Cygon’s Blog

I could still feel my legs from sunday’s run but because this was one of the few sunny days in the year so far, I decided to do a light jog through the forest today anyway. Contrary to that plan, at the end of my planned route is a step hill that has been troubling me for some time and I set my mind on jogging it up

The first 30 minutes were okay, then my thigh muscles started feeling quite weary. Right before the hill I had planned to jog up. It was an interesting experience forcing myself to keep jogging. Maybe you know this from yourself, you’re already exhausted at the beginning of the chicane and try to get your mind back to the “I think I can” side while your unconscious cleverly tries to stop you by extrapolating how wasted you would have to be after the next difficult section.

Well, now I can proudly say that for the first time in maybe 4 years, I’ve done that hill again. Not at full jogging speed, but it didn’t degenerate into walking. Hugh!

 

Today’s route was 6.5 km. Time taken: 58 minutes!

Surprisingly, even though I hadn’t completely recovered from Sunday, my average heart rate was only 157 bpm (today’s maximum was 189 bpm). I didn’t feel any effects of having a cold anymore, maybe Sunday’s run killed it off =)

I’ve discovered a cool use of google maps, a website where everyone can enter his own running routes: runmap.net

I think this is a very nice idea, since it allows me to exactly determine the length of my running routes. Plus I can try out other routes in my vicinity and perhaps even make contact with other runners (well, once my fitness is on a competitive level, that is, I don’t want to embarrass myself :)).

Today I ran this route. From start to finish it took me about 1 hour 18 minutes, with my heart rate averaging 168 bpm (max 190 bpm). The route is about 8.4 km long and, as you can see, includes some cross-country running.

  Not too good since I know that I was trying to beat the 1 hour mark some time ago. It was snowing throughout my whole run (yes, snow in April) and I woke up with a clogged nose, so I’m confident that I can hit the 1 hour mark again later in the year!

I was in the mood for some experiments these days:

Experiment 1: Running Drunk

Last weak, I drank 1 liter of beer (I get rather easily drunk, that’s a moderate dose for me), waited 30 minutes for the stuff to enter my blood vessels and went off to my favorite jogging route. I think I read somewhere that about 50 years ago, alcoholic drinks were served to long-distance runners because it was believed that they restore the bodies’ electrolytes quicker than water or so.

For the initial 30 minutes of running, I had a legendary low. Legs felt fresh, but power just wouldn’t come, whenever I increased my pace, I felt wasted after just a few minutes. I kept going at it and after about half an hour, I started to put up a really good performance that saved the day. I’m not sure whether I just had a bad day or whether the alcohol caused it. And if the alohol caused the low, was the high because the alcohol had been catabolized away or was it the alcohol that gave me a delayed boost?

Experiment 2: Starving

Well, time for another experiment. Today it’s been 45 hours (or in other words, nearly two days) since I had my last meal. Thus my stomach is completely void of anything solid. As I’m writing this, I just came back from another running session on the same route. Digesting food requires energy as well, so running with an empty stomach should theoretically give more power initially (the body of a good runner can distribute nearly 95% of its power resources to the arms and legs anyway - the digestive system just stops in its tracks - on the negative side you may start to puke, however). With no food, you will run out glycogen quicker and the body has to use energy from stored fat, which makes it harder to keep running.

I had a really good start. A feeling as if my legs were much lighter than they used to. The first uphill part quickly drained my reserves and left me barely running with stitches on the left side of my lower belly. At about 40 minutes, at the beginning of the next uphill section I was practically dead, but while forcing my self to keep going, I got better and better. Crossing the peak at just 62 minutes, I even did a little sprint to get up a short steep road. My vision faded slightly for a moment, but I attribute that to the fact that it was my first try at a post-60-minute-running sprint this year

Conclusion

So, if you ever wondered what happens if need to run but you’re drunk or have nothing to eat — from my observation it merely might place some ups and downs in your performance. I’ll keep away from good until friday (meaning about 120 hours or five days without food) and repeat the exercise.

Of course I’m not a physician and whatever you do is your own choice, so if you run drop-dead drunk and get run over by a car, don’t put the finger on me

In the past 3 weeks, I’ve experienced a noticeable gain in leg muscle mass. And I didn’t even invest a lot of time, I just crunched the intensity of my workouts to maximum effort with a method I’d like to share with you

If you haven’t been following my earlier blog entries, let me sum it up: I am an overweight person but I love endurance and power training, though I originally started off with jogging because I wanted to lose weight 8 years ago. I’m not going to talk about how I managed to keep it up all the time, just that once you establish doing something on a regular basis, it becomes a habit and
suddenly you find yourself putting on your running shoes just because it’s a nice evening.

Beginning last year, I have tried lots of variations to make my training more interesting:

• Sneak-jogging: Trying to step as lightly and silently as possible while still keeping a good pace.

This requires better coordination and is more demanding for your muscles than jogging, possibly it’s even better for the joints since there’s a much lower impact with each step.

