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If You Run, Keep A Journal

Posted: July 5, 2008
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Author: Shéamus
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Filed under: Workouts
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Tags: 30 Minute Days, Running Journal

Day 34 Amazing what a few small changes can make.

Today was my day off. No, don’t worry, not running - food. I eat clean six days a week, and have one ‘anything goes’ day as a reward. It’s usually a Saturday. This works for my diet - and will work for yours - because the unexpected spike in calories and nutritional content surprises my body and keeps my metabolism interested. It prevents my metabolic rate from slowing down or, worse, going into any kind of ‘starvation mode’, and hording fat as a result.

Here’s what I ate today:

10am - Two slices of cheese on toast, a glass of orange juice, and a pot of coffee. Very thick wholemeal bread (at least one inch per slice), and lots and lots of mature cheese. It was fantastic.

2pm - It was my youngest son’s school fete today. They had a barbecue. I had a hamburger (in bun), and then a small coconut cake, a chocolate cup cake and a small sausage roll (all home-made).

4pm - Half a litre of Pepsi.

I ran around 5pm. It was the best run I’ve had to date. Check the stats.

Day 34 - Splits

And the chart:

Day 34 - Chart

A full 10-second improvement on yesterday’s average. What does that tell us? Perhaps that my low-GI diet the other six days of the week isn’t giving me enough or the right kind of carbohydrates to keep me fresh through my workout. That’s certainly a possibility.

But I made some other little changes today. For example, it was so hot that I decided to run without any kind of shirt. Yes, I ran topless. It had a major impact on my performance.

When I was very small, I was involved in quite a serious car accident. It put me in a coma for a week and caused a few lifetime problems for me, one of which was damaging my nervous system. What happens to me is that my body has some problems regulating its heat. If I get too hot, too quickly, it can take me a long time to cool back down. I’m very, very rarely cold (although it has been more of an issue since I dropped all this weight). When I’m running, of course, I get hot, and I sweat, and as I get hotter (certainly when it’s 25C+), I start to really sweat. This causes me to dehydrate moderately and naturally has an impact on my speed.

However, while it was very warm today, there was also a soft breeze, and because my upper body was shirtless this kept me cool for virtually my entire run. I still sweated, but it was pretty quickly whisked away. As a result, I was able to run faster more consistently. Yes, there were times when my speed dropped as I tried to recover from a particularly fast burst, but I soon picked up the pace again.

I also ran with my Garmin permanently on the ‘pace’ setting today. I wasn’t bothered too much about anything else, only rarely checking my one-mile lap and overall times. Because of this, I could focus clearly on where my pace was, and make adjustments accordingly.

It’s the little things like this that can make a massive difference. However, unless you keep a record of your workouts, in a few months, or even weeks, it can be very difficult to remember these minor changes. And this is obviously significant, because today is a big day for me (I’m nearing the eight-minute/mile average) - what if in a few weeks I’m struggling at a much slower speed, want to get back to where I am now, but can’t remember how I did it?
This is why you must keep a journal of some kind. I have this blog, but I also keep notes in the software that came with my Garmin watch. You could just as easily use a cheap diary or a text file on your computer.

I log: