Most people spend a lot of time building capacity – very few train expression.

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Do you love going to the gym? Or perhaps you’re like me and just don’t enjoy it at all; it seems way too much hassle carving out the time for a strength routine when you could be out running. Sound familiar?

The problem is, whatever we hear and read about reducing injury risk, injury prevention, prehab and rehab, getting stronger is something that almost always tops the list. And in many ways the phrase…

…is absolutely correct. We do tend to be more robust and more resilient when we are stronger. We are also able to develop more power and have greater stability – two things that go hand in hand in helping us run faster. Furthermore, if you are a runner over the age of 40, research implies that we should pay even more attention to staying strong in order to improve our performance and reduce our injury risk.

So essentially, you’ve got to get stronger! But hang on a minute… What does that actually mean? Does it mean you need to make time for two or three weight training sessions per week? Does it mean you need to drop one run per week to focus on strength work?

If the very thought of it is making you anxious, the good news is that you may not have to do this at all. There are ways to help you get stronger without lugging giant weights about, or spending numerous hours per month doing resistance training. Actually, some of that might still be necessary, but as it will be super targeted it will be shorter in duration and you’ll see results far quicker and they’ll last far longer.

What Is Strength?

Before we get into that though, we need to look at what strength actually is. Here are some dictionary definitions:

The ability to do things that need a lot of physical or mental effort

Cambridge Dictionary

The Merriam Webster dictionary has these definitions:

Looking through each of those, I can apply them in my mind to running. But is that what most of us really think of when considering doing strength work in connection with running? Although it seems logical that we need to be strong to run, do we really think “I’m going to make myself impregnable, solid and tough!” Or do we just think “I wish I could run faster and longer without my knee hurting! I better make sure it’s strong enough”.

So dictionary definitions of strength don’t actually help us at all in a practical sense. And I’m pretty sure most of us think we’re robust enough already, until we aren’t of course.

Be honest here, how many of us would skip strength work if we didn’t really need to do it? What’s that – you are already skipping it?… Yeah, I hear that all the time from runners.

But that’s OK. To me, strength is like fitness. It changes in the different areas of your life. If your goal is to sit on the couch all day and watch TV, and you can achieve that goal, then you are both fit and strong enough to do that. Equally, if your goal is to run a 20 minute 5k, but you’re currently running a 25 minute 5k, then you are neither fit enough nor strong enough to achieve that goal. We can split this down a bit further to be more helpful.

If we leave fitness to one side for now – mainly because I view strength as just one aspect of fitness and this could get very complicated – and just focus on strength. We can view strength in a similar way in which I view resilience:

The ability for your body’s tissues to withstand the forces applied to them, in the intensity, duration and frequency which your activity demands.

So basically, you are strong enough if your body’s tissues can handle all the forces you chuck at them without either giving up (injury) or forcing your nervous system to introduce some red flags such as fatigue, niggles and the warning experience of pain.

To complicate it slightly, strength is also linked to your ability to produce power, which in turn helps you run faster. But let’s just keep this simple for now, as your nervous system won’t let you express high levels of power without first having a powerful expression of strength. If you just went “uh?”, then let me explain:

Strength can be expressed in two different ways:

When you run, your feet will typically only be in contact with the ground for between 220 milliseconds and 350 milliseconds. At the more elite end of running, the number is lower as the foot turnover (cadence) tends to be a little higher. And I know, we are all told to improve our cadence.

But the trick with improving cadence is also keeping good form and not just turning what may have been a half-decent heel lift at a slower cadence into something that resembles a fast shuffle, just to get your feet turning over faster. There is also the challenge of being able to put down enough power in a shorter amount of time, but I’m kind of moving away from the point here and these are topics for different articles. Back to strength…

With your feet being on the ground for such a short period with every step, you don’t have enough time to voluntarily think about keeping your joints stable in your feet, ankles, knees, hips, pelvis, back, shoulders and neck. This all needs to happen automatically or reflexively. It also needs to be coordinated across the different areas for improved movement efficiency. And while you may think that only being on the ground for a fraction of a second means that there isn’t enough time to even bother with joint stability because you essentially hop or lunge from one foot to the other continuously, the forces of running are such (up to 3 times bodyweight – possibly more depending on what you read) that stability in each step is critical. 

Many of us get away with less than ideal reflexive stability over short distances and when we are not tired, but ramp it all up and suddenly the impacts are amplified and before long we certainly know about it. The same is true if you start to push the pace. More pace generally means more force both into the ground and back up from the ground (ground reaction force), so your body’s tissues need to be able to handle the greater demands and the need for even better reflexive stability.

One great example that we can all observe is the classic hip drop. The next time you are running behind someone, look at the movement of their pelvis. If their hip drops down to the opposite side of their stance leg, then they are likely to have some reflexive stability issues. Ordinarily, if you have hip drop, you will be told to do lots of glute (maximus and medius) and core strengthening and integration exercises (hopefully), but if your reflexive stability is poor, you are still unlikely to be able to build or use that strength properly.

Mastering the skill of reflexive stability is, in my opinion, a relatively quick and highly efficient way to improve your overall expression of strength for running – far better than just lifting weights and hoping it will all work. You will feel more stable, be able to put more power into your running, and run longer distances more comfortably than you’ve been able to before. 

You will also be teaching your nervous system how to identify, activate and control your muscles (these are all individual skills by the way). This then forms a fantastic foundation for you to carry on with any other strength work you may enjoy doing, and it will have much more of a positive impact and the benefits are likely to stick around for longer.

For clarity, to improve your reflexive stability, you do need to do voluntary neural drive exercises (i.e. resistance training), but they need to be well designed so they stimulate and upregulate the parts of your brain and nervous system that control reflexive stability.

Summary

To summarise then, first think about reflexive stability when you think about strength in running. Once you have mastered this through well designed and personalised exercises, you may or may not need more strength work of the normal “just lift weights” kind. You may find that your running sessions already provide you with enough stimulus to keep improving your resilience and neural drive strength. Of course that does depend on your goals, but that’s a topic for another article…

The post What Is Strength In Running? appeared first on RunTeach.

I’ll present one case study here, and follow up with more over the coming weeks.

Firstly though, for the avoidance of doubt, tissue issues are real things. Strains, sprains, tears, breaks – they are very real and just because they may not always be associated with pain (but in most cases they are for the reasons mentioned in Part 1), if you are in any doubt whether you have a physical injury or not, then you need to get seen by a medically trained professional – ideally someone who has experience of dealing with active people and specifically runners.

OK, now we have established that, let’s start looking at some case studies where runners have come to me with painful knees, hamstrings, ankles, IT Band etc. In many cases they have had this pain for months and months, and a few of them have had the pain for years and have seen a wide variety of very well meaning professionals that have helped somewhat but not quite got to the source of the issue. I want to give you a high-level overview of how they presented, some of the things I tried; what didn’t work and then what did work (with varying degrees of success).

Runner 1: Outside of right knee very painful for the last three years.

Introduction

Runner 1, we’ll call him Jim as that’s not his name, came to me for a running assessment as he had been getting pain in the outside of his right knee for the past three years. The only way he could run without pain was with a knee brace. He had a number of different types of knee brace from simple thin neoprene ones to more sturdy neoprene ones with built in hinges. This last type was the one he used most often as it gave the best relief, although it was quite cumbersome and very hot to wear.

