Running adaptations

Running adaptations
Let's talk some more about how the body changes and what you can expect and be aware of as your new physicality in this sport begins to develop.
A quick review of running anatomy; Cardiac muscle will adapt first, respiratory systems next, and then body musculature, your foot strength, and then connective tissue. This order of business cannot be put into fast forward nor can the order be changed for most folks. Patience is very important. If the body feels ready in one department it may not be ready in all departments without the requisite mileage. Remember our mantra of “train, don’t strain” that comes from Arthur Lydiard.

Cardiac capability – You heart is quite possibly the hardest working muscle in the body and will adapt very quickly if you gradually increase the training loads. One of the best ways to measure this adaptation is to know your resting pulse and then check your pulse right after finishing a run. Continue to check it every 30 seconds or so following the run to see how quickly it returns to normal resting rate. While you may not always run faster each day – if you see your pulse drop to normal more quickly – you have a great reassurance that your body is working more efficiently. This means you can run more easily and farther without duress. Endurance of this type allows you to have muscles contracting consistently for longer periods of time and this is a benefit for any activity you choose to participate in; Arthur Lydiard trained all types of Olympic athletes for their respective sports by increasing their stamina.
Dr. Philip Maffetone discusses the idea that I posted last week of being able to run the same distance, over each successive month, at a slightly faster or more efficient pace as your cardiac capacity improves. Even if your speed never significantly increases – you ease in performing this effort will improve and this, as well as how fast you return to your baseline heart rate – are good indicators of adaptation.

Proprioception - You ability to “body sense” and kinetically know where you feet are; where they are in relationship to your legs or ankles, what you arms are doing while you run are some basic examples of proprioception. How many of us can stand on one leg with our eyes closed? If you practice this skill over time your body becomes more tuned into where you are in time and space. This skill is developed daily in running as we are falling down & catching ourselves with the next stride. Two attributes to refine in our body awareness while running are; making sure we are projecting most of our energy into moving forward, making sure we are landing on the ground with quiet feet. We have discussed running form in other classes and this kind of gradual awareness of how you are running will greatly enhance how well you run and keep you running farther over successive weeks. Don’t tune out your body – listen to it and focus on what you are experiencing.

Pacing – Can you start slow? Can you run a 13:00 mile, a 12:00 mile and an 11:00 mile? These are skills that take time to develop and are essential to the runner for best tactics while racing and training. After you develop the ability to hold yourself back, and adjust your expectation of running pace - then after eight week or more we’ll begin to develop the ability to slowly speed up over the course of a run. You should manage the tendency to start much faster than you can sustain as a running pace. You can experiment with running different paces and different perceived effort rates to better understand your own body and stride. Later in our program we’ll introduce the ideas of having you train with speed work and hills. For hills we generally run more slowly and for speed work we seek to sustain a sharper pace over a given range/distance to boost cardiac and respiratory function. Tuning into your PE (perceived effort) and comparing that to a stopwatch and or a heart monitor is the fastest way to develop this skill. How many of us can tell how fast the car is moving without looking at the speedometer? You will develop this as a runner over time, the ability to sense how fast you are moving by how much effort you are putting out.

Lung capacity – The body will develop the ability to process more oxygen to your muscles and feed them faster. This happens in both the short and long term. While many folks say that they breathe easier and more effectively in just 4 weeks it has been proven that there is not a known limit to how much aerobic fitness you may develop. Stretching your torso and practicing diaphragmatic breathing may further enhance this ability to move air and process oxygen. The muscles of the diaphragm and the intercostals that expand and contract the ribcage must be exercised and stretched for optimum results.
What is VO2 max? How many liters of oxygen you can process in a minute is a measure of how much work your muscles can perform before oxygen deficit. You can and will see gradual and continual increases in this capacity. To increase VO2 max capacity takes a long time and is best accomplished with some of the advance concepts of speed and hill work mentioned earlier (that we save for further on in your program). This has lasting repercussions for your everyday health and levels of concentration.

Lower leg muscles – Gastrocnemius (calf), Anterior Tibialis (front of tibia/shinbone), and Soleus (deep calf) are muscles that we are working a great deal with strength training and preparing them for distance running. You’ll see differences in muscle composition in these areas.

