Running Easy

There are 2 main parts to fitness - well actually there are 5 parts - Cardiorespiratory, Muscular strength, Muscular endurance, Physical flexibility, Body composition - but we want to keep this simple and useful. You're not going to be jogging along the road thinking about the crossover point between your cardiorespiratory gain and body composition. More likely you're puffing and wheezing and got sore muscles. So, we're going to simplify it down to two elements;

- Cardio Fitness - that's the huffing part.
- Structural Fitness - that's the aching parts.

Cardio fitness is to do with the fitness of your heart and lungs - essentially it is how efficient they are. After all we basically need air to live and do everything. If the big pump (heart) and air reservoir (lungs) are optimized then your cardiovascular fitness is operating well and running (or any exercise) will feel easy.

Structural Fitness is the condition of your muscles, joints and all the other parts of your body that are doing all the moving when the Cardio engine is pumping.

It is a lack of Cardio fitness that makes most non-runners feel that it must be impossible to run anything more than a couple of kilometers, let alone a marathon. "Hang! I'm huffing and panting just when I get up from the dinner table, and sweating like a Turkish wrestler after walking up the road, there is just no way I could run a marathon!" The hardest part of your training is developing the cardio fitness. But the good news is that this fitness is quickly acquired and by Week 2 or 3 of our marathon program (assuming you started with the required 5km core fitness) the cardio fitness issues will be minimal.

The first phase sees you experiencing high levels of effort relating to developing cardio fitness. The second phase sees the cardio effort dropping off significantly while the strain on the structural component increases. Then finally the third phase, where the training reaches the peak weeks just prior to the taper, the strain on the structural fitness component increases the most. This is when there are lots of sore muscles, joints and others parts of your body you never knew you had.

So as you can see by the time you develop your marathon fitness your cardio fitness feels easier and easier, and with rest your structural fitness also starts to feel easier.

Yours in running easy....
Craig & Nicky
www.runningeasy.com