It’s been such a cold winter and I haven’t had enough time to train as I would have liked. I am registered for a big race in a couple weeks. Should I run it?
It HAS been a chilly winter to say the least, which has