Stride enhancing muscles - muscles such as the hip flexors, lower abdominals, glutes are used to raise the leg for the next step and to stabilize the hips during the stride and keep us upright and aligned while headed down the road. Strength training and running are changing these muscles too and adapting them to running.

Foot strength – Feet grow throughout our life and then get tougher and stronger (and larger) as we use them. Think of the farmer who is 85 and now his body is smaller than his work wear but he has the large muscular hands of a much bigger man. Your feet will become conditioned to running and all of the smaller muscles associated with balance, ankle strength and supporting the foot grow stronger over many months of running. As long as you spend a great deal of time in the shoes and socks you will use, running and walking the conditions you will see, and traveling the distances you will race – your feet will condition themselves for your chosen event all by themselves. You’ll just need to treat them gently and stretch them occasionally – we’ll talk more about feet in a few weeks.

Fast twitch vs. slow twitch muscle fibers – fast twitch fibers run mostly off of sugars and are designed for speed. We are born with a certain number of them and while you can wake up what you have been given, to be employed in speed work – you cannot make any more fast-twitch fibers. Those without an abundance of fast twitch fibers will never be Olympic sprinters. Slow twitch fibers burn fat and fire slowly and steadily to easily resist fatigue – they are largely a predetermined quantity too but fast runners can train their fast twitch cells to burn fat and condition them for endurance.

Dr. Maffetone states that the slow twitch or aerobic fibers are the ones that are most resistant to injury, and associated with supporting the joints and that these fibers “contain a significant proportion of the body’s antioxidant activity,” so developing our capacities here is a great investment.

Capillary bed development – Both Jeff Galloway and Arthur Lydiard talk about the body’s ability to increase circulation to the capillary beds as a result of sustained exercise – having great ramification for both muscle endurance and recovery. When you exercise for long periods your body increases blood production and blood volume increases subtly. The cellular need for perfusion during these long runs forces capillary growth into new and developing muscle tissues. This allows greater transport of Oxygen and CO2 throughout the body and has beneficial lasting effects.
In Arthur Lydiard’s book he discusses a study by Swedish researcher Bengt Saltin which compared seven Swedish runners with students from Kenya’s St. Patrick’s High School – a school which has produced six, world cross country champions, many Olympic athletes and four sub 2:10 marathon runners. The research showed that there was a slight advantage among the Kenyans (over the Swedish athletes) for anaerobic capacity of about 3% and each group had equal ratios of slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers. The primary difference that Saltin found was that the Kenyans had more mitochondria per muscle cell and more capillary development in their muscle fibers – nearly twice as many capillaries. Lydiard points to this study and teases out what many coaches, anthropologists and physiologists have said since. That these kids run to school every day, and everywhere they care to go, not at a fast pace but in an aerobic way – often for 100’s of miles a year. Without creating an oxygen deficit and without stressful training programs they simply ambulate naturally so many more miles than other folks that when it does come time to train for competition - their bodies have developed great vascular depth and energy generating capacity due to adaptations any runner might produce.

Mental stamina - while the endorphins come from the brain and are often associated with the “runner’s high” sensation this is only one component of mental process in the runner. Many folks may claim to never see the runner’s high phenomena and yet they reference the seasoned knowledge that all runs have high and low points. They have a large “aches and pains database” that they can reference to understand what will pass and what is something that will cancel their run. They use mental tricks, disassociate from low intensity pain, and compare their current toil to previous challenges. The longer a person runs the more tools that have to motivate themselves further and the higher their tolerance becomes to high intensity exercise. Please do not misunderstand here that - I continue to stress that when it hurts, smile, and if it hurts too much to smile, slow down or stop. Yet over time you do get to know that “hurts so good” feeling and that type of achievement translates well to the rest of your life very well. We’ll have an entire class in mental process in later weeks.

