Cranking up discipline, diet for fun return to running
Preparation is key for successful effort
The 33rd annual Vancouver Sun Run — set for Sunday, April 23 — has inspired people of all ages and skills to lace up for SportMedBC’s InTraining clinics around the province, including Matt Colpitts, who filed this recent report, which has been edited for length:
I am writing this on an airplane, on a Sunday, exactly seven weeks before the Vancouver Sun Run.
So, to state the obvious, my blogging is off to slow start. Thankfully my preparations for the 10K race are a little further along!
I started getting ready for the run in mid-January. I decided then that I needed to do three things in order to be successful. The first was to set a goal. As I wasn’t running much and had not been racing at all, this was a bit of a challenge. So I picked the somewhat arbitrary goal of running my age (43). For me, this means anything under 43 minutes which works out to 6:47 per mile.
The second thing on my list was to lose some weight. In early January, thanks to a generally sloppy diet, I tipped the scales at 206 pounds. Yikes! It was clearly time to ramp up the activity level and clean up my diet.
Cleaning up my diet meant giving up my morning snack of a green tea latte and breakfast sandwich as well as my afternoon snack of another latte and cookie. I’ve replaced these with plain green tea and healthy snacks like apples, Greek yogurt, tuna and whole wheat crackers. Also, I’ve been experimenting with actually being hungry some of the time and hanging on until my next meal — a novel concept!
These changes, along with regular activity, have me down 20 pounds over eight weeks. I’m feeling really good about my weight and hope to be down another six or eight pounds by race day.
My third key to success was having and following a structured training plan. As a longtime runner, I have accumulated quite a few different plans over the years. The one I decided to follow is one I bought off the Internet a long time ago for $9.99. It’s a 10-week program and calls for six runs per week with one long run, two speedwork sessions (short intervals, long intervals or a temp run), a hill run and two easy recovery runs.
With work and family commitments, it’s not realistic for me to run that much so I’ve given myself permission to swap in either a cross training day or a rest day for the two easy runs.
To get myself ready for the program before it was time to start, I started doing shorter versions of the workouts called for in Week 1. This ended up working really well as while Week 1 was tough, I was able to get through it. So that brings us pretty much up to date.