This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

"Is is still possible to improve as a runner and qualify for Boston being consistent week to week rather than necessarily day by day?"

This is a question I was asked recently by a runner who needed some flexibility in her day to day schedule. Not every week is she able to get in the long run on the same day of the week so we were exploring the idea of a bit more flexibility.

Some runners thrive on a consistent schedule. Every Sunday is your long run, every Tuesday is your speed workout. You don’t have to think about it. You just do it. Personally, I’m one of those runners. My life outside of running is relatively consistent and I just like not having to think about when to fit specific runs in. It also works for my family life. My family knows, if I’m not racing, expect me to be running for 2 hours Saturday morning. Sunday morning’s run will be shorter.

For other runners, this routine just doesn’t work, though. Work or family life may not be as consistent. If you try to force that long run on Saturday, it will work sometimes but other times it just won’t happen. If you’re one of those people, don’t try to force things.

I often say the key to developing as a runner is consistency. The key to consistency, though, isn’t doing your long run or primary workout on the same day of the week every week. It’s doing all of your planned runs every week. It doesn’t matter if your long run is on Thursday this week and Sunday next week or if your workout is on Monday this week and Wednesday next week. What matters is that you’re getting all of these runs, along with as many easy runs as possible/reasonable, done on a consistent basis.

Be flexible. Keep the big picture in mind and use that flexibility to make yourself more consistent.

By the way, here is how I responded to the question at the beginning of this post:

"You can absolutely qualify for Boston being consistent week to week! Really, week to week and month to month consistency is what we’re looking for. Whether you do your long run every Friday or Sunday doesn’t matter as long as you’re doing it every week (or most weeks at least). Same with the workout. The day of the week doesn’t matter, what matters is that it gets done more often than not."

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I used to take large doses of antioxidant supplements daily. My supplement was a combination of Beta Carotene, Vitamin C and Vitamin E. It was recommended to me by my doctor way back when I was in high school and I kept taking it until just a few years ago. I figured it might help and what’s the harm?

Did you notice that I stated I "used to" take these supplements? I’ve been following Steve Magness for quite some time and he, along with a few others, was pointing out studies (such as this and this) that said not only was antioxidant supplementation not beneficial but it might actually dampen the body’s response to training.

Now, a new study that again took up the topic of how antioxidants affect our training has come out. The results? Well, not a ringing endorsement for antioxidant supplementation. While running performance didn’t seem to be affected, there was clearly a difference between those taking the antioxidants and those who didn’t at a cellular level. There was evidence of an increase in mitochondria in those who were on the placebo, while there was not in those who were taking antioxidants. Remember, mitochondria are often referred to as the "power plants" of the muscle cells, where glucose and oxygen are processed to produce the form of energy the muscle cells can use. At the cellular level, more mitochondria is one of the key results we’re looking for when we do aerobic training.

It’s a little confusing that we would see a difference in mitochondria production but not a difference in running performance but the lesson here is that, however you look at the results of this study, antioxidant supplementation did not help the runners.

It’s not just the vitamins we know about that make our foods healthy. There is more going on and supplements that pump us full of this incomplete nutrition aren’t helpful and might even be harmful. Focus instead of eating whole foods. Nature has things pretty well figured out, don’t assume we can engineer things that will work better than nature. If you don’t know how the supplements might affect you, don’t assume like I falsely did some time ago that they couldn’t hurt. That could very well be a bad assumption, just as mounting evidence suggests my assumption was.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

You don’t need a watch on race day if you practice running by effort in training

As anyone who is or has been coached by me knows, I usually target effort in workouts. I often assign workouts such as mile repeats at 10K effort or a tempo run at half marathon effort or 1/2 mile repeats at 5K effort. While some people naturally gravitate toward working in accordance to efforts, I think I drive others crazy. "What pace should I be running?" "Should this by my target pace or the pace I think I could run right now?" "I don’t know my 10K pace/effort."

As I usually do my best to explain, what I’m targeting is truly effort, not pace. I want them to become more independent, not as reliant on the watch or whatever other aid they may prefer and more reliant on themselves and their bodies’ responses to their efforts.

But why do I prefer to prescribe workouts by effort and not pace or some other parameter and how do you do a workout by effort?

Why do workouts by effort?

In my opinion, there are a lot of good reasons to focus on effort, not pace or some other parameter, but I’ll focus on a few key reasons.

Training by effort allows you to refine your ability to race by effort: Running by effort, whether in a training environment or a racing environment, is a skill. Just like all skills, it needs to be practiced. There are some race day skills that can only be developed on race day. For those we can develop in training, we should to the fullest of our ability.

But why race by effort?