Changes in metabolism – While running should never be used as a diet program - over the long term you will see body mass changes and BMI will be smaller. You burn a large number of calories over the course a week’s running and often this will cause your base metabolic rate to rise. Muscle mass consumes more calories at rest than fat cells do and thus as you develop lower leg and stride enhancing muscle mass you also shift that resting metabolic rate. Running requires 1.7ml of oxygen per meter for every kilogram of body weight. So for example; a man weighing 160lbs (72.5kg) would use 123cc of oxygen for every 3.28 feet he travels. A 120lb woman will only use 92.5cc of oxygen over the same distance – almost a 25% increase in efficiency. When running you start the run on simple sugars (glucose & then glycogen) but as soon as you have begun a regular aerobic rate for running the body begins to synthesize fats and carbohydrates together for muscle fuel. Galloway’s book cites that after 30 minutes of running the body is using fuel that is comprised of more than 50% free fats (free fatty acids and triglycerides). Along with your light strength training routine this aerobic training will leave you with greater definition and changes that most folks see as a positive benefit of an activity they really enjoy.

How long can I expect to develop these adaptations and how long can I keep these adaptations?

Lydiard commented that he continued to see cardiac and respiratory function increase in athletes for years and felt that the greatest gains were often seen in the third year of consistent training. I mention this to emphasize that while you will experience great gains early in your program – you are just getting started on you potential as a runner. Other coaches have taken this gradual progress even further – Joe Vigil coaches Dena Kastor, one of America’s fastest women in history. Vigil worked with Dena over the course of nearly six years and they increased her lung capacity from 72 mls to a VO2 MAX of 81.3 mls, one of the highest ever recorded in an American athlete.

In the book Born to Run, author Christopher McDougall cites analysis done by Dr. Dennis Bramble, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Utah. Dr. Bramble examined finishing times by age division for 2004 New York marathon participants. He found that runners begin to peak after 19 years of age and reach full physical potential at 27 years of age but take heart – yes, they do begin to decline in capacity after age 27 but how long does it take for them to reach the same level of ability that they had at age 19? Sixty-four years of age. Go ahead and read that again slowly because the spell checker is on, I said you would have to be age sixty-four, before a nineteen year old could beat you – provided you were both still training. The statistics on master’s athletes and ultra running confirms this idea and dispels the previous notion that runners only improve for seven years. They may enjoy great capacity and be able to run well for much longer than we previously thought possible. The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico and the Kenyans and Kalahari people run their entire lives, existing without grocery stores ( you have to run for food) and without other means of transport.

Galloway states that muscles can perform the amount of work that they have been accustomed to during the previous 14 days. There is very little loss of adaptations over the short term. If your running is a regular habit you should be able to handle intervals of rest and inactivity without detriment. Loss of some of these running specific attributes occurs slowing over a curve of time. When you are getting back to your program after a long lapse expect to have a short dip in running comfort followed by you feeling more yourself. Folks that have a regular mileage program find that they can sharpen their speed and endurance for a particular race in just 5-8 weeks depending on their physical state. Most runners plan to take a break from running one or two times a year to stay fresh and let the body rest & see no adverse affects from doing so.

What can I do to add depth to these running specific attributes?
We'll continue to talk about this in coming weeks but for now here is some food for thought.

Vary your route by distance, by elevation gain and loss, by surface, by purpose. These all can test and challenge your adaptations and thus enhance your adaptations. Design a four week session for any one attribute and develop it in this mini training period. This tactic periodization, is a regular technique for elite athletes. They pick apart the challenges of their particular race and design a 4 week interval where they develop the needed skills for that challenge. These periods of specific training can follow each other consecutively without substantial loss of ability and allows them to have a manageable training load while sharpening for a particular event.

Add drills that support balance, movement in a different plane, and activate different muscle fibers.

Sports or activities that translate well to running and enhancing your current adaptations: Tai Chi, Yoga, dance, weight training, rowing, Pilates, plyometric exercise and drills, wobble or rocker boards.

Run year round – these skills develop over time and cannot be rushed without facing injury. So apply patience and mileage while keeping in mind that runners see the biggest gains in the third year or more and that many improve over the course of the their lives.

Run with someone. A little competitiveness, watching someone else’s strengths, having external inspiration to push, can all aid in getting to new and higher places with your running.

Barefooting or de-structuring your shoe program is another way to mix it up and we’ll talk about this in greater detail in another class. In the meantime I’ll just tell you that we start not by running but by walking around the house barefoot. This is advanced territory and merits further investigation and discussion before giving it a try.