Tag: coaching

Stopping

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

My running isn’t going very well at the moment. This is partly because of the virus I had a few weeks ago (COVID?) and partly because of the coaching. The virus sapped my energy levels, which is fine, but I feel, ironically, that the coaching is intefering with rebuilding because there is such a focus on strength work that it’s leaving me with too little energy for running. The outcome is that I seem to be paying to add kilograms to my deadlift, which isn’t that exciting and not something I’d really put a monetary value on, if I’m honest. So I feel like we’ve lost the plot a bit. Last week I felt really down some days, possibly from the virus, possibly from fatigue, and thought about it a lot, and… I’ve mentally checked out from it now. Before my next session I will email her and let her know I won’t be continuing with it past the current month, but to be honest if we could just stop right now I’d be happy. It feels like when you give notice in a job and suddenly it seems completely pointless.

In gaming news… I did get bored of Mad Max after all. I went back to Fallout 4 but I struggled to be interested in that too. It just seems very mediocre. In the end I went with Wolfenstein: The New Order, which I must have got free a long time ago but never played. I had low expectations but they were completely surpassed – this game is great! It has you go from breaking out of a hospital to breaking in and out of a concentration camp to stealing nazi helicopters then stealing a nazi nuclear submarine and then infiltrating a nazi moon base to steal the nuclear warhead encryption keys. All in a day’s work for Captain Blazkowicz. But it’s well written despite being kind of stupid and doesn’t take itself seriously at all. I really liked Frau Engel, the seondary villain.

I enjoyed it so much that I bought a pack of three other Wolfenstein games. I have now started the next one (The New Colossus) and one of the more unusual things is that you can overhear some of the nazi enemies talking about the events of the first game and discussing how they found it traumatic to be hiding from the American lunatic with the laser rifle while he slaughtered their friends and that they still have nightmares from it. Err, sorry 🤷‍♀️

Coaching!

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

I’m about half way through the three month coaching period now and I can say it’s definitely improved my form. Has it improved my performance? Well I don’t really know, because I’d normally measure it by my Parkrun times, but we’ve been doing an interval workout on Thursday evenings, so by Saturday morning I’m not recovered enough for a 5k race effort (which I learnt the hard way – several times, just to make sure). I have a reasonably flat 10k on Sunday which I’m going to treat as a race effort, so as long as I can get the pacing right (big if) then the result will be informative.

My form has improved in the sense that I’m getting my weight and my hips more forward and I have better awareness of where my weight is while I’m running, my stride length has increased quite a lot because I’m spending more time in flight (though whether I can keep the stride at high cadence is another matter – I think this will require more endurance), and my left-right balance is steadily improving. The balance of ‘bad’ runs are now at the level that my good runs were to begin with, though there is still room for improvement.

Up until now the 1 to 1 sessions have been focused purely on weights to try to even up my strength, but we are going to shift to me-specific drills from now on. I’m not sure exactly what those are yet.

We do a lot of various drill routines before the interval session and also in the strength class. I do think they have a noticeable effect just before running because you are getting the motion into your legs and muscle memory which you then draw on when you start moving. A lot of it is focused on getting your knees high. You see it and think “isn’t that just wasted energy?” but actually it starts to make your stride feel very cyclical, with your leg kicking out behind you then swinging forward towards the high knee position and suddenly your stride is far longer than it was before.

But it’s only recently I feel like I’ve really got the movements working smoothly enough for it to help. Drills look so easy and fluid when you see someone on YouTube do them, but you have to practice the drill a lot before you can do it to a level that it’s actually beneficial. You don’t see the hours of them starting off and lifting their left leg and then thinking “err, my right arm should be coming up, not my left”.

I’ve enjoyed the weights though and she wants me to continue with them twice a week myself. I have a 50kg barbell/dumbell set from years ago and I’ve bought an extra 2x10kg plates for the deadlifts. This morning I deadlifted 40kg which is the most I’ve ever done, and it didn’t feel that heavy! I don’t think lifting any more than that is really going to help with running, but I would quite like to get it up to bodyweight.

Analysis

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My coach finished her video analysis and the next stage was to go around to her home gym where she assessed my mobility. There was a lot of detail, but the main outcomes are:

1. My right hip flexor has nowhere near the same range of motion as my left. This is surprising to me as my left always feels very tight! Perhaps because it works harder. She’d spotted it on the video that I wasn’t getting as much hip extension on the right and confirmed it in her gym. It wasn’t just a small difference either.

