Zelda Running Update

Last weekend, I went down to my parent's house in Highlands Ranch, Colorado for Father's Day.

Ever since my teen years, my parents have been pretty active. T

My partner, me and my Mom and Dad at a 4th of July 5k last Summer. 

hey are a huge part of the way that I got myself in shape. 

My mom is especially fit. While she was a track star in high-school, she had yet to accomplish her best things until after I was born.

When she turned 40, she used her track-star athleticism to pick up the insane sport of triathlons. My mom excelled almost right away in her races, rattling off top three finishes in her age group race after race. Soon, running became her worst event because she picked up swimming and biking so fast. She was able to turn this new-found hobby into world-wide recognition and has competed in the Triathlon World Championships as a part of Team USA each year for the last 5 years.

She's a runner at heart, and has helped me immensely on my running journey.

And now shes helping my dog. 

When I first started running my endurance was terrible, but I wanted to be able to exercise for longer. 

To try to enable me to conserve my energy, as well as train my body to run longer, my mom had me go for longer run/walks. 

But the strategy wasn't to just run as long as I could and then walk until I felt better, which is what I thought would work at first.

We actually planned out how long I would run and walk for, giving me short periods of running and rest. 

For example, when I took my dog out with my parents on Father's day, we did three minutes of running and 1 minute of walking. 

This allowed us to run at a comfortable pace for three minutes and gave us one minute to cool down.

It didn't slow us down too much, either. 

In my other post, when I took Zelda out on a run around my apartment, it took us about 11 minutes to run two laps around the complex. According to my Garmin, that is almost exactly one mile.

This time with our revised strategy and a shadier location, Zelda was able to run 3 miles in just over 33 minutes.

She laid down as soon as we got home, making it very difficult to take off her harness. 

We averaged the same amount of time even though we were walking for 3 or 4 minutes out of every mile. 

How?

It's because we were conserving our energy. 

During the spots we did run, we were able to run much faster because we knew the break was coming and we were energized from our last one.

This also helps train our bodies to conserve energy better.

Eventually with this strategy, the time you spend running increases while the break stays at one minute. Then, maybe only walk for 30 seconds every break. This will help ease your body into the ability to run for longer and longer distances. 

Not only did implementing this strategy help build my endurance up when I first started running, it also greatly improved my puppy's ability to keep running. This came after a run where I thought one mile would be her maximum for at least a couple months.