All runs and no plan makes jack a dull boy!

Are you addicted to run every race that happens around? Do you like to collect those finisher medals and event tees and hang them as your achievements? You don’t care missing few training runs but you lose your mind over missing a running “event”? Do you run intervals and tempo all year long and never reached your target? You think you are entitled to do a long run every weekend like it is a ritual? You frequently worry about pace charts and VO2 max indices and max yourself out just to prove something nonexistent? Are you always tired and sleepless sandwiching late night work and early morning runs? Are you always nursing an injury and still don’t like to take a day away from running? With legs full of blisters do you still run barefoot just for the minimalist tag? Do you always enrol in random fitness challenges just to keep yourself motivated? Registered for too many races and have no idea how to train? Flaunt your Strava dashboard with all the yearly running mileage crossing a random number? You think the more you sweat out the more you worked out? If you don’t sweat out enough, you make sure to do something strenuous just to feel better? What follows may not interest you.

Let the brawn meet the brain, I mean give it a chance

Sports science has attained a lot of breakthrough, debunked a lot of traditional myths. Living in the age of ChatGPT, sticking to the way old method of training and living by the so called legacy is absolutely brainless. I mean machines have started to think, you don’t have an option, but resonate with the trend. You don’t need years and years of tempo training and mindless amount hill repeats or interval runs to achieve any realistic goals, be it a sub 4 hour full marathon or running a 5k race under thirty minutes. Sounds too good to be true? Read further.

An ideal training time for any race should be 3-4 months. With 2-3 months of pre race preparation, you should only be training for 2-3 races per year; if you really mean to reach your goal. If you plan your races well, train with specificity, believe me, its never a hit or miss; may not be a bullseye, but a close call perhaps; but you would never miss your target by 20 mins! Either your target was wrong or your training was wrong or it could easily be both. But yes, you may not be running a lot of races; you cannot frequently post pictures with a medal on you, but your body will appreciate you.

Euphemism has ruined our lives

George Carlin in one of his shows, explains how soft languages has taken the life out of our lives. Like the word ‘Cripple’ explains the hardship they go through than the word “Differently-abled” ever can. People don’t expire like a magazine subscription, but they DIE. Too much inclusiveness has sucked the blood out of the flesh and left us weak and pale.

Your Ultramarathons, Marathons, Triathlons, 10Km runs, 5kms runs are not running events. They are running races. “Event” sounds like it's a celebrations, it's a way of convincing yourself that you are not competitive and this is only recreational and you fear progress. Make it competitive. Compete with your friend, your spouse, your coach, even yourself – its healthy. Finding the strongest version of yourself is the name of the game. Run races.

Be driven, not motivated

Events keeps you motivated; Targeted Training keeps you driven. To be motivated is external, but the drive is with in. Your goals should be simple and something you can visualise happening in few months. Unattainable/Unrealistic goals will demotivate you and hinders your progress — makes you quit and lose trust on the process. Achieving smaller goals from time to time keeps you driven and actually gauges your progress realistically. The real progress seen in papers is “motivation on steroids”.

A Product is only as good as its raw material

Nutrition is the most neglected and plays the most integral part of your lifestyle. The more you put yourself into highly demanding physical stress, the need for a complete nutrition is no more optional. The food is the brick and mortar of your body – make sure you choose it right. Cutting carbs and avoiding processed sugars are probably the last thing you should worry about – its mostly about what you miss. If you are training for a Full Marathon or a triathlon and you still haven’t prioritised your nutrition – you are physically abusing your body, I don’t have any different thought about it. Nutrition requirement of a physically active person is several time higher than a person with very minimal activity.

Feeling fatigued most of the time? Not recovering faster from your previous day workout? When is the last time you prioritised Magnesium and potassium in your diet. If you fear the fats in the nuts and the glycemic index of a banana—you would never progress towards your goals.

Ever noticed your joints being weak and unstable? When is the last time you kept tab of your calcium and Vitamin D3.

Putting on too much of fat and not building enough muscles? You can be pretty sure that your protein levels are insufficient. You should eat at least one gram of protein per 1 kg of your body weight. Eat whole eggs, the yolk is the most nutritious part of the egg—never throw them; your dietary cholesterol doesn’t increase your blood cholesterol levels, seriously. Don’t be that person who eats the entire plate of Biriyani but spares only that little yolk. That would’ve been the most healthiest ingredient of that meal. Protein and good fats keeps you satiated and naturally forbids you to eat in excess.

