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Monday Musing: Outdoor v Treadmill

For today's Monday Musing, I would like to know your opinion on treadmills.



Treadmills are incredibly popular and have many advantages over outdoor running including being easy to judge pacings with, they are all weather and are safer to use than going outside.

However, I personally find them dull and monotonous. Despite being a gym member I honestly cannot remember the last time I used one myself. I run to the gym and find myself warmed up and ready to lift weights or box when I arrive. I cannot stand the thought of running on one of these machines!

How about you? Do you love or hate them? Please let me know in the comments below!

Neil Macey
RunRight

Sunday Story #2: GoodGym Missions

On Friday I posted the following picture and asked the simple question: what is happening here?

In today's article I wish to share a different type of running that I feel very passionate about: community and charitable running.

In December 2015 I joined a charitable organisation called GoodGym which encourages runners to use their training activity to help others in their community!

They do this in 3 ways: Large Group runs to train together and help on a large project, Individual Coach runs to visit an issolated eldery person and the subjecvt of today's article: Mission Runs.

On a mission run a small group of 2 or 3 runners will run individually to meet at the home of garden of an elderly person to do a task that they are unable to do themselves. Common examples include some gardening, moving furniture or fixing something that has broken.

In this particular picture, I was changing a set of curtains. This is a great way of making a small difference to somebody's life and inspires you to run as you do not want to let that person down.

GoodGym is available to runners of ALL abilities and is FREE. Mission and Coach runs require you to be DBS checked but group runs can be done by anybody, are held all over London (and increasingly the country) and you can just turn up, no need to book!

PhotoFriday #2 What am I doing here? That's not running?

For the second instalment of PhotoFriday, I have a much more criptic clue...what do you think is happening in this photo? How does it link to running? Where, what, when and why? Why not have a guess in the comments below?

Thursday Training

Thursday Training

Even though I am an endurance runner, I still try to incorporate one SPEED  training session per week into my routine. There are numerous ways of improving your speed and many benefits to doing so, which will be a topic for a longer post in the future. This is a simple yet effective strategy for runners of all abilities. All you need is a standard Olympic-sized running track (400m around) or a pre-measured place to run the same distance.

The main benefits of tracks are that they make measuring distances simple and they are usually flat and quick to run on. A disadvantage is that many require membership and they can be difficult to locate one.

The routine that I use is as follows. I use it in the weeks leading up to a race and simply reduce the rest times steadily as weeks progress:

Example:

 After a while of doing this routine I was able to eliminate the rests between interval types completely. It is good training as heart rate stays high and a range of speeds are used.

Why not give it a try? What do you do for speed training?

Weekly Wednesday Update

In this weekly update I want to do a post about the progress of the RunRight brand. A week is a long time and it is nice to provide an update to our existing and potential customers about how we are progressing.

Less than three weeks ago, RunRight was just a twinkle in my eye...an unformed idea. We have come far. Our website (www.runright.uk) has had three style relaunches from our first grey appearance to the white with yellow trim to what I think is the best one yet; our bold black background with red and white foreground. I think the website stands out and looks sleek and professional but I am a little biased...what do you think? Talking about the website, it now hosts 19 products all of which come with free UK delivery or £2.99 to the rest of the world.

We also now have an accompanying blog (here) and facebook page. We have a growing customer list, who receive discounts and news updates by email. Special offers are also available on our website.

Still, we are not resting here. We strive to improve for you, the customer. What features do you like? What would you like to see more of? Is there anything you dislike or would like to see scrapped? Let us know via
email: NMacey@runright.uk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NMRunRight/
or in the blog comments below.

Best wishes,
Neil Macey
RunRight

Quick-Tip Tuesday:- Busy Lifestyle and lack of time

Are you a busy person who struggles to fit running into your day? Do you have other commitments that compete for your time and stop you from meeting your running (or other) goals?

Our new weekly section, "Quick-Tip Tuesday", will look at a common running problem (often with a real-life example) and offer some practical solutions that should be helpful to others in that situation.

Week 1: Neil Macey (Me). Problem: busy lifestyle and lack of time.

The problem:
Like many people living in the modern world I have many competing demands for my time and even with the best will in the world and plenty of motivation it can be a struggle to maintain a work life balance and fit in those runs. Does this sound like you? You are not alone!

A recent pole found that the average Londoner works 38.4 hours a week although that rises to 48.2 hours for teachers like me with 20% of us workig over 60 hours per week! As a nation we are probably working too much. So how can we "fit in" those much need extras in our lives that we don't want to miss out on?

My solution:

There is one simple step that I took a long time ago that has resolved this issue for me and I hope it can be of help to you: routine.

Put simply I no longer have to "fit" running into my life...it is a part of my daily routine just as much as brushing my teeth or having a shower (except the occasional day off running isn't disgusting!). Being a teacher I have a Monday- Friday job in a fixed location so I know I'm going to be making the same journey every day. Each day when I leave work I leave my smart clothes and work shoes in school and get changed into my running clothes. This is my routine, I do it everyday. Since I am wearing my running clothes I might as well run home, right? It's better than waiting for the bus! And I have to run past my gym on my way home...so I might as well pop-in, right? I'm wearing the right clothes anyway. What I have done is removed the barriers that would otherwise have stopped me.

The best result though comes the next morning...my work clothes are still in school so what do I do? I take a clean set of running clothes and I run to school! At home time I've got all I need and the cycle repeats. All I need to do then is bring home 5 dirty work shirts on a Friday and my little 1.5 mile each way run has turned into 15 miles (1.5 mile there, 1.5 miles back, 5 days a week). And I have saved myself £15 in bus fares and arrived at work in a good mood each day.

The results:

Here is a two week period from my strava account. This is a typical week for me in which I wasn't training for a particular event. Each dotted line is a day of the week and each circle represents a run. You can see straight away that every weekday starts with a 2.8 ish mile circle. That is my commute to workand home again and makes up a significant part of my total weekly milage and then I just need a few longer runs at the weekend and some harder training drills a few evenings a week.

Over to you:

How do you fit running into your life? Do you have any strategies to share? Any useful hints or tips? Do you need any advice? Let us know in the comments below!