This can be a tricky time of year for runners. On the one hand, it’s nearly spring – the nights are getting shorter, it’s a bit less Arctic out and the prospect of brighter days starts to loom.
If you’re training for a big spring race then you’ve hopefully made some real progress towards your goal, you might be hitting some big miles now and the hard sessions of the winter are starting to pay off.
But it’s still winter for another month or so, it’s still dark in the morning and you‘ve had the same goals for what seems like forever. It’s easy to feel like it’s all getting a bit stale. By this point in the year you might really be starting to need a change in the routine.
So here’s five ways in which you can refresh your running training, and get the magic back into the thing you love, if it feels like it’s losing its shine.
1. Run somewhere new
You probably know your local trails and streets like the back of your hand. And that’s the problem – if you know the routes too well, it’s too automatic. You’re in cruise control. If you’re somewhere new, you use your brain as well as your legs and lungs – you notice things. You’re more alert.
So get a local map out and look for somewhere you don’t normally run. What is there within a half hour drive or cycle that could add a bit of spice to your workout? What green spaces are there within a few miles that you could make the most of?
Another way to broaden your horizons is to get a bus or train to the next town and run back, either on trails or roads (if the roads aren’t four-lane motorways of course – do be safe).
Make an adventure out of it – go longer than you normally would, eat as you go, find your own way home again. It’s a great way to run and it also provides a different kind of satisfaction because you get that feeling of having been on a real journey, not just a run.
2. Do interval training
No-one likes it, but it’s backed by a hundred scientific studies and you know you need to do it. If you’re in a rut where you don’t feel like you’re getting any faster or stronger, intervals can be your answer. There are so many different ways to introduce some speed into your training but here are a few of my favourites:
Find a steep hill – then run up it, fast, for 45 seconds, and jog down. Start with six or eight of these, then see if you can increase that number next time.
400m fast, then 400m slow – try and do ten sets, and try and keep the fast reps as close to each other in time as possible. Keep track of my total time for the ten intervals and try and beat that next time.
3 x 2 mile reps. This is a horrible session, but it’s a great workout to do about ten or twelve days out from a half-marathon or marathon to sharpen up. It’s also a useful race pace predictor - I’ve generally found that the slowest of those three 2-mile intervals is a pretty accurate gauge of the pace I can hold for 13.1 miles in a race.
Similarly, try Yasso 800s – named after and created by legendary coach Bert Yasso, you run ten sets of 800m with a jog recovery of about 3 mins between them. Your average pace in minutes & seconds is a good predictor of your likely marathon pace in hours & minutes – so if you can do ten sets of 800m, each in 3 mins 30 seconds, you should be able to run a 3 hour 30 minute road marathon (3:30 = 3:30).
If you’ve got access to a track, then 200m repeats can really take your fitness to the next level – half a lap fast, half a lap jog recovery, as many times as you can. US Olympic runner Galen Rupp would apparently do a whole 10k made up of these reps (if you don’t think that’s impressive, give it a try and see how far you get).
3. Do pilates in front of the TV
Lazing around while you get something done at the same time? Yes please. Swap the sofa for the floor a couple of times a week, doing a range of exercises to strengthen your core, hips and back.
And it doesn’t just help with the running, it also helps to relieve the aches and pains from the sedentary parts of your lifestyle, if, like me, you spend too much of your week at a desk.
Try searching for videos on any of these, for stronger, more efficient running:
Clam shell exercise
Crab walk with exercise band
Plank or side plank
Side leg raises
Psoas march with band
4. Set yourself a dream goal
Pounding the streets is all well and good, and it’s great to get out on your local trails if you have them, but sometimes you need a big, dream goal to get you through the winter. Build yourself a running ‘bucket list’ of amazing races or experience runs that you’d like to do over the next few years, and start looking into what it would take to make them happen.
It’s important to have a ‘why’ when you run – it’s increasingly the question that elite ultra runners are asked just before or just after a major race, and it’s the same for you, whatever your standard or level of aspiration. You need a reason to be doing this – and if you’ve forgotten what yours is, maybe it’s time to get a new ‘why’?
My dream races include the Mont Blanc Marathon, the Kielder Marathon, the Cotswold Way 100, any other hundred miler and any backyard ultra. There’s no rush – if get any of those done in the next few years I’ll be happy, and if I wanted to do them all I’d expect it to take about ten years, but that’s fine, I plan on running for a long time yet, and just knowing that there are some real, long-term goals there is sometimes enough to get out of that door or up that hill.
Once you know what runs you might want to do, watch videos about them; read about people who have done the runs you dream of, and get online and find out what they’re really like. Even if you don’t end doing them all (or any of them) you can have a lot of vicarious fun dreaming about them, and either way you’ll get a load of new inspiration for all aspects of your running.
So what’s on your dream run list?
5. Make it fun!
Finally, whatever workout you’re struggling to get motivated for, you can always make it more fun by making it into a game. The 400m interval session (see above) is one I call the ‘thousand second challenge’ – my aim is to get the 10x400m reps done in a total of under 1000 seconds.
When you were nine, everything was a game. At some point along the way we forget to make things fun. So make it fun! Can you get to the next lamppost before the chorus kicks in on your headphones? How many times can you run up that hill and back down again? Time random segments of your run, or check out local Strava segments and see if you can beat an existing one or set a new one.
Try setting random distances for new personal bests – everyone knows their 5k and marathon PBs, but what about 600 metres? 4.3 miles? Whatever the distance is to your nearest trail and back again? What’s the furthest you’ve ever run in five minutes, or an hour, or a day? Try setting yourself bronze, silver and gold targets for distances.
There’s always a record to be beaten – and it’s more fun and more rewarding if they are your own records, rather than something set by some random person you’ll never meet and know nothing about.
It’s all about trying something new and getting out of the safe, comfortable routines that your training may have settled you into by now. And like a lot of things in life, if you’ve temporarily forgotten that running is something you love, all it needs is a little reminder by freshening things up.
So make this month the one where you discover something new about running, and see how far it takes you.
