View looking uphill and south along the Matt Davis Trail - Marin County, CA
Funny you should ask that. I was just out running this morning and came up with the answer.
Since I moved here to Western North Carolina almost three years ago, I’ve been learning how to play the fiddle (when in Rome…). I have a great fiddle teacher named Jamie Laval and I highly suggest you check out his website if you’re interested in any form of Celtic or Scottish music. He’s one of the best around.
I’m still very much a beginning fiddle student and so Jamie has me do these great warm-up exercises where I’m learning finger placement. I begin by playing one note at a time with my first finger, and then matching it with an accompanying string so that I get the right pitch. Then I do the same thing with my second finger and so on until a four fingers of my left hand have practiced their respective positions on all four strings. When I can hit a good pitch with all 16 notes I get to move onto playing the songs I’m learning. What this does is get my fingers to always land on the right spot on the finger board so that playing the song is much more fluid and accurate. I’ve already noticed a huge difference in my playing when I do these warm-up exercises.
So, I was out on my run this morning doing my 1-minute intervals on the trail. It was a one-hour run and I started out the first five minutes pretty easy and then got into alternating one minute of race pace focuses with one minute of easy resting pace. As I progressed through my workout, I noticed that my body was feeling more and more relaxed and the speed intervals were feeling easier and easier. So, I started doing 2-minute race focus intervals with one minute of rest. Throughout my run I gradually increased the length of the fast intervals and kept the resting intervals at one minute. By the end of my run I finished the last ten minutes at race pace feeling very little effort because I’d spent the better part of the run warming up and working on focuses.
My goal is to get to the point where I can run at race pace for an hour without stopping for a rest break. My race is at the end of August, so I don’t see any problem with working my way up to that. And, as you can see, it is absolutely the same thing I’m doing with my fiddle practice. It’s built on the premise that if you do your technique work up front, the rest just falls into place. I meet many people who think that speed comes strictly from strength and I couldn’t disagree more. Speed with running, just like speed with the fiddle, comes with efficiency, accuracy, and most of all relaxation. If you don’t have all three, you’re going to have to work harder to get that speed you’re looking for. It doesn’t matter whether you’re watching Salina Kosgei (the Kenyan woman who won this year’s Boston Marathon) or Itzak Perlman, they’re both doing the same thing underneath it all.
For Spring Break our family traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area where ChiRunning was conceived and launched. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing many of our old friends and doing a little sightseeing, which for me means trail running in the Marin Headlands, home to arguably some of the most beautiful trail runs in the world. Over the next few blogs I’ll post some of the photos I took just before my camera died an untimely death at Stinson Beach.
Spring is upon us and I hope these shots inspire you to get out and see Nature in its finest season (in my opinion). There’s nothing better than feasting your eyes on the millions of shades of green that paint the landscape this time of year. I had a wonderful 90 minute run through redwoods, past waterfalls, and along vast fields of blooming Lupines. I hope you enjoy these pictures as much as I enjoyed running to find them. I find that it’s really hard to match trail running for connecting your eyes, your heart …and your legs!
Carpe diem!
Danny
This is a shot of San Francisco looking south from the top of the Matt Davis Trail above Stinson Beach. The tower in the background is Sutro Tower which rises above Golden Gate Park. The water you see is the Pacific Ocean as it enters the San Francisco Bay (to the left, out of the picture).
Looking south from the Matt Davis Trail towards ocean side of San Francisco
Here’s an add-on to my last blog about running one-minute intervals. In the last half of this workout, depending on how I feel, I’ll begin extending the “racing” intervals to two minutes instead of one. I still keep the “resting” intervals by running in 1st gear for a minute. (Just as a side note, I avoid walking during my rest breaks. It does nothing for my conditioning or my psychology to be giving myself an “out” unless I absolutely need it.) Lengthening the time of the racing intervals, especially once I’m well warmed up, is fun and it stretches the conditioning phase of the workout. My goal is to very gradually increase the length of the conditioning intervals over the next few months until I can comfortably run at race pace for an hour, taking “rest” breaks only when I absolutely need them.
When I transition into running the “race” pace intervals during these trail runs, I’m not focusing on speed per se, but on the running form required to run the fastest through whatever section of trail I happen to be passing through. Then, instead of working harder and harder, I’m actually making it a fun game. I’ve only played a few video games, but approaching my runs in this way feel much like playing a video game where you’re working through different levels of difficulty and developing new skills in the process. I would have to say that this is a far cry from a video game because it’s in real time and it has a direct influence on my mind/body connection in ways no virtual reality could possibly do.
OK, I just have to report on my new favorite workout… my Monday morning hill intervals. This workout has a wonderful blend of cardio/aerobic training mixed with technique training, and the best thing about it is that it’s really fun.
In preparing myself for the National 10K championships I’m starting where I’m at right now. What I mean by that is I’m in no kind of shape to race right now, but I’m willing to up the ante and begin adding a little chutzpah to my workouts. So, I’ve begun running hill intervals once a week and I’ve picked Mondays to do them because it gets my week off to a brisk start. These workouts allow me to practice my ChiRunning form and also keep me in great shape for my marathon training.
I’m assuming that the race course will be very hilly and I’ve even had the race director tell me that there’s a hill somewhere in the course that’s a third of a mile of very steep sustained climbing. I’m thinking, “Now that’s no problem if you’re ready for it. Heck, here’s a hill at mile 52 in the Leadville Trail 100 that’s 5 ½ miles long and climbs 2500′ in elevation. If I can do that, this should be relatively easy.” So what I’m doing with this particular workout is training by body to hold a steady running pace for a sustained climb.
Here’s what I’m doing. I warm up for about 10 minutes easy and then start the countdown timer on my watch which will beep at one-minute intervals through the whole workout. Then, when my beeper sounds off, I start running at race pace (*PRE-7) for exactly one minute until the beeper goes off again, at which point I run at a resting pace (*PRE-3) for the next minute. I then alternate this cycle of race pace and resting pace for the remainder of my run. The beauty of doing this workout on trails is that no matter where I’m at in the trail, (running uphill or downhill) I have to break into a race pace whenever my beeper tells me to. This means that sometimes I’m “racing” downhill and sometimes I’m racing uphill…and sometimes I’m having to do both because I might get caught in a transition between the two. All of it is great for my running form and my conditioning level because it is the best way for me to practice all of the various situations that will happen on race day…without feeling like I have to practice holding a race pace for an hour…today. All I have to do is practice racing in little one-minute increments, which is entirely doable… and even fun!
There’s much more to this running workout, so I’m going to save it for the next blog.
Happy Trails,
Danny
(*PRE – Perceived Rate of Exertion: Exertion level based on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being easiest and 10 being instant exhaustion. See ChiRunning book pages 14-16)
Your lower back should remain in contact with the ground when your legs are lifting. When you’re in between lifts, allow your back to resume it’s normal curve.
