Masters: The Secret Of Lifelong Motivation
As you get older, free yourself from the tyranny of time and distance – run by feel to stay motivated and avoid injury
It’s all about running by feel
BREAKING FREE from the shackles of always running to a set pace or strict time limit can help veteran runners train smart, avoid injury and stay motivated as their capabilities change over time. Here’s how to make running by feel work for you.
As runners, we tend to crave details on how to maximise our running time and efforts: how many miles should we run, how many repeats, what pace on which runs on which days? Charts and numbers fill training books and magazine articles. We download training apps that tell us exactly what we should be doing each day and how to do it. The market is saturated with devices that allow us to track every number, every step, even the quality of our sleep. But what if a key to achieving your best is to stop planning and tracking? What if, instead, you just listened to your body and ran how you felt?
TO LEARN HOW TO TRAIN BY EFFORT REQUIRES CHANGES IN HABITS AND TOOLS. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE YOUR GPS WATCH BEHIND
Finger on the pulse
The mental benefits of training by feel are enormous. But so are the physical benefits. Most experienced runners have a story about getting injured in their 40s as a result of trying to match their training from earlier years in distance, pace or both. Training by effort addresses these difficulties in one swoop. If you’re tuned in to what a tempo run feels like, or a long run, or a session at 5K effort, your pace will naturally follow as your ability changes. In contrast, if you try to match arbitrary paces, either what you have always done or to follow an age-based formula that doesn’t account for your unique experience, you’ll have to increase your effort when, perhaps, you shouldn’t.
If you listen to your body, running hard when you feel good and backing off when you don’t, you’ll also automatically add the increased recovery time you need as you age without having to modify your schedule and lament that you can’t do what you used to. If you throw out the plan and run as far as your body lets you, being careful to listen when it tells you to rest, you’ll land on the volume that you need, avoiding either extreme of cutting back too little and getting hurt or cutting back too much and losing fitness.
Some will hear all this and still prefer to follow a schedule. That is fine, but tuning in to effort is still part of the process. Even with a schedule, you must be willing to adapt to what you are capable of doing each day. To do that, you need to pay attention to how you feel; you’ll need to know yourself.
Walter Bortz, a professor of medicine and marathon runner, wrote in his book The Roadmap to 100: ‘If there were a first rule of longevity, it would be the command “Know Thyself”, handed down by the Ancient Greeks some 3,000 years ago. Our bodies constantly give us feedback on our internal workings.’ The ability to run by feel is the result of knowing yourself.
What should I do today?
Training by effort frees you from the tyranny of the training schedule and the watch; protects you from overtraining; helps you discover your strengths, your limits and the type of training that works best for you; and removes much of the stress – whatever your age.
To learn how to train by effort requires changes in habits and tools. You have to leave your GPS watch behind (or learn to ignore it). If you do look at a watch, discipline yourself to treat the numbers simply as information – this is what pace this effort level feels like today – not as a judgment or a guide to how hard you should run.
Many runners who train by effort find the GPS can still be helpful in that it keeps track without you having to. But consider checking it after the run to find out what pace that effort level was on this day or on a specific repeat or hill. Looking at it every mile and speeding up or slowing down based on the numbers you see is counterproductive. You must tune in to what feels right for the workout and trust yourself.
Learn to cook
To truly train by effort, you also can’t be too closely tied to a daily training schedule. If you do follow one, you must at least be willing to alter it regularly, without guilt or reserve. However, this requires a considerable knowledge of training and your own body, which takes time and experimentation. While many lifetime competitors follow an effort-based schedule as masters, few, if any, started that way.
In this regard, the charts and information in training books and articles are important and useful. To use an analogy, you can’t bake bread with no experience by simply dumping random ingredients into a bowl. You have to have a good idea of which ingredients, in which proportion, must be added at which time. You must follow recipes often enough that you come to understand them and also learn how changing variables alter the results: only then can you relax and start playing with the ingredients and proportions.
Similarly, in order to confidently know what feels appropriate on a given day, you have to learn how to taste the mixture and, in doing so, know which ingredient is lacking. Those who are very good at this can quickly sense what type of workout or drills their bodies need on any given day, what ingredient or spice will perfect the dish of their race-ready fitness.
Focus on the effect, not the stats
Most importantly, training by effort requires a change in mindset about how training works. Training by effort recognises that what is really important is the training’s effect on the body, not the numbers recorded in a log. It requires relaxing and ignoring the voices that question if you’re working hard enough and then needle you to add more miles.
If you went out and did the work, and you’re ready to do it again tomorrow, then you’re ahead of the game. Believe you are fit because you feel fit, and because you can run fast when you want to and long when you want to, not because of your Strava feed or because you’ve dutifully followed a training plan.
