Our buddy Rourke of Modern Survival Online asked if I might be able to help him out with a plan to get running. First I must note that I am not a doctor or an exercise scientist. I suggest he takes any advice I give and submits it to a panel that includes his personal physician, a cardiologist, a professional marathoner, a pair of cross country coaches and a monkey. Consider yourself disclaimed. I asked a few questions to sort of get a feel for his situation. The questions follow with abreviated/ edited answers in italics.

I want to improve my “usable fitness”and be more versatile.

I asked our buddy to be brutally honest in these answers. There isn’t a right or wrong answer as long as it is honest. The whole point is to establish the starting point so being anything other than honest is just screwing yourself.

My thoughts are as follows. 3 times a week is a pretty good amount for most folks to do high impact running type stuff. This allows time for recovery, healing and other exercise. Unless your goal is to compete and win at a high level of competitive running 3x a week is plenty if your workouts are of the proper type/ duration and intensity. More than 3x a week and you are either not training hard or are risking injuries. Less than that and unless your workouts are insane (heard of ultra marathoners who do a 50 miler a month and maybe a walk or two in between) it is probably not enough to make any gains or even maintain. As much as possible try to have these days be non consecutive so M/W/F or T/TH/SA or whatever.

In general I am a fan of doing a long slow run, some sort of speed training (sprints, fartlecks, etc) and a medium distance tempo type run. However if you haven’t got some sort of a baseline in terms of running this plan would be very rough. A 20 year old of a healthy weight with no injuries might just have a rough 2 weeks then be fine but someone who is a bit closer to 40 and could maybe stand to loose a few pounds would be asking for trouble.

To establish this baseline (IE get running) I would say 2 runs and an alternate but similar event. For the runs starting with a run/ walk makes sense to build capacity and distance. Keeping the run short lets you not get totally gassed and thus you can cover a lot more distance and build endurance. This lets you operate at a relatively quick pace with a moderately high heart rate for far longer than you would otherwise be able to. Keeping the walk/ rest short lets you work on recovering and keep your heart rate fairly high. You can do it by paces(run 100, walk 100 as a random example), landmarks like blocks or telephone polls or time. It doesn’t matter so just do whatever seems easiest to you. Over time as you become more capable of running you can increase the running legs until the need to walk goes away all together.

Here are the runs to start with.

1. Jog/ walk. This is your long slow day so start with 30 minutes. The jog needs to be different from the walk but you should still be able to hold a normal conversation. Keep the splits short.

2. Run/ walk. This is your fast day. The “run” is not a 100 percent sprint but it is more than the jog. If at the end of the run you are not tired and fatigued it is too slow. Keep this at about 20 minutes.

3. Alternate but similar. At this stage you are not going to run on this day. Why? I don’t have a great reason but it seems to make sense to me. Do a fairly fast walk, or a hike in hilly terrain or with a pack. Especially since you aren’t really running yet the goal is just to get the legs and the lungs working together. Depending on the intensity and difficulty of your activity do this for between 25 minutes and an hour. For a walk up a vicious hill 25 minutes is good and for a fast walk on flat terrain more like an hour could be good.

Do not increase the time in either run. The point of this phase isn’t to be able to run/ walk for longer but to get you running. Your goal is to gradually increase the length/ time/ distance of the jogging/ running portions while keeping the walks the same. Example; you have been doing jog 50 and walk 50 for a couple weeks. It is starting to seem like even by the end of the whole workout you really don’t need the walk portion. So you ratchet things up and switch to running 75 and walking 50. A couple weeks later you switch to 100 and 50, then 150 and 50 and then decide to drop the walk all together.

I would say that for a person who is at a reasonable weight with no significant prior injuries using a program like this should let most people eliminate the walking and just jog or do a moderate run well inside of  a couple months time. If by 3 months you still need the walking breaks I would submit to you that either you were not brutally honest about your starting point or have not been pushing yourself.

That brings up two interesting questions. The first is “what if I am in worse shape than a typical does no cardio and might be a bit heavy type of guy?” Well I would say to start at a lower point and then work forward. Start with a brisk walk 3 times a week and sticking with that for a month to build up some stamina and condition yourself.

The second is “how do I know when to increase the intensity of my runs?” This is a hard one. The general rule for increasing distance is not more than 10% a week/ run. However as broad advice I would say to increase your difficulty (in this phase longer “run” legs and later either time/ distance or speed) when it feels like things are getting too easy. You shouldn’t be destroyed after every run but if you are breathing normally, haven’t sweated a drop and have a low heart rate then it is time to increase the difficulty. One note. Do not be afraid to take a step backwards if you up the difficulty and it gets too hard. Especially with the plan I laid out of you are unable to complete a workout due to exhaustion, muscle pain or profuse vomiting then drop the intensity.

The third question is “what about injury?” I think injury in running comes primarily from two sources. The first is doing something you are not conditioned for. Maybe a decade ago you were a lean mean running machine but 50 pounds and a lot of couch time later try to go on that 40 minute 5 mile which was cake back in the day and you will likely hurt something besides your pride. People rarely hurt themselves doing something they are reasonably conditioned for. A guy who clean and jerked 205 last week won’t hurt anything trying for 210. A guy who cleans 150 then tries 210 might mess himself up.

The second source is ignoring problems. Especially with a moderate jogging/ running type plan it is unlikely you will have that “snap, pop, tear, there goes my knee” kind of moment. More realistically there would be a bit of pain and you would ignore it for awhile and it would stay the same and then maybe get worse feeling over time and become a big problem. Telling sore from injured is hard. As a reasonable guideline if a whole muscle group hurts as a result of a hard workout (legs after a long run, etc) it is probably just sore. If a real specific part of a muscle hurts it could be a problem. Joints hurting are a huge red flag and almost always mean it is time to seriously think about what you are doing.

Well Rourke, I hope this helps. If you decide to give this a shot and are at the point where you’re ready to just start running shoot me an email and I’ll try to help.

Happy running!

Wifey mentioned she has heard good things about Couch to 5k.