did it, saw the finish line in the distance and just pushed on (the mind is a strange thing - prior to then I didn't think it was possible).
Good luck with your fun run tonight! :)
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