Avoid comparing your distances and paces with others. Remember that what works for them is only marginally related to what works for you. Everyone’s reaction to training is different; everyone’s recovery needs are different. So save the comparisons for the racecourse.
Roy Benson, author of Heart Rate Training (Human Kinetics), wrote: ‘You can correctly run any workout you want, if you run it at the right effort for you. Because effort, not your teammates or training buddies, dictates how fast you should run a hard workout or how slowly you should run an easy workout.’
Training by effort also requires that you stop treating every run as a test. Even a race-specific workout is simply a workout designed to stress us so that we rebuild stronger.
Masters runner and coach Pete Magill puts it this way: ‘ We don’t run repetitions to practise running faster. We run reps to improve the physiological systems that will allow us to run faster in the future. To accomplish this goal, we train at 5K effort rather than 5K pace. As our fitness improves, our pace will improve. But our perceived effort will remain the same, allowing us to become well versed in the effort level we’ll use in the race itself.’
How do you learn it?
Learning to train by effort is a process that improves over time. Running must be consistent, a regular habit. You also have to be committed to training at a variety of paces, from sprints to tempo runs to long runs, progressions and repeats. If what you feel like doing is going easy every day, you won’t get race fit and you’ll be more prone to injury.
Many top competitors follow a rough schedule even when relying on perceived effort to control the details. Those who don’t follow a schedule have developed a desire for variety in their runs. Thus they will choose to push the hills one day and go long on another, speed up during a run to make it a progression – finishing in a joyful sprint – or cruise at a fast-but-not-hard tempo pace during another run.
The experiences of top runners show us that to be a competitor who trains by effort also means pushing the limits. The question must be, ‘ What can I get away with?’ in terms of doing more miles and pushing the pace, rather than, ‘How little can I do and still accomplish this goal?’ The goal is always to do your best, regardless of what that happens to be on any day.
Part of judging your own appropriate effort is to have pushed over the edge at some point, to know the warning signs and to have the discipline to come close to that edge but not push too far the next time. Ideally, you learned these limits and warning signs as a younger runner and avoid the edge as a veteran, as the consequences are greater for older athletes. ‘For the senior athlete, not training means that the rate at which aerobic capacity and muscle mass are lost accelerates,’ warns Joe Friel in Fast after 50. ‘ What may have been a half percentage point lost per year now doubles (or worse).’
Every breath you take
If you don’t know what different training paces feel like, the first step is to start paying attention. One good place to focus is your breathing. Veteran coach Budd Coates, experimenting with his own running and that of other runners, developed an advanced breathing system in which you breathe in for one more step than you breathe out. Among the many benefits of adopting this method, described in his book Running on Air, is learning how to judge different paces based on what breathing pattern you need to run them. Once you’ve learned this pattern, it doesn’t change.
Coates says that back when he developed the breathing plan in 1990, he learned that when running intervals he needed a three-two pattern (three steps breathing in, two steps out). ‘Now, at 60, it is the same pattern’ he says. ‘The times are different, but I’m working just as hard, I’m getting that same feeling.’ Coates uses this perception to guide his training. ‘I don’t even look at the watch anymore,’ he says.
Whether or not you follow Coates’s specific rhythms isn’t as important as learning to feel the different breathing efforts of each training pace. Breathing is strongly
‘ EFFORT, NOT YOUR TRAINING BUDDIES, DICTATES HOW FAST YOU SHOULD RUN A HARD WORKOUT’
correlated with effort across the full range of paces. One transition point, near your tempo-run pace, is called the ventilatory threshold, the point at which you need to start breathing harder to keep up with oxygen demands. Paying attention to this transition can help you learn what running at that threshold feels like. That threshold is based on your current fitness and, unlike set paces, will go up when you get more fit and down when you age. Learn it once, however, and it will feel the same your whole life.
Heart rate and feel
Another way to learn effort is to correlate what you feel with what a heart-rate monitor tells you at various paces. Tracking your heart rate will give you an empirical number to assure you that you’re working in roughly the right range. Over time, however, as you get used to the perceived effort of each type of workout, that perceived effort becomes the best measure, one that is more reliable than heart rate. Heart rate lags behind when effort changes, and it can also be affected by your emotional state, how much coffee you drank that morning, or other factors unrelated to your running effort. Perceived effort will also endure as a reliable measure throughout the decades of your running life, even as your maximum heart rate changes with the passing years.
To assist in learning perceived effort, Benson created an effortbased training chart (right). The first column gives the reason for running at this pace and the second column provides the percentage of your heart-rate reserve. Research the Karvonen Formula to calculate your heart-rate reserve zone, which takes into account both maximum and resting heart rate. The third column gives a description of what the effort feels like at that pace, and the final column lists common names for these efforts, which you’ll find in training plans and by talking to other runners.