15
‘24 minutes, 3 and a half miles, easy felt good, nice rhythm, trying to kick my legs back at my bum and stand tall.’
Break those distances down
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some good trainers over the years and people who give you good advice. The easy thing to think is you’ve got to run loads and loads and loads to get faster and fitter. In fact, to run fast you simply have to run fast, and to do that you have to break it down into minisegments and interval work. The idea with interval work is that you run a lot faster than you normally would, but not to the point where your technique is suffering. But you can run 400 metres faster than you can run a mile so you break that mile down into four reps of 400 metres, so you do 4 x 400 metres off a two-minute recovery. In other words, you have a two-minute gap between every 400 metres. The advantage of the recovery is that you can run each 400 metres faster than if you ran one continuous mile flat out.
Listen to your body
You also need to listen to your body. A cliché, but true. I would often go out and get injured because I was overtraining, pushing myself too much, trying to get too fit too fast. If you’ve got that mentality, you’ll end up knackered and unable to train so it becomes a vicious circle. The best advice I ever got was from Chris Davies’s dad, Terry, in Telford. He trained a lot of the good runners up there. I’d train the first day, then a second, and the third day I’d go running and I’d have to stop. I went to have a massage and my calves were so tight, but I didn’t realise it was my calves till I had the massage. So after I broke my foot I phoned Terry up and said: ‘Look, I’m really out of shape because I haven’t trained for seven months. I’m struggling, carrying a lot of weight.’ He said: ‘Look, just do twenty minutes every other day for the first five or six weeks.’ So I did that: I was able to run with no injuries and after four weeks I found myself getting faster and faster, not having to stop as much. In short, I was listening to my body; not overdoing it. I was enjoying each run I went on because my muscles weren’t killing me. It’s hard to listen to your body when you’re obsessive! But if you get too enthusiastic, you’re just going to end up on the runners’ scrapheap. As I write, I’m being sensible. Not as fit as I have been, but doing nicely enough. Getting there slowly. Every other day I do my nice little four-mile loop because that’s all my body can take at the moment. To push it further would be silly. Once I get three or four months’ training under my belt I’ll push it a bit further.
Run tall
There’s lots of advice you can give on posture etc., but then again there are so many exceptions to the rule I’m not sure how worthwhile that advice is. For example, I watched Paula Rad-cliffe run and her head bobbed like a crazed chicken’s – hardly classic – but she was winning all her races. So I thought, I’m going to try that, and it worked for me because it stopped me thinking about having sore legs. I was just focusing on bobbing my head about. But you tell any coach that and he’ll laugh you off the track.
Coaches will tell you that to run well you’ve got to feel that you’re running tall. When you’re not fit you slouch and sit on your hips and your stride gets shorter. A lot of the time I used to sit on my hips and shuffle along because a lot of the runners I ran with were long-distance runners and they shuffled along on a shorter stride. To increase your stride you’ve got to do a lot of drills – get your knees up high. It’s hard to change your natural stride pattern, though. People tend to have a naturally long or short one, and sometimes you just have to go with what you’ve got. But the fitter you get, the stronger you get; the less you sit on your hips, the better the rhythm you’ll have. When I wasn’t fit and I was tired, I had a tendency to run out of energy; then my shoulders would slacken and I’d sit on my hips and shuffle along. But when I was fit I always felt I was pushing the top half of my body through, and that makes you feel you’re having a good run. And if you feel you’re having a good run that tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Run on the balls of your feet
The best runners run on the balls of their feet because it’s quicker, whereas if you go heel-toe, heel-toe you’re doing more work for the same distance. If you go toe toe, toe-toe, you’re going to have energy and be quicker, but it’s hard to run on your toes. When I’m running well I feel my feet are hitting the ground quicker, but I’m still not running on the balls of my feet.
Give those fry-ups a miss
My ideal diet would be a slice of toast before I run, then porridge for breakfast when I get back. Then I’d have tuna salad at lunch and fish with boiled or jacket potatoes for dinner and natural or Greek yoghurt with a banana and a bit of honey. When I’m not training I fall back into the bad roasties and fry-ups habit, but when I’m training I just can’t do it. I used to run a food diary as well as the running diary. As I say, I’m obsessive. If I was tempted to eat something bad, the diary would stop me because I knew I’d have to write it down at the end of the night.