Month: June 2023

Balance!

~ e.v. ~ 4 Comments

Since I got my Running Dynamics Pod I’ve been focusing really hard on trying to get my left/right balance to centre. I think I’ve probably always had a strong right bias because I remember years ago noticing that the heel wears down on my right trainer much faster than the left. I think I probably overstride on my right leg, but not on the left. I became a bit more focused on this lately because my right hip keeps getting tight (which happens every so often) and then it progressed into knee pain too.

The good news is that my balance is improving! Not only that, but my overall contact time has reduced a little bit and my flight time (i.e. time off the ground) has increased quite a lot, which are proxies for good/efficient form.

But the trend still has me at only about 51.5%, so there’s still a way to go.

It’s actually quite difficult to work on this, because there isn’t much information online about left/right imbalances. Mostly advice is pretty generic and either not really actionable or not useful, so I’ve had to experiment quite a lot.

I’ve found generally that it helps to foam roll my quads and hips before I run, but some days the balance is way off and there’s not much I can do about it. I find that it’s worse on faster runs and tends to go downhill as I fatigue. However, it is improving. The outlier dot on the 11th is Two Castles, which was a 10k I ran at roughly tempo pace, which had me at about 54.7%. The last most dot is a 9k I ran yesterday at roughly the same tempo pace, and I was on 52.8%, which is still way off centre but a huge improvement.

I think I’m having most success with thinking about pushing off from the ground behind me. There are two competing schools of thought on this. One is to think about pulling your feet off the ground quickly, the other is to think about pushing behind you. I’ve tried both and I seem to get along better with the pushing idea.

I find that when I think about pushing, the weight in my feet shifts a bit more underneath and maybe behind me and my body seems to lean forward to compensate. The slight lean is important, I think the pushing idea doesn’t really make sense without it.

The second cue is to think about keeping my hips level and forward, which seems to help a lot with balance. It also kind of creates a pull through my abdomen and feels like (although I’m sure it doesn’t look like) the kind of classic elite runner pose with the strong hip extension that you see often in very fast runners, like Eluid Kipchoge here (who has the most graceful and effortless form I’ve seen):

For exercises to support this, I’m mostly focusing on:

  1. Stretching and foam rolling my quads and hip flexors, because I sit down too much and tightness here interferes with proper hip extension
  2. Core/abdominal exercises like bicycles and dead bugs
  3. Hamstring/glute strength like exercise ball curls (I bought such a ball for Monty, so I might as well use it!) and extensions against a resistance band.

You can spend a lot of time doing general hip strength exercises like fire hydrants and bridges and even squats, and I used to, but I’ve become a bit sceptical that they realy apply to running.

Two Castles

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The Two Castles 10k went…. Ok.

Two Castles is a 10k run between Warwick Castle and Kenilworth Castle. It’s a nice idea with two main disadvantages: 1. Kenilworth is about 40m higher than Warwick so it’s really the wrong way around, and 2. There’s not a lot of shade on the roads between them.

As is becoming tradition, it was a race day so the weather was really hot. There were a few familiar faces from parkrun there so we were standing around before hand, chatting in the grounds of Warwick Castle. Castles tend to have quite wide courtyard areas and relatively short walls, which means they aren’t very shady. I could feel my exposed skin getting baked even at 8:30 in the morning. The past few runs have been unusually warm for the time of year, but I think we’re now in official heat wave territory. I have to credit the organisers with handling it well, though. Compared to the Solihull half marathon, which I ran last August during a heatwave, there were more water stations and a lot more marshalls around.

Unlike on some previous races, my death-wish tolerance was quite low this time so I took it pretty steady and ran just under 48 minutes. Last weekend I did a 13k at 4:30/km, this one was 10k at 4:45/km. So that’s quite a bit slower. I decided that if I raced it, I might hit 45 minutes (which I wouldn’t even be happy with for a race effort anyway) and I’d feel grim for the next day or two. So I kept it at more of a mid tempo effort and felt all the better for it. It was actually very congested anyway, not helped by the weather causing people to slow down all the way along the course and walk up hills, so even at a more sedate pace I was having to weave around people the whole way, which meant I was expending a bit more energy than I should have been for the pace.

I think I made the right choice. One of my Strava enemies rivals friends who finished less than a minute behind me on the 13km last weekend ran it in 45:30 but said she felt sick the whole way. Been there, done that, this way was much better.

