Jerusalem 2024

Although running is undeniably great for your general health, cardiovascular system, energy level, proper weight maintenance and multiple other health benefits, it does tend to tighten the muscles and render them inflexible.  This is easily correctable which a proper stretching routine.  Stretching will help you maintain flexibility, enhance blood-flow, flush lactic acid out of your system and prevent soreness.  I recommend doing the following stretching routine after your run.  Stretching before you run (as opposed to warming up) does not provide much benefit and can even be harmful as cold muscle are shorter and are therefore more susceptible to tearing.  Please note that the optimal duration of a stretch is 15-20 seconds.  Never bounce into a stretch, but rather ease into it slowly.  Finally, the phrase “no pain, no gain” is absolutely incorrect in stretching.  Stretch to the point where you feel tension but not actual pain.  As you do these exercises regularly, you will see your flexibility increase.  The entire routine  should take no longer than eight minutes and will pay huge dividends.

1) standing hamstring isolation (stand straight with legs spread apart slightly wider than your shoulders. Bend your torso to one side, keeping your kness locked.  Then reverse sides.  Hold each stretch for 20 seconds).

2) Behind the back arm raise (While standing up, bend slightly at the waist and clasp your hands together behind your back.  Slowly lift your hands behind your back towards the back of your head).

3) Alternate side knee bends

4) lateral knee bend

5) knee raises

6) butt squats

7) alternate side leg kicks

8) quad lift

9) calf thrust

10) sitting hamstring stretch

11) groin stretch

12) lying down hamstring stretch and knee lift

13) hip flexor extension

14) crunches

15) pushups

If you are training properly for a marathon or a half marathon, you are, by definition, pushing your body hard. Your body is a precision machine that, like a car, must be properly fueled in order to obtain optimal performance. The role of proper nutrition in your program is no less important to your sucess on race day than your actual training program. In this article, I will attempt to provide a brief overview of what you should be doing to stay properly fueled and hydrated.Hydration: Staying well hydrated is absolutely critical for the distance runner. Not only will dehydration negatively affect your performance during a run but it well also impede your recovery afterwards since fluids remove waste products and bring nutrients to tissues for repair. When you sweat, your blood volume decreases and therefore less oxygen rich blood reaches your working muscles to produce energy aerobically. This, in turn, forces you to slow down. When you run in hot and humid weather, this effect is magnified because the body sends more blood to the skin to remove heat, making even less available to the muscles. So how do you know if you are drinking enough? Don’t rely on feeling thirsty to cue you about the need to drink. The body’s thirst mechanism lags behind the actual process of dehydration. Many marathoners become chronically dehydrated without knowing it by virtue of a small daily deficit in th eamount of fluids they take in versus the amount they expend. The result is fatigue, irritability, loss of motivation and often injury. In fact, research has shown that often that feeling that we interpret as hunger is actually thirst and can be alleviated simply by drinking more water regularly. It goes without saying that runners who lose a lot of fluid during exercise need to drink far more than the average person in order to compensate for this additional fluid loss. It is useful to weigh yourself on an accurate digital scale just before a long run and then immediately afterwards in order to guage your fluid loss. Your objective should be to replenish that weight loss with fluids within four hours of your workout. So without making you neurotic about consuming a specific amount per day, I will make the following suggestions. Drink two full cups of water upon waking up in the morning and two