Consistency benefits (Read 832 times)

I know I see it mentioned by experienced runners all the time on here, but I thought I'd share some of the benefits of consistency that I'm seeing right now as a still green runner (only slightly more than 1 year now). The biggest thing, that occurred to me just this morning, is that repetition is the best teacher. The more regularly I run, the smoother my stride, the faster I warm up and the less discomfort I feel while warming up. I've gone to 6X/wk in the last month or so, from 4-5X per week before that (excluding my sporadic newborn related schedule Mar-June). While I know this isn't for everyone, this has really helped me. I feel like my body "remembers" how to run much more readily. I fall into a smoother stride earlier in the run, sometimes right at the start, when I do it every day. I see a lot of people mention how the first mile (or 2 or 3) are often no fun, uncomfortable, or downright painful. I experienced this too when taking 2 consecutive days off, but now, with only 1 day off, my warm-up seems much less uncomfortable, and it doesn't seem to take as long before I'm feeling really good. I'm still really new though, so maybe I'm attributing my improvements inappropriately. I also seem to be fairly injury-resistant (knock on wood), so maybe that has a lot to do with my personal response to an increase in training load frequency. I don't really know. Probably no one does, I guess, though some folks here certainly know more than me. At any rate, there's my rambling attempt at sharing. Please add your own.

The other thing I like about a 6x per week schedule is that even when life happens, I still usually manage 5. With the exception of the weekend I got sick and missed my 20 miler, most of the time even if something happens, it only knocks about 10% off my weekly mileage. I rebound from "taking the kid to the ER at 3 am and then holding her head over a bucket for 30 hours" a lot faster if I am just missing 1-2 out of 6 rather than 1-2 out of 4.

I never schedule a day off. My days off come when life happens and I just can't no way no how get out to run. Lately, I averge a day off every two weeks or so. I know most people don't have the luxury of running 7 days a week but my kids are 21,22 and 23 years old. I ran marathons 10 years ago (when my kids required a lot more attention) on 5 days a week of running. The more running days, even if you have to go slower, the better.

When I started I was not able to run more than a little bit, probably was running too fast when I did run. I did it a bit different than C25K I was walking a ~3 mile loop at work at lunch time and one day I decided to run a little bit of it so I ran for maybe 2-3 minutes and then walked and ran again and then walked and then every day I would try to run one (light pole, bench, tree, other landmark) farther and start running again one landmark earlier until I could run the whole thing. Eventually I ran it most days that I worked and sometimes ran on weekends. I didnt really start trying to do more until a few years ago. I used to do no more than 4 days a week running and DID do X training because I felt it was easier on my overweight body. And it probably was the right thing to do for my body at the time until my body adjusted to more running. I just dont have time to Xtrain anymore. I did 4 days a week gradually lengthening the runs and the long run until I really felt like I couldnt increase my mileage anymore on 4 days. Only so many miles I can do before 7 am. So then I split one of my longer midweek runs in two (instead of 8 miles on Wed, I did 4 on Wed and 4 on Sat for example) and did that for a few weeks and then started increasing their length. And you guessed it, after about a year I felt like I really couldnt increase my mileage any more on 5 days and I felt ready to, so I split my 10 miler and here I am at usually 6 days a week. But it was never a goal, it just kind of happened. If you had told me even a year ago that I would be running 6 days a week or 50 miles a week I would have said no way, I'll never WANT to do that.

redleaf: About Feb of 2007, I started going to the Y every weekday morning. I started out on the elliptical trainers, and did those faithfully every morning for about half an hour before doing some weight workouts. Around the end of June, I started C25k. I purposefully took it easy and followed the plan to the letter. I continued to cross train on the ellipticals on the other 2 weekdays. When I finished C25k, I jumped straight into OHR, keeping up the elliptical cross training and again following OHR to the letter. After OHR, I began to switch one of my cross-training days to another short and easy running day, starting out with just 20 minutes or so. I kept that up for a while, then a newborn complicated my running schedule. It was upside down for a while there. What brought on the 6 day transition though was a 14 day jag recently where I didn't miss a day running, and felt better than ever. I decided that if I wasn't hurt after that, I could probably maintain 6 days a week. So far, it's been great. I'd go to 7 days a week, but since I do all of my running at 4:45, it's nice to have 1 day a week to sleep in as late as the kids will let me (which is usually about 6:30 - 7). One of the most helpful things to me, as far as keeping my running easy and injury free is that about halfway through C25k I started using a heart rate monitor and kept my HR very low (and thus running very easy). I've kept this up since. I've eventually learned how to really run easy even without my HRM, but I never would have started out as slow (14.5-15 m/m) as I did without using that as a governor at the beginning. Since starting running 6 days, I don't really do any crosstraining, but I also don't miss it. The elliptical is pretty enjoyable as far as it goes, but I like running much better. I do some weight workouts on some days, but I keep those very short and simple. Hopefully that answered your questions without being too long. Good luck. Keep at it, and you'll get to wherever it is you want to be, and you may find when you get there that you never would have expected to want to be where you are. I know I used to think people were crazy for wanting to run at all. glowan: I do think I'd love doubles and 7 days running, but my time with my wife and two kids under 5 right now is a bigger priority for me. The evenings after work are too full with family activities.

In my vast years of running experience - in which I have experienced many runnng successes (Ran the Boston Marathon) and many runninng failures (have been injured numberous times with about every running injury know to modern man), I have figured out two, and only two things... First - if you can keep from getting hurt so that you can run year after year....you will really get good.... if you push too hard and get hurt all the time - you wont get good... Second - if you get out on the road 5 or 6 days a week and get in a reasonable number of miles -- like 20 or more....you will really get good... If you dont go out very often and dont get in your mileage....you wont get very good.... In my book, Consistency is what it is all about........and I think noteye explained it pretty well......