I’m s-l-o-w-l-y training to be 10K ready by the end of October when I’ll be running a few races with one of my daughters. Every single time I’ve trained to run with her before I’ve overdone it and ended up with a gruesome virus and chest infection. Once you hit 50, it’s so easy to overtrain. But I know if I bother to take notice, the signs of overdoing it will be there way before I succumb. So now I peer into the mirror each morning whilst pressing a finger on the pulse point of my wrist – how tired do I look? Is my heart rate raised?
So far, so good. Instead of running an easy session followed by a tougher one and then starting over, I’ve added an extra easy session in; easy, easy, hard, easy, easy, hard.
And yesterday I tried something new. I checked my cadence. This is the number of steps you take per minute and if you get it right it’s one way of avoiding injury; running with a quicker cadence reduces the impact of each foot strike and therefore the load on the joints is less. Increasing cadence can also make us into faster runners but, right now, that’s not my goal.
The number 180 is hailed as the magic number so I thought I’d shoot for that. I’m sure it’s not as simple as this and the ideal cadence must differ between individuals but no harm in me giving it a go. I was intrigued to see how it would feel.
180 steps per minute.
I read a few articles online warning me that if I’d never paid attention to it before then my cadence was likely to be too low and it would take time to push it up to that lauded 180.
I downloaded a metronome app (stroke of pure genius) – the idea being that I could set it to pulse at 180 beats per minute and try to match my foot strikes with it. The metronome emitted a loud ‘tock, tock, tock’ which was fine with me but did alarm the farmers and grape pickers as I trundled past.
At first, the increased foot movement felt a bit frantic and the ‘tick tocking’ and my steps were all out of sync but it honestly didn’t take long before my feet were in time with the app. A matter of minutes.
And, you know? Keeping up with the metronome wasn’t that hard. I definitely had to concentrate so I didn’t deviate from the rhythm but it was strangely satisfying running along to the beat and a little bit meditative. I ran for 30 minutes at an easy pace.
The cadence of 180 was definitely quicker than I’d normally run but I’m wondering if I found it relatively easy to step it up as I’d maybe already increased my cadence without realising. Last year, Julian Goater, the British long distance runner and author of ‘The Art of Running Faster’ had paid a visit to my running club and taken us out for a coaching session.
‘Quick and quiet!’ he’d urged. ‘Quick and quiet!’
He coached us to take lots of small steps (quick) and to take care to run lightly on our feet instead of pounding (quiet). I’d remembered that ever since and have tried to stick to it.
So, what next? Well, I’m going to take the metronome with me on my next few runs and see how it feels over the longer term. I’m also not quite sure how I’ll find trying to run faster and maintaining the same 180 cadence. But for starters, running at a higher cadence definitely feels as though I’m pounding less on my joints and that’s got to be a good thing.
