50/50 (21 page)

Recovery is one of the most important aspects of running, and one that runners often struggle with. Even those running far less than a marathon a day generally have to make special efforts to ensure that they recover adequately between runs. In the short term (from day to day), inadequate recovery causes muscle soreness, fatigue, and poor performance. When a runner consistently trains too much and/or rests too little for a week or more, the ultimate result can be an injury or illness.

The best way to avoid overtraining is to train smart. The hard–easy rule, for instance, involves alternating more challenging runs with gentler runs from day to day. It’s also a good idea to vary how hard you train from week to week. Once every two to four weeks, you should reduce your running mileage by 20 to 30 percent to facilitate recovery and prepare your body for another batch of harder workouts. Like the hard–easy rule, planned recovery weeks allow you to train harder when you mean to train hard, yet also recover from your hard training more fully than when your training load is less varied.

You may need to experiment to find the frequency of planned recovery weeks that works best for you. A good place to start is with a three-week cycle with a 20 to 30 percent reduced training load in the recovery week, as in this example:

Week 1. 25 miles (three hard runs)

Week 2. 28 miles (three hard runs)

Week 3. 20 miles (two hard runs)

One helpful way to monitor your recovery is to grade your workouts. By grading your workouts, you can measure how much you’re getting out of them and adjust your training appropriately when it’s not enough.

After completing each run, give it a grade in your training log: for example, great, good, fair, or bad. Three consecutive bad days indicate that you aren’t getting enough recovery to perform adequately in workouts and should rest or take it easy for a day or two. A full week without any good or great workouts indicates the same.

There are a few other measures you can practice to promote post-workout recovery. After an especially hard workout or race, taking a brief cold bath may limit the tissue swelling that accompanies and often exacerbates muscle damage, enabling your leg muscles to heal faster. While scientific studies of ice baths and other cold therapies have not confirmed these benefits, many top-level runners swear they work, and I tend to agree.

The recovery method that has the most scientific support is eating properly. When you complete a hard run, you have many damaged muscle fibers in your legs, you are at least slightly dehydrated, and your muscles are low in glycogen fuel. Nutrition is required to correct all of these physiological imbalances. You need protein to repair and rebuild your muscles, liquid to rehydrate, and carbohydrate to replenish your muscle fuel supplies.

Eating for Recovery

Studies have shown that, to maximize your post-run recovery, you need to consume protein, carbohydrate, and fluid within an hour after each run. Here are some especially good post-workout snacks, meals, and supplements.

Nature’s Recovery Secrets

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the following twenty foods are excellent sources of antioxidants—nature’s recovery potion: small red beans (also called Mexican red beans), blueberries, red kidney beans, pinto beans, kiwi fruit, cranberries, artichokes, blackberries, prunes, raspberries, strawberries, Red Delicious apples, Granny Smith apples, pecans, sweet cherries, black plums, broccoli, black beans, plums, Gala apples.

Research has shown that athletes who consume these nutrients within the first hour after a workout recover faster and perform better in their next workout than athletes who wait more than an hour to eat. It doesn’t have to be a big meal. A modest-size snack or a recovery supplement with carbs and protein, plus water, will do.

Maintaining a diet that’s rich in antioxidants and omega-3 fats will also help your muscles recover faster after runs. Large amounts of free radicals are released from damaged muscle cells through the inflammation process after runs. These free radicals cause additional tissue damage, which may explain why you may feel sorer one or two days after a hard run than you do immediately afterward. Fruits and vegetables are full of antioxidants your body can use to neutralize free radicals and help limit post-run muscle damage. Omega-3 fats aid in the production of anti-inflammatory compounds that boost the muscle repair process between runs. Good sources of omega-3 fats are salmon, flaxseeds, and fish oil supplements.

One final measure that is very important for recovery is sleep. The majority of muscle tissue repair happens during sleep. Since I normally sleep just four to five hours a night, I rely on fresh, healthy foods to take up some of the slack. During the Endurance 50, I sometimes only got two or three hours of shut-eye. Rest was a luxury that would have to wait until after I finished—
if
I finished. Until then, my motto was “Bring on the broccoli, wild salmon, and raspberries!”

The Dean’s List

Some nondrug alternatives for treating muscle strain and soreness include:

•
Arnica Montana

• MSM (methylsulfonylmethane)

• C3 Complex (turmeric root)

• BioAstin

CHAPTER 21

The Next Level

Day 29

October 15, 2006

Boston Marathon

Boston, Massachusetts

Elevation: 66'

Weather: 58 degrees; partly cloudy

Time: 3:59:27

Net calories burned: 92,423

Number of runners: 50 (filled to capacity, or so I thought)

T
he Boston Marathon
was out of control, but in a good way. We started in the town of Hopkinton, due west of the city, with fifty runners, our official limit. These folks had come from as far away as Israel to take part. No sooner had we gotten under way, however, than unofficial runners began adding themselves to our number. By the time our group reached the halfway mark in the Wellesley Hills, where the Wellesley University cross-country team jumped in, our group had swelled to more than double its original size. As long as the police didn’t mind, I certainly didn’t.