Over the previous three years he had seen different practitioners, and at one point saw a physio once per week for three months. Unfortunately, nothing worked and the end result was always the same – he had to go back to running with a knee brace.

He eventually came to me on a recommendation. Jim’s thoughts were that something about his biomechanics (running technique) was leading to the knee pain and if he could improve his technique the pain would go away. Jim was also very concerned that if he ran with the knee pain (i.e. without the brace), he would be doing himself damage and severely injure the tissues.

The assessment

I always start my assessments with some basic pain and neuro education. After listening to Jim’s background and discussing his pre-submitted health forms, I explained how pain and movement works through an applied neurology lens. I often begin this education piece with the information in Post 1 of this mini series and expand from there as necessary. I find this helps to relieve some of the fear that you may have over damaging tissue when you run in pain. Let’s be clear though, running through pain is never a good idea, but the reframing of pain Vs injury helps you to take a step back and look at your situation more objectively.

Following this discussion, I stuck a load of dots on Jim and observed him walking up and down my office; taking video for discussion later in the assessment. How you walk gives me a wealth of information about how well your brain and nervous system is integrating with your muscles, and how well you unconsciously control certain movements. Jim then walked on the treadmill as it gives me slightly different data, and then he did a very small amount of running (both barefoot and in shoes) so I could capture the most important movement patterns as he ran. Now onto the really fun bit.

The rest of the assessment was made up of lots of brain-based tests and drills designed to look at Jim’s movement patterns specific to running. So in this section, I’m looking for things like coordination, agility, stability (both conscious and reflexive), balance, and your ability to express and control strength in certain movements. In Jim’s case, I also wanted to look at his sensory system in depth. From Jim’s pre-submitted forms, I had designed some tests to specifically assess how his sensory input may be contributing and impacting his knee pain.

Sensory Mapping

You may not be able to fully appreciate why this is important, so let’s take a very brief detour into the world of sensory mapping…

Without wanting to go into any complicated explanations, science has revealed to us that you have a number of virtual maps of your body that sit in various areas of your brain. These maps detail parts of your body with particular reference to controlling movement. The only way these maps can be kept to date is through the sensory input that comes in from those areas. If the maps go out of date or get blurry, your brain cannot accurately identify where that body part is so cannot move and control it well.

If the brain doesn’t feel ‘safe’ in knowing where a body part is, you won’t be able to be strong in that area and you may well be inaccurate when trying to move. Let’s just say that the body part in question is your knee. If this map is blurry, then your brain cannot identify where your knee is, so it can’t move it well. In addition, this inability to move well spills over into not being able to stabilise your knee joint.

As I’m sure you can imagine, when you are running your ability to stabilise your knees is very important. If you aren’t able to do this, your brain doesn’t feel ‘safe’ and predicts that this could lead to a physical injury. In order to get you to do something about it (initially, to stop this threatening activity of running), it gives you the experience of pain. But get this, it may not be the map of your knee that’s blurry. It could be your ankle or your hip and your brain is using pain in the knee because it knows you’ll pay attention to it.

Updating Jim’s Brain Based GPS

Through the sensory testing, I discovered that Jim’s right leg had a much lower sensitivity to vibration, heat and cold. This was most pronounced around his right knee and right ankle. The maps of these areas, therefore, were not being properly updated as there were significant sensory mapping data missing. So the first part of my mission to help Jim run without knee pain was to begin updating those brain maps.

To help update the maps and to also start to improve Jim’s right sided reflexive stability, we spent a couple of sessions where we combined cold sensory input around his right leg with loaded coordination and accuracy drills. This involved exercises such as accuracy shoulder circles, banded punch outs using my reaction lights, and mobilising the nerves around his right side pelvis and right leg.

As we started to make changes, Jim started to feel better about his running and was doing a bit more – and he had ran twice the preceding week without the knee brace. We then started to see the impact of not having the required level of skill to stabilise his joints to the degree needed for an increase in his running. Over the past months, Jim had also had left heel pain but this had been secondary to his right knee pain so wasn’t an initial priority. Now, however, it started to feel worse. Jim had changed running shoes which may also have been a factor, but the main challenge was that he still hadn’t developed the necessary stability skill, and clear brain maps, that he needed in order to increase his running. Determined as ever, Jim was due to run a trail half marathon in a couple of days.

Although that race went well, it was clear that Jim’s left heel pain was now the priority. We shifted focus slightly to deal with that while Jim was still doing the brain mapping exercises for his knee. After a few weeks of doing the exercises, Jim’s heel pain had improved and we put our focus back onto his right knee.

We spent some more time clearing up Jim’s brain maps with a variety of exercises designed specifically to challenge his brain and nervous system to clear the maps up.

The Big Breakthrough

Jim could do a few runs a week now without the brace, and even went for a period of a couple of weeks where he didn’t wear it at all. However, he had become somewhat reliant on it from a comfort perspective. Jim had used his knee brace for so long that his entire belief system about his knee pain was firmly attached to his use of the knee: with the brace, he had no pain and felt fully confident in running up 13 miles. Without the brace he could run without pain, but was always on edge about the possibility of impending tissue damage because he didn’t have the knee brace supporting him.

So now I had the added challenge of changing Jim’s belief system so we could reduce his anxiety around running without a knee brace. As part of this process, we also looked together in some detail at what the knee brace was actually doing for him.

The first thing I did was to demonstrate that his knee brace wasn’t giving any real support to his knee joint at all. It was just a neoprene brace with some plastic hinges built in. Although it was a bit weighty and felt the part, the truth was that Jim could move his knee into every angle very easily and the brace didn’t stop him. If it truly was providing any kind of positional or rigid joint support, he shouldn’t have been able to do that. So if it wasn’t providing significant joint support, what was it doing that was making his running completely pain free when he wore it?

We looked next at whether the heat being generated by the brace was making up for the lack of cold sensory input that Jim had in his knee, and therefore helping to update his map on the fly. There was good logic around this, and if the brace was heating the skin then this would help clear up the map as he was running. This in turn would help his brain activate the muscles better and stabilise the joint: no threat, no pain.

Then Jim told me that at the times when he wasn’t wearing the brace, if his knee hurt he would massage it in the painful area and this often allowed him to continue running for a bit longer. So I decided to get Jim to do some safe exercises that nevertheless irritated his knee, so I could do some testing. Jim started doing single leg squats and sure enough his knee pain came back. So I checked the skin mobility around the relevant area and discovered that it didn’t move very well. Skin stretch and fascial stretch (the deeper layers of tissue) are important sensory inputs that also help to map out your joints, and for Jim the skin stretch sensitivity in that area was poor.

I had Jim squat again but this time I made contact with his skin in the relevant area around his knee at an appropriate firmness and depth, and his knee pain simply vanished. I learned from this experiment that Jim’s knee brace was giving him firm pressure and pushing layers of his skin together which was providing the necessary sensory input to complete the brain map and allow his brain to control and stabilise his knee.

After some more experimentation, I came up with a personalised taping strategy that provided the same pushing together of Jim’s skin and fascial layers. So I managed to replicate the benefits the knee brace was giving him with a simple single piece of kinesiology tape strategically applied, that was both more comfortable and more practical than lugging a hinged knee brace around. Jim found he could complete all of his runs totally free of any knee pain as long as he had used the taping strategy before he ran.

