Read This First

<aside> 💡 Y’all can find the article here: https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-get-good-at-2-4km-a-comprehensive-guide-85e9669ee19c

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<aside> 💡 At the end of every run (regardless of what kind of run it is) / body weight session (if you want to put your gym session here also can), please fill in THIS google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19HDxaxzuFPkVbuItpPREapOqqAFH2TSAG8D4LMilyPw/edit?usp=sharing

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Before you guys get bogged down with the technicalities, don’t care too much about what’s under the run workouts section, it’s just a way for me to keep track / write my thoughts down on what to do when I’m coaching. read background and conditioning first.

background (a little bit on why you can trust me) -

tl,dr: while i’m not very experienced with coaching, there are some things that work and some things that don’t, so as long as the basics are right and you, on your part, want to work out consistently (no break weeks, break days can), you will for sure see incremental gains.

Conditioning

Given that you have read the article as stated above, you would have some basic idea of what we will be doing. Now run workouts suck especially when you are a beginner (like I was) and you have to do some things by yourself. My goal for you bunch is to minimise that feeling of suckiness / that feeling that you want to kill yourself after each run because running can, and should be, fun. Only when you start to realise how fun running can be will you be intrinsically motivated to run more. If I have created an environment / atmosphere where that is achieved, then I can say I have done my job properly.

So what now?

Start easy running. Go grab someone living close to you (I know Marv u consistently grab some gals staying near you to run), or just text the group chat to activate a run. These runs should be easy, and a way to test whether you are running easily is to keep chatting during the run. Aim for at least 25 to 30 minutes, and don’t care too much about the pace. If you have to run 7 minute and 30 seconds pace or slower to make it seem easy to condition your muscles, so be it, it’s fine. The goal is to build distance more than anything else.

Cross Training

As far as I know, there are a couple of different cross trainings that you can do that give quite significant returns on your aerobic fitness:

  1. Bike
    1. The main form of measuring exertion at the elite level would be via power meters, but I doubt that any of us (including myself) have a good bike setup at home that gives a power reading to gauge exertion. So if you do hit your gym to do a bike workout, try to gauge your exertion level by your heart rate.
    2. Personally, I believe that biking translates into the most aerobic gains for running (i.e. it is the most transferrable cross training exercise if you are injured). A good example of someone who benefitted immensely from this would be Ari Klau, who helped Spencer Brown (then a professional Brooks athlete) pace a 4 mile time trial with very little run training at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKbyJOMkFHQ
  2. Elliptical Machine
    1. Surprisingly, this gives quite significant returns on aerobic fitness as well, while reducing impact on your legs. A good way to gauge exertion would just be to measuring heart rate.
    2. An athlete who came in second in her NCAA XC Championships 2022 while running low mileage for a pro college athlete (30-40 miles only, while other people are running easily >100 miles) who utilised a lot of cross training via the elliptical machine would be Parker Valby. Another interesting thing to note would be that she came in second in the NCAA 5000m 2021 while being injured and surviving pretty much off cross training. So yes this works even when you are injured.
  3. Swimming

Shoes

There are different kinds of shoes! In my shoe rotation, I have a couple of shoes that I wear, and I don’t wear one shoe for all my workouts. Wearing one shoe for all your workouts will wear out the durability of the midsole of the shoe, in which there is the most cushion which reduces the impact on your legs (knees, ankles, calves, everything). So don’t wear one shoe continuously for all your runs because it will flatten the midsole.