I have a hypothesis about why the Endurance 50 version of the Boston Marathon generated such enthusiastic participation. Without a doubt, it happened partly because the Boston Marathon is the oldest continuously run marathon in the world, with a mystique and an appeal unlike any other. (The first Boston Marathon was held in 1897, and was only 24.5 miles in distance.) Another factor was the simple fact that the Boston area is a terrific and popular place to run. Yet the main reason so many runners got so excited about marathon number twenty-nine of the Endurance 50, I believe, is that the Boston Marathon is normally held in April, while the Endurance 50 re-creation was run in mid-autumn, when the foliage has exploded into glorious, fiery colors, bringing the entire race route to life as never before.

Reaching Higher

How fast can I run a marathon? What should my next marathon time goal be?
These are questions that many runners ask themselves after they complete their first marathon and decide they wish to improve their time in subsequent events. Of course, the most basic way to set a new goal is to simply aim to beat your first marathon time by one second or more. But many runners feel that, with accumulated experience and better training, they can aim higher. How high, though? Boston?

Another way to set a new marathon time goal is to base it on your performance in a shorter race. As you train for your next marathon, enter one or more 5k, 10k, or half-marathon tune-up races. Your finishing times in these can give you a sense of how fast you will be able to run your next marathon. How? A number of running experts have created race performance equivalence tables and calculators that show how runners of any given talent and training level can expect to perform at other race distances based on a recent performance at one distance.

One of the better of such calculators can be found at
www.runnersworld.com
. Just enter your time for a recent shorter race and see what your equivalent marathon time would be. This is no guarantee, but it could be one helpful guideline to use in the goal-setting process.

Other major marathons, such as the Chicago Marathon and the New York City Marathon, are open to all comers. If you can afford the entry fee and you sign up before they sell out, you can run these marathons no matter how slow you are and regardless of whether you have ever run a marathon before. Boston is different. To run the Boston Marathon, you must first achieve a gender- and age-specific qualifying time in another marathon. Therefore, the Boston Marathon is out of reach for many runners and completely closed to first-timers.

Our group covered the course in a respectable sub-four-hour time. While many of the runners in our group had previously completed the Boston Marathon, the newbies were thrilled to be running this legendary course as their first marathon. And even the multiple Boston finishers were enchanted by this unique Hopkinton-to-Boston mid-autumn experience.

While the primary goal for first-time marathon runners is just to reach the finish line, most second-timers aim for something higher—to beat their first marathon time, to eclipse a round-number finishing time (such as four hours), or to qualify for Boston. It’s a natural progression. By no means is it necessary to try to run faster in your second marathon than you did in your first to have a thoroughly satisfying experience, but a lot of runners find that raising the bar adds a new level of excitement to the training and racing process.

Improving your best marathon time requires raising the level of your training. Here are several ways to do it:

• Run longer, earlier
. Most first-time marathon runners complete no more than one or two twenty-mile training runs. They gradually increase the distance of their long runs from week to week for many weeks until they are able to cross the twenty-mile threshold two or three weeks before race day. This approach is perfectly adequate if your goal is just to finish, but if you’re gunning for a challenging time goal, you need to build more than the minimal amount of endurance required to complete the race; you need a surplus. To achieve this endurance surplus, do your first twenty-mile training run at least six weeks before race day, and do at least three total long runs of twenty to twenty-four miles.

• Practice your goal pace
. Every marathon goal time is associated with an average pace. For example, the pace required to achieve the Boston Marathon qualifying time for women aged eighteen to thirty-four (3:40) is 8:23 per mile. It is important that your body be well adapted to running at your goal pace before you attempt to sustain it for 26.2 miles in a race.

A simple and effective way to gain efficiency at your goal pace is to do a few goal-pace long runs during the latter half of the training process. For example, seven weeks before your marathon you might replace your typical slow long run with a workout consisting of a four-mile easy warm-up followed by eight miles at your goal marathon pace. Two weeks later, repeat the workout, but add two more miles of goal-pace running. Finally, three weeks before your marathon, do a sixteen-mile long run with twelve miles of goal-pace running.

•
Build speed
. Another tried-and-true means of improving marathon performance is to regularly do workouts involving running speeds that are significantly faster than marathon pace. Such workouts increase the body’s capacity to consume oxygen during running, so that you can sustain faster running speeds more comfortably. There are two specific types of workouts that I recommend for speed building: interval runs and tempo runs.

An interval run features relatively short segments of faster running separated by slow recovery jogs. For example, after warming up with a mile or two of easy jogging, run a mile at your 10k race pace, or the fastest pace you feel you could sustain for six miles. Jog a quarter mile and then run another fast mile. After completing a second recovery jog and a third fast mile, cool down with another mile or two of easy running. Repeat the workout a week later, adding a fourth fast mile. Build up to six fast miles over the next few weeks. By the end of this process, you will feel much better able to sustain faster running speeds comfortably.

• A tempo run consists of a single, longer block of fast running sandwiched between a warm-up and a cool-down. The appropriate pace for tempo running is comfortably hard—that is, the fastest pace you can sustain without beginning to struggle. Start with a tempo run consisting of ten minutes of tempo running between a ten-minute warm-up and a ten-minute cool-down. Repeat the workout every seven to ten days, adding a few more minutes of tempo running each time you do it. Build up to approximately thirty minutes of tempo running between your warm-up and cool-down. The more tempo workouts you do, the easier your somewhat slower marathon goal pace will feel.