running spring

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Backyard: Start Line

In recognition of yet-another-local-lockdown due to the ongoing pandemic, I'm doing a week of feature blog posts about living in the backyard. From May 10th through 16th, my posts will be themed around life outdoors but as close to home as possible, a few steps out the back door.

Sunday Runday and my usual social weekend run date has turned into a solo expedition from my backyard.

But training calls, and has little respect for blips in the calendar like global pandemics and provincial lockdowns and excuses about being stuck in one’s own backyard.

Knowing a convincing distance run (by which I really mean a modest ten kilometers these days) was going to take some additional motivation, I gave myself a mission: I would visit the graffiti tunnel.

While I can hardly claim to had discovered a concrete underpass painted thick with years of graffiti, I’d like to think I may have seriously helped popularize this local off-the-beaten-path bit of culture.

The construction of a highway ring road around the city completed construction of this leg just over a decade ago, and in planning for future southward expansion of the park system, the designers incorporated a culvert-style concrete tunnel with a suspended walking path to accomodate the local creek and pass everything under the roadway above. The catch: the footpath was connected to nothing. It was little more than a bit of infrastructure for the future.

For years few people noted this as anything more than a strange sort of bridge on the highway passing over a bit of wilderness.

Then about five years ago I got adventurous. I went out on a long run (very much like I did today) and followed an old stretch of closed off road, went down through the trees, climbed down a grassy bank along the highway, and found myself in a graffiti-filled wonderland.

Obviously the countless people who had decorated the place had known about this secret for a while.

After sharing my photos on the socials and telling my run crew, I spent that summer leading multiple adventure runs into the off-trail wilds that led to the secret Edmonton graffiti tunnel.

The next year other run groups, led by runners who had been along on my previous adventure runs, were posting their own shots from their own treks with larger groups of people, and the summer after that my feed was routinely populated by people who had driven from across town or from different cities to run down to this photogenic secret spot.

By the summer of 2020 I started seeing the graffiti tunnel appear in semi-pro photo portfolios of local photogs I follow, blogs writing it into their local attractions guides, and even the radio stations promoting it as a hot thing to check out on a weekend.

It had become mainstream, even to the point that it’s not unsual to see cars (illegally) parked along the aforementioned highway as their occupants take the shortcut down the ditch path to check out the tunnel.

This morning, five klicks into my solo long run, I was the only one wandering through the graffiti tunnel, kinda like my first trip five years ago.

Very solo.

And if I couldn’t run with friends, at least I could visit an old favourite spot.

Addendum: as I was writing this, one of my running crew with whom I have been running cohort through the pandemic posted the update from her Sunday solo run. She had run from her backyard too, and made her way to the same tunnel. We’d missed each other by less than ten minutes.

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Race, Off

Sunday runday, and it was about just a month ago I was lamenting the upcoming lack of race season.

My running partners were all busily signing up for virtual races that seemed to me as little more than paying for a t-shirt and a medal. Meanwhile we would all tell ourselves that the difference between running around the neighbourhood this weekend as opposed to last weekend was that this weekend was a virtual race. Wink wink. And about ninety-dollars in race fees.

I would run. But this year would be a season of no races.

Tho.

Until Friday night there was an exception to all my lamenting.

The long-shot was a local late-May ultramarathon of various distances that we’d all signed up for in the first days of twenty-twenty. Over a year ago. Trained and ready when COVID sprung. In April of last year, we each recieved an email that the race had been deferred for a year in hopes that the pandemic (which surely wouldn’t last more than a couple months, right?) would be a distant memory. We would all race again next year.

This year.

So it went that on the last weekend of May 2021, four weeks out from writing this, I was due to tackle the Blackfoot Ultra for another go. Twenty-five kilometers of the “baby ultra” distance through the rolling trails of a nearby natural preserve area.

Friday evening the fateful email came again.

Due to COVID the race organizers, unsurprisingly, were unable to obtain a permit from the local health authority to host a couple hundred racers and support crew for a daylong event. Every registration has been deferred yet again to twenty-twenty-two.

The single, solitary race for which I have been registered now for nearly a year and a half is now officially thirteen months away.

Race, off.

I could grumble here. I could write that all those hills we’ve been running were all for naught. That my push to recover from some joint inflamation over the last couple months so that I could keep up my distances was a waste. Or that somehow my motivation was only sparked by the prospect of that looming twenty-five klick weekend less than a month away.

I could.

I won’t.

We’ve all made so many sacrifices this past fourteen months that I can’t account for this as more than another disappointing blip.

It’s another opportunity to reshape my training plan. A chance to think about what I want to get out of a summer without any races at all. None. What that means to my week-to-week training and how I can use that freedom to explore the city’s trails again this summer.

Perhaps a running streak?

Or some adventure running, looking for trails I’ve never met before.

Maybe just enjoying the time with my cohort without any pressure for pace or distance.

The last of my races may be off, but I’m thinking of it as an opportunity.

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Should you take walk breaks while running?

Back in 2012 I ran my first travel-based half marathon.

My wife and I had hopped on a plane and spent a long weekend in Las Vegas where the race had shut down the strip and some tens of thousands of runners ran through the Nevada evening basked in glow of more neon than I’d ever seen in one place.

