It feels as though I’ve done a lot of whingeing over the last 3 months. I’ve gone from chest infection to pulled calves to meniscal tears and it’s beginning to sound like I’m manufacturing my own get out of the London Marathon free card.

It was rather convenient then that Craig Carroll contacted me last week to offer me a trial session of his services. He is billed as a Performance and Injury Specialist and that is just what the doctor ordered. At least, that is what I wanted the Doc to order, instead she wrote out a prescription for no more running.

I tore the prescription up and went along to see Craig instead.

Craig never once gave me the impression that sitting back and giving up was an option, in fact he never even hinted that my knee injury should hold me back from my goals. Craig himself has a military background and has experienced being written off following injury. Apparently he suffered horrible shin splints on one of the mammoth, full kit, training runs and was discarded by the military doctors. It sometimes feels like civvy doctors can follow the route of least resistance too, if your knee hurts, stop using it. Simples.

So back to my session. Craig set me off doing the ministry of silly walks. Side to side waddling and full on drunk staggering, all of which apparently enabled him to determine potential problems with my gait and assess imbalances.

I think the results suggested I may over use my left side to compensate for slight weaknesses in my right side and the basis of Craig’s style is understanding that the body works as a chain. The site of your pain is not necessarily the cause of your pain, so for example a blister on your right toe my lead you to alter your pose so that you end up with lower back pain or an overuse injury on the opposite leg.

Having completed the initial assessment we moved into the treatment room where Craig started to do a little work on my feet. He had me doing repeated squats and lunges – both of which are exercises that I never do because of the knee pain. I get sharp pains in both knees and they feel like they are about to give way. Still, I did as I was told and lunged on command. As I was doing it Craig was manipulating my feet. Not quite sure what he was doing, it didn’t feel like much but all of a sudden I was able to lunge without the knee pain. Odd.

He did a little more work on my feet, loosening up the joints before discovering my special toe. My second toe on the right foot has been “special” for a long time now. I often refer to it as my broken toe as it makes me yell like crazy when it gets knocked or bent. He whipped out a special little tool that looked like a perfectly moulded Alessi can opener and started working the hooked end into my toe tendons (I later discovered the tool was from I Am Tools). After 5 minutes of deeply painful massage he was able to bend my dodgy toe back into the sole of my foot.

I remain quite impressed that he discovered my achilles heel quite so quickly. Could it be the source of the pains in my left leg? Who knows.

We finished off with a series of exercises that I could use to warm up for a running session. They were a little bizarre or maybe balletic would be a better description. Either way they are a bit hard to describe without pictures. They were a form of lunge with a plie style arm movement but with the arms going in opposite directions. I started the move under my own steam and then Craig stepped in to force the movement just a step further. Taking me beyond the point at which I felt I would fail or fall was designed to inspire muscle confidence. It worked actually. Back under my own steam I was able to take move further than before and still stay standing.

I took something very positive away from the session. I learnt that I can do more than I think and that it is also possible for me to move without pain. I got a small dose of muscle confidence and it’s much easier to move when you aren’t waiting anxiously for the next problem to appear.

When I ran the next day after my session with Craig Carroll, I started to get the usual twinge with my knee but I remembered his action of altering the position of my feet and so tried adjusting them myself. A slight outturn of my left foot and the pain went again.

I’m very happy with the result of my session, I could get quite used to the idea of having a personal trainer, especially one that works so specifically to my goals and treats me as an individual, accepting the strengths and weaknesses that are wrapped up in the package.

If you are in central London and want a personal trainer to help you achieve your goals then I would really recommend getting in contact with Craig Carroll for a session.

Crossing the line at the end of the Great North run I felt elated, 10 mins later I was sick and feverish.

Any fitness I had in September disappeared over the next 5 weeks as I feebly battled a chest infection. Now that I’ve more or less cleared my chest and started venturing back onto the treadmill or out for a Grid Run I find myself struck down once again, this time by a bolt to the back of the knee. I can’t run without yelping and trying to do so has left me with a permanent limp.

This really does not bode well for my marathon training plans.

I haven’t been resting on my laurels though. While my body may well have been degenerating rapidly my mind has been busy researching training schedules and drawing up plans.

Hal Higdon has a series of well respected schedules available but they are relentless and require you to commit to 5 runs per week and a max weekly mileage of 44 for the intermediate program. At my pace that’s a lot of my life to spend running.

I accept that marathon training is supposed to be gruelling, the reward doesn’t come after a days pain but after 4 months of commitment and then a days pain but if there are alternatives I’m going to be tempted.

Fortunately there are alternatives and plenty of them.