So the big lesson here is that Jim’s lack of sensory input from his skin and deeper layers of tissue in a small area near his right knee, was confusing his brain and stopping the brain maps of his knee from being correctly updated. Combine this with the other sensory deficits and the brain maps were constantly out of date. Because the maps were blurry, his brain couldn’t properly control his knee when he was running. This meant he wasn’t handling the forces correctly which was creating a large threat level for his brain. His brain interpreted this as being unsafe and produced a pain experience to get Jim to stop what he was doing.

Was Jim’s issue fully resolved? No, he still needs to use the tape until such a point where the sensory deficit has been improved. This is going to take time and dedication, and Jim may decide it’s easier just to use a small piece of tape on his knee each time he runs.

So No Strength Work Then?

It’s very common in cases of knee pain for you to be given a load of strength work to improve the activation and strength of the knee and surrounding areas. While this can work in some people at some times, I often find that this doesn’t address the source of the issue. Is strength the ultimate output we want? Yes, but how you go about achieving it is the key.

Jim, like you, already has an abundance of strength in his muscles without doing additional lifting. The goal wasn’t to add more strength. Jim simply wasn’t able to access the existing strength available to him. The goal then, was finding a way for Jim’s nervous system to effectively activate his current strength and help his brain in stabilising his ankle, knee and hips.

Through all of the mapping exercises we did, and then finally with the specialist taping, we were able to do just that. We did use resistance bands at times, but I used these to stimulate stability with light and moving resistance rather than direct lifting work.

As an added benefit, Jim had always had very tight hamstrings – so much so that he couldn’t forward bend towards his toes very far at all. In problem solving his knee and heel pain, we also hugely improved his hamstring flexibility and strength without ever directly working on his hamstrings. Things like that happen a lot when I work at the level of the nervous system.

Main Takeaway

If you’ve had knee pain (or ankle, hamstring, hip pain etc) for more than six to twelve weeks, maybe you need to be looking wider than just some calf raises, clams, squats and lunges. Perhaps your sensory system needs testing to see if there are reasons why your brain won’t allow you to access your current strength. My motto, learned directly from two of the experts I’ve been following for many years, The Gait Guys, is:

1. Develop the skill first.

2. Add endurance to that skill.

3. Finally, add more strength to that skill if it’s needed.

In Jim’s case, he had to develop a joint stability skill that was currently beyond what he had. We achieved this through mapping exercises, sensory therapy and taping. He is currently adding endurance to this skill through his running and other exercises, and a natural part of this process is accessing more of the strength you already have.

The post Why Does My Knee Hurt? Case Study 1 appeared first on RunTeach.

Earning The Injury – A Bigger Problem Than Just Knees

Along with the monumental growth of recreational running over the past 10 years or so, there has also been a huge increase in the number of runners getting injured. You may think that’s logical and it does make sense that if the total number of runners increases, so does the total number of injuries. So far so obvious.

But I think the ratio of injuries to runners has got all skewed and the same runners are getting more and more injuries in a shorter and shorter time. In fact, I think that running related injuries in some sectors of recreational running are so common that they are almost worn as a badge of honour! Injuries almost seem to be an inevitable part of being a runner.

This may be common, but it’s NOT NORMAL!

When is it alright to just accept that we get injured? Never! But that’s what seems to be happening and I get disheartened whenever I read about runners getting injured over and over again and often ask myself the question “why?”.

Back To Knees

OK, mini rant over.

So, why does your knee hurt? To answer this question we need to put injuries into two distinct camps:

1. Acute injuries that have just happened. For example, you’ve slipped off a curb (or stepped off the promenade which I witnessed an unfortunate gentleman do the other day on the beach) and twisted your knee and ankle. Or, two days ago you banged your knee really hard on the table leg and it’s swollen right up. Or, you’ve unfortunately tripped on a tree root and face planted like a good’un.
   
   I used to split the above type of injuries from the more common running injuries that tend to sneak up on you over time. But in this context it’s more useful to keep them together as ultimately if there are tissue issues, it’s a single point in time where the threshold has been breached and led to those issues – even if it’s been a slow burn to get to that point.
   
   All these are examples of an acute injury that may or may not have resulted in some tissue related issues (strains, tears, breaks etc). In all these cases, your brain thinks you’re pretty stupid and in order to punish you releases huge amounts of pain… No, not really – but your brain does think the behaviour that led to the acute injury was a bit uncalled for and creates a small packet of data called a Neurotag that it can push in front of you next time, just to remind you that doing it again may be a little silly and this can trigger caution – a good thing.
   
   What actually happens at the brain level is that the area that received the physical injury goes on heightened alert and special threat sensors in the tissues send signals to your brain alerting it that there’s either an issue or a possibility of an issue.
   
   If your brain thinks the situation is important enough (based on a lot of past and current data), it will produce an output to get you to change your behaviour. In the case of acute injuries it’s normally quite a bit of pain so you pay attention to not using the injured area until it’s had time to heal.
   
   The threat sensors, called nociceptors, stay at a high sensitivity until such a time that the tissue has recovered enough that you can go back to using it. Essentially, the nociceptors create a buffer zone around the injured area that if you try to access (i.e. move, put weight on, put force through, etc) the brain’s response is to create an experience of pain to remind you to back off.
   
   Under normal circumstances, most injuries will have recovered to a state where the sensitivity of the nociceptors has gone almost back to normal within six weeks. Under certain conditions this can take longer, but rarely more than 12 weeks for most of the common injuries. Of course, there are always exceptions so it’s always a good idea to get things checked out by medically trained bods if you are in any doubt at all.
   
   So, in summary: acute injuries, whether they actually result in tissue issues or not, are injuries that have happened somewhere in the last 6 weeks. They usually cause an increase in sensitivity in your threat receptors (nociceptors) that in turn triggers the creation of a buffer zone. This buffer zone is closely monitored by the nociceptors and they inform the brain if you try to breach it. In response, your brain creates the experience of pain to remind you to reign it in. Usually, but not always, this buffer zone shrinks as the tissues recover and the sensitivity of the nociceptors returns to normal.
2. “But I’ve had my pain for months!” I hear you cry. I know, I know, we’re coming to that now. The second category or injury was what used to be called chronic injury. This is the pain and apparent injuries that just go on and on and on. So what’s happening here?
   
   At this point it’s really useful to separate out injuries from pain. You may have gathered from the acute injuries section that injuries and pain aren’t necessarily linked. “Whoa!!! Wait, what???!”. That’s right, injuries and pain don’t need to be bed buddies – you can have one without the other. I know, mind-blowing isn’t it. But you actually already knew that. Here are some examples:
   1. Military personnel injured on a battlefield that don’t feel any pain until they are in a hospital.
   2. The guy in Australia who walked down the high street with an axe in his head, even stopping to buy a sandwich from a convenience store on his way to the hospital – didn’t feel a thing.
   3. That cut you just noticed on your finger and now hurts because you’ve seen the blood.
   4. Phantom limb pain where the pain is somewhere in the limb that’s no longer there.
   5. And countless other examples, both major and minor.
      

So what we are really talking about in this section is chronic pain rather than injury, now often referred to as long-term pain. This will make more sense in a minute, I promise.