2. My left shoulder/trap is very tight. She thinks this is contributing to my imbalance on a rotational level as it intereferes with my arm swing and I kind of throw my weight over to the right side. I’m not sure if she’d completely figured it out from the video, but she’d picked up that something was going on with my left arm. She had my do a few overhead squats and the moment I said the main place I was feeling it was in my left trap she started smirking as if she knew I was going to say that.

3. My landing is forward from my centre of balance, which seems to be caused by me leaning backwards a bit. It’s very obvious in the video stills. She thinks I’m a bit unusual with this because I seem to have a strong core and I’m not sagging in the middle, which is usually the problem with landing too far forward, I’m just getting my centre of balance wrong. Apparently I’m missing out on a lot of speed because I’m having to use my hamstrings to pull myself forward as soon as I hit the ground, rather than already being the right place (I think she’s right on this – I think I should be quite a bit faster and this looks like a big energy cost).

The first two she was quite pleased about because she thinks it’s easily fixable outside of running. I just need to loosen up the muscles and fascia. Ok, easier said than done, but lying on a foam roller for 15 minutes a day is a lot easier than altering my running form.

The leaning thing, however, is going to take some work. We were focusing on it last night during the group session. I think some of it is mental, in that you feel like you’re going to fall forward, and you just kind of need to switch off from that and keep putting your feet underneath you to catch yourself. I felt like I was keeping a lean for brief periods but it wasn’t coming easily.

I’m pleased about this too because the first two are things I would never have worked out on my own. I hadn’t realised that my right hip flexor was restricted and although I was vaguely aware of tension in my left shoulder I would never have considered that it would affect my running. I had worked out that my lean needed some work, but I’m sure I’ll get much better results with her than on my own with this.

Coach

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

It’s interesting how the verbs ‘coach’ and ‘train’ in the context of sports both mean something similar, and, as nouns, they are both public transport vehicles. I wonder what’s going on there.

Anyway, the more interesting thing is that I now have a running coach! I thought I was making progress with my balance but then I had a series of very unbalanced runs and my knee starting feeling a bit funny again, so I was going to go to the physio… and then it occurred to me that what I really need is someone who’s going to watch me regularly and give me feedback on how I’m moving, which you don’t get in a physio’s office. Conveniently there happens to be a parkrun regular who’s a professional coach and I know someone who’s been to her group sessions who says she’s very hot on running form. I sent her an email explaining it all and asked if she’d be interested, and she is!

So I’m with her for three months, and I get a weekly one to one session, a weekly group running session and a weekly group strength/mobility class. I did the first group running session last week. It involved a lot of agility work which I’ve never really done before and then a few intervals. On Monday I had the first one to one, which consisted of her filming me at increasing paces so she can analyse it and see how I’m moving. Last night was the first strength session, which included a lot of running drills. On Friday she’s going to assess my strength and mobility in her gym and then she’ll come up with a plan…

In other news, I took advantage of the recent sale on Steam to load up my Steam Deck with games! Even though I’m going to have even less time to play them for the next three months…

I also got a bunch from Humble Bundle choice for £8.99. I now have a big backlog to work through. I’ve played a few minutes of Fallout 4 and had to laugh when I tried to explore the town instead of going to the fallout shelter (vault) and was prompted evaporated by a nuclear explosion. But, to my surprise, Middle-Earth Shadow Of Mordor has really grabbed me. It’s an action adventure thingy that’s really well made and works well on controllers, and I’m enjoying sword fighting orcs. I think the Steam Deck might be my favourite purchase of the last decade. Other games I nabbed were Lego Star Wars, Star Wars Squadrons, The Outer Worlds (big RPG, but mixed reviews), Factory Town (low expectations but might be fun) and Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate, which is possibly the stupidest concept I’ve seen for a game (in a good way).

Also in very unrelated news, this Huw Edwards thing is terrible! The Sun ran a story accusing an unnamed person of soliciting child pornography citing the victim’s mother, but included enough information that it was quickly discerned to be Huw Edwards. Then the “victim’s” lawyer released a statement saying it was nonsense, and now the police have said that there’s no evidence a crime was committed and won’t be taking it any further. Now Huw Edwards is in hospital because of the effect to his mental health. I hope that he sues the Sun out of existence, but it’s a poor reflection on the country in general that people actually exchange money for these newspapers.