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WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting

WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting

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A couple posts back, I wrote about how Coach Jack Daniels (and others) have written about how important turnover is in an athlete’s speed.  Daniels maintains that 180 strikes/minute is the ideal number that will let athletes gain speed but not at the expense of making them think too much or unduly change-up their running form.

That said, on this morning’s 6.11 (I like the random numbers, what can I say!?), which wasn’t really anything besides a maintenance run following Tuesday’s speedish run and in advance of tomorrow’s tempo, for the second part of my run I counted.  And counted.  And counted.  And attempted to do some mental math (not my strong suit, but I managed).

For the record, it is way easier to count armswings than it is to count the number of times my foot hits the pavement.

How’d I fare?  Well, from the about 5 times I did counted, the numbers ranged from around 94 to about 100.

Honestly, I haven’t done this (counted) since 2008, at least from what I can remember.

And really, I don’t know that I even counted correctly, since I was only counting right arm-armswings (because again, counting armswings is way easier than counting footsteps).

When I did a little interwebs research about this just now, it seems like my values are either a) at maximal efficiency (which seems hard to believe because I wasn’t going much faster than MP this morning) or b) could stand to see some improvement.  I’ll tell myself that the latter is the truth.

In the quest of self-improvement…. because we all know I will probably start counting my armswings and footsteps prolifically now… I happened upon an AWESOME site by a vegan athlete (I’m in love!), Matt Frazier, who also has some great instructions as to how to make your cadence quicker and lighter.  While I’m not a fan of the dreadmill, I think next time I have the opportunity to, I’ll hop on a high school track to give his recommendations a try.  Thanks, Matt!

So what’s the rest of the week hold?  Probably about a 4mile tempo tomorrow, 15 on Saturday, and an hour (or so) easy recovery on Sunday.

It’s looming, folks!

The elusive high

The elusive high

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Talk to any runner about the elusive “runner’s high,” and you’ll probably get a host of explanations and defenses about whether (or how) it exists (or doesn’t).

Here’s an interesting article about it that I picked off another site; apparently, some scientists maintain that it was the runner’s high that played a key role in human evolution.

The New York Times’ Well Blog also took on this article just recently here.  And like the author’s friend, I’m totally in agreement; I would be guilty if I said I haven’t almost burst into tears (or actually cried) following a hard race or hell, even a hard training run.

What’s my take on the runner’s high?

I totally, 100% believe it.

For sure.

I don’t necessarily think the elusive high is just reserved for running, but I’ve (personally) not gotten it from anything else.  What’s interesting to note, too, is that the first article cited the research that was done on this by way of a treadmill.  It’s hard for me to believe that anyone can get a runner’s high from a treadmill, but that’s just me.  (Haven’t touched the thing since the Dominican Republic in 2009).

Anyway.  I wouldn’t have an entire blog devoted to running RUMINATIONS if I didn’t think there was some good after-effect of running.

Add it to the never-ending list of reasons to run or, minimally, reasons to lead a very active lifestyle.