Remember in the acute injury section I mentioned that usually, the buffer zone reduces within six weeks? Well, sometimes the system just doesn’t work very well for one reason or another. This means the buffer zone stays put and the sensitivity stays high. In fact, the sensitivity can even increase and this can become a real problem. The key thing here is that while the buffer zone stays where it is and the nociceptive sensitivity stays high, the actual tissues themselves are recovering exactly as they should. This results in…dun, dun, dun…..

Pain without injury.

So it is completely feasible, and actually very, very common, that if you’ve had pain for more than at least six weeks, your are moving into a chronic pain state where the injury (if there even was one at all – don’t worry, that’s for a different day) is recovering well but the system isn’t resetting. This results in your brain being tricked into thinking it needs to keep giving you the experience of pain so you avoid using the now non-injured area. 

Does that mean you should just push through the pain if you’ve had it longer than six weeks? NO! STOP! DON’T EVER DO THAT!

Pain MUST Be Paid Attention To

Even if you’ve had the same pain for many weeks, months or years, you should always pay attention to it. Pain is an output from your brain to let you know something isn’t right and you need to take action. Even if your nociceptive sensitivity and buffer system hasn’t reset properly, you still need to pay attention to the pain experience.

There are many things that could be triggering the threat levels in your nociceptors and stopping the system from resetting. Often, I find this is connected with a poor sensory or motor map of a joint at one side (or both sides) of the painful area.

If, as part of the original injury (even if it was years ago) some of your sensory ability may have been affected, the joint maps may be incomplete. Your brain uses this sensory input to help determine where a joint is, and how to activate and control the muscles and connective tissue in supporting the functioning of that joint.

This can also impact your ability to stabilise your joints when running, and you can probably guess that this itself presents a huge threat to the brain. In turn, your brain produces a pain experience to get you to stop doing the actions leading to the threat, and you get in a cycle of threat-pain-threat-pain etc.

This can be hard to break, particularly with traditional strength-type training and rehab as they almost completely miss the mark of how your system needs to be treated for those sensory systems to be up-regulated and stimulated.

Paying attention to your pain experience can give many clues as to the underlying cause(s) and is often not directly related to the painful area at all. Ignoring your pain experience can lead to unhelpful compensations that can then lead to other acute injuries, whether of the immediate kind or the slow burn kind.

So, Why Does My Knee Hurt?

Hopefully, this article has helped you to understand that injury and pain aren’t necessarily linked, and you can have one without the other. You will also appreciate that sometimes your system doesn’t reset correctly following an injury (or perceived injury), and this can lead to long-term pain because something is still causing a threat to your brain and until you deal with that something, it can be a very long road back. This is often the reason why you may get recurring pain in the same or a similar area.

So the real answer to “Why Does My Knee Hurt? AKA Runner’s Knee” is:

It Depends…

Over the next few weeks I’m going to write up some of the case studies of runners that I’ve worked with where we’ve approached their knee pain, as well as other “injuries”, at the level of the nervous system rather than just always going for “strengthen, strengthen, strengthen” in the traditional way.

This means that I’ve assessed how and why their nociceptive system isn’t resetting as it should, and we’ve designed specific drills and exercises, as well as things like specific taping strategies, to make incredible progress – even when they have already seen everyone else and done everything else.

I hope you’ve found this article interesting and it’s raised some questions about how you currently approach your running injuries and pain. As for the answers… you’ll need to open your mind and stay tuned for more articles.

The post Why Does My Knee Hurt? AKA Runner’s Knee appeared first on RunTeach.

We don’t even need to open the weather app because we can see it streaming down the widows. We can hear it bouncing off the Velux and as it cascades over the edges of our gutters. If we stand long enough on the pavement, our feet act like dams as they hold back the floodwaters of our great British winter.

And if that weren’t bad enough, it’s almost freezing and it’s pitch black. A gloomy, unwelcoming, murkiness awaits us outside – and you have your evening run to do!

Some of us relish these harsh conditions and wear our toughness to get out there and get it done as a badge of honour. But for many of us, the thought of getting cold and wet is enough to miss our evening run. If this sounds like you, my 5 tips to get you motivated and out the door will help.

If you find it hard to leave your warm and cosy home, get changed at work. Go for your run straight from work skip the temptation to stay indoors. I’ve always done this and find it a fantastic way of ensuring I get my running in.

We read so much about setting goals in running, and setting one for the winter months can be a real motivator. Write down what you want to achieve by the end of the dark, wet weather, and make sure every run counts towards this. You are far more likely to get out the door if you have purpose.

While some of us love running solo in the rain, many of us find this to be the hardest part. Share your wet and windy run experience with likeminded people. Team up with a local running group, club or a bunch of running mates – The cold never seems as bad when you are with others.

Here is a list of RunTogether groups, and here is an index of affiliated running clubs.

One of the most difficult aspects of soggy, cold winter running is getting out in the first place. But when you are running, you often forget those first few minutes and settle into it. Hold onto that wonderful feeling of achievement you get when you finish your run. Use it as motivation the next time – the more you do this the easier it will get to take on the winter!

The feeling of having some form of protection from the weather can be enough to help us get out the door. You don’t need a full on waterproof, breathable, mountain-proof running coat… A simple lightweight jacket that protects you in those first few minutes is often all you need to take the edge off.

Here is a downloadable infographic as quick reminder.

I’m sure there are loads more tips out there, and I would love to hear some of your suggestions for a follow-up post.

The post 5 Tips for winter motivation appeared first on RunTeach.

We don’t need to be super competitive to want to set new personal bests, and the fantastic thing about running is that we don’t have to be going after the win to get those PBs.

But here’s the thing: many of us make the mistake of trying too hard. We set our time target, no matter how conservative or ambitious, and that target is where we put our focus on race day. As a result, we go out too fast, we panic about putting time in the bank in the early part of the race, and we get sucked into the lure of getting “that time”. 

But I believe this is a mistake. Instead, we need to focus on the process, not the prize. If we execute the process well, the prize of the PB will be ours – and with a lot less stress and a lot more joy.

How do I know this? I’ve lived it and I still live it. At a recent parkrun I did just this. I put all my focus on the process of running rather than the final finish time. Having not run a parkrun event for over a year and still testing my recovery from months of some strange respiratory issue, I had no idea of what I was capable of. I had a target in mind of course, but I knew that if I were to focus just on that, it would consume me.

Instead, I put my focus on the process of running. I broke the course down into chunks and ran each of those chunks paying attention to running form, breathing and pace in that moment. It was still hard – very hard! But I was confident that if I followed the process of running, and used those skills that I teach other athletes, and ran each chunk well, then I would achieve my target time.

Not every chunk went to plan, but most did and in fact they were run better than I had predicted. As I crossed the line I was amazed to see that I was 30 seconds faster than my target time!

The longer the event, the more critical it is the follow the process and not the outcome. At least with a 5k, the misery of over-egging it or the frustration of under-pacing is done with pretty quickly and we usually have another opportunity to try again soon.

But with half-marathons, marathons and ultras, that pain can be prolonged for many miles!

So, it’s all good and well me saying “follow the process”, but what process is that? And that’s a great question!

And it’s exactly why I believe we all need to learn how to run. There are skills we all need, and it’s these skills that make up the process.

