May 9, 2010
Years ago, before I really ran, I’d try it every now and then. I’d walk some and then jog some and jokingly called it ‘wogging’. When I got serious about trying to run, I still did a little walking, but my goal that first season was to run the Bolder Boulder 10K without any walking (besides water breaks and checking my blood sugar).
The couple of years I was running before I decided to take on triathlons last year, I was still determined to run rather than walk. Walk breaks were just that – breaks – and taking them meant that I wasn’t having a successful workout or race. Once triathlons came into the picture, I had to throw that thinking out the window, since every tri I did last year I had to do some walking. And I was looking at those triathlon finish lines as ‘success’, no matter how I got to them.
This season, the form focus for my tri group is the run/walk method. With this, you’ve got _planned_ walking for 30-60 seconds after a number of minutes of running. The walk is quick and with good form, and it’s a good time to get some water or nutrition into you as well. Besides the obvious advantage of giving you a chance to ‘catch your breath’ and get the heart rate down, this method is supposed to have many other benefits, including a lower chance of injury. So lots of people in my group, including some of the really speedy types, are trying this method.
So far, I’m liking it! Psychologically, it’s quite uplifting to think only in chunks of 10 minutes (I’m trying 9min running/1min walking). The walk breaks are a great time for me to check my blood sugar without losing the people who are running at my pace. And even though I don’t have a lot of data yet, it doesn’t seem like my overall pace isn’t suffering at all – evidently I’m moving a little faster when I run, because I get the reprieve of the walk. Nice!
I plan to do all of my long easy runs this way through the season, as well as my races. I think that _planning_ to take these walk breaks in my triathlons will make the run leg of my races more enjoyable. And who knows – I may even go faster…
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