Spring running
Every season has its pleasures and annoyances. In spring, puddles join the snow and ice, and waterproof shoes earn their keep. Dressing for winter is simple: stay warm. Spring is trickier, and getting it wrong means freezing or overheating. A waterproof jacket often comes along for the ride.
The days get longer, though, and a morning run no longer automatically means darkness. I can head out earlier and earlier. More routes open up. In the park, I'm no longer confined to whichever paths someone has cleared. I spot the first birds and flowers, often before anyone else out walking seems to notice them. I like that.
Every spring I look forward to taking my "normal" shoes out of the closet, the ones for dry pavement and a decent pace. I miss them in winter. It's a pleasure to choose shoes for how they feel on a run without worrying about keeping my feet dry. Even that change makes me feel faster, lighter, better.
Spring and fall bring my favorite running temperatures. Around 10°C is often described as ideal: less work for the body to regulate its temperature, less sweating, the air helping carry heat away. The running season begins, and the first organized races offer a chance to test myself.
Spring is also a lovely time to start. There's time to feel fitter before beach season and enjoy the changes. If your running year begins in spring, good for you.
Spring is the perfect season for running.
Running, diets, and the weight-loss question
Making things complicated is easy. Making them simple is hard.
I'm not a nutritionist and can't explain every detail of weight loss. I'm keeping it simple: the biology we learned in school. Food and drink supply energy, measured in calories. Staying alive and moving around use energy. The body is a small biological reactor.
Take in more energy than you use and your body stores some of the extra, including as fat. Use more than you take in and it draws on those reserves. That's the stripped-down version.
Most diets concentrate on the intake side: different foods, different meal times, elaborate rules about fat, protein, and carbohydrate. Countless apps calculate calories and help you stick to the rules. My own rule is modest: I don't add sugar to coffee, tea, or food. If a prepared dish already contains sugar, fine. In any case, there are plenty of systems for restricting what goes in.
Those approaches have their place. Personally, I find counting what goes in pretty boring. I'm much more interested in the other half: how I spend energy.
Running burns a lot of energy. The more you run, the more you use, shifting the balance toward spending more than you take in. Keep that up consistently and you'll lose weight. It seems obvious!
So, pay attention: the secret to losing weight is simple. Run more than you eat. More regular running means faster weight loss. But build up gradually. Increase your running too sharply and you're asking for an injury.
Once I watched a stocky guy at the gym working very hard on his abs. He didn't look weak. His abs were probably fine, and so were his other muscles. They were just hidden under years of second helpings. Watching him, I thought: three or four workouts a week won't burn all that off. Two or three months of daily 10 to 12 km runs, though? That would do it.
That's one reason I run every day. I also walk the dog. Keep moving that regularly and burning an extra 500, 800, or even 1,500 calories a day isn't difficult.
Garmin had an Insights section comparing my activity with that of other users. There must have been a lot of them: hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. A couple of months into the year, I was astonished to find myself in the most active 1%, ahead of 99% of users across the age groups in steps and distance. Apparently I was using quite a lot of energy.
How much is "a lot"? What put me in that top 1%?
I averaged about 17,000 steps a day, often reached 25,000, and once hit 48,000. Across the year, my running averaged 6.5 km a day. Until I saw Garmin's comparison, that didn't strike me as extraordinary. That 99% figure stopped me short. If a daily total of roughly 13 km on foot was so unusual even in that group, how sedentary had we become?
An old Chinese saying compares movement to a door hinge: the door may age, but the hinge keeps moving and stays sound. The original hinges were wooden, yet the idea remains wonderfully simple. Keep moving.
Looking ahead, the really dramatic changes in my body came when I reached 80 km a week. I discovered that in June.
There are downsides. At passport control, someone always seems to point out that I don't look like my photo. Honestly, I don't mind.
The dry half marathon
After learning about heart-rate training, I decided to try a serious distance at a low heart rate: a half marathon. No organized race. Just me, running for myself.
I planned a route through the park and along the waterfront, left plenty of time in the day's schedule, got my head in the right place, and set off one spring morning.