Through my blog posts, workshops, coaching and ‘soon to be revealed’ online courses through the RunTeach Academy (exciting!), l share what these skills are. The RunTeach Academy will teach you how you can take these skills and create your own personalised process so you can go and smash those PBs!

In the meantime, you can start by breaking down your runs and races into chunks and running those chunks well – one chunk at a time. You may not be able to do this for a whole run yet, but the more you practice, the better you’ll get.

Happy Running,

Chris.

The post A better way to get a PB! appeared first on RunTeach.

“What’s propieception?” you ask. The easiest answer is that it is the brain’s way of knowing where our body is in 3D space when stationary and when moving. As I’m sure you can guess, this is very important when we are running and critical to reduce our fall risk.

How does it work?

Now I won’t get all technical with how it works, but the essence is that we have sensors known as mechanosensory neurons located at our joints and within our skin, muscles and connective tissue. These sensors send messages via our nervous system to our brain to be referred against a central map of our body. If we don’t move a body part well, or don’t use it as it was designed, the brain’s body map goes out of date. Because we aren’t consciously aware of the proprioceptive messages, poor movement becomes the norm without us even realising it. I see this all the time when I carry out the RunTest assessments. It’s not until a runner sees themselves on video that they see their hips are dropping or their foot is turning out, or their arms are sticking out like chicken wings.

Bio-automation

Add to this that our walking and running gait are automatic processes called Central Process Generators (CPGs) that don’t need any external sensory input in order to function. If the movement patterns are poor and we are not overriding the CPGs with good sensory input, the central body map becomes incorrectly updated. This can lead to ever-worsening movement patterns that effectively write poor quality code for the CPGs to execute. The risks of these poor movement patterns are overuse injuries, unexplained pain, and when it comes to running in the dark, an increased risk of tripping or falling.

Most of us are so reliant on our vision when it comes to balance and coordination that when we take it out of the picture, or it’s severely restricted as it is when running in the dark, we don’t have the skills to run as well or as safely as we could.

Warming up

So, what can we do about it? Fortunately, there are lots of simple & short exercises that you can do to improve the proprioceptive skills that we need for running. A great starting point is to update your brain’s central body map. You can do this in a number of ways, and I like to start by doing a bit of a weird neurological warm up. As you’ve probably come to realise, I don’t always do things the same way as everyone else – as Jason Zook says: “own your weird”! 

What I do instead is spend a lot of time finding the information and exercises that actually make a difference, even if they are a bit odd looking. The neurological warm up is one such exercise. This one is from Dr. Cobb at Z-Health (yep, I like Dr. Cobb!) and you can find it here.

I’ve created a PDF Version you can download here.

Get into the habit of doing this warm up (or a version of it) before any activity and you’ll very quickly update your central body map and start to perform better.

Over the next few weeks I’ll share a number of other exercises that you can do to keep improving your proprioception and your ability to run faster and safer, whether in the dark, on the freezing ground or in the glorious winter sun.

The post Better Night Vision – Proprioception appeared first on RunTeach.

You are as ready as you’ll ever be, and all that stands between you and marathon glory is a simple case of 26.2 miles…

So, given this distance and the fierce reputation that a marathon has, you would be forgiven for thinking that most runners wouldn’t hare off as if they were at the start of their Saturday morning 5k. But you’d be surprised at how many runners go off way too fast in the first few miles of a marathon. I’ve even seen people literally sprint away to get in front of the crowds.

And it’s easy to do. We are always thinking about those last 6 miles, that dreaded final 10k. We are desperate to bank time when we are feeling great, just in case the wheels come off later in the race. The truth is, the banking time strategy can actually cause the problems that many of us experience in those later miles.

So, what to do? Well, throughout your training you will have determined your approximate race pace. You know what you can do in training and will have done at least some shorter runs at your target pace so you feel comfortable. This pace is usually a lot slower than you normally run and you are going to feel great for at least the first 10 miles, if not the first 14 to 16 miles of the marathon.

And there’s the challenge: the pace will feel slow. It may even feel a little ploddy depending on your cadence (steps per minute) and running form. And the temptation to push on will be nipping at you that whole first half. But you need to hold back!

You need to manage your pace and avoid getting carried away. We’ve all done it. We’ve all got into a conversation while running and before you know it we are running way faster than we intended to. Having a group, or even one other person, to run with during the marathon can be great and makes it much easier to get through the miles.

But it can also be a distraction from your pace in the early miles, leading you to go out ahead of pace and lining yourself up for a higher chance of a sticky ending! You need to run your own race at your own pace, even if that means dropping back from others, or indeed going ahead of others throughout the event.

We all think that the end of the marathon is the biggest challenge, and maybe it is. But the first half is also a formidable undertaking. Holding yourself back when you are feeling great is hard to do. But if you can achieve this, if you can closely manage the pace and effort in the first half, you are setting yourself up for a much stronger final 6 miles.

Run the first 3 miles (5k) at the slower end of your target pace range, letting everyone else around you do their own thing. Don’t worry – you’ll probably go past a lot of them later on. Use this first 5k to settle into your pace.

Run the next 3 miles (5k) at a similar pace, but then progress to the faster end of your target pace range by mile 8 or 9 (12k to 15k). From here, hold a consistent pace until the end. Almost everyone drops back in those last few miles, but by running your race this way, you stand the best chance of limiting that drop-off to a gentle slide.

If you don’t have a pace range, then run those first 6 miles (10k) a little bit slower than your target race pace and progress from there.

Avoid trying to make up for “lost” time at the start or on hills. You’ll use up too much energy with little bursts of speed and weaving in and out of people. Over the 26.2 miles, a minute or so of lost time at the start isn’t significant. By running with a restrained strategy, you’ll more than make that up.

Consciously holding back and managing your pace will pay big dividends from mile 18 onwards, and I challenge you to try this so you can have your best marathon ever!

The post Hold your horses! Marathon pacing appeared first on RunTeach.

First, we need to take a look at our energy systems.

Next, we see what happens when we eat carbs.

Finally, we summarise.

In order to keep this piece easy to understand (I hope!), I won’t be delving too deep into the science. However, I will be providing links where you can obtain more information should you wish to. There is a great resource on Peter Attia’s website that gets pretty technical if that’s your thing: https://peterattiamd.com/category/ketosis-and-fasting/

Energy Systems

Any discussion about energy systems has to include a mention of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). ATP is commonly referred to as the energy currency and has two vital functions:

1. Ion transport (pumping sodium into our cells and potassium out of our cells.)
2. Muscle contraction

In the first case (ion transport), I am not going to go into any more detail here but suffice to say that if this process does not occur (i.e. the pumping in/out) we die.

So, on to muscle contraction which is probably what most of us are far more familiar with. ATP is required more for the release of the muscle contraction rather than the contraction itself. Of course, without a contraction being released it cannot be repeated. A good example of this is in rigor mortis where the muscles have stopped releasing due to the fact that we have stopped producing ATP – because we are dead!

ATP, therefore, is a vital molecule that our body must produce. It also has to get to our cells in some way, and that’s where our energy systems come in.

Most of us have heard of the terms aerobic and anaerobic, but many not be familiar with them in respect to our energy systems. In addition, there is actually another energy system that is not often talked about. So let’s take a look:

• Creatine-Phosphate System
• Anaerobic Pathway (often referred to as the alactic system in sports)
• Aerobic Pathway

We can see from the following picture (figure 1) how each energy system works:

Figure 1: Energy Systems.