One of my overriding requirements for this marathon is that I’ve got to get faster – not fast, but I don’t want to be running around that course after 7 hours. There is one schedule on the market that claims to increase the pace of anyone who sticks to the plan and that is FIRST from the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training. It seems that even Boston qualifiers have achieved PRs using the FIRST method of 3 runs per week, and if it can work for someone at the top of their game its bound to do something for me.

Their method is based on a 3+2 schedule called “Run Less, Run faster”, not to be mistaken with “Train Less, Run Faster” because although you only run 3 times a week you are supposed to take part in some fairly energetic cross training on 2 other days in the week.

The key to the success of the FIRST plan seems to be related to the nature of the 3 runs. Each one is very specific and targeted at improving a key element of your running fitness. Key Run 1 is a track repeat session, ideally suited to treadmill workouts, Key run 2 is a tempo workout and Key run 3 is the Long Run a familiar staple of any marathon plan. RunnersWorld has a useful article giving an overview of the approach and Fetcheveryone has a very active forum on the topic.

The Furman website has the marathon schedules available to download along with the target pace charts.

I’ve spent a few hours knocking up a spreadsheet that includes the FIRST Novice Marathon Plan and the FIRST Half Marathon plan along with all the recommended paces for runners achieving 5k times anywhere between 15 and 40 mins. The spreadsheet personalises the schedule so that you can select from the drop down box your latest 5k performance and see each workout broken down with your specific target paces. I’ve gone to quite a bit of effort with it because I wanted to be able to print off a clear schedule for use on the treadmill.

If you want to try it out yourself feel free to download it and test it out:

FIRST Personalised Marathon and Half Marathon Schedule for Excel.

Now all I have to do is get over my knee problems and start running.

Here’s an excellent video from Terra Plana showing the speed with which you can transition from heel strike to forefoot running just by going barefoot. In the video, Barefoot Ralph is taken through his paces by Lee Saxby who runs masterclasses in the Pose technique.

I heard about the video after listening to the interview with Christopher McDougall on the Living Barefoot podcast.

Learning the Skill of Barefoot Running from Terra Plana on Vimeo.

Shakti joined me for a short run around the block last night. She hasn’t been running for a few months so she was even more reticent than usual. I’ve said before that running is a ridiculously psychological sport but Shakti has got to be the most psychological runner I know. We start at a reasonable pace but 20 seconds in she appears to start running backwards, I grab her sleeve and we carry on as normal for a while. Then I feel really strong resistance and find that she actually has turned around and started running in the opposite direction. I get behind now and start nudging her forwards in the right direction.

Despite the pulling, nudging and prodding, I really enjoy these runs, they are quite a bit slower than I’m used to and I feel comfortable and chatty. At just over 8 mins per km I still have the breath to holler abuse in the true sargeant major style – “Move that ass you good for nothing idler!”. Nice aren’t I.

The funny thing is, the moment we turn around and I announce we are on the way back, Shakti starts sprinting like a banshee. This shuts me up, I have to start my puffing billy routine while I tag along behind her desperately trying to keep her within my sights. Needless to say she doesn’t return the favour and pull me along by my sleeve.

So my plan for todays commute home was to go slow. I wanted to add a “slow for me” slow run to the routine instead of every run being at the same pace. As I set off it seemed to be paying off, despite the niggles in my hip I was feeling fairly comfortable and I didn’t feel the need to jump in front of a bus within the first 2k.

I had to change my route and run to my home today. Shakti is out go-cart racing or something exciting like that and is therefore not available to make my tea or run me a lovely soapy bath. What a bummer eh? Also the sun is staying above the horizon for a bit a longer now so I also intended to shift my route to take in a bit of riverside beauty. I made 3 attempts to hit the river around Brentford but each time I was introduced to a lovely riverside promenade that lasted about 10 metres before being thrown back onto the grotty Brentford High St. I was cursing the inefficiency of my run until I got home and loaded the satellite data into SportTracks – another perfect 10 km run. How lovely is that??? I’m going to have to make those irritating riverside detours every time though now.

SportTracks also revealed the truth about my pace. Although slow, it was pretty much on a par with my previous commuting runs. The average pace for the 10 km route today was 07:52/km, the average for the previous 3 commutes has been: 07:51, 07:50, 07:51. You’d think I must run like a metronome but this excel graph shows the degree of variation.

I find it odd that I can complete the route literally within seconds of my previous time despite setting off with completely different pacing intentions. Psychological I tell you!

I’m a bit out of sync with my posting but I wanted to slip in an update for the weekend which was quite active on the running front.

Firstly my new shoes arrived: Asics Kayano X11′s and Asics Gel Trabuco trail shoes. The first pair were simply a direct replacement for my existing Kayano’s – a touch larger so they shouldn’t bruise my toes. My parents were visiting as well so my mum ended up leaving with a fine pair of previously owned running shoes with only 158 km on the clock.