Training and racing by effort allows you to better handle variables out of your control: You’ve trained through this brutal winter we’re having. You know what paces you’ve been running but, when the better weather of spring rolls around and your first race shows up on the schedule, what do those winter paces mean? Nothing. You know you’re more fit than those paces. Further, what if the race course is more or less hilly? What if it’s windy, unseasonably warm or you’re dealing with some other weather variable? Paces can lose a lot of meaning in many scenarios. However, if you know what the effort should feel like, that’s a constant you can rely on.

Running by effort removes your susceptibility to technical glitches: Batteries, especially for high tech devices, wear down rapidly. What happens if your GPS device battery dies on you? What happens if your GPS device doesn’t lock into satellites correctly? Everyone I have talked with about this has had at least one run where their paces and splits were all screwed up or their battery died on them. What do you do if race day is that day for you?

How do I do workouts by effort?

The idea is to think of the workout you’ve been prescribed and break it down into its components. Then, target each component to its corresponding segment of the first 1/2 to 2/3 of a race.

For example, if I saw 3×1 mile at 10K effort, that first mile should feel just like the first mile of a 10K, that time where you are definitely extending a good effort but you’re still feeling controlled, relaxed and smooth. The second should feel like the second or third miles of a 10K, that time where you’re working hard, you’re breathing hard but it’s still rhythmic and controlled and you’re settling into a tough but controlled pace. The final mile should feel like the third or fourth miles of a 10K, that time where you’re pushing pretty hard, challenging yourself, but you’re still under control, you still feel like you have some gas left in the tank for those last 2 miles. As I also mention often, I think almost every workout should be finished feeling like you could have done at least one more repeat if you had to. You may be simulating a race effort but you’re not racing. Save the feeling of the last mile or half mile of a race, that all out effort to reach the finish line as quickly as possible at all cost, for race day.

If I saw 8×1/4 mile at 5K effort, I’ d break it down to each repeat corresponding to its 1/4 mile segment of the first 2 miles of a 5K. For the first, I want to get out quick but be under control. For the second through the fourth, I want to work the pace but stay under control. For the final 4, I want to dig deep but feel like I have something left.

The most important part, though, is that I don’t want to get too caught up in my splits. I don’t want to target a pace. Maybe I’m tired from the past week’s training and my paces are a little off what I think I could run in a 5K race right now. That’s fine. I know what I’ll be capable of on fresh legs. What matters is I just simulated the effort I was targeting in this workout.

Give it a try next time you’re planning your workouts. Target a race effort and don’t worry about the splits, just aim for the effort. There will be a learning curve but getting on that curve in your workouts just might help you to a better result when race day arrives.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

You don’t win these in workouts

I believe it was my junior year in college when our coach was having a terrible time keeping guys from running too hard on our tempo runs. Sure, we were young invincibles but we were racing almost every weekend. We couldn’t afford to be racing our Tuesday workouts also. I remember Coach saying something along the line of you don’t get awarded All-American honors on Tuesday, you do at the end of the season. He started calling guys who overran their tempo runs Threshold All-Americans, illustrating the point that they were racing their workouts, which would harm their races. Even this didn’t seem to be doing much good.

After a couple workouts with guys trying to be Threshold All-Americans, he came up with a way to put it to an end. He said anyone who doesn’t go through the 3 mile mark ahead of their target pace but finishes on pace gets a t-shirt and gets announced as a Threshold All-American the next day at practice. Almost everyone accomplished this, even the guys who had been running too hard. I’m not quite sure why but all it took was that one time and everyone did a better job staying on pace on future workouts.

These days, I understand the importance of what Coach was doing for us and I see many people, sometimes myself, making the same mistake many of the guys on the team, myself included at times, were making back then.

It’s easy to get pulled into running harder than you should in your workouts. You’re feeling good, you’re gaining fitness rapidly, you feel like you’re on top of the world. Your workouts are feeling easier every week and you feel like you need to keep pushing, to keep challenging yourself, every week in order to keep getting better. The problem is this perception of the workouts getting easier isn’t what’s really going on in your body.

The problem is you begin to get ahead of yourself, especially as your confidence grows. You feel like you’re gaining fitness and you should see those results in your workouts. So you think, if I ran my mile repeats at 6:30 this past week, I should be able to do 6:25 this week. Next week, you’re thinking 6:20 or maybe 6:23 if you’re being "conservative". Even though you feel like it is, your fitness isn’t improving enough to be doing your workouts measurably faster every week.

This continues until you’re racing your workouts and you’re not building yourself up. You’re breaking yourself down and not recovering adequately enough between workouts, usually exacerbated by the fact that you don’t want to slow down on your easy runs. Eventually, your body gives in and you fall off the cliff.

Don’t fall off the cliff. Know that some workouts, I would argue even most workouts, shouldn’t leave you feeling like death at the end. Sometimes, even hard days should feel relatively refreshing. Don’t be a Workout All-American. Save your race efforts for race day and do your workouts at efforts that allow you to continue moving forward for months to come.