One Workout

The Masters’ Workout

Ipersonally think you need to practice running at your desired race pace to get a feel for it and to be able to run relaxed and efficiently. When I can do the workout at my goal pace with the prescribed recovery, I know I can likely maintain that pace for the race distance. This makes determining pacing under race conditions much easier and is a good confidence booster. As most of us know, starting a race at too quick a pace can have a detrimental effect on your finishing time, especially in the marathon. Adjusting for temperature, humidity, wind or altitude makes determining your race pace hard enough as it is, even when you have a good idea what your goal race pace should be. In the Niagara Falls Marathon I had to adjust race pace by 10 –12 seconds per kilometre right from the start because of the humidity and wind. Looking at my splits after the race, I think it was the right decision. I read a quote recently from U.S. Olympian Jenny Simpson that sums it up perfect ly: “The secret to racing is not digging deeper for more than you’re capable of; it’s about knowing exactly what you’re capable of.”

I have a few favourite workouts I like to do depending on the distance, with all of them being racepace specific for different events, but the 5 x 1k has to be my personal favourite. —Stuart Galloway

Recovery for older athletes

It’s not just the workouts that feel harder as you get older – it’s the recovery afterwards. While younger runners may be able to alternate hard and easy days, masters runners often find they need at least two easy days between hard workouts, and sometimes more. What explains this delayed recovery, and when does it start? To investigate, researchers at the University of Central Florida compared a group of fit men in their late 40s with a similar group of fit men in their early 20s. Both groups did a hard lower-body strength workout, then the researchers took repeated blood tests to measure inf lammation and muscle damage over the next 48 hours, along with maximal strength tests.

The results, which were published in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, revealed a surprise: nothing. While the younger group was stronger to start with, the relative loss and recovery of strength in the two groups was the same, as were reports of pain and soreness and markers of damage and inf lammation. While the study looked at strength training, the basic mechanisms of damage and repair are thought to be similar in running. Does this mean older runners should throw caution to the wind and start hammering workouts more frequently? Not quite. For most of us, life has gotten considerably more sedentary and stressful by the time we reach our late 40s, leaving us more injury-prone and less resilient overall. It would be foolhardy to ignore those changes. But it’s encouraging to think that our muscles are still able to respond to the challenge of a workout and repair themselves if we stress them appropriately. And on that note, it’s worth emphasizing that the older group was about 20 per cent weaker, on average, than the younger one, so their workout was a little “easier.” Perhaps the real conclusion, then, is that you can recover from hard training as a 47-year-old – as long as you don’t try to work out like a 22-year-old.

Time dilation in running

The faster you go, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the slower time passes. This principle of modern physics often seems applicable to running: do seconds ever tick more slowly than when you’re racing or training all-out? Now, researchers Britain’s University of St. Mark and St. John have quantified this ubiquitous mental distortion. Volunteers were asked to guess when they’d passed the quarter, halfway, and three-quarter marks of a 30-second bike sprint and a 20-minute row. They repeated each test at three different effort levels. Sure enough, the perceived passage of time was about 15 per cent slower during the hardest efforts compared to a more relaxed pace. The reason? Nobody’s really sure, but the researchers suggest that “greater than usual sensory awareness” during periods of danger (or situations like running, which your body may interpret as danger) fills each second with more mental input than usual, causing to time to appear slower.

FODMAPs for runners

A recent spate of research has suggested that fodmaps – a family of poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates found in a wide range of foods like milk, stone fruit, wheat, and onions – may trigger the symptoms of irritable bowel disease. Could the same be true for the exercise-associated gastrointestinal problems that plague some runners? In a recent Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise study, volunteers trained for two six-day periods while eating either a high- fodmap or low- fodmap diet. The meals were as similar as possible so that the subjects didn’t know which diet was which, and 9 of the 11 volunteers had a significant reduction in GI symptoms like f latulence, urge to defecate, and diarrhea with low- fodmap food.

While the results are encouraging, runners should be cautious about adopting a low- fodmap diet, says Dana Lis, a Canadian sport nutritionist who led the study at the University of Tasmania. The diet can be very restrictive, making it difficult to meet other nutritional goals. Before suggesting it athletes, she says, “I am very careful to rule out any clinical issues and try the more classic triggers and strategies first: gut training, food timing, fibre loads, low residue, and so on.” Still, she believes the approach could be useful as a short-term gut-friendly strategy for runners in the days leading up to an important competition.