I took my folks to Richmond Park to show them the sights and used the opportunity to get a video of my running gait. Booyaa has stoked my interest in running styles by mentioning in a recent comment, the debate between pose and chi running styles. I thought it would be useful to see what my natural running style is before I consider altering it.

Here is the movie:

My 66 year old mum features in the video, she is only at the back because I absolutely forbade her from overtaking me during filming but the moment the filming finished she whizzed past me in her new trainers.

I think I’m demonstrating a definate heel strike in that clip, which doesn’t bode well for me ever getting any faster, every footstrike is the equivalent of me slamming on the brake. I need a video of an “ok” runner to compare techniques with. Would I be better to try raising the knee or kicking my legs out at the back for example? Any of you bloggers got a video to share?

I’ve managed to find a clip of someone demonstrating the pose running technique:

It looks pretty strange – as though the guy is hopping on one leg and bashing his trailing toe into the tarmac, however I think it also demonstrates most of the essential features of pose:

1) Strike on ball of foot, not heel
2) Land with knee bent
3) Land under Centre of gravity with knee, ankle and shoulder in vertical alignment.
4) Lift ankle under hips
5) High cadence resulting in very brief contact with ground.

Not sure where to go with this now, the pose technique looks too far away from my natural style to be feasible but there must be some simple improvements to be made.

I went on the treadmill this lunchtime and tried the Balke test for determining my V0₂ max score. This involves running as far as you can in 15 mins, I actually ran for 20 mins so I obviously wasn’t pushing hard enough, but I still managed to get up a fair speed. I actually managed to run at 11 km/hr (not for long) without being propelled off the back of the treadmill. I wouldn’t even dream of running that speed a couple of months ago. Things really seem to be coming together with this running malarky.

Anyway, back to VO₂. As with everything else I do, I have to get thoroughly obsessed with the science behind my hobby. Hence the purchase of all the sporting gadgets, training software, books and whizzy excel spreadsheets. I recently bought Daniels Running Formula which aims to tell you exactly what pace you should train at, based on your VO₂ max. So there would be a set pace for the long slow runs and another for marathon, 10k and interval runs. Trouble is I am too slow to even get onto his tables, so that was another waste of money!

The runningforfitness website is a techies dream. It is awash with converters and running calculators to tell you everything from predicted race paces to speed improvements associated with weight loss. I love it. The link I have given above enables you to determine your VO₂ max figure based on the 15 min run and then tells you what pace you should train at.

Apparently I should do my long slow runs at a pace of 08.03 and it reckons I should complete the 10k in 69 mins. Not sure if that figure is based on me running the race tomorrow or after a training schedule. I would hope to be running slightly faster than that by October but we shall see.

I am so impressed by the runningforfitness site that I have taken up PHP programming to recreate some of the conversion tables on my website. Not that I need another project at the moment – I’m supposed to be submitting my thesis in 2 weeks, instead I am spending every evening cursing about some line of code that refuses to do what I want.

I was reading the other night that the most efficient running style is associated with exactly 180 strides per minute. Apparently, almost all athletes run at this cadence regardless of distance and therefore speed. The faster runners just take longer strides.

Anyway, I thought I better check it out. So on this mornings run I discovered I take 158 strides per minute. So it looks like I’m not an athlete. Darn am I surprised.

So now what to do about it? It is suggested that most runners would benefit by taking slightly shorter steps and increasing cadence but if I take shorter steps I’ll be running backwards. Also, efficiency is not all its cracked up to be. Efficient runners use less calories, which is pants! Inefficiency rules – as do cream cakes.

**UPDATE 14/01/07**

Thought I ought to provide a link to a more informed opinion on running cadence. The endurance coach
records cadence as the number of times 1 foot hits the ground in a minute ie. half the figure I quoted above, and on his site he details a few training exercises to help increase your cadence. Must admit that non of them involve listening to music with the target bpm.

**SECOND UPDATE 12/02/07**

I have a new gadget in my sights (Polar RS800SD – but more of this later) and it has yet again triggered an interest in the running cadence issue. It’s obviously my cycling roots that encourage this obsessive trait with cadence. The RS800SD monitors and displays both stride length and cadence so that you can schedule training sessions to focus solely on this issue. As they say at polar, there are two ways to run faster: moving your legs at a higher cadence or taking longer steps.

Here is a link to the polar article on cadence and running efficiency, where they make a few suggestions for increasing pace:

“A good way of improving stride length is to undertake specific strength work, like running hills, running in soft sand, or running up steps. A six-week training period including strength work should result in noticeable improvements in stride length, and if combined with some faster leg speed work (such as short strides at best 5km pace), noticeable improvements should be seen in overall speed, as well.”

So it looks like I need to ramp up the treadmill as well introducing fartlek.