Adapted from Peter Attia’s presentation on UCAN

Creatine-Phosphate System

This system works in quite a different way than the other two in that creatine is used to convert ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate) to ATP. There is no requirement for an external fuel source such as glycogen or fat for this to take place, so at first glance it looks very good and doesn’t have all the issues that the other two systems have.

The rather large downside to the Creatine-Phosphate System is that it is very limited. This is due to us not having very much creatine in our bodies. In fact, typically this system only has between 10 and 30 seconds worth of high intensity effort.

Look back at evolution, this energy system was very useful for providing a rapid burst of energy; in hunting or escaping for example. In terms of athletic performance, it is the system used when sprinting, during high intensity activity and explosive bursts of energy such as in competitive weightlifting.

Anaerobic/Alactic Pathway

This energy system is one of the two commonly known systems, and operates in the absence of oxygen. That is, oxygen is not needed for ATP to be produced in this system. What is needed, however, is glycogen. Glycogen is the stored form of glucose and we will learn more about this in the section on carbohydrates. 

We can see from figure 1 above that:

• Glycogen is turned into lactic acid (through the use of pyruvate)
• This is then turned into ATP

The Anaerobic energy system comes into use when we cannot take in oxygen at a fast enough rate to use it in the manufacture of energy. In terms of running (and other exercise), this is called the Lactate Threshold and is the point where we start to produce more lactate and hydrogen ions (acidic environment) than we can clear from the cells. We typically see this in high intensity interval training, and for doing those sprint finishes once the Creatine-Phosphate system has gassed out.

Like the Creatine-Phosphate system, the Anaerobic Pathway is limited in that we cannot sustain energy output at this level for long periods. Unlike the Creatine-Phosphate system though, we can maintain it for up to 4 minutes or so.

The point at which we cannot maintain that high level of intensity any more is known as our VO2 Max (Maximum Ventilation (consumption rate) of Oxygen). This is the point of failure when we are exercising.

The Anaerobic system can only use glycogen and not fat as its fuel source.

In reality, the Anaerobic Pathway is activated right from the beginning of our activity, as are the other two systems. However, at different points (timescales and intensities) one of the energy systems is the dominant one. This table, taken from brianmac.co.uk , illustrates which energy system is used at what point in time when working at 95% effort:

Figure 2: Energy Systems in use at 95% intensity

Note: CP is the Creatine-Phosphate System

Longer periods of exercise (and at a lower intensity level) require the oxidation (use of oxygen) of either glycogen or fat. In other words, it requires the Aerobic Pathway.

Aerobic Pathway

This energy system utilises oxygen and under certain circumstances can provide energy up to our lactate threshold level for several days.

Other than the use of oxygen, the Aerobic system differs from the Anaerobic system in that it can also use fat as a fuel source to create energy. In terms of our running, this is where it gets really exciting!

We can see from figure 1 above that:

• Glycogen or fat is turned into phosphate
• This is then turned into ATP

How we use Carbohydrates

Now is a good time to offer a very simplistic (but very useful) view of what happens when we consume carbohydrates.

Carbohydrate essentially comes in two forms:

• Starch
• Simple sugar

Starch is stuff like flour, wheat, grains, etc, and is commonly referred to as complex carbohydrate.

Simple sugars are glucose, fructose, lactose etc.

In most cases, starch is broken down by the body into glucose and is first used by any cells that need it, and it is then stored in the liver and the muscles.

The stored form of glucose is called glycogen, a term many runners and other athletes will be aware of. The body only has a very limited capacity to store glycogen, and this amounts to between 1,200 kcal to 1,600 kcal (what we commonly term as calories) of glycogen between our muscles and liver. Any remaining glucose that cannot be stored is turned into body fat. 

In order for the glucose to be stored in the muscles, insulin is triggered. And it is the rollercoaster effect of eating carbs followed by a crash that can lead to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

Simple sugar can also be stored as glycogen, especially glucose. Due to the fact that glucose is already in a form that can be used by the body, it can be absorbed up to 15 times quicker than the complex carbs. We can easily see then, that by consuming energy drinks and gels we can flood our system with glucose. Be aware, however, that we also have a limited capacity to absorb that glucose and this is one of the reasons why it is a contributor to metabolic syndrome that can lead to obesity and Type-II diabetes.

Interestingly, fructose hardly triggers any insulin at all. This means that it does not get stored in the muscles. Some fructose can be stored in the liver as glycogen, but only if there is capacity (i.e. not already full from glucose/fructose consumption). And in the same way that excess glucose gets turned into body fat, excess fructose also gets turned into body fat.

In fact, because fructose doesn’t really trigger insulin it has, until recently, not been seen as a contributory factor to metabolic syndrome.  However, it is now being viewed as far more dangerous than glucose, especially as it is found in so many foods that we eat. Simple table sugar (sucrose) is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. So any foods that say they have sucrose in them should be treated with caution.

So when looking at the energy systems, the important points to remember are:

• Carbs can be starch (complex) or sugars (simple)
• Starch is broken down to glucose which is used immediately, stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen, and any excess is stored as fat

We will ignore fructose for the purposes of this article, but please remember that fructose is quite likely to be stored as body fat. This is especially the case if consuming a general high carb diet.

How are carbs used for energy

We know now that in most cases, carbohydrate is broken down into glucose. We also know that this glucose is stored in both the muscles and the liver in limited quantities.

Both the Aerobic and Anaerobic energy systems use (or can use) glycogen to create ATP to power our muscles. So far so good.

We mentioned that our liver and muscles have limited glycogen storage capacity, but in fact the issues with using glycogen as our primary fuel source are a little more complex. Glycogen that is stored in the muscles (a greater capacity than the liver) can only be used by those muscles. That is, they cannot share that glycogen with any other cells, not even other muscle cells. This is because they lack the required enzyme to break the glycogen right down, and this is a good thing as in most cases we want to keep the glycogen in the muscle where it is needed. The liver on the other hand can send its glycogen to other cells, primarily the brain.

This means that as we use up our glycogen stores, we must replenish them in order to keep producing ATP (energy). This is why traditional sports advice says we should carb load before endurance events, and why we need to use sports drinks and gels during endurance training.

Whilst we are talking about endurance, I classify distances from 10k as ‘endurance’ in the context of energy systems and fuel sources. This is mainly due to my own experiences racing 10k events, and in particular the fact that we are trying to run at the highest maintainable pace possible over that distance. If you recall from our discussion on energy systems, this pace is just below the lactate threshold. At this level of intensity we are using our glycogen stores up faster than at lower levels of intensity. We’ll see why this is important soon.

Generating ATP

Each of the three energy systems results in the creation of ATP for energy, this much we already know. What we haven’t yet looked at is how much ATP is generated by each system, and therefore how efficient each system is with respect to energy creation.

For each glucose molecule, we get 2 units of ATP.

Additionally, in the Anaerobic system, lactate is utilised to create an additional 2 units of ATP. Therefore, the Anaerobic system generates 4 units of ATP from each glucose molecule.

