Run to Win

Chris over at Strength News managed to cut more than half of a minute off of his 1 mile time trial time in the past month. He managed to run a 7:19 mile on his first trip outdoors since he started testing himself. The interesting thing about Chris is that he is not a runner; he is a power lifter. He adds a little cardiovascular work to his workout routines and has recently been checking once per month to see how fast he can run a mile. He has a new goal of beating his mile time from high school, which was somewhere in the low or high 6 minute range. He recently asked me what I thought that he should do in order to bring his time down another 30 seconds or a minute, and this is what I suggest based on what I know about his training.
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Breakfast is key in obtaining and maintaining a healthy weight, as well as leading a healthy lifestyle.

Our bodies don’t like to be without food, but we can’t process a lot of calories at one time. If you think about it, you probably spent a third of the day without food when you wake up in the morning. Assuming that you don’t eat right before you go to bed and sleep for 7 or 8 hours, you can easily have gone 8 to 10 hours without ingesting anything.
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In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we will be writing about timeless exercises in different disciplines throughout the month of May. They may not be the easiest ways to get in shape, but can be an important part in your workout arsenal.

This week, Scott continues discussing squats. Specifically, he describes the hack squat.

A couple of points that Scott made that I would like to highlight are that you should treat your hands as though they were hooks (as in a deadlift) and that you should use your heels rather than your toes to raise your body. Reducing extra strain on your knees is a good idea for anybody, and especially for runners.

This week last year was very light.

• I suggested that a regular sleep schedule is important. I think that this is a very important habit to cultivate.
• I updated a few stories that I had written about the week before. The alligator was caught that had killed the jogger down in Florida, and it was announced that Justin Gatlin didn’t break the world record because there was a timing error. He only matched the record.
• I completed my weekend discussions on the New Rules of Lifting with New Rule #20 (Have Fun).

I have never run a race blind folded, but I have run many times (and raced a few times) without having the full use of my vision. This June there is a race in Boston called the Vision 5k where runners are blindfolded and given a guide so that they can experience what it is like to race blind. You need to register by tomorrow (May 18) and attend a training session on Saturday in order to participate in the blindfold challenge, as well as raise a minimum of $1500. The first training session was at the beginning of the month and has already gone by. They will then match you to a guide that races at about the pace you expect to run.

I think that this would be a lot of fun. I did not find out about it until it was a bit too late to be able to participate in it, but perhaps I will aim towards working it into my schedule next year. I have gotten migraines during races before, although I have only had one where I couldn’t see anything at all for most of the race. That happened in Van Cortlandt park the weekend after September 11^th, when we weren’t even sure that there was still going to be a race. The migraine began around a quarter mile into the race, and I was completely blind by the first mile. Normally when I have migraines while working out, I just hallucinate and have blurry vision or lose parts of my vision and do not go completely blind, though.

Has anybody ever run this race or run a race like it?

There has been an RSS feed for Run to Win available for the last few years, but I have finally gotten around to setting up email updates as well. If you would like to subscribe to the articles written here and have them show up in your email box every morning, just fill in your details in the box below:

The latest ProBlogger group writing project is over and it was popular. Here are the exercise related lists that I saw in a quick perusal; let me know if I missed any:
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In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we will be writing about timeless exercises in different disciplines throughout the month of May. This week I would like to talk about one of the most important types of workouts for any competitive runner.

What is interval training?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fourth definition, an interval is “one of a series of fast-paced exercises interspersed with slower ones or brief rests for training (as of an athlete).” Intervals can be practiced across sports, but in running an interval workout is any workout where you run for a specified distance or time at a specified pace with a specified amount and type of rest.
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