Do you know your body can absorb the Iron in the dates and almonds you eat, only if you consume them with Vitamin C. Calcium in your diet can only be absorbed by your body if you also include Vitamin D. Not to bore you with science, but just enough keep your thoughts focused.

Eat a complete version of your home-cooked meal, add proteins, supplement multivitamins, eat fruits and vegetables. Consider Whey Proteins – They aren’t anabolic steroids. That is your holy grail.

More is not always better

The more you shorten your sleep; the more you stress your heart; the more you work your muscles; the more you stretch your tendons; the more you torture your body. Fatigued muscles will never grow; An over stretched tendon will lose its elasticity; A sleep-deprived body will sleep eternally and an over used heart will give up one day or the other. Enough euphemism? Read further.

Too much of motivational shits has ruined us for good. You can never lose fat by working out like a maniac; you only lose fat by a calorie deficit diet. You only workout to train your body to physical stress. Working out to burn calories is like turning on your car engine while it is parked so you can burn some fuel. It not only wastes fuel, it increases wear and tears subsequently eats the lifetime of the engine. We are too blind to comprehend this simple concept. We torture ourself beyond reality and screw the only body we have beyond recognition and recovery. If you don’t have a good sleep, working out the next day is not even the last option. Get your priorities straight. If your running buddy doesn’t understand your priorities, it's time to find a new buddy. As simple as that.

Prioritise your events (or) No one can dictate your terms

The intent of running a specific race should come from within. Nothing is better than an organic thought over a dozen of “expert opinions” - including this one. Put your heart and soul into what is going to be your next 6 month of training or in other words—way of life. You actually know what you can endure, others can merely assume. Fuck assumptions, let's go with the obvious.

Choose only the races that challenges you; Choose only the races that connects to you; Choose only the races that means something to you. Choose a race so you can run with your friend? That is something you do in the training. Spend a lot of time training for that one race that matters instead of spending several 1000 bucks for a lousy medal and a questionable tee shirt with a tiny armhole, everything for a sub-standard running effort—what a waste of hard-earned money!

Progressive overload (or) How Milo rebuild himself

Given that running is already addictive, the peer pressure adding the compulsion of achieving huge progress in a tiny sample of time is dangerous. There are two broad categories – Too fast too soon; Too far too soon. Exponentially increasing your running speed and mileage is possibly one of the many reasons for injuries or even death. Your body grows only a tiny bit every day, your body adapts to the physical stress very slowly than you think. One step at a time. Do it responsibly.

In the Ancient Greece, there lived a Wrestler named Milo. His only ambition was to become the strongest human in the whole world, he wanted to be invincible. He trained harder and harder, but there was never a point, he thought he reached a stage what he wanted to be. Disappointed and frustrated, he wanted a scholar’s advice. After listening to his ranting, the scholar said “Go, buy a Calf.. lift him on your shoulders and go around the town.. everyday”. Milo wasn’t convinced, but this was his last resort. The determined wrestler, did not think about anything and did exactly what the scholar asked him to do. Day in. Day out. Years rolled by, the people started looking at Milo in complete awe—a stellar display of raw strength, as he was carrying a fully grown Ox on his shoulders!!

How did that happen?

The story is a Myth, but not completely false. It teaches you three things:

Consistency: Do it like clockwork; day-in, day-out. No matter if you like it or not. Trust the process.

Patience: Nothing happens overnight. Natures takes its sweet time to create something, but what it does is beyond human understanding. Trust the process.

Progressive Overloading: The calf only grew a little day by day. If you want anything to happen—start with easier options and progress gradually. Had Milo lifted a fully grown Ox right away, that would’ve been a miracle.

Don’t abuse your body with mindless activities, bad diet and no rest. Take good care of your body because that is the only place you live.

Divide and Conquer:

Basically your training should span over several phases. At any given or taken instance you should know where you are placed in the training. Every phase has its own goals and objectives. I am talking functional goals, not numerical targets. This is your body I am talking about, not your company’s quarterly report. Slipping away from these objectives is no less than quitting.

Phase One (or) Building a rock solid foundation:

1. You keep all runs easy and aerobic. May be 3 days per week. Keep the distance very short. Throw in some terms like ‘MAF’ or ‘Zone 1’ runs, so your social media posts will still look cooler with reduced pace.

2. Concentrate more on strength and conditioning, prioritising at least 3 or 4 days per week. Remember this is the phase you concentrate on shedding some unwanted body weight.

3. Lift weights—Resistance training will help you build strength and endurance much quicker and better than several long runs put together. Have you heard? Those who lift weights outlive those who don’t. If you’ve not, you have now.

