Time to Rest ?

Pay attention to 10 body indicators to gauge when to run and when to back off.
By Jayme Otto
Image by Saverio Truglia
From the June 2011 issue of Runner's World

After disappointing performances in a couple of key tune-up races last fall, a depleted Ryan Hall made the hard decision to withdraw from the Chicago Marathon. Too many grinding 15-mile tempo runs at a five-minute-per-mile pace at 7,000 feet with too little rest afterward had finally caught up with him. "I love to push my body," he says. "Recovery is the hardest part of training for me."

Problem is, if you don't take time for proper R&R, your body won't adapt to the stress of your training—you won't get stronger or faster, explains Stacy Sims, Ph.D., at the Stanford Prevention-Research Center, School of Medicine. Neglect recovery for too long, and you will start to lose strength and speed. You'll sink into the black hole known as overtraining.

First, your sleep patterns and energy levels will feel the effects. Eventually, your immune system crashes, and you lose your appetite. It's like burning out your engine. And you don't have to be logging 100-mile weeks to suffer. Recreational runners can overtrain, too. "With deadlines, chores, bills, kids, and lack of sleep, it's more challenging to recover properly from your runs," says Sims.

So in preparation for the 2011 Boston Marathon, Hall used an online recovery-tracking program called Restwise, which looks at simple biological markers input by the athlete first thing each morning, calculates a daily recovery score from 1 to 100, then trends it over time. (Rest-wise subscriptions start at $119 for six months; go to restwise.com.)

Pay attention to the following 10 markers. If three or more of these indicators raise a red flag, you should consider a few easy sessions or off days so you can return to running strong (see box, right). Says Hall, "Now I'm learning to love to rest."

1 BODY MASS: You lost weight from yesterday
A two percent drop in weight from one day to the next indicates a body-fluid fluctuation. Most likely, you didn't hydrate enough during or after your last workout. Dehydration negatively impacts both physical and mental performance, and could compromise the quality of your next workout.

2 RESTING HEART RATE: Your resting heart rate is elevated
Take your pulse each morning before you get out of bed to find what's normal for you. An elevated resting heart rate is one sign of stress. It means your nervous system prepared for fight or flight by releasing hormones that sped up your heart to move more oxygen to the muscles and brain. Your body won't know the difference between physical and psychological stress. A hard run and a hard day at work both require extra recovery.

3 SLEEP: You didn't sleep well or enough
A pattern of consistently good sleep will give you a boost of growth hormones, which are great for rebuilding muscle fibers. Several nights in a row of bad sleep will decrease reaction time along with immune, motor, and cognitive functions—not a good combination for a workout.

4 HYDRATION: Your pee is dark yellow
This can be an indicator of dehydration, barring the consumption of vitamins, supplements, or certain foods the evening before. The darker the color, the more you're struggling to retain fluids, because there's not enough to go around. You need H2O to operate (and recover).

5 ENERGY LEVEL: You're run down
If your energy level is low, there's something amiss. The key is honesty. Athletes can block out signs of fatigue to push through it, thinking it will make them stronger. It won't always work that way.

6 MOOD STATE: You're cranky
When your body is overwhelmed by training (or other stressors), it produces hormones like cortisol that can cause irritability or anxiety. Stress also halts chemicals like dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that has a big bummer effect on mood when depleted. Crankiness probably means not enough recovery.

7 WELLNESS: You're sick
Any illness, or even a woman's menstrual cycle, will increase your need for energy to refuel your immune system, which is having to work overtime. This means fewer resources available for recovering from training.

8 PAIN: You're sore or nursing an injury
Whether you're sore from overworked muscles or an injury, your body needs more energy to put toward repair, lengthening total recovery time.

9 PERFORMANCE: Your workout went poorly
This is a subjective measure of workout quality, not quantity nor intensity. If you felt great on yesterday's run, you'd evaluate that as good. If you felt sluggish on that same run, you'd count it as poor. Trending workout quality—multiple poors in a row—is one of the easiest ways to identify the need for more recovery.

10 OXYGEN SATURATION: Your oxygen level has dipped
The amount of oxygen in the hemoglobin of the red blood cells can be measured by placing your fingertip in a portable pulse oximeter, a gadget available online for about $40. The higher the percentage, the better: Above 95 percent is the norm at sea level or for an athlete who is fully acclimated to a given altitude. This is a new area in recovery science, requiring more research, but there may be a link between low oxygen saturation and the need for more recovery.


Count Your Red Flags
The restwise algorithm assigns more weight to some markers (e.g., performance) than others (e.g., mood), along with other factors to generate a precise recovery score. But you can get a sense for your ballpark recovery quality by tallying the red flags (left) you average per day in a week.

0-1 GREEN LIGHT
You are clear to train hard.

2-4 CAUTION
You can go ahead with a hard workout if your training plan calls for it, but cut it short if it feels too hard. Better yet, take an easy day, or a day off.

5-6 WARNING
You're entering the danger zone, which could be intentional according to your periodization or peaking protocol. If not, back off.

7-10 DANGER
You require mandatory time off, ranging from a day to a week, depending on the severity of your fatigue and what you've seen over the previous few days and weeks. You may need to visit your doctor.

FEEL Better: Too much rest has its own problems: Your performance stalls. On your recovery days, do something active; go for a bike ride, walk, or do yoga.

MUSCLES NEED 48 HOURS TO RECOVER AFTER AN INTENSE RUN. DURING THIS TIME, CELLS ARE REPROGRAMMED TO BE STRONGER.

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-238-267--13950-2-1-2,00.html

Is the Long Run Overrated?

Is the Long Run Overrated?

For beginning marathon training, fewer long runs may well be better
By Lorraine Moller

As featured in the September 2011 issue of Running Times Magazine


Is the long run the be-all and end-all of training for the marathon? Or are many runners, particularly those new to the marathon who are still building the infrastructure of their endurance running physiology, running too long, too hard, too close to the race?

At 43, Kristen Suvick, mother of three, became a runner. She was quickly smitten. Over the next year and a half as her fitness improved she found she could run longer, and began to entertain the idea of running a marathon. So she enlisted the director of the Lydiard Foundation, Nobuya Hashizume (known throughout running circles as Coach Nobby) to guide her through her first marathon. Coming into the race she was nervous about completing the distance as she had worked her way up to a 2-hour, 40-minute run just once, but had done none of the series of distance/over-distance runs that other coaches advocated. Nobby wasn't fazed. In his eyes, two years of base training was fully adequate, perhaps ideal, to complete a first marathon.

Nobby had another reason not to pile on the long runs. As occurs with many beginners, the resilience of Suvick's musculoskeletal system was lagging behind her cardiovascular capability and her ambition. She had been plagued with shin splints, and barely had the condition under control with a month to race day. To squeeze in any extra long runs was dicey. Nobby knew that prolonged runs (over 2 hours) in particular can cause micro-tears in both muscle and bone tissue, from which the body may not adequately recover, especially with legs not yet hardened by many years of training. His priority was that Suvick be healthy for the start line.

The result was a 3:38 first marathon, which handily surpassed her 4:00 Boston qualifying goal. Two months later, on a diet of light recovery running, Suvick followed up with a New York City Marathon PR of 3:22. After a recovery period Suvick followed an 18-week program supervised by Nobby to prepare her for Boston. This time hill, interval and sharpening segments were stacked upon her base training, while her long runs were kept to a conservative minimum. Suvick peaked beautifully with a 3:11 PR. Such a dream marathon progression was achieved by training that incorporated only a handful of long runs but a heap of aerobic running.

It's easy to dismiss Suvick as an anomaly who somehow bypassed "correct" training by running the marathon distance for the first time in her race. On the other hand, it's worth considering that perhaps many runners tend to overdo the long runs and lose the precious minutes of PR that they dreamed of and worked so hard for.

Coach Nobby advises, "One mistake I see many runners make is that they think they have to run a marathon to prepare for a marathon. Their long runs are too long and too fast, often piled on top of other quality workouts such as tempo runs and intervals. Worse yet, a lot of them don't even take recovery days in between. Next thing they know the training has overwhelmed the goal and they fall apart in the race like badly made sushi."

DISTANCE BEFORE SPEED

The first priority for any marathoner is to be able to cover the distance by developing their endurance. (I'm defining endurance as the ability to sustain adequate energy production over the time required to keep one running without having to stop or slow significantly.) Oxygen metabolism is the key factor here, as it is with any sport with continuous activity over 2 minutes or so. In the marathon the energy requirements are 99.9 percent aerobic, which is why all distance runners need to start there, as Suvick did. During base building it's important to construct a strong aerobic infrastructure through physiological and mechanical adaptations that will allow the runner to train efficiently in the years to come. The endurance base of the pyramid not only provides the bulk of energy for the distance race but also supplies the mortar that binds all the subsequent training bricks together. This process takes a few rounds of training, so for most runners it's well worth training for several years and racing shorter distances before attempting the marathon.

For the seasoned runner, base training is a time to take the aerobic capacity to another level. This is one system that will continue to build for many years so the more miles one can handle the better. According to Olympic gold medalist Peter Snell, Ph.D., runs over an hour and a half at around 70 percent of VO2 max give an optimal net gain in aerobic capacity. (See "Peter's Pacing Principles" below for a detailed discussion of this topic.)

