A landmark week. A fun one. A wild solo run. Feedback from my running video (yes!) New achievements (yes!) End of month (not very scientific) ‘analysis’ of my breathing practice. {Long-post alert.🚨 Wishing you all a wonderful week upfront, if that’s not for you. 😁}
Run 1. 8am. Local park. Mild at 6 degrees; overcast but with sun breaking through mackerel clouds in a cool pale-lemon luminescence, further dramatised by a silhouetted plane on its descent to Heathrow. 6.07 km, 47:29.
Run 2: Solo. 7.40am. Destination park and street exploration. Mild at 6 degrees; sky mostly clear with clouds on eastern horizon reflecting pinks, warm pale lemons and mauves. 7.27 km, 60:08 (01:00:08). Yes! New for me.
Run 3: 8.15am. Local park. Freezing (‘feels like’ minus 2); clear but with a sprinkling of little puffs distributed as if they had been thrown out before it by the blinding sunrise. (Photo.) 4 km, 32:09.
All outings were preceded by 5 minutes warmup walk (in turn preceded by 10 minutes qigong warmups at home) and 5 minutes cool-down walk.
Project: Since new year, I’ve been focusing on nasal breathing, using the comfort/stress point in this as my guide to run-walk intervals. The idea was and is to establish easy nasal breathing as my foundation. It’s definitely getting easier, even taking into account the challenges of colder winter air. I’ve experimented with my comfort/stress point and with shorter/longer intervals. Over the month, I shifted to shorter intervals (erring to maintaining comfort before stress arose). I tend to go the first km without walking, but then transition more frequently, although sometimes walking for just 10-20 seconds. Today (a shorter run) I was doing less walking.
The impact on my stats is worth observing. December average pace 7:58 mins/km; January, 8:03. As pace has not remotely concerned me (if anything, I’ve tried to slow down my starts), I see the difference as negligible. Presumably, my fitness is improving, so there’s a changing baseline to be factored in, I guess.
Another comparator (also inexact) is with M. He is running-only. When we were both running-only (December), I would usually be behind by the end, maybe by a few hundred yards. Earlier this month, with me jeffing, this remained so. (We need to bear in mind here - and over and above the simple fact that we are different - that he had a fortnight’s injury break in late December, although compensated by rowing). At the end of January, I now keep up with him easily and, today, I found myself out in front. Irrespective of length, I end my runs with energy to spare; M stops at 30-35 mins. So, eg Run1, he bailed while I continued for another twelve minutes, as has been the pattern in previous weeks. (Run3 today, I’d decided in advance to stop at 4k, given the excess of Run2.)
My January distance is (compared to many of my amazing VRBs) a modest 56.4km over 11 runs (December was 52.6, over 12). As I lost the first week of January, so I’m pretty pleased with that. I’d not been planning to increase my distances, but I have. I only realised this when I reviewed the record. Since late December, weekly totals look like this: 12km, 13.6, 14, 15.3, 17.3. Without trying, I’ve pretty much kept in the +10% guidance, until my solo outing this week tipped things.
My solo run (run-walk jeffing) was the occasion for a bit of a liberated blowout. Back to the park M prefers not to go to. Do what I want. When I want. I got out a bit earlier. Street orchard, minipark, back-snicket orchard, residential streets, *the* park. There were lakes not only where they should be, but all over the show! There were coots fighting. Amazing skies to be seen through the bare branches. After this, I went exploring, but in a vaguely homewards direction: along a crescent of allotments; finding a path through the flats to avoid the main road; zigging up and down every street for the same reason (all ‘side streets’ on my overall line of travel); discovering another neat connection using quiet roads to the old lane, which I ran up and down before slipping down another little alley back to the orchards. Realising I was close to the 60-minute mark (oh, boy, I was at fifty-eight and a half!), I squiggled a few turns of the gardens, up and down and through the rockeries and around the playground. I’ve finished here several times in past, and my pace in always noticeably slower. I’m never sure if this is the stage in my run (tiredness), the slowing terrain (sinuous tiny paths looping back on one another through rockeries) or the confusion to GPS (ditto).
Vídeo: I joined a short series of running workshops earlier in the month (a present to self, combining graduation, birthday and Xmas). We had the option to video our running and this week had my 121 with my tutor. The core principle was nonjudgmental learning. I’d already identified something I needed to change: my arms were just looking weird, like a marionette, moving like Bill and Ben, for those of you old enough to recall Watch with Mother. Oops, that was a bit self-judgmental! Anyway, they were not at all what I imagined them to be doing, and one elbow likes to ‘swim’. I’d probably overdone all the relaxation advice. Or, maybe it’s due to the squabbling with M over the the whole filming protocol? Who knows. Since seeing this, I’ve already been on a side-mission to address these flailing arms without tensing the shoulders, but I’m now primed with some home exercises and run drills. So Run1 and Run2 have been focused not only on breathing but also on incorporating some short bouts of arm drills. For these, I use a similar approach as I did for measuring cadence a few weeks ago. I use breath to count, here with oral exhales, which seem to embody the drill in a stronger way, focusing in my back swing. And I get the option to re-video my run for the final 121. Of course, this necessarily involves the (inescapably judgmental) cooperation of M.
Another small thing I’m working on is my tilt. I was fascinated by the analysis. Pausing the video at a specific point in my movement, lines and arrows were drawn. My cadence looks good and I don’t over-stride. Posture is very good but overall I was deploying it a little too ‘uprightly’ (I recall that M declared this to be ‘stiff’). It was probably because I had overdone postural care, effectively pulling my upper spine backwards. I confess, I was equally surprised when I saw this. But there’s the evidence and I’m here to learn. And this was going to be easy to adapt to now that I have awareness; more a refinement. On Run2, I managed to glimpse myself in a long stretch of plate glass windows, and I was definitely not so upright. For the moment, I can be content with my general running bodily form, stop thinking about that aspect and relax.
The qigong warmups mentioned above have come from these workshops, along with my balance exercises (the main one can be closer to meditation). I feel I’ve gained such a lot from these workshops. They have helped me to prioritise what to focus on and mean there’s some clear intentions for each run.
I have not had what I would call a bad or meh run - or even a neither-nor run - in an absolute age. I am just so focused on my breathing (or arm drill or cadence), the runs just race by (even if I don’t). I certainly encounter moments when I realise that there is discomfort or that I feel sluggish or ‘heavy’. However, I’m ‘noting’ it, as meditation tutors would say; observing, spotting and acknowledging rather than ‘being in’ it. ‘Heavy’ feeling are usually a sign I’ve lost my form, and then I can recalibrate. Of course, the breathing project I’ve embarked upon specifically keeps me at or below the sweet-spot, so I’m not ever pushing through exhaustion. Probably, the very knowledge that I have that control is an additional factor: I am not being controlled by set interval times or distances, just by my own decisions about breathing ease. Seems to be working for me at this stage of my journey. I’m already looking forward to seeing my next assessment at the end of February. 🏃🏼♀️🦌🙏👍👌🤗🦌🏃🏼♀️
week3run1 ✅. 3 x 17 mins with 1 min walks. 
How did your parkrun or (not)parkrun go?