The hills weren’t too bad. Maybe I’m just getting better at them. A lot of people walking them whereas to me they felt alright. It was quite an undulating route with a lot of gradual climbing. Anything steep was pretty short lived.

Warwick Castle. Sorry about the lighting.
He didn’t run it with us

So anyway, let’s talk about ground contact time balance. This was the worst one yet, with 54.7% of my ground contact time on the right foot. 54.7% maybe doesn’t sound that bad looking at percentage points, but in terms of actual percentage difference it means I spent 20% more time on my right foot than my left, and that’s a lot!

I don’t want to read too much into one reading though. I’m using the Garmin Running Dynamics Pod, which clips onto the back of my shorts. I suspect that if it’s not perfectly centred it’ll bias it one way or the other, so it’s more something you have to look at in terms of trends rather than single data points. Regardless, it fits with my suspicion that I tend to rely on my right leg for power a lot more, which is going to show up on faster runs and hills.

In doing a few easy runs since, I’ve found that my left hip flexor is tight (well I knew that already) and I tend to move nearer to 50% if I really focus on pushing against that tightness through my stride. Yesterday I did a run that that was roughly 50-50 for the first few kilometres, which I think is because I did some squats and hip hikes to warm up. There’s lots to work on.

13

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I went for the 8 mile race instead of the 3 after all. I think it’s officially 8.2 miles. My watch got it as 13km. The conditions were warm and sunny, similar to the last few races. You don’t expect to have so much sun in England, but maybe that’s climate change for you.

I struggled with the sun in the last two races so I was a bit apprehensive. The route was on country roads which were heavily shaded in places and totally open in others. We started at 10:30 so some of the shade gradually reduced as the sun moved overhead. I was quite aggressive in trying to minimise my sun exposure on the course, even if it was just running right next to a hedge that gave my legs a bit of cover. I also carried my own bottle of water because these tiny charity runs tend to provide water in cups which are very difficult to drink from while moving.

And it went like this…

Oh what’s that? Is that even pacing? Yes, it went exactly to plan. I decided to go out at a 4:30/km pace (22:30 5k, 45:00 10k – nice round numbers), and I actually stuck to the plan and kept it solid the whole way.

I had the fun experience of gradually overtaking all the people who hadn’t paced it as well, which I was on the other side of last time!

The end result was that I felt great when I finished, with no hint of dehydration. It was a huge win for sensible pacing and a confidence boost in general after a string of races where I’ve struggled. I think the water helped too.

It’s not all good though. My right knee is feeling a bit niggly. Since this run, I now have a Garmin Running Dynamics Pod which gives me some more stats on my running form. I’ve used it twice so far and on both runs I spent a lot more time on my right leg than my left leg and the difference gets bigger on hills and trail paths (and hilly trails, well that’s even worse). That’s interesting to know and is probably my problem. Unfortunately it can’t tell me why, or how to balance it. You could take the view that the left leg is weaker and my body is compensating. You could also take the view that the left leg is working optimally and the right leg is slow (after all, a short ground contact time is good).

I need to figure this out on my own, but I think it’ll involve a lot of single leg plyometrics.

I have a 10k this weekend, which is the last race in the near future (thankfully!). I’ll be interested to see what my L/R balance is like on a sustained race effort.

Work

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

Work is annoying me a bit. I’m off this week, so Friday was my last day. My manager was off on Friday. I should have been tidying something up and getting it finished before being on holiday, but what actually happened was one of the sales staff decided to take advantage of my manager not being in to start harassing me directly. She phoned my personal mobile, which I ignored because I didn’t recognise the number. Then she phoned the landline and my sister picked it up! The reason for the call was to ask me to jump into a video meeting with her. FFS, just send an email. 🤦

So we had a video call for her to demonstrate something which my manager has already told her several times is correct behaviour and she doesn’t understand her test data. “But the test data is fine” she insisted. Anyway, apparently this was super urgent because it affects her ability to show it to clients, so I spent several hours going through it to find exactly where her test data wasn’t what she thought it was. Several emails later she still doesn’t really understand and helpfully suggests “I’m happy to do another call if it helps clarify”. No!

Needless to say I didn’t get any actual work done, and I was trying to fix a bug that will actually affect her ability to do show it to clients, so that will have to wait a week now. 🤷 Aaarrrgggghhhh. She is a nice person but oh my god.