cups of water before each meal. This will also help you avoid overeating. In addition, keep a sports bottle filled with water at your desk and drain it several times a day. If you find it hard to stomach water, you can lightly flavor it with a sweetened concentrate but go easy on the syrup as it is easy to consume large amounts of empty calories from sweet drinks if you are not careful. Sports drink such as Isostar, Isotone and Powerade are excellent choices during runs of more than one hour and immediately thereafter because they provide carbohdydrates that are readily usable energy and are absorbed as quickly as water. They also contain sodium to enhance glucose and water absorbtion and improve fluid retention.Nutrition: Most of the energy you use during exercise is provided by carbohydrates with a smaller percentage provided by fats. Since the body can only store 2000-2500 calories of carbohydrate in the form of glycogen, you need to continuously replenish your glycogen stores after a workout. Incidentally, the faster you run, the higher the proportion of carbohydrates that you use. This fact led to the now discredited theory that if you want to burn fat, you should run slower. Carbohydrates are a more efficient energy source than fat because breaking down fat requires more oxygen per calorie. Therefore, you can’t run as fast by just burning fats. The upshot of all this science is that, if you want to marathon train, you are going to have to adopt a high-carb diet. If you took up marathoning to lose weight (you will, I guarantee it) and are dieting with an Atkins type low carb diet, forget about it. You will be like a car running on empty. Instead, choose a diet high in complex carbohydrates. Some excellent food choices are rice, pasta, bread, sweet potatoes, pancakes, bagels, potatoes, corn, raisins and cereal.The timing of your meals is also important. I always used to skip breakfast until I became a serious runner. We have all heard the mantra about how breakfast is the most important meal of the day and we have all ignored it. Well, don’t. My standard breakfast during marathon training is 2 bowls of cereal such as cornflakes or cheerios, a banana, a cup of orange juice and two glasses of water. Rather than eat three large meals a day, it is good to graze throughout the day with healthy, high carb snacks such as fruit, pretzels, rice cakes and granola bars. If your mileage is high and your weight is under control, treat yourself to some good ice cream or cake a couple of times per week. You deserve it. One of the best aspects of marathon training is that you can get away with indulging occassionally without guilt. Also make sure that you have at least one good source of protein such as chicken, fish, eggs or meat every day. Most people can get away with eating a light meal up to 1.5 hours before a run but stay away from red meat and hard cheese in the four hours before a workout. It is extremely important to refuel by eating a high carb meal within 1.5 hours after a workout because the body absorbs and replenishes its depleted glycogen stores very efficiently during this window of time.Supplements: Most people with a normal diet do not need vitamin supplements. However, because you will be pushing the envelope over the next few months, it is worth taking a multi-vitamin to ensure that you are not lacking any essential vitamins and minerals. Distance runners often suffer from low iron, which will give you a feeling of exhaustion. In addition, your immune system is slighly suppressed after an intense workout thereby rendering you more vulnerable to catching a cold. Additional doses of Vitamin C can help address this. Unless, you suffer from a specific and pronounced deficiency of a particular nutrient, I recommend taking one-a-day Centrum Performance to make sure that you ae covered against any deficiencies.

If you are over 40 or have aching joints, you may also want to consider taking glucosamine tablets. Research suggests (albeit inconclusively) that glucosamine may help repair the cartilage that erodes with age and can become painful with excessive pounding on the joints.

