Got sweaty with 4,500 of my closest friends again this year. This time I set a new PR in my current age class. Also saw Forrest Gump and Santa Claus, with his eight tiny reindeer (who looked a lot like spaniels with bells), in the race, too. Rock bands, belly dancers, and lots of general fun during the race. My shorter and easier training approach worked well.

Main Results

My official finish was a PR of 1:03:47, or 2 minutes faster than last year’s finish. That places me in 1153rd place out of 1650 who finished, and 25th out of 39 males in my age class (60-64).

Now all I have to do to win this race is keep up my speed long enough to enter the race in the 75-79 year age class. This year I would have won that class by 5 minutes!

Sounds like a plan to me.

For the past few years I’ve been shooting to finish one of these things in less than hour, and I am getting closer. I credit my shorter and easier training method for the improvement, which entailed only one running day per week. My longest run was a three-quarter mile warm-up.

This is as simple as an endurance training program can be: Once a week for the past 6 months, I ran 10 intervals at 80-90% max (whatever THAT is), with 3-4 minutes rest in between. In fact, I never ran with less than a 7-day break between workouts, and occasionally it would be 8-10 days. Once or twice I spaced training runs 2-3 weeks apart.

This should be easy to tweak for more endurance and more speed, maybe by reducing the time between workouts or increasing the number of intervals. I’ll keep you posted on how I change the experiment and the results I get, probably with another 10K in a couple of months.

Although this sounds like a recipe for disaster, the results say otherwise. I took the idea for this this burst-training or sprint-training approach from some recent scientific research articles that compared long-run endurance training (aka, ‘old style’) with the short-run sprint training approach. Research has shown that the latter proves superior in endurance testing and in several key physiological parameters that mark endurance. (Oh, ‘parameters’ is just a fancy term that we scientists like to use. It just refers to different kinds of variables. You may have heard the term on ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, when Commander Data was asked, “How are you?’ He responded, “All systems are operating within normal parameters.” You get the idea.)

My Barefoot Running Style

My sprint training approach would not be as effective if I had not also adopted a barefoot running style. This style took me several months to acclimate and strengthen the right muscles, mostly my glutes and calves. This is absolutely the best running style that I have ever used. It is what humans evolved to do. I’ve posted comments on why it is so important, how to do it right, and what the research behind it shows. See:

Barefoot Running Newbie Results

and

Efficient Running for Senior Fitness

These give you some good reading on the topic. Of course, I’m biased on how good these posts are, since I wrote them.

All the best for barefoot running,

FitScientist
(Dennis)