Running Two Days in a Row

When I first started running, I never ran two days in a row. Not ever! Even after a couple years of running under my belt, I rarely ran two days in a row. I still think it’s wise to avoid it, so as to minimize the stress on your joints.

Now that I have a treadmill, tho, I do sometimes run two days in a row. The running deck is very easy on my joints. The training plan I’m following doesn’t specify running two days in a row, but I sometimes re-arrange days to better fit my schedule, as was the case this past weekend. Read on…

On Saturday I did a 1 hour M2(4-5a) run, which means Cruise intervals of 5 minutes done in zones 4-5a, with 1 minute recovery jogs in between. I did this run outdoors, and without timing my pace – I wanted to just relax and focus on form. The plan didn’t say how many repeats to do, so I did 5. It was a good hard run. My hamstrings and calves were really sore and tight afterwards.

The next day, I did a 30 minute S2 Pick-up run. The description of S2 specifies to stay mostly in zones 1 and 2, inserting several 20 to 30 second accelerations. Focus on cadence and posture. Jog easy for a minute or two in between accelerations. It doesn’t say how many sets to do. Okay, see what I mean about the run workouts being ambiguous and too easy! (read my last post) I’m already having a hard time with this.

I wanted to do this workout on my treadmill, so I searched google for treadmill workouts and found one that roughly fit the S2 description above: “Treadmill Workout – Guaranteed Speed”. Coincidentally, this workout is by the same author that wrote the training plan I follow.

The workout says to warm up on the treadmill for a few minutes. Then bump the speed up slowly until your heart rate stabilizes at zone 2, which is 144 bpm for me. That happened at 5.5 mph.

Then, I proceeded with the intervals, which alternate 20 seconds of running at an increasing elevations (7.5%, 10%, then 12.5%), with 1 minute rest periods of getting off the treadmill to walk and stretch.

Turns out my treadmill doesn’t go past an elevation of 10%…GRRR! For the 12.5% elevation sets, I put the incline up all the way to 10, and then stuck something under the front end of my treadmill to boost it up a bit higher. Hopefully that approximated 12.5%.

I focused on good form and cadence during the 20 second “hard” sets. I barely broke a sweat during this workout, so this really felt more like a recovery run than anything. Probably a good thing since my muscles were still feeling trashed from the day before. The best part of this workout was all the stretching. I needed that.