The Race Continues
We’re excited to partner with The Race Continues; a Bay Area elite track club created for student athletes, regardless of income, experience, skill, or ability. “Our mission is to empower athletes to find their strengths and use those to work towards whatever they define as success.” The Race Continues was founded by Ronald Douglas and Shamara Carney, who both are retired college student athletes. The sibling duo grew up in a sports loving family and their mother specifically loved track and field. Their mothers passion for the sport led to them both exploring the sport for themselves and eventually running at the collegiate level. Ron competed at Azusa Pacific University from 2010-2014 while receiving his bachelors in Psychology and Masters in Physical Education. Shamara competed at UC Santa Barbara while completing her Bachelors in Business Communication. “The only barriers that should exist in track and field are hurdles and steeples.”…
Base Building Workouts to do During an Off-season
During the present COVID-19 pandemic, several sources have recommended limiting high-intensity training that could possibly weaken our immune systems. Long runs or hard interval sessions can deplete our glycogen levels and leave us more susceptible. I agree with this and would suggest keeping the majority of training aerobic and limit most higher efforts to a ‘comfortably hard’ tempo at most, such as marathon pace. If you are going to run faster paces, keep the number of reps on the lighter side compared to what you would normally do in training. With no races in the near future, this is a perfect time to focus on staying healthy, keeping up base training and laying the foundation. The following strength workouts are great for base building periods like the one we’re all in, and can all be done at a moderately hard effort without overdoing it. Long Hill Repeats/ Hill Circuits Find…
The Importance of the Warm-up and the Cool-down
Unless we’re in the ranks of the elite runners, we have to weave our running into our daily lives and schedules — not always an easy task. We have these small windows where we can fit in a few miles here or there without any wiggle room, often leaving things like the warm-up and cool-down by the wayside. Other times, we don’t feel like doing all the pre- and post-run prep, just wanting to lace up the shoes and go. No matter the reason, when we skip out on warming up and cooling down, we also skip out on the chance to properly set ourselves up for success with the workout and recovery. The benefit of the extra ten to twenty minutes spent doing these things extends far beyond the workout itself! Why you should warm up It’s beneficial to warm up before any type of workout so that we can…
What is Your Foot Strike Telling You?
Most days, you’ll throw on some tech tops and shorts, lace up the kicks, and start running. Whether you’re trying to run five miles at half marathon pace or just run off a tough day at the office, you’re usually not worried about all the little details of your form. But, what if we slow it down a bit and really look at your stride? Once we start digging deep into how one foot follows the other, there’s a lot more we can look at and learn from to better understand how to run smarter and faster. One of the first things to think about is stride length. While measurable length will vary from person to person, we can look at foot strike to get a sense of what an individual runner’s form looks like and how to interpret their stride length. So, what exactly is your foot strike telling…
Pacing: Run Slow Slower So You Can Run Your Fast Faster
Proper pacing is difficult. It takes time, and can hurt a lot. But, with how important and powerful pacing can be during your training, it’s something all runners need to consider. Most runners will stick to a single, easy pace when they first start running; something they can maintain for an increasing amount of time. That won’t help runners go faster or become more efficient, although it will help them to run longer and farther. Once you get comfortable with going slow and steady (you know, to win the race) for as long as you want or need, the best way to improve speed and efficiency is to vary your pace with purpose. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the way to get faster is to run a lot more of your miles at a slower pace. In theory, the best way to practice running faster would be to run fast — that…
Every Runner Should Be Scheduling Rest in Their Weekly Routine – Here’s Why
When you talk to experienced runners who run six to seven days a week with mileage so high you wonder when they find time to do anything else, you probably might be thinking: “How do their bodies hold up to that kind of mileage?” “How do they stay injury-free?” “What’s their secret?” “Ouch.” Well, yes, ouch is correct, but the reason behind their ability to put in those high mileage weeks with few to no injuries is no secret. Hidden among all the long runs, tempo runs, interval workouts and easy runs is the most important part of the training schedule: rest. Rest is something that is often overlooked but provides essential time for the body and mind to recover and repair. When you run (or are doing other types of muscle building activities), tiny tears are formed in the muscle fibers that require time and nutrients to repair themselves.…
Lactate Threshold: How to Find Your Limits, Then Exceed Them
When talking about speed workouts, we’ll often mention different race paces — speeds that you can sustain over a 5K, 10K, half marathon, and so on. What we’re really talking about is your lactate threshold, and as you get deeper into running, it becomes more important to understand. And no, it’s not how much milk you can drink! Your lactate threshold is the intensity level of a workout that is difficult but sustainable, and there are a ton of benefits to understanding where that level is for you. The lactate threshold is based on the main antagonist to high intensity running — lactic acid. For most people, lactic acid is the sour part of sour milk products, but for us runners, it’s a byproduct from the breakdown of carbohydrates. While it’s produced during most kinds of exercise, runners will find it most apparent during higher-intensity workouts because the acid builds up…
Hill Repeats: The Thin Line Between Love and Hate
A road runner’s worst enemy and a trail runner’s best friend, hill repeats embody Daft Punk’s 2001 smash hit, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. Harder because you might be a road runner and have gravity working against you. Better because you might be a trail runner and have gravity working against you. Faster because what comes up must come down. And most importantly, stronger because that’s what you become when you do hill repeats! Hill repeats are as much a strength workout as a speed workout. They not only break down the muscle fibers in your legs to make them stronger, but they put nearly all the muscles in your legs to work. It’s as if you rolled squats, lunges, and calf raises all into one workout while also getting your heart rate up in small spurts. Hill repeats also promote better running form, as it gets you lifting up your…
The Tempo Run: The Key to Race Success
If you’ve heard anything about race training or speed workouts, you’ve probably heard the term ‘tempo run’ thrown around — and for good reason. Among all the workouts we’ve discussed so far, tempo runs are probably the most beneficial speed workout you can add to your regimen. Don’t take these workouts lightly and throw them into your schedule all willy nilly, because tempo runs are often some of the hardest workouts you can do! As White Goodman tells Average Joe’s Gym’s dodgeball team, “best bring your bib, ‘cause it’s gonna get messy.” In a tempo run, your pace should be just a bit slower than your goal race pace. During a tempo run, you’ll be picking up the pace for a more sustained distance or time, as opposed to the shorter, faster intervals you do in fartlek training or pyramid workouts. That pace will be somewhere between goal race pace and…
The Pyramid Workout: A Pyramid Scheme Where Everyone Wins
Over 4,000 years ago, when the Ancient Egyptians were designing their dream burial sites, they came across another sort of blueprint — a plan for a speed workout to train for long distance running. Long before Pheidippides’ famed run from Marathon to Athens, the Ancient Egyptians discovered that they could make the most progress and build the most strength by starting with short speed intervals, gradually increasing to longer intervals, and then finishing with shorter intervals that mirrored the first half of the workout. They called it the pyramid workout. After looking at unstructured Fartlek training, we’ll turn to this more focused workout — one that is best done on a track or predetermined loop. Structured speed workouts like the pyramid workout are similar to Fartlek training in that they involve alternating between slow and fast running. However, while warm-up, cooldown, and rest periods are still just as important in running…