Running has went well while living back in Honolulu; it's a beautiful place to be outside, and the weather is perfect for it. At least compared to back in Bangkok it is, where it's always way too hot.
This update isn't meant to be informative related to training approach for experienced runners. I'll still include some "lessons learned" related to experiences at the end, but many runners have been through a lot more training scope than I have.
I've looked into what I might be doing differently if I was training more seriously before, watching the typical training theory videos, which would go better if I was 20 years younger, or on steroids / hormone replacement. At 55 I need to work around limited recovery capacity. I'm up to running 37 km / 23 miles per week recently, so related to volume that's not bad, but I'm not running as fast as I was a year ago, so intensity (speed) has needed to drop out, at least until I can work back up to that.
Some general and aesthetic background first: I live at the Eastern edge of Waikiki, near Diamondhead, and run around Diamondhead three times a week, then out and back the Ala Wai canal after that. It's beautiful there. It was a stretch moving up to that weekly volume, but it works out.
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view from the Diamondhead hill, on a really early outing |
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the opposite side of the run, the end of the Ala Wai canal, after circling that volcano |
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there really are a lot of rainbows here |
Back to running progress
That's what run pacing looks like recently, if anything on the fast side. I brought a watch that tracks heart rate but lost the charging cord on the trip, so I let that part of tracking stats go. It was interesting varying running intensity but I can feel how that's going, and more typical challenges are pulling together motivation, effort level, sorting through stiffness, and breathing.
That initial 10 minute km--in the stats / picture--is from walking over to the park (I start it at home since that phone has no active SIM card in it), then a short stretch, with a second warm stretch after a warmup run. It takes doing loosening up.
A typical route looks like this:
I usually run the 12 1/2 km route, doing the canal out and back; that's slightly longer, going through that other neighborhood area. There are two hill sections on the route and I'll usually walk a little at the top of the first steeper one, or sometimes both. Frequency looks like this:
I wasn't running that far at the beginning of April, the current 12 km, and switching over took some doing. Sometimes I walk a good bit, hike, ride a bike, or swim, and I've been ice skating twice in the past month, and mixing activities can tax training recovery.
Lessons learned
All well and good, but what do I understand differently now after this experience? I ran an equivalent amount last May, but still my impression of it has changed a little.
Effort required to run at a relatively normal pace, for me, that 6 minutes per km (9 1/2 minute miles), stays on the high side. I could be clearer as to why. It seems like it's hard to improve conditioning without varying training intensity, doing faster shorter interval running, so that the normal pace feels more moderate. That risks injury for me, if I don't take that slow, and for whatever reasons my interest has been to increase training distance instead. I'm really running to stay in shape, and to experience it, not to train for fast race times. I don't race.
I haven't fallen into a clear routine for timing, related to exactly when I run, and I think that throws off making improvements. Early morning is most pleasant, but I'm not a morning person, and that requires running without ingesting any caffeine first. I need to also eat when I drink tea to protect my stomach, or at least that's how I see it, so I can't run too early if I have a light breakfast. Sometimes I run in the afternoon instead.
It's interesting how relative effort related to body tension and breathing forms works out. For pushing it for distance increase it's hard to fully recover, and carrying leg and body tension from not being completely recovered seems to add a lot of extra work (and adds a few minor aches, of course). It's odd how the two things inter-relate, experience of tension and effort level required to run. I've experimented with shifting posture, relaxing my shoulders, and using different hand positioning to help with relaxation while running, but I would expect that what works for anyone is a bit individual.
Often I'll experience a very stable, slow form of breathing that only evolves as I fully relax, usually after 6 km. I might push that pace to as fast as 6 minutes per kilometer, but often that's not fully sustainable, and I'll alternate a faster and rougher breathing pattern. I don't know what that means, but it seems the faster and shallower form might relate to my body clearing lactic acid or carbon dioxide faster, or maybe I just need more oxygen.
Related to that running theme of muscle and soft tissue recovery, very light activity, like swimming or walking, seems to speed that process up. Youtube running channel content producers always claim that slow "recovery runs" work better than rest days, and it seems that might be right.
I think I could push it a little harder. I'm concerned about injury, since I've experienced three very minor injuries in the 5 1/2 years I've been running. Those issues were nothing that required much treatment, all just extended extra soreness in a tendon or ligament, but taking a month or more off running definitely throws off progress.
It's not just that; part of the running experience is about enjoying it, relatively speaking. Focusing and leaning into the pace over a shorter run, for example for 45 minutes, isn't so bad, but pushing it doesn't work well with longer hour and a half range runs. I could emphasize the divide that's already happening in these runs, starting slower, and changing pace at the mid-point / 6 km mark, but part of the conditioning input that's not as clear in the stats listing is about grinding out two uphill sections early on. Leaning into the hill climbs is a little rough but also kind of pleasant.
To offer others advice, for people regularly doing shorter runs or always at a moderate pace, it worked well for me earlier this year to divide a run into an initial slower pace then a later faster one. It was odd how close the two were in terms of actual running speed, both essentially right around 6 min / km or 9 1/2 min / mile, but easing off a normal pace just a little made it feel much less intense. In a sense that's like using the first 5k of a 10k / 6+ mile run as a long warm-up, which is probably not ideal for maximizing training effect, but it took the sting out of working up to normal effort level several times a week.
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some of that is heat stress, running back in Bangkok |
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she is hardly ever in the social media photos |
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light hikes can be nice here, very scenic |
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