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Windsor Running Blog

The Importance of A Workout Partner

4/28/2016

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Picture this: It’s 5:00AM and your alarm sounds. While it’s technically spring, the weather outside is painting a different picture. Your plan calls for an easy five miles before work and while normally you’d wait until the afternoon when the weather is like this, you have family and work commitments today that will prevent you from getting your run in.
 
This is the type of situation that prevents so many of us from reaching our running and fitness goals.  At Windsor Running, one of our secrets to getting consistent workouts in is making sure that we always have a running partner. And on days where we can’t find a friend to get up early with us, we make sure to hold ourselves accountable in our online running communities! We’ve outlined four key benefits to running with a partner below:
 
Accountability – In our scenario above, the only thing that got us out of bed was knowing that our friends were waiting for us at the track, and not wanting to let them down! I live across the street from a track and had some 400-meter repeats on tap last week. Even though all it was going to take was literally crossing one street, my bed was so comfortable! But I knew that my buddies were already warming up and we needed to get the work done. So out I went, crushed the workout and came back ready to take on the day. 

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From Big Data to Big Performance: The Art Of Recording Your Progress

4/15/2016

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There are many ways technology can help make us better runners. From Fitbits, to Bluetooth headphones, to heart rate monitors, there really has never been more technology and data available to us than there is right now.

That's great, right? It is...but only if you're using that data to your advantage. While real-time results are great for singular workouts, your devices really pay off when you're able to analyze your workouts over time, allowing you to gauge real progress (or regress when life gets in the way). The lesson being, take advantage of your data by recording each workout. Or put another way: if you have all the gear, make sure you have an "idear" of what those (often) expensive devices are doing for you.

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The Benefits of Hill Training for Runners

4/7/2016

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Olympic Gold and Silver medalist Frank Shorter once said: “Hills are speed work in disguise.” As coaches who have grown up and gone to schools at places that always seem to be at the top of a hill, we can’t agree enough with Frank that hills should be an important part of your training routine. The best part about hill training is that depending on the length and grade of the hill you are running on, and the time and intensity your training plan calls for, you can accomplish many different workouts. One of the biggest advocates of hill training was famous coach Arthur Lydiard. He used hill repeats to great success when training his athletes for races from the 800 meters to the marathon. We have listed a few different benefits of hill work that you can do reap in your training right now to make yourself stronger:

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Why Strength Training is Important for Running

4/2/2016

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When I was in high school, I was a track and cross-country athlete.  I was not a large kid.  And when I graduated back in 2002, at a height of 5’9 ½ (don’t you dare short-change me that half-inch!), I was 140 pounds and that was a direct result of my awesome two-day a week weight room regimen of two sets of bicep curls and three sets of talking with my friends.  And while I wasn’t the fastest in the country, in the state, or even on my own team, I could run a pretty quick 5K despite my lack of strength training.  Fast forward to college, where I spent the majority of my first four months in the weight room and the cafeteria, which resulted in a 35lb weight gain by the time Thanksgiving came around.

As you can tell from this story, my goals and focus in high school were different from my goals and focus in college.  As a high school cross-country athlete, my goals were to be best distance runner possible and I felt that lifting was a barrier to achieving that.  When I entered the world of collegiate track and field, my goal was to gain muscle mass and strength to make myself stronger and more explosive for multi-event competitions like the Decathlon. Now that I’m a coach, I realize that my biggest mistake was thinking that strength training meant abandoning my ability run distance! I used to believe that weight training had no place for endurance athletes and the only strength gains that were important were the adaptations that took place during a run.  This was a mindset that I, and many other distance runners, had despite the overwhelming scientific evidence disproving this theory.

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