Kevin's Watch

So since July 5th I have started running a mile every morning before work. Since that date, I have only missed once.

I have read various snippets on the net that say that a person should not run every day and should give the body days to rest in between to let your muscles recoup and grow stronger.

Any one have anything to add to this?

Is this something that any of you can contribute to?

I kind of hit a wall and am not really improving any at this point and am wondering if I should start shutting it down for a couple of days a week or so.

jelerak wrote:So since July 5th I have started running a mile every morning before work. Since that date, I have only missed once.

I have read various snippets on the net that say that a person should not run every day and should give the body days to rest in between to let your muscles recoup and grow stronger.

Any one have anything to add to this?

Is this something that any of you can contribute to?

I kind of hit a wall and am not really improving any at this point and am wondering if I should start shutting it down for a couple of days a week or so.

First thing, it depends a lot on your body right now. Assuming you don't have serious medical issues:
In general, running 1 mile a day is not a distance that requires rest days.
At this point, you've been doing it more than a month...you should stop worrying about the distance for a while, you should be thinking in time terms. You want to go [for now, later it might change depending on why you are running] for 30 minutes. If you can't run for that whole time, don't worry...run till you are breathing hard, then walk till you're not, then run some more, just as long as you're moving for 30 min.
When you can do it for 30 min running the whole time, start a different program: on even days, run the whole 30 at a pace that feels like work, but doesn't exhaust you. On odd days, do intervals: Run faster than your normal pace for 1 min [again, don't kill yourself, but run fast enough that you couldn't carry on a conversation in whole sentences] then jog slower than normal [or even walk, if you pushed yourself too hard] for 2 minutes, then repeat till 30 min.
Once neither the steady day nor the interval day feels like you're really working/you've hit a plateau, you'll want to change it up, here's where the rest days come in. Do the steady pace twice a week, and the intervals once a week...but not on consecutive days [you might want to just maintain at this level, or work on increasing the pace, or you might want to lengthen the time/distance...purely up to you] on other days, warm up with an easy jog [10 min or so]...then do something else: like weight training and such for the upper body and abs...a little weight training is good for everyone, and you don't have to use massive weight.
I personally am a swimmer, so non-running days I use the same method but in the pool...distance days and interval days.
One last thing: unless you're going to [for some reason] be doing high kicks or moving massive weight, all you need for warm-up is a light jog and some easy shaking out, you don't need to do real stretching. It is much more important to do real stretching AFTER the workout...and the harder you ran, or the more weight you moved, the more important the stretching is.

I assume you aren't caring for a knee or other joint injury/issue. With that, I believe the "don't run every day" advice is geared more towards the running nuts that want to run 5+ miles every time they run. The downtime is to give the joints time to refresh themselves. For the rest of us, a mile or two a day should be no problem. Myself, I can tell when I've run too many days in a row because my knees start to feel a little 'crunchy'. I'm sure my being 39 has nothing to do with it.

If you want to improve your performance, there a few ways I would suggest you can go about it:
1) the most straightforward approach is to extend the distance you are willing to run - add a quarter-mile until you get used to 1.25, then 1.5, etc. This mostly attacks from the angle of building your muscle endurance, to run further.
2a) go the same distance (1mi) but steadily decrease the time you run it by 15 seconds, so you are effectively slowly increasing your running pace in chunks of fifteen second time reductions. This approach attempts to increase your cardio output, to make your run more efficient.
2b) an alternate way to do the same is to measure only the distance run (not caring about time), but alter your pace while you are doing the 1mi, so you are mostly jogging but with an increasing number of sprint bursts to up your heartrate. Again, this tries to increase your overall cardio output.
In my experience, doing either of the #2 options (run faster) will enable you to more easily accomplish #1 (run longer) with relative ease.

I typically run about 4miles 3x per week (usually M-W-F). All treadmill, but I vary both incline and speed during the run. I am currently averaging just under a 9 minute mile, but I'm improving. Once a month I take one of the 4mi runs and instead run until I can't run any more. So far, the most I've run at once is 10 miles, and stopped because my feet started hurting, but cardio-wise, I felt fine.

dw