Feb
8
How to Build the Ability to Run by Feel
Photo Credit: 20100528 – Well used watch by Flickr user Rob, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
All too often we get caught up in miles and pace, day in and day out through our training cycle. Even on the days when it really doesn’t matter – for anticipation runs, base building, or frankly most other days – we become slaves to the almighty mile (or, acknowledging our international friends, kilometer). Technology makes this far too easy, with the prevalence of GPS watches, foot pods, heart rate monitors, and cell phones with tracking capability.
As Caleb Masland points out, there are a great many reasons to forget about our mileage once in a while, and just run based on time. A key point he raises is that, especially for the marathon, training is about getting used to the time on your feet, not strictly covering the distance. Additionally, even if you aren’t running for competitive reasons, gains in health come from the time spent in an aerobic heart rate range, and actually has surprisingly little to do with mileage.
If you are a competitive racer, it is incredibly valuable to be able to set and hold a given pace. While you can often rely on your watch for this, there is always the risk of technical difficulties such as having insufficient charge, poor satellite reception, or just plain forgetting the device. Thus learning what a given pace feels like can be a make or break proposition come race day, and becoming overly reliant on the watch deadens this sense.
I’m as guilty as anyone of focusing too much on the metrics. And in fact I have a hard time with leaving the watch at home, as I do like to ultimately measure and track progress, even on easier runs. The good news is that learning to run by feel doesn’t mean going without your trusted technological companion. The key is to ignore the watch until after the run is finished.
This may sound easier said than done – after all, looking at your wrist has probably become so instinctive that you don’t even think about it. There are a few tricks that may help you overcome these instincts; in each case, you may want to turn off automatic lap / mile notifications to avoid getting any hint as to the distance you have run.
- Keep the watch in your pocket – out of sight, out of mind. The drawback of this approach is that you may not know how long you have run, which may be a problem if you are targeting a specific time (or need to be done due to another commitment)
- Leave the watch on time-of-day (Caleb’s trick) – Garmin’s, and I suspect other GPS watches, can continue to track your mileage even if you have the screen set to the time of day instead of training mode.
- Leave the watch in your mailbox (or somewhere more secure) – if you know the mileage of the route you are running, then you may miss the goal of running for a specific time, but at least you are gaining a better sense of pacing without relying directly on the watch. Even better if you don’t know the exact distance but can plot it out later. Again, you lose the ability to target completion in a specific time.
These tips can apply not only to your total run, but also to pace-targeted portions of specific workouts like tempo runs or marathon pace runs. For these, you can set an interval for the total time (say, 30 minutes for a tempo run) and then leave the watch on time-of-day. You can then review the results at the end of your run to see how well you were able to predict or target a specific pace. You may well find that these approaches help add variety and challenge to workouts that can, over the course of a training season, get a bit repetitive.
Over time, you’ll learn to judge your pace by other cues, such as your rate of breathing, your perceived effort, or the rate at which fatigue starts to set in. The key to successfully building your sense of pace through running by feel is to continue to use technology to measure and confirm your results, but to avoid letting it dictate your workout.