The trade-off for this is that as lactate travels around the body (and builds up as part of the anaerobic system), it takes with it a Hydrogen Ion. This hydrogen ion is thought to lead to muscle stiffness and give us that burning sensation in our muscles when we do an all out session.

This is a rather simplistic view, as there are other theories about what else may be contributing to muscle fatigue and that burning sensation (such as nerve ending exhaustion etc).

The Aerobic system works much more efficiently and actually produces an additional 34 units of ATP from the same single glucose molecule. Therefore, the total units of ATP in this system is 36!

As part of this process (the bit that generates 34 units of ATP) we produce carbon dioxide and water, which is why we exhale both when we breathe.

Remember that the Aerobic system can also use fat (fatty acids) as well as glucose to generate energy. Well, if we use fatty acids instead of glucose we get 34 units of ATP instead of te 36. This may seem like we are losing 2 units of ATP by using fat, but also remember that our glucose (glycogen) stores are very limited. If you recall from earlier, we have the capacity to store between 1,200 kcal and 1,600 kcal in glycogen. Compare that to around 100,000 kcal from fat! Therefore, one huge advantage fat has over glucose is that we do not need to refuel (top up) anywhere near as often (days not tens of minutes).

What this actually means in our running, is that for every hour a person exercises (based on a fairly fit individual) at a pace they can maintain for a long time (marathon pace for example), they would use up about 750 kcal per hour (or 12.5 kcal per minute).

This would mean that at this pace we should have enough energy from our glycogen stores to last about 2 hours. This sounds pretty good, especially when we are talking about 10k, 10 mile and half marathon distances. However, I would refer back to my own experience that we usually attempt to race these distances at pace quicker than the “all day” pace.

Also worth noting at this stage is that when glycogen stores become depleted, the resulting crash in energy is significant and immediate. Generally, there is no real warning that this is going to happen and is what we commonly refer to as hitting the wall or bonking.

Contrast this to utilising fat as our energy source. We know from earlier that we can store up to 100,000 kcal in fat. At the rate of energy use noted above (750 kcal per hour), we could last for over 5 days!

So we can see that utilising fat as our primary energy source is more efficient in terms of the amount of time we can exercise for. However, you may be reading this thinking “yeah, but I can just keep topping up my glycogen stores. I can take gels and sports drinks for that.” Of course you are quite correct, but this carries with it some important disadvantages:

• The amount of glycogen we can replace in a given time frame
• Your body’s reaction to frequent re-fueling with carbs
• The inconvenience of needing to refuel frequently

We cannot physiologically ingest more than about 60 gm of carbs per hour.  It has been suggested that this is independent of body weight.

Consuming more than this has an affect on the GI system and often leads to diarrhea, nausea and vomiting.

There is also the rollercoaster effect mentioned near the beginning of this article. Whenever we consume glucose (even complex carbs as they get broken down into glucose – but to a lesser extent) we trigger insulin. As you may recall, the insulin’s job is to “mop up” the glucose by storing it in the muscles in the form of glycogen.

If we flood our system with glucose the insulin spikes in order to mop it up faster. This state is known as hyperglycemia, and is when glucose is too high (compared to normal blood sugar levels).

However, as the insulin removes the glucose, it does it so efficiently that it causes the glucose to be way too low. This is a state known as hypoglycemia.

In order to try and correct the low blood glucose, the body makes us crave more and the cycle starts again. We can see this in figure 3 below. The dotted lines are where our normal blood glucose levels should be, and the blue line represents the blood glucose in this scenario. The aim is to keep the blue line within the dotted lines, but as you can see insulin doesn’t manage this very well.

Figure 3: Glycemic Rollercoaster

Adapted from Peter Attia’s presentation on UCAN

We can see from figure 3 that this rollercoaster ride can lead to headaches, sweating, lethargy, shaking, and hunger. Clearly, none of these things are desirable when training or racing.

As was hinted at a couple of paragraphs ago, it is the simple forms of carbohydrate that cause the most dramatic spikes in insulin. Complex carbs still raise insulin levels, but not anywhere near as much.

One side effect of raised insulin levels is that the breakdown of fat (lipolysis) is blocked. That is to say that while insulin levels are raised, the body cannot use fat for energy. If part of your goal for exercising is to lose weight (body fat in particular) and you consume sports drinks and gels, you are actually stopping that very process. In other words, you are not in fact burning that body fat.

Summary

So you may have noticed by now that we have four good reasons to prefer using fat to glycogen (carbohydrate) for our aerobic training:

1. Storage capacity. We can store more fat that can be used for energy than we can store glycogen.
2. Physiologically we cannot keep up with the required glycogen intake required for sustained high level activity.
3. Most of the sports drinks, gels and other glycogen replacing supplements we take cause a spike in insulin levels which in turn leads to the glycemic rollercoaster and a whole bunch of undesired effects. Add to this the discomfort from attempting to consume more glucose than we can actually ingest.
4. Raised insulin levels also block the utilisation of fat for energy.

This is a clear case why switching to fat instead of carbs can be far better for us and for our training. But wait! What about Anaerobic training?

An excellent question. There is certainly a slight tradeoff in that reaching the same VO2max may not be possible when we are using fat as our primary fuel source. However, this probably amounts to only 5% to 10% degradation of performance at the very top end of this. In training we may notice it slightly when doing high intensity intervals/reps. In racing we may notice it because getting that sprint finish in may be harder. That said, there is a solution to this that we won’t go into here, but you can find out more by checking out the video on Peter Attia’s site, or by looking at Generation UCAN. You can save 10% on Generation UCAN in their UK store by using the discount code RunTeach.

For most of us though, we won’t notice any difference in this area at all. Remember, you will still have the glycogen stores there when you need them. You just won’t need to access them until you are doing that anaerobic work, so there will be plenty to supply you.

One thing I have noticed is that both my easy pace and threshold pace have got faster. That is, I seem to have pushed both of these paces up by adapting to using fat rather than carbs. So, using this logic, if I can run more of a distance at an overall higher pace, my race times will improve naturally and I won’t have to rely on that sprint finish quite as much.

In conclusion, at our level of running we have everything to gain from switching to fat (even over shorter distances) and nothing to lose – except unwanted body fat!

The post Switching to fat? appeared first on RunTeach.

As the name suggests, it is a 24 hour endurance race and it starts at midday on the Saturday and the last lap must be started before midday on the Sunday. The race numbers carry the tag line Epic, Brutal, Relentless and by lap 3 brutal and relentless was already kicking in!

The organisers bill the event as Glastonbury for Runners and there is certainly a festival feel with hundreds of tents, a race village with colourful flags, food vans, craft activities and a real atmosphere of community. This year there was an even more authentic feel with the rain and mud – unfortunately I can’t run in wellies! Mind you, I’m not sure how much use they would have been anyway.

This was my 5th year at the event and it has grown hugely over that time. I ran in a small team of 5 runners for the first 2 years and then a team of 4 runners in the 3rd year. We were a mixed bag in terms of ability, but all had a steely determination to do our best no matter what. We did reasonably well each year (apart from the 3rd year), falling just outside the top 10. We all did 35 miles each (7 laps) most years, but in our 3rd year we covered 40 miles each.