With a burst of fireworks I pushed out of the start line and headed south and outbound, past the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign, pacing myself for twenty one klicks amongst the hoards of runners. I was feeling good. I was running strong. Everything was great. The air. The music. The vibe. The colours. The lights.

Then my watch beeped …and I took my first walk break.

Y’know. Just like I’d been training to do.

Ten minutes running followed by one minute of brisk recovery walk, repeated until the end of the run. It’s how I’d practiced. It was my race plan. It was intentional.

It was only after a fellow racer dressed as Elvis Presley pulled up alongside to ask me if I was alright and a couple other concerned folks patted me on the shoulder to encourage me to “stay strong buddy” did I realize that how my Canadian run club had been training me for the previous few years was not the universal approach… even a few hours away just down in the States.

Nearly ten years later, and even this morning on our fourteen kilometer run through the spring river valley, we still tend to take walk breaks on our long and simple training runs.

Ten minutes of on-pace running followed by one minute of brisk recovery walk.

Ten and ones.

I’m sure there is some science that could be found online about the training benefits of walk-run intervals, the value of mid-run recovery, the advantages of training for time-on-feet versus pace, or even how it’s tough to take a water break without choking if you don’t stop and slow down for at least a few steps.

And I have many personal anecdotes about passing fellow racers on the back half of the course, runners who leapfrogged past me on my first couple walk breaks but who faltered in their pace an hour or so on. I’ve even raced both with and without breaks, and invariably I always do better with my regular recovery walks worked into the pace.

Or, I could just tell you how nice it is to enjoy the scenery of a minute-long walk through the woods or across a bridge, maybe snapping a photo or two to remember the moment.

There are reasons.

None of those reasons matters much, of course, other than to say I’ve got my own list of rationalizations for why taking walk breaks on long training runs has worked well for both my crew and I over the years. It was how we were taught by the store-based club we started running out of. It’s become habit. We’ve all had a decade-plus-long running career backed by an interval setting on our watches. I don’t see it changing. Also, I like it.

Walks are not for everyone, of course. Highly competitive racers likely turn their noses at recreational runners like us. (Those folks are not reading this advice anyhow. ) If you’ve found this post because you searched for advice on if it’s okay to take breaks while you run then you’ve come to the crux of my point. Yes. It’s fine. Better than fine, in fact, if it means you can run longer or further than you could without those breaks. Maybe walking is even a good idea, if by walking you even slightly reduce your chance for injury by overstress. Walking is okay.

This is not meant to be advice. Every runner is different. Every training program is unique. Every kilometer run has a purpose and a challenge. Do your own research and learn your body.

That said, I do believe from years of personal experience that walk breaks can find a place somewhere in that mix and interval walk breaks might be the ingredient you need to train longer distances or simply find enjoyment of the sport through the blurry push for always faster and ever harder.

I finished that Las Vegas half marathon strong. I’ll never actually know how Elvis found himself managing his own pace in the second half of that twenty-one kilometer race. Part of me likes to believe that in one of the fifty-or-so white sequined jumpsuits that I passed through that evening’s run was that guy who (as nice as he was for stopping to check) thought I’d buffed it ten minutes into the race.

Cuz I didn’t.

I was just taking a break, enjoying both the race and the neon.

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Running: What is Hill Training?

Sunday Runday and while the weekends are reserved for distance training, the springtime has rebooted our training schedule and put us back into proper-training-mode. This includes regular and progressively longer hill training runs.

If you happen to live beside a hill where runners train maybe you’ve seen folks like my running friends and I, climbing and descending on repeat, week after week. Perhaps you wondered what the heck why were were torturing ourselves so…

So, what is hill training?

Running is running, and the longer you run the further you’ll be able to go… eventually.

More serious, focused run training tends to pry apart the various aspects of running and portion them into dedicated types of runs meant to isolate enhancing various pieces of the running puzzle: speed, endurance, longevity, pace, and strength.

Hill repeats are meant to build strength. They add a very specific element of resistance to a run, building stronger muscles and generally agreed upon to improve overall performance.

Our hill is roughly a 7% – 9% grade leading into and out of a creek valley near our meeting point. Our Wednesday runs turn into hill training sessions in the spring and early summer, building back up that foundational strength that usually dwindled over the winter months.

There are many different approaches to training on hills as there are runners, but here’s what my crew does:

A brief warm-up run leads us down to our start point.

A single repeat includes a steady climbing run up to a designated point roughly four hundred meters from the base of the hill. As we crest this distance, we do a short recovery walk, turn around, and jog at an easy pace back down to the bottom of the hill.

Starting in early March we begin with three repeats, building by one each week until we reach a maximum. That maximum count depends on the type of race for which we are training, but usually somewhere between twelve and fifteen repeats total by the time we enter June.

(After June we switch to speed training mixed with “hilly runs” which are things I’ll get around to writing about then!)

It’s a tough session. It’s a tough spring. But it’s been working for us for a long time.

Hill training is a slower, deliberate isolation of run training meant to build strength, train muscles in ways not targeted on flat trails, and make runners better at their sport. We grumble a lot, but the spring pain has payoffs for a great summer.