I'm forty years old. Off and on, I've been running on the treadmill for five years or so. I've been a referee for four years. Now that I have more experience, I'm spending a lot of time in the center. That means lots of running. I'm not one of those bump-on-a-log referees that likes to stay in the center circle. I like to stay on top of the play, but not get hit by the ball :-) Therefore, I'm not entirely sedintary. That's why I don't think the 3.4 mile run Tuesday was really that big a deal. I'm not up to it every time yet, but I will be in a month or two.
Given that I'm rather a "newbie" to this community, I have a few questions I hope that you might be able to answer:
1. Treadmill vs. Pavement, any difference in conditioning/training?
2. What would you consider a reasonable race schedule? I wanna get to a 10k before summer of next year.
Eventually my hope is to become a tri-athelete. Lofty goals for someone who is 40-60 pounds over-weight! Well, I'll start out small. I have a 5k on my radar for September. No running yesterday. I had to work full time at my job than I spent the rest of the day at the restaurant. A full day of rest. LOL. Not really, since I'm on my feet all day at the restaurant.
Tonight I hope to get in 2.5 miles. We'll see how these little old legs hold up after Tuesday's run.
Waddle on,
Wes
ORN: N/A
6 comments:
I answered your first question about training on a treadmill over at Run to Win:
Track vs Treadmill: What's the Difference?
As for your second question, I do not know what kind of mileage you have under your belt or what your experience is, but a 5k in September and a mid-winter 10k should certainly be doable. Try slowly increasing your mileage by a few miles every week (with a back-off week every 3 or 4 weeks) until you are running in the mid-20s to low 30s each week. Mix in a little fartlek training, which basically means to mix in some fast running with your steady-pace running. Run for 10 or 12 minutes easy to warm-up, and then run 3 minutes easy and 1 minute hard a few times and cool down as an easy starter workout. I would not recommend trying that on a treadmill though; it's much easier outside.
You should be fine for a 5k or two on that sort of training, and would certainly be able to finish a 10k. The important thing is to enjoy the process; races are just benchmarks to know how your training is going. The training is the real point of getting out there every day.
I find the pavement is much harder to run on than the treadmill. The treadmill helps propel you along. On the pavement, it's all you.
The treadmill is wonderful for bad weather days or days when your body wants to take it easier.
For race training, I would definitely do some training outside to get used to the difference.
I forgot to mention - since you are thinking of competing in tris in the future, you might want to start working the biking and swimming in right away even if they are a year or two off. You can keep yourself a lot healthier a lot easier by working in the cross training.
Looks like you've got lots of good advice. Here's my two cents: I think that a 10K by next summer will be easy for you to achieve! As for the treadmill vs. pavement - I prefer the pavement! But, if you are training a lot on the treadmill, make sure you prep yourself with some pavement work so it's not a shock to you.
I answered your treadmill v. open road questions in a post here. Well, I may not have answered them, but I definitely gave an opinion.
Anyway, if you keep working on your base mileage, I think you should be in fine shape to run a 10k by next summer. You might be ready to run in one this fall (say, in October or November) - you just need to lengthen the run of 1 run per week - say, running 3.5 this Saturday, then 4 the week after. Then, drop back down to 3 for a week, then go to 4.5, 5, down to 3.5, etc. Be careful of increasing your mileage too quickly, and definitely be wary of trying to increase both mileage and speed in the same week.
Training for Tri's is great cross training. So even if you aren't ready to try a tri it is not to early to start swimming and biking.
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