Last year, one of the team members, Emma, asked if I would like to run as a pair in the Mixed Pair category. Initially hesitant, I agreed with grave reservations of whether I could actually run 5 miles every 50 to 60 minutes for 24 hours. On the event weekend we ran just for the fun of it, and were surprised to learn that by Saturday evening we were in 3rd place! No pressure… Aside from a bit of a mixup in the race results at the end when we thought we had come 2nd only to be demoted to 3rd (which was actually the correct result), we were elated! Despite my joy, it had been tough and I really wasn’t up for facing going round and round that course again – enough! 

But when Emma asked if I would do it this year, I somehow found myself agreeing – what was I thinking!

 All this went through my mind as finished my 3rd lap last Saturday, covered in mud and already feeling exhausted. I said to Emma, who hadn’t had any sleep the night before due to an upset stomach, that I didn’t mind if we called it a day. “No, I’m fine – I’ll keep going” she said. Drat! I thought…

The training hadn’t really gone well for either of us and we knew we weren’t as fit as last year. We were happy just to plod along and finish wherever we finish… kind of. You see, both Emma and I are highly competitive at some level. And last year’s 3rd place was a benchmark that neither of us really wanted to let slide so much that it fell off the table. “Top 10” we agreed. But this early on I just wanted to pack it in. The course was muddy and a lot busier than it had been in previous years – it was hard work. 

At the end of the next couple of laps I tried the same gentle words to get Emma to rethink our continuation of this torture, but she held fast. At one point Emma’s friend Magda stuck her head in my tent during one of the brief few minutes of rest I had when Emma was on the course. She said sternly to me “You are not going to quit – are you” in her firm Polish accent – it was definitely an instruction, not a question. And it was what I needed in order to get my head together – thanks Magda 🙂

I noticed that so far I had run every lap faster than the equivalent lap last year. When running the laps I felt fine and didn’t want to slow down – however I was waiting for the fatigue to hit me like a brick wall, but it never really did. And, if I had needed any more incentive to keep moving quickly, by 5pm we were sitting in 3rd place out of 36 pairs in our category. This slipped to 4th place over the next couple of laps, but by midnight we were back to 3rd although it was very close on timings.

The way the event works is that the runners/teams (solo, pairs, small teams, large teams) with the most laps in each category are ahead. If a runner/team has the same number of laps, then it comes down to who has run them faster. We were only just ahead of 4th place on time but determined to hold it.

Teams have different strategies of how they run the event. The only official rules are that everyone in the team must do at least one lap, and you can only have one person from your team on the course at any one time. You must hand over the wristband in the official changeover area.

Pairs is often seen as the hardest combination, although I would also say a team of 3 is pretty tough going. Solos clearly have it tough because they are by themselves, but they can at least come off the course for a rest or food whenever they like and if they are overdoing it, then can go and have a nap. Of course, this will affect their race result, but many of the Solo runners do this.

Pairs is a bit different. There is always that pressure to get back to the changeover area in the time you said you would because you know your running partner is waiting there for you. This is especially critical as you also know that they have given up rest to get there for that time, so they are mighty annoyed if you are late!

Some pairs start running single laps (lap, changeover, lap, changeover etc) and then overnight they switch to maybe two or three consecutive laps to give the other runner a chance to rest. Emma and I tried a double lap once last year but it really didn’t work for us. So this year we stuck to just doing 1 lap each.

Because Emma was running a lap between 48 minutes to start with, and then in about an hour as the event progressed, I got about 20 minutes where I could lay down (alarm set and one eye open!) You might think 48 to 60 minutes is a decent amount of time, but when you consider walking from the changeover area to the toilet and then back to the tent; a quick chat with friends who were in teams; try and get something (actually not really anything) to eat; rehydrate; head down; back to changeover area 5 minutes before they are due in… it goes pretty quick!

And I had sheer luxury because Emma had virtually no time between laps because I started out at just under 38 minutes per lap and never took longer than 50 minutes. I have no idea how she survived it.

But survive it we did. Even overnight when the course was pitch black and all we had to rely on was our head torches, feeling our way through the slippery mud. And there was mud! The course is a 5 mile loop on mixed terrain that takes in some beautiful forest and countryside. There are one or two hills to mix things up, some crazy folk with inflatable guitars blaring out rock and roll from a VW camper van and handing out cocktails at halfway… and did I mention the mud?

On the Saturday lunchtime it had rained a lot. It was sloppy and yuk. Then throughout the rest of the day it started to dry up and even overnight it got better. The mud turned from very slippery to gloopy, but at least we could run through it. And then it rained… 7am saw a downpour that drenched Emma and the other runners on the course. There was so much rain that it turned some parts of the course into a quagmire reminiscent of a wet and muddy farmyard that has been driven through several times by a tractor.

Some parts of the course were so bad that I had to run along verges and pick alternative footing. One advantage I did have from doing so many laps though – I knew which bits all the runners were going through and which bits were left alone and made a better route. At one point in the morning part of course was diverted as it was just too slippery and dangerous.

But did that deter us? No it did not! By early morning we were over a lap ahead of 4th place, but also a lap behind 2nd place. Knowing it was unlikely that we could catch them I kept maximum effort up anyway, and we did gain a bit.

Last year I ran a total of 14 laps which was 70 miles. Emma ran 13 laps or 65 miles. This year, Emma was determined to get that last lap in, and I encouraged her so that we could make absolutely certain we held onto that 3rd place. We had worked so hard that I really didn’t want to give it up now. In the end, 4th place decided to stop at a total of 25 laps so Emma probably didn’t need to run that final lap – but she wasn’t having any of it. We both ran 14 laps (140 miles combined), equalling the 1st and 2nd place pairs, only they ran them faster than us.

As we crossed the line together on her last lap (I had handed my timing chip in already so as not to break the rules), we celebrated that fact that not only had we finished 3rd despite the lack of training, pre-event stress and tiredness, Emma had ran 5 miles further than last year and I had run my 70 miles more than 38 minutes faster than last year, completing them in 10 hours 40 minutes and 17 seconds. Now was the time for Epic!

Just to finish, I have to say a huge thank you to Ian and Amy from SOS Hydration (20% discount code CHRIS20 at http://bit.ly/2IVv7Jo ). SOS has been my preferred hydration product for a few years and it really makes a positive difference to my running. At Endure 24 Ian and Amy were there as sponsors of the event and provided much needed support and hydration after each of my laps.

As I mentioned earlier, there really wasn’t time to take on much fuel. Add to this the fact that I suffer from stomach issues if I eat too close to running, so I knew nutrition would be a big factor. I burned an average of 460 Kcal per lap, so I definitely needed to fuel. This is where Generation UCAN comes in (10% discount code RunTeach at https://www.generationucan.co.uk/). As a very slow release carbohydrate, one scoop was giving me up to 2 hours of sustained energy. As such, I didn’t need to start taking any until lap 5 and after that it was every 3rd lap. I had absolutely no stomach issues at all, which is unheard of for me at this event. I did also have some fast acting sugar in the form of marshmallows and American hard gums, as well as a few dry crackers throughout the 24 hours. But I couldn’t have done it without the slow releasing energy of UCAN.

The other product that I used (and caused much hilarity amongst my friends and running buddies) was the vibrating foam roller from PulseRoll – much easier to use than a standard foam roller.

So, if you want an event that will challenge you but is also very sociable and where you can choose how much running you do, then Endure 24 Reading or Leeds could be for you.

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