The single biggest training mistake that people make is their belief that the harder they train, the better they will get. Well, my friends, you are hereby placed on notice that the Law of Diminishing Returns is not just an economic principle. It is also true in the realm of exercise physiology. As a result of this erroneous pereception, many runners go out and run as hard as they can every time they hit the road and entirely ignore their bodies in the process. Inevitably, such runners wind up becoming overtrained, fatigued and ultimately, injured. In addition to the physical ravages of overtraining, there are also pyschological pitfalls. If you know that every workout is going to be a gut busting, lung searing experience that leaves you totally spent, yourbrain which naturally register a certain subconscious resistance to doing them, since the brain is programmed to avoid pain. You may be able to override the brain’s reluctance to work hard for awhile but eventually the brain has all kinds of clever tricks to beat you into submission such as side stitches, sprained ankles, stomach issues, dizziness and a whole host of other running related “ailments” that may be nothing more than pyschosomatic symptoms generated by a brain that desperately wants you to back off. Therefore, it is crucial that some of your running be easy and enjoyable and not invariably associated with pain and hard work.Furthermore, supremely hard efforts during workouts must be made very sparingly. For example, the world’s top marathoners will not run more than two marathons per year. At first glance, this seems strange since these guys run up to 300 km per week, which means that they average a marathon distance worth of running every day. Why should it be a big deal for them to run, say, one marathon per month? The answer is that the maximal effort that racing a marathon at one’s optimal pace entails is too draining on even a professional athlete (whose body is used to incredible strain) to be done more than twice per year. Our goal is to peak for Tiberias in January and not to waste our best efforts on our training runs. That does not mean, of course, that training should be a walk in the park. I strongly disagree with the theory that long runs are merely time acumulated on your feet and that pace is almost irrelevant on these long runs. That may be true if your objective is merely to finish the marathon. But if you want to run the marathon well, you have to train accordingto how you ultimately hope to race, while again reserving those rare supreme efforts for race days. This means that you should do plenty of tempo, intervals, fartlek and strides and our schedule certainly has generous doses of all of those things. But it does not mean that you go out and run a race every time you lace up.All of this sounds wonderful in theory but how do you implement this in practical terms. The answer is by doing proper warm ups and cool downs and by doing recovery runs at the appropriate pace.Warming up is critical for three principle reasons. One major objective is thermonuclear regulation: In order to exercise efficiently, you need to raise yourcore body temperature. Another is cardiovascular: As the heart shifts from a resting rate to the vastly increased effort necessitated by running, this increased effort should be made gradually to avoid shocking the heart. By the way, this is one of the reasons why you usually feel much better after 15 minutes of running than you do after 2 minutes. The heart has already adjusted to the new demands and has reached what physiologists refer to as a “steady state”. The final reason why warming up is important is muscular: Cold muscles are short, tense and easily strained. The biomechanic principles involved in running, specifically with respect to muscle contraction in the legs, are incredibly complex. Tearing off like a bat out of hell at the start of a run is a recipe for a hamstring, groin or calf strain. So, how long should you warm up? It really depends on how old you are and on your body type. Some older runners need up to a half hour to warm up while others need no more than 5 minutes. Because everyone has limited time to invest in their training, I recommend the following rule of thumb. Start out very slowly and continue to run slowly for a full 10 minutes (e.g. a Narkiss or Dolev loop) before doing anything harder than a moderate effort. If you are going to be doing fast intervals, you need to be warmer so a 15 minute warmup is preferable and you should slowly pick up the pace in the last three minutes of the warmup to give your body a subtle hint of what lies ahead.Recovery runs and cooling down work on the same principle. Endurance running causes microscopic tissue damage and miniscule muscle tears. This is no big deal and the body’s natural metabolic processes easily heal these impacts. However, since if you are marathon training, you are going to be doing the same thing to your body again tomorrow, you need to help the body accelerate the healing. The way to do this is by increasing blood flow. Enhanced blood flow is facilitated by movement. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, you will recover best from long runs not by lying comatose on the couch with a box of Pringles but rather by doing an easy recovery run. How slow and how far should recovery runs be? This is also quite subjective. If I had to give it a specific number, I would say that your recovery pace should be 45 seconds to 1 minute slower than one’s normal moderate training pace and be somewhere between 8-12 kilometers. However, there are a few caveats here. It is not true that the slower you run, the more you will recover. At some point, the unnatural biocmechanic process of running so much slower will throw your stride off and actually tax your muscles more, which is precisely the opposite of what we are trying to achieve. Therefore, you should run at the slowest pace at which your body can find a rythm. For most people, this is between 45-60 seconds slower per kilometer than their normal, moderate training pace. However, if you are dogging it every time out there, you would slow down less on recovery runs or risk an unatural stride. With respect to the distance of recovery runs, they can sometimes be effective with as little as 5-6 km, depending on what you are recovering from. We reduce the length of our recovery runs on Saturday Nights when we have run very long on the previous day and we also eliminate the strides. The best part of a recovery run is that theoretically, you should know immediately if you have done it correctly. If you have done it properly, you should feel less sore and more invigorated than you did when you started, which is certainly not the intense exhaustion you would feel after an interval session.