Warning: You may look funny doing this exercise, maybe as if you were trying to quickly sneak away from someone — for miles. But maybe you have a route where you rarely run into other people? If you need some additional motivation, think of the edge this will give you when World War 3 has taken place and your very survival depends on such skills =)

• Free running: Passing obstacles as quickly as possible with the least effort possible.

Google “free running” or “parkour” and you’ll know what this is. Hint: The opening chase in the new James Bond movie wasn’t computer animated. There are people who actually move like that in the real world. The fugitive actually is a known parkour practitioner.

If you start with easy moves, this is very worth the effort. You don’t have to invest the enormous amount of time required to become as good as the people in those movies, just doing it improves your coordination skills and trains muscles that you otherwise seldomly use. Plus it looks cool and might save you from injuries when you trip or fall.

Adding variations to your exercise is very important: If you keep running the same route again and again, you might not only grow bored, you will also hit what athletes call a plateau. This means that you get used to your workout. After an initial growth phase, your metabolism knows just how much energy is needed to perform. You will have learned how to perfectly ration your power and your muscles will have developed enough strength to manage that route. In short, even though you’re still training, nothing changes anymore.

To avoid hitting a plateau, you have to vary your training. Do something that challenges your body in unexpected ways. This might be as simple as trying to run on two consecutive days every now and then, leaving the shoes at home (if your environment allows it), creating your personal biathlon challenge (switching between biking and running), or integrating above two tips into your training.

Lately, I have developed a new variation that’s almost addicting to me. How should I call it?

• All-Out-Uphill-Sprinting. Pick a steep hill, as steep as possible, choose difficult terrain, a forest would be ideal. Then sprint until you can’t take it anymore, fall down, wait, repeat.

This is basically interval training, only more intense. The sprinting parts are 100% all-out sprints, meaning you concentrate on punishing your muscles as hard as you possibly can. On even ground, you would only push certain muscles to the limit, but running up a steep hill, to maximize speed, you have pull your feet very high and run on your forefoot.

You can have sore muscles all the way from your calves up to and including your butt As a neat side effect, it increases the range of motion of your upper legs.

This is in no way masochistic. It’s great fun and it doesn’t even take much willpower to do it. You just concentrate on running like mad and invert all the economics programs normally running in your brain. See, normally your brain is like “Mr. Doe, just a bit slower, at this rate we’ll be wasted in in a few seconds” when you sprint, forcing you to settle for 90% or just 80% effort. But since your mindset now is that of quickly wasting as much power as you possibly can, the economics question is out of the equation.

Just make it clear to yourself that your goal is to use up all your power beforehand. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing stopping you from plunging your feet into the sorry ground with all the force you always wished you had. The more you push, the quicker your power will be gone and the quicker you will have reached your goal. So push to the absolute limit!

The hill I’m currently practicing this on takes me about 6-7 sprint phases. During the sprints, I don’t feel exhausted or sore (like when I’m jogging uphill) at all, it’s just one short adrenaline drift. Eventually I reach the point when either my metabolism or my leg muscles tell me it’s over, at which I simply let myself plummet to the ground, waiting until I’m feeling well again (which may take 3-5 minutes!). The real strain only becomes noticeable when, after the experience, you try to resume walking.

From what I feel, I’d say the risk of injury is rather low, especially if you do this on soft forest floor. Of course, don’t even think of doing this with a torn muscle. I also wouldn’t recommend it if your legs aren’t used to at least one year of jogging because your tendons and bones might not have the necessary strength yet (but don’t worry too much, the human body is a masterpiece and will tell you or even stop you way before you break something).

Last week, we had a small hurricane in the area. News stations kept issuing warnings that it’s going to be the strongest storm in 20 years and that nobody should go out there until several hours after it was ofter. The apex of the storm was due for 8:00 PM, so staying in the house was not a problem unless one has weird sleeping habits. Finally some action, a bit of an adventure in this forsaken place. Better live with risk than die in boredom

But of course, the only thing happening at my house was a bit of wind making noise. Just a bit more than what is usually observed during autumn. Not even enough to close the windows, so I went to sleep, soothed by the rythmic sound of the wind. Still, when I went to work next day, there were a lot of fallen trees to the sides of the road. Radio talked about 10 deaths in the region and all in all somewhere near 1 billion of collateral damage has been generated.

When I went for a jog through the forest after work, I was up to a surprise: There were literally hundreds of trees on my favorite forest path, often piled up in chunks of 4 or more trees on top of each other. I took the route anyway, but it didn’t get any better. I spent the first 30 minutes climbing onto the fallen trees, balancing on the trunks until to where I could jump down again, pushing my way under fallen trees, jumping between branches and looking for ways to cross over those things. I loved it! I didn’t have such an intense workout with so varied movements in several years.

