Week 6

In a fleeting moment of optimism I Googled the weather forecast for this week, see left. Running today seemed like a good idea.

Today I started my Week 6 training with the following:

Run 8 walk 3 x3

Running for 8 minutes doesn't sound very impressive at first, but the DCCT plan points out that when starting from just 1 minute of running, running for 8 minutes is an 800% improvement, which sounds pretty good! I must say, I was worried when I set out that I wouldn't be able to run for 8 minutes. I was having flashbacks to how my lungs struggled to manage 5 minutes and thought this might be their breaking point. I ran. I didn't break. Even better, I quite enjoyed myself. This seems bonkers given how challenging the past few weeks have been, but it seems I'm finally noticing some improvements in my fitness. The day I thought would never arrive is here!

My training plan suggested I'd notice the iomprovements in my fitness arouund week 4. For me it took until week 6, so I guess the lesson is to keep at it, trust the plan, and stay positive.



As the previous week was the "easy" week I took the opportunity to work on something other than breathing for once. I was aware that my right leg is taking a greater impact while running than my left, and also that my legs could feel a bit heavy and sluggish on the road.  I decided to see how incresing my running cadence just a little would feel. I knew from my research that a slow cadence (the number of times your feet strike the ground in a minute) is regarded as inefficient, is associated with overstriding, and has been cited as a cause of a heavy footstrike. This article from Runner's World has more information for the curious.

So it would seem that my cadence over the past few weeks has been particularly slow, round about 145 (not that I was counting, I used a running app called Runzi to find this out, which I highly recommend.) So that's pretty slow as generally a running cadence below 160 is regarded as inefficient (well according to the Internet anyway). As I was running for intervals of 3 minutes during week 5 I experimented with a quicker cadence (somewhere between 5% and 10% quicker). I could see the improvement right away.  The shorter stride reducd the impact on my legs, which didn't fatigue as quickly. I ran at this faster cadence again today for each of my 8 minute intervals and felt much better. There is still room for improvement as my cadence is still on the slow side, but I'm not going to increase anything drammatically, as that way usually leads to injury. It's something else for me to work on.