In the past 7 months I've gone from hating running to being a runner, from running 6 miles straight for the first time in my life to running a 43:22 10k, from running 5-10 miles a week to 40+. Here are the most important things I've learned.
Improve your cadence
Your feet should hit the ground this often, even if you are going slow. This is the single easiest and most valuable improvement you can make to all aspects of your running. This might not feel natural at first, so you have to be intentional about it.
Build a base of easy weekly miles and run slow
If you're starting out totally untrained, some sort of alternating running/walking program is the best way to start. C25K seems to be the most popular one.
Once/if you can run for a few miles continuously, start tracking your weekly mileage and work on increasing that with more easy miles. Start by increasing your weekend run.
The key here is not to run too fast early on and turn running into a miserable experience with ineffective workouts. You should be able to hold a conversation for most of your miles.
Love the long run
You should have one run every week that's longer than significantly the others. The prescribed percentage of your weekly miles that should come from this run seems to be different wherever I look, so I think it's fine to just start out by feel until you start a training program that's more prescriptive.
The long run is an amazing opportunity to explore the city you live in. Going out and picking new, unexplored routes on my long runs is really what made me finally fall in love with running.
Include a quality workout per week
Once you have a running base, you can drastically accelerate your progress by spending more time at higher percentages of your maximum heart rate. Some ideas:
- Fartleks
- Hill Sprints
- Sprints
- Tempo Runs
Sign up for a race and follow a training plan.
You can't progress without setting goals.
Some runners are content running the same weekly miles at the same pace for years. That's totally awesome. But these tips are based on my experience, and that's one of wanting to push myself and figure out what I'm capable of, and racing is a non negotiable part of that.
And even for the casual runner, races are a ton of fun.
The benefit of following a plan is not trying to figure out what to do for your quality run, how long your long runs should be, how to split up your easy miles, etc... Any good plan will include those things.
Track your workouts with an app like Strava
This is really easy to do and really valuable for tracking progress.
Get strong
Strength training is starting to gain a lot of traction in the endurance community as the one of the keys to injury prevention.
Coming from an Olympic lifting background gave me a big advantage in this respect. I know a lot about this topic. I will write a separate piece on this entirely but here is the very simplified summary.
The most valuable advice I can give is to focus on big movements like squats and deadlifts and keep the reps in the 1-3 range. This may sound crazy to most runners who probably think doing high reps with low weight better mimics running and is less likely to make you bulky. This is not only misguided but potentially harmful, as the last thing your body needs when running every day is to squat a high volume.
The idea that low weight high reps "tone" while high weight and low reps makes you bulky is completely wrong. The opposite is in fact much closer to the truth. This is why body-builders whose goal is getting huge train in the 12-20 rep range, while weightlifters who are trying to stay in a certain weight class while increasing their strength training in the 1-3 rep range. This is because working closer to your one-rep-max is much more conducive to neurological adaptations. That means you get strong without actually getting bigger, because your body learns to better recruit muscle fibers.
I usually don't stay in the weight room longer than 30 minutes. I work up to a set of one deadlift or three squats, do 3x5 on the bench and a few sets of chin ups to exhaustion. This has been enough to maintain my strength.
Shoes
There's a pretty convincing study that rotating shoes helps prevent injuries. If you're running a lot, you're going to go through a few pairs a year anyway, so why not buy them all at once and rotate between them. Injury prevention for no extra effort? Yes please.
As far as picking shoes, pick based on pronation (essentially the angle at which your leg hits the ground) rather than the flatness of your feet. I have flat feet, which usually means over-pronation. In fact, I have neutral pronation, and running shoes designed for flat feet tend to make me under-pronate.
Stretching
I do yoga once a week. There's no evidence that stretching before or after every run does anything and I hate doing it.
Eccentric Heel Drops
These are the magic bullet for one of the most common running injuries: achilles tendonitis. If your achilles starts feeling tender, do them every single day! I wish preventing other injuries was this easy.
Nutrition
I started very slowly gaining weight when I upped my mileage because I was just an endless pit for carbs. I had to start tracking my food more carefully to stay down.