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Archives for 2019

Podcast: Episode 112 – How to celebrate kissing your a goal goodbye (a Melbourne Marathon update!)

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I’m back, it just took me a little while with school holidays, a race, two short weeks and life, you know?

So this episode is all about how to let go of your A goal, and still have your race or your event be the celebration of your training that you want it to be.

Because as it turns out after Melbourne, that’s something that I know a little bit about.

Honestly, this podcast is a bit of a rambling one, so I won’t attempt to summarise it, you’ll just have to have a listen.

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Support this podcast for bonus episodes!

If you enjoy this podcast, I would love your support on patreon, where you can listen to this week’s bonus episode: How to prepare for your next race: tactics for physical, emotional and mental preparation.

Podcast: Episode 100: The long and winding road of progress or how to take over an hour off your half marathon time in 6 years

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When someone in our Run Club community asked me about progress, they probably didn’t expect me to go on about it for 80 minutes, but here we are.

So often on the socials, you see where people are now and might not realise all the ups and downs it took to get there. And in fact, you probably couldn’t get there without the ups and downs.

In this podcast I talk about getting started running in 2011 and then a bit of my timeline in going from a 3 hour half marathoner to a 1:36 half marathon at Canberra, just recently. I think I confuse myself a bit with the timeline somewhere in the middle, but you get the idea.

2013: First two half marathons, being dragged along by someone faster than me.

2014: Decide to actually follow a specific training approach to get better, rather than just running without any plan. Manage to break 2 hours in April and break 1:50 in July. Go on to run my first marathon at the end of the year.

2015: Tear my adductor at the beginning of the year, but go on to run a 4:08 marathon at the end of the year, which didn’t go according to plan but I was so proud of anyway.

2016: Work up to a 25 minute 5k in January to get some speed back, but then business pressures take over and I take time off anything but easy running. Run all the marathons between 5 and 6 hours and fall out of love with the distance pretty quickly.

2017: Challenge the story I’m telling myself about never being able to better that Gold Coast half and start proper training again. Run 1:46 in Gold Coast and 1:40 in Melbourne

2018: Come to terms with a long-term structural injury from scoliosis and don’t run for around 6 months. And then start the process of rebuilding.

I talk a bit about the obstacles (some physical, some mental), how to assess where you should be working and how to create sustainable change for the long term.

Grab a 7 day free trial in Run Club, by heading over to the store here.

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Podcast: Episode 99 – How to put your habits on auto-pilot

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Have you ever wondered why it’s so much easier to get going, once you take that first step?

But that first step is brutally hard and challenging isn’t it? And once you do get going you wonder why it was so hard in the first place?

This week I’m talking about how to create routines that make habits almost inevitable by creating little steps that have nothing to do with running or your new habit really, but make it almost impossible not to happen once you start to create that chain reaction.

So in this episode I’m talking about:

  • Creating those habits to build in that first step so you don’t have to think about
  • How motivation happens after you get moving, not before
  • Creating some temptation bundling for those things that you are most resistant to doing
  • Setting up systems to get your habits on auto-pilot and make the things you want to do almost inevitable.

You can listen here:

You can watch on YouTube here:

Podcast: Episode 98 – Does it really come naturally? Breathing while running

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Breathing feels like it should be easy, like something that should come naturally – after all you do it all the time, right?

This is one of the topics that comes up really regularly in Learn to Run as often breathing is one of the biggest struggles for a new runner, or someone returning to running. In this episode I talk about:

  • Mouth breathing vs nose breathing
  • How to improve your breathing technique by practicing when you aren’t running
  • Breathing exercises to improve your lung capacity (you can check out a great starting point here)
  • Running workouts that will force adaptation in your lungs.

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This is Learn to Run: Helen’s Story

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It is such a pleasure to bring you Helen’s Learn to Run story. There’s no greater power than investing in yourself, every day. Even when you don’t feel like it, even when it’s hard. And along the way, Helen inspired so many other people to do the same. It was such an honour to see her progress over the three months in Learn to Run and to see her continuing to build on what she achieved in Run Club. 

