Running 10K at 66

No. 1 Health Objective for 2010 - Run a 10K event - 6.2 miles in less than 60 minutes.

Can I still do it ? Only time will tell.

Why ? I just like the feeling that running gives me and running seems a healthy activity - maybe the healthiest. Runners who keep running into old age seem to do better every possible way compared to people who stop running (and many times better than those who have never pushed their bodies hard). Read the report on a study of runners (and the control group of non-runners) which has now been on-going for over 20 years. At the start everyone was at least 50 years old and by now they have progressed into their '70s and older.

So I want to run 10K (6.2 miles) in under an hour before the end of 2010. What can I achieve right now ? I can run 10K on a treadmill in 62 minutes. Not bad but a long way short of objective because running on a treadmill is easier than running on the road and that's what I need to do at a running event.

This is my plan for 2010:

1) Increase endurance so that 10K is easy not really hard - target to achieve a long run 0f 15K i.e. 50% above race distance

2) Run 10K on a treadmill in 59 minutes by gradually over time increasing running pace.

3) Add a 1% incline to the treadmill to start to replicate running outside compared to on a treadmill and try to get to 59 minutes.

4) Run 5K on the road with a target time of less than 28 minutes.

5) Run 10K to see where I stand time wise.

This leads to the big question. How to improve my running time. I need to be able to run 10K at least 5 minutes faster on the treadmill than I can currently manage.

An important running concept is VO₂max

There are two ways to go:

- hard, fast intervals

- long, slow distance.

After reading the long article by Seiler and Tønnessen I'm going to start train with long slow distance. This means running a lot at below race pace.

The body adapts to endurance training by:

a) increasing the flow of blood to leg muscles by growing additional tiny blood vessels all the way to the muscle fibers so that oxygen carried in red blood corpuscles has as short a distance as possible to get to the muscles that need oxygen. Lots of long, slow distance encourage the body to become more efficient at running distance. This is called peripheral adaptation.

b) encourage the heart to produce stronger contractions, to eject a bigger fraction of the blood in the heart at every contraction and to increase the diameter of major blood vessels close to the heart. This is central adaptation.

Central adaptation needs faster running pace taking heart rate up close to maximum. More on this over the months after I make good progress with long, slow distance.

Our species probably evolved to run and that might be why running seems to be the healthy activity and it might even encourage a larger brain.

Of course, one can dream about running distance in the Kenya mountains - enjoy this video.