4. Work on your running dynamics. Concentrate on your running form and do corrections that you always wanted.

5. Try to understand the frequently occurring injuries. These could be due in imbalances in your muscles, weak joints, poor mobility. Work with a qualified professional who can help you understand and correct these issues.

6. Since your runs are going to be short and easy in this phase, you don’t have to wake up in wee hours. Get used to running in mild sunny conditions. If you wanna run a full marathon or be a triathlete, you are definitely going to be under the sun a lot.

7. Intervals and hill repeats should be forbidden in this phase or in others words, it will not help you at this stage of the phase for a race that is several months away. Don’t exhaust yourself running too much.

Phase Two (or) Step on the Gas a lil’bit

1. In this phase, you slightly increase your running mileage, perhaps run 4 days a week. Still keeping the intensity mild, step on the weekend mileage a bit—starting to run a little longer.

2. The focus on the strength, conditioning and mobility should still be prioritised. You can still lift weights couple of days a week.

3. Introduce running form drills into your schedule. This will improve your running form and improves your run-specific mobility

4. Start introducing some speed work in to the training. 60-90sec speed repeats, Short fartlek once a week preparing/building your running muscles for next phase.

Phase Three (or) Crank up the heat (or) the suffer feast

1. In this phase, your long runs are really long; your easy runs are really easy and hard runs are really hard.

2. Avoid False Progressive runs: Scenario—You start an easy run, as you proceed, slowly you lose track of the pace, you run faster and faster every kilometre and end up huffing and puffing. These runs are usually 9km long or the 10th km would be a walk—you would probably plan to call that a cool-down lap of a so called Progressive run. Don’t call it a progressive run, it is called failed training run. You didn’t meet the training objective. Fast is not always good. A run is considered progressive if you second half of the race is slightly faster than your first half.

3. You run short, medium intervals to maximise your Cardiovascular performance(directly proportional to your VO2 max), Long intervals and tempo runs to improve your lactate threshold, in other words delay your muscle fatigue so run faster for longer period.

4. Your aerobic training runs should exceed your race distance a few times. If you are training for a Half Marathons, your longest easy run should exceed 21kms.

5. The average pace of your longest tempo runs should exceed your race pace.

6. Race pace, race distance runs are uncalled for. Choose only one poison at a time.

7. Your Strength and conditioning should be limited to once a week and you should have 1 day of complete rest.

8. Your Vo2 max will peak at this period—your Aim is to sustain that for the next few weeks until the race day. Vo2 max is a highly volatile parameter, don’t worry if they fluctuate—the one that your gamins shows is calculated with a formula and not clinically accurate. If you don’t know what Vo2 max is, don’t bother, it's not important. Ignorance is sometime a bliss.

Phase Four (or) Sharpen

1. This is where you taper your mileage. But keeping the intensity of your quick runs intact. We are talking 3 weeks from the race day.

2. The objective of this phase is to recover from all the abuse your body took from the long runs and gruelling intervals and hill repeats. You would’ve been training with fatigued muscles in the previous phase. This phase is to maintain all the training you received so far and recover to an ideal state.

3. Do a lot of race pace repeats, tempo runs, and short easy runs.

4. Mimic the race day in all training runs, wake up early and run like you run the race.

Phase Five (or) Good things happen to those who are disciplined

1. This is where you run the race. If the training was right, everything will fall in place.

2. Divide the race into 3 or 4 segments and strategise. Alway think about finishing the race stronger. Adapt to the conditions and slow down if you have to.

3. The final segment of the race would seem definitely harder than you ever imagined—only if you can convince your mind that you been through worse in your training, you would understand the pain is just imaginary.

4. Think Solo. Anything that happens in the race is unpredictable, train yourself to be independent. While running the third leg of the triathlon under the mid-day sun, even your shadows will ditch you.

5. Go all in.

Phase Six (or) Kaipulla vittatha paatha moment

After a long hard race, your joints, your muscles and your internal organs will be in a vulnerable state, to  recover from all the beatings you should go into a lean period of activity. Give ample rest to your body from running. They say one would need 1 day of rest per 1 km of race pace efforts to recover from all the toll it took on your body—it may or may not be accurate, but it doesn’t hurt to hibernate. Frequently stressing your body in running race pace all out efforts, puts your body in an irrecoverable state. 

Explore new activities. Try cycling, take swimming classes. Work on your weaknesses—mobility training or anything that is not hard running. You can run once a week. Spend some time with your family, take a vacation, visit new places you always wanted to travel, go on a road trip. Energize. And then you should look for a new race to challenge you. Enrol and repeat all over again!

Article by Elvis Yesurajah.