The Engineered Boulderer

After my very first half-marathon I took a bit of a break, both because I didn’t do so well, and because I got sick. Then a few weeks ago I felt it was finally time to get back on my feet (so to speak). One of my first runs, however, was an utter disappointment. It was a 6 km run, but after 4 km I had to take a break because I had severe shortness of breath and a tightness in the chest. Needless to say I called my doctor there very next morning and got an appointment.

At the doctor I had several tests done, but I had normal lung function and capacity. In general a lack of anything wrong. It is frustrating not to know why I had that experience, but I guess the best estimate is that I tried to hard after a long period of inactivity. That is why I am now starting slow. I run several times a week, and also runs around 6 km, but I have very low intensity.

I am taking advantage of this low-intensity period to take a good hard look at my running technique. Last fall I bought the ChiRunning book and DVD. It is a program that makes sense, if you (as a skeptic like me) can get over the life-force mumbo jumbo. A friend of mine who is studying to become a physiotherapist also looked through the book one evening, and said the approach also made sense given the latest research in motion physiology. I don’t want to got into all the details of ChiRunning right now, but after the summer I will probably write a more in-depth entry about my experiences.

Now, ChiRunning is based around the concept of gradual progress, and when I first started it went well, but after I had the first focus down pat I thought “I can simply let the other focuses enter my running along the way”… Wrong! Not taking the time to let your body learn each focus properly is definitely not a recipe for success. This time around I am taking my time making so called form intervals for each focus. A form interval is simply a normal run where you have a timer set to go off every minute. So for one minute you have to concentrate on the focus you have decided on for the run, the next minute you just relax, and so on.

I’ll spend the summer doing mainly form intervals until I have the technique covered and then I will start training for some of the races I want to run this fall.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Hobbies, Life, Me, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.