Zoey

Wangaratta 5k Fun Run 2019

I’m an “it’s better than the alternative” runner.

My running journey started back in 2013, overweight and unfit I signed up for the 12 week challenge at the gym that I had joined. The hook that got me in was training to walk a local fun run; hills, 11km, fire trails.  I seriously underestimated what was involved, and that very first walk I was hanging on to trees to stay upright trying to catch my breath. If it wasn’t for the fact that my car was at the far end I would have turned around and gone home.  10 weeks later, event date rolled round and I’d done 9 training walks. I knew I was fitter because when I got to the top of the hill it didn’t take anywhere near as long for me to get my breath back and on the day of the event I finished 34 minutes faster than the very first walk.

After that event life went back to what it had been, and next thing you know it’s 12 months later and I’m signing up for another 12 week challenge in pretty much the same spot as where I’d been a year earlier.  This time I set a time goal for the fun run that meant I had to do some running on the flat sections.  Somewhere in the next 10 weeks of training I realised that I didn’t mind this running thing; I didn’t love it, but it was way better than doing burpees or TRX rows – not that there is anything wrong with those things, I just really really don’t like them.

From there I moved onto parkrun. I loved it and worked my way up to being able to run the whole 5km.  Somewhere along the way I tried to leap from being a once a week 5km runner to a 10km runner and collected myself an injury although I didn’t have a clear reason why. I couldn’t tell any of the health practitioners I consulted what I’d done, there was no I did X and now Y hurts.  I tried to keep running, but things weren’t improving because I was treating the symptoms not the cause, and this was the start of a slow downhill slide to long periods of no running.  With hindsight, I know now that I just tried to do too much too soon and too fast.  One thing I did learn was that I’m pretty much a 5km girl who’s prepared to step up to a bit of a longer distance for special occasions.

Eventually my injury led me to a local physio group with a clinical Pilates class and a fiercely persistent massage therapist. It wasn’t a quick fix, but after a couple of program cycles I stopped worrying about my symptoms returning and started to think that maybe I could try running again.  I had some intermittent attempts to start again but never had a proper plan or a clear goal so each time I would fizzle out and give up. And I’d still be at the same point as when I very first started, overweight and unfit.

Around this time advertisements for Learn to Run started appearing in my Facebook feed and in the ads that google tossed at me, I guess because I had googled Couch to 5km apps. I ignored them at first but these things can be a bit persistent and niggle in the back of your head.  I was a bit interested. The idea of having a plan to follow was really appealing, but I was going away on a holiday and wouldn’t be able to finish if I signed up for the advertised program.  I sent Zoey an email to find out when the next program would be, and discovered I would be back from holidays just in time; and even better, Zoey followed me up with an email a couple of weeks before the program started.  Personal contact is so much better than just downloading an app.

Learn to Run was absolutely what I needed. There was a clear plan for the week, and explanations about why there are differences in the plan across the week.  The Monday check in and posting each of my sessions was great accountability that I would never have found had I gone down the Couch to 5km route.  Knowing that there were others having similar issues as I was (why can breathing be so hard!) actually helped me keep going, and of course being able to ask questions either in the Facebook group or of Zoey directly was fantastic.  I was home from holidays in time to do half of the pre-program walks which I think really helped, particularly going from doing not much to 3 run/walk sessions a week. Even more important was the gradual progression through the weeks.

Of course it wasn’t all roses. There were some days when I really wondered what the hell I was doing, when my huffing and puffing was so bad I couldn’t finish an interval, or when my legs felt horribly heavy. This is when the feedback in Learn to Run really kicks in, because well, sometimes running just sucks and it’s good to have someone to remind you of that, but running never seems to suck as much as burpees do!

Before I knew it, 12 weeks was done, and no injury issues.  As well as confirming for me that 5km is my sweet spot, Learn to Run taught me that I really need to have a goal sitting out there that I’m working towards, and a plan to get there, because I’ll never be the person who exercises just because it’s good for me.  So this year, because being back running is a special occasion, I’m going back to that very first event, 11km, hills and fire trails and I’m pretty excited about it.