Obviously some foresters who were trying to get a picture of the overall situation were quite shocked seeing some strange jerk blazing through the trees

That was quite a run. I’d love to repeat it tomorrow (which would be two days after this happened), but I fear the entire area will now be crowded by forest workers shooing people away. People nowadays are supposed to life a secure life and have to be scared by natural phenomena :/

I’d like to share a little training experience I’ve had during one of my recent runs. After reading some material about how to move more economical (eg. using less muscle power to generate more effect), I decided to try and improve my own technique. The obvious advantages are tempting enough:

• increase your maximum speed by letting less of your available muscle power go to waste
• run easier, faster or longer during long-distance exercises
• lower the stress on your joints and tendons

Normally, a human’s leg movements are controlled automatically by the motorical center of his brain. If you try to modify your own running technique using conscious effort, you will probably notice that your movements immediately lose efficiency. The effect will get worse the more you concentrate on moving consciously.

Obviously, nature is already quite good at saving power, so how could we possibly improve upon that?

First, instead of using conscious control, we need to tell our brain how we’d like to move and then just let it figure out the best way to do that. Let’s bring some fun into this: During your next jog, imagine being a spec ops guy. Run lower, use a longer stride and try to step as silent as possible. Do this on a longer distance.

For the first few kilometers, you’ll probably need to apply conscious effort to keep this running style up. Then, gradually, your autopilot should kick in and the movements should become more fluid and less stressfull. When you’re finally at the end of your training session, your legs will probably be exhausted.

Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that to keep running like this. This way of moving will always be more stressfull than running naturally. But doing this once in a while will reward you with a better feel for your leg mechanics and train those muscles that often become a bottleneck at high speeds. You will step softer, have less airtime and longer ground contact providing for an extended propulsion period!

When I started my parkour training a few weeks ago, I noticed that even thought I could jog for hours, the jumping and rolling quickly killed my endurance. Guess I fell for the typical exercise trap: Keep doing a single kind of exercise and you will only train a subset of your muscles, leaving the remainder as a bottleneck that painfully surfaces as soon as you embark onto something new.

One thing I did was to include a few all-out sprints near the end of my jogs. For example: moderate jogging for 40 minutes, 10 second sprint, walking for 5 minutes, another 10 second sprint, walking for 5 minutes, easy jogging 10 minutes. Mind you, 10 seconds isn’t much but by “all-out”, I actually mean it: running at absolute maximum speed, pushing as hard as you possibly can.

You’ll feel really drained after the sprints, but a week after or so, I began noticing an increase in overall energy as in being more awake and optimistic. So much in fact, that I decided to research this subject. And I came to gather some rather surprising finds:

• Training at high intensity burns more fat. For decades, low intensity, long distance running has been recommended as the way to lose excess body fat. Just about any fitness guide will advocate this idea. But: While high intensity burns more carbohydrates and less fat, it will increase the overall metabolismic rate for several hours after the exercise, burning a lot more fat than the low intensity training possibly can.

• Higher intensity means more muscle growth. During the extended recovery time after a high intensity workout, your body builds up muscle mass. Muscles are commonly referred to as “active tissue” since they consume energy while idle and even more when in use. A muscle burns about 9 times as many calories than an equivalent mass of fat. And during one year, a muscle will burn about 5 times its own mass in fat.

• Sprinting does increase your endurance. Common training systems that draw the famous line between “aerobic” and “anaerobic” exercise teach that in order to gain endurance, you need to run slow and long. Long runs make sense as they can teach you to run more efficient, reduce impact on joints and develop a longer stride. But high intensity training will increase your endurance more in a shorter time than traditional training can do in a longer time.

• Extreme intensity exercise makes your body produce growth hormone. This hormone improves your mood, increases disease resistance, accelerates muscle growth and even slows down the aging process. Of course the risk of injuries is the highest for this kind of training.

No, I’ve not gone french now. “Le Parkour” is a french adrenaline sport that involves moving over and around obstacles in ways most people think the human body is not capable to (eg. jumping from great heights onto hard ground, running on walls, jump-diving through tight passages).

To get an impression, take this page of the “PARKOUR Österreich” (Parkour Austria) team explaining the basics: Basic Parkour Movements. Even if you don’t understand german, the animated gif movies will give you an impression what this is all about.

Well, to come to the point, watching some parkour videos I was immensely fascinated by the feats these “Traceurs” (the persons performing Parkour) could do. I know that jumps from 2 meters upwards are realistic since I’ve done that a lot as a child, much to the dismay of my parents. So I decided to begin learning parkour.

One of the worst things about living in a small village is that just about everyone seems to know you. Word would quickly spread you’ve gone crazy if people see you trying to jump off walls and attempting somersaults while running. But that’s not a problem as I go jogging through the local forest 3 or 4 times a week. Parkour originated from “La Méthode Naturelle”, which is basically parkour applied to nature instead of urban environments, so this should work out fine.

If you’ve ever been to a gym that is even remotely related to martial arts, you probably heard that being able to roll in order to deflect impact energy (or just so you don’t hit the ground hard with some part of your body) is of utmost importance. So I tried somersaulting inmidst of running on the soft forest floor. Funny how, becoming an adult, one can totally unlearned doing somersaults. The skin on my right shoulder blade has taken a healthy blue shade by now.

It was fun nevertheless and I’m definitely going to continue this. There also are lots of opportunities for practicing precision jumping and balancing. If I could manage to do a flip over a log or even a backflip against a tree trunk within the next few weeks that would be quite a feat I think