The rule was absolute: stay below 145 bpm for the entire distance. Ideally, stay above 134 as well. But the ceiling mattered most.
I wasn't trying to go faster or farther. No surges, no bonus kilometers. One target only: keep my heart rate in that narrow band.
I already had enough experience to know I could cover the distance. I also knew roughly how long it normally took, where I tended to tire, and how I felt afterward. Previous half marathons had sometimes left me needing an hour's sleep. I'd be ravenous and thirsty, my legs trembling, my shirt wet enough to wring out.
This run felt unlike any of those. In fact, it felt downright strange.
I was a sports-car driver creeping through a city full of speed cameras. The engine growled: come on, we can go faster! But I'd made the rules, and now I had to follow them. Instead of touching the accelerator, I kept hitting the brakes.
Every few seconds I checked the heart-rate display. The moment I accelerated, my pulse responded. I slowed, walked, or stopped until it came down. In practice, I used 142 as the point to back off. Above that, I stood still for as long as necessary. So much for taking it easy. Slowing down took discipline.
It was almost comical, constantly restraining myself as though playing an odd little game. But I stuck to the plan. And for the first time, a half marathon didn't leave me tired. I didn't even feel particularly thirsty - after 21 km! My shirt was almost dry.
My half-marathon best at the time was 1:50. How long did this one take? No idea. I'm not even going to look it up. More than two hours, certainly, but that wasn't the point.
What mattered was learning to run for a long time at a low heart rate. After that, I watched my heart rate like the tachometer in a car: too high and I needed to ease off; too low and I wasn't getting the workout I wanted. All I had to do was keep the needle in the right band. It felt like a video game. I could do that.
These are the workouts that do the most for your health and your running.
The surprising part was that a pace I once considered "very fast" gradually became an ordinary pace for an easy, low-heart-rate run.
Making sense of pace
Runners describe speed in a slightly unusual way. Instead of kilometers per hour or meters per second, we ask how many minutes it takes to cover one kilometer, or one mile. That's pace.
Running apps calculate it and show how it changes throughout a workout. I can compare sessions by distance and time, but also see the pace on each stretch. A pace of 6:00 per kilometer means six minutes for each kilometer: 10 km in an hour, or 10 km/h.
A four-hour marathon requires an average pace of about 5:41 per kilometer. Three hours requires about 4:16.
Unless I'm on a treadmill, my pace rarely stays perfectly steady. I speed up and slow down, leaving a jagged line in the app. Those teeth in the graph are why I call my favorite workouts combs. I love studying them.
Some well-trained runners can hold an extraordinarily steady pace. At big races they serve as pacers, guiding you toward a particular finish time. Stay with them and you know you're on track. Saints, every one of them.
Volume
By this stage of my running year I'd settled into a routine, gotten used to the workload, and learned to run at a low heart rate.
What next?
Time to talk about training volume: the distance covered over a period. Weekly and monthly totals are the figures I pay most attention to.
A single run of 5, 10, or 25 km may feel impressive. But one workout doesn't tell you much. Look at the bigger picture.
Once I began running at a low heart rate, I stopped feeling so exhausted. I started enjoying running. Distances that had seemed excessive became manageable, and I could start thinking about a sensible monthly total.
With my previous experience, 100 to 120 km a month was familiar territory: about 25 to 30 km a week.
That's a modest training volume, but without ambitious racing goals, it may be enough. It's a base for a respectable half marathon in under two hours. Keep it up for eight or nine months and a marathon in roughly four to four and a half hours should be within reach.
If I wanted to race faster, the next step seemed obvious: gradually run more and see how much I could handle. People differ, and so do their responses, but that was my plan.
In the fourth month I felt ready to increase the load and ran more than 170 km. The following month I passed 200. The weekly totals I watched were now around 40 to 50 km.
Increasing volume made sense, but the rate had to suit me. I thought in terms of gradual monthly increases, roughly 10 to 15%, rather than sudden leaps.
As my monthly total moved into the 150 to 200 km range, I began feeling capable of more and wanting to enter a race. That gave me a goal. For me, it's what turns exercise into sport: something specific to work toward.
May was coming, along with the big races. The goal was getting closer.