Joy of running

Couple of weeks ago I got myself a book called ChiRunning. It’s a book about running. It’s a book about smart and effective running and because I’m not very athletic and don’t have much muscular power, I’m happy to find ways how to run farther by using less energy. This book is all about it.

Word ‘Chi’ in title means ‘energy’, this meaning comes from eastern philosophy. While I don’t care much about all this philosophy behind eastern religions, I must say that there’s a lot to learn from this book. After I’ve read about 1/4th of the book and haven’t even done any exercises that come later, I already see progress in my running. When I got my knee injury from army few years ago, it has bugged me ever since. It was lottery during longer runs – will my knee hold on or will it start to protest and stop cooperating with me. But now, when using correct posture taught by ChiRunning I’ve no problem with that. When knee starts to hurt I know I’ve wrong posture and I adjust it – and voila, pain is gone.

Another good thing I’ve noticed. My “training zone” for usual runs is 70-80% of max heart rate (MHR), speed around 4.30 min/km, that was before book. Now, when posture is correct my speed “in the zone” is about 4.05 – 4.20 min/km, when posture is wrong, my heart rate goes above 80% of MHR and speed drops to about 4.30 min/km. This is truly awesome – using less energy to run faster and longer!

My 10k record time is about 41 minutes. Yesterday I ran 10.7 km, and inside this my 10km time was 43:00 and I wasn’t even trying that hard.

And it’s 66 days till marathon.