Slower but longer runs don't achieve the same cardiovascular benefit, but according to the master himself, Arthur Lydiard, it takes only one carefully timed extra long run (2.5 to 3 hours) five to six weeks before the race to increase the capillary beds in the muscles. For multiple runs over 3 hours duration, however, the law of diminishing returns kicks in as far as any cardiovascular improvement is concerned. The mental benefit of knowing one can handle the distance must be weighed against the down-time required to recover.

ALLOW THE BODY TO ADAPT FULLY

Twice-weekly long runs in the base-training phase consisting of a medium long run (1.5 hours plus) and a long run (2 hours plus) adequately stretch the envelope of aerobic capacity. The specific adaptations being invoked here are threefold:

1) the ability of the body to continuously mobilize free fatty acids along with carbohydrates for energy consumption;

2) the enhancement of all oxygen carrying components from the cellular to the systemic level;

3) the ability of the physical structure to take the pounding.

Each time the body is subjected to a challenging workout, recovery time must be taken to allow it to fully adapt to the stress. This is how the runner improves. If this doesn't take place within a maximum of three days then the workload is too great and the training program needs to be revisited.

While there's a place for a race-distance long run in marathon training, this was designed for high-level athletes who could run aerobically at under 6:00 a mile. For many marathoners, especially first-timers, running that far would mean long runs of 4 hours or so. Prolonged runs like these, especially when done week after week, create enormous tissue damage, especially for the slower runner who hasn't yet developed their best mechanical efficiency or optimal recovery mechanisms. The body then has a big job recovering for the rest of the week and the athlete's chance of becoming chronically under-recovered from the outset is increased.

CHINESE PLATE SPINNING

Just like the art of Chinese plate spinning, effective training is a coordinated act of balance, juggling and precise timing of a number of elements. The goal of the grand finale (race) is to have a number of plates (energy systems) affected at the same time. To achieve this the performer can attend to only one plate at a time, but must be checking in and tweaking the already-spinning plates with the minimal action required to keep them in orbit. And so it is with good training. The first erected (and therefore longest-spinning) is the large endurance plate. Once it has its own momentum it can be left while the other smaller energy system plates (strength, anaerobic capacity, various paces and speed) are set in motion.

How long and how hard the long runs need be in order to keep the endurance plate spinning is very much dependant on the individual runner. Contrary to base training, where more is more, in the final month of training when the runner is gathering energy by tapering, less is more. Ideally by this stage many plates are in motion, and the runner, using precise effort, needs only to be tweaking those whose spin is slowing.

Progress calibration runs, time trials and lead-up races give vital feedback here as to which plates need help. For example, if the runner can't maintain their pace throughout the duration of a progress calibration run, time trial or race, either the pace plate (they went out too fast) or the endurance plate (they're running out of gas) needs tweaking. In the latter case a run of an hour and a half at 70 percent VO2 max with plenty of time to recover before race day will do the trick. If the runner finishes the run/race feeling fresh but unable to pick up the speed then their endurance is intact and a non-lactic acid speed session is in order.

As Coach Nobby puts it, the priority isn't an academic debate of mileage vs. speed but to determine what is necessary to deliver the runner to the start line in as healthy and fresh a condition as possible. And that will always entail keeping long runs in perspective.

Peter's Pacing Principles

Before earning his Ph.D. in exercise physiology, Peter Snell was, of course, a three-time Olympic gold medalist who also set five world records. Here is his advice on long runs:

Two primary systems are responsible for the delivery of oxygen to the muscles and its utilization for energy production: first, the heart and circulation, which deliver oxygen to the muscles. The muscles constitute the second system whereby oxygen is extracted from the blood and enters the mitochondria where the major energy-producing pathways reside.

VO2 max is a measure of the capacity for oxygen delivery more correctly known as aerobic power and depends on cardiac performance. Aerobic capacity refers to the extent to which a runner can sustain their aerobic power and this is dependent on muscle adaptation, which seems to take years to fully develop compared to VO2 max.

After VO2 max is fully developed in the first six months of endurance training, continued runs of about 70 percent VO2 max for at least 90 minutes are effective for further muscle adaptations, including capillary growth. By the process of glycogen depletion, muscle fibers initially active drop out after the first hour (roughly) and others, including fast-twitch, are called into action. Normally these fast-twitch fibers would only be recruited during high-intensity interval training. (Two roads to Rome here.) It's axiomatic that for a fiber to adapt it must be stimulated to contract; how much, how often is up in the air, which is why training is still an art.

If the distance running is too slow, it's likely that the energy can be provided largely by fat metabolism, thus sparing muscle glycogen. This means that once conditioned, the runner needs to run at close to maximal steady state pace during these longer runs.

Finally, all running presents an adaptive stimulus to the heart, the circulation and the muscle fibers. It's a question of understanding when the law of diminishing returns kicks in for a particular system.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lorraine Moller was a four-time Olympian for New Zealand who won the bronze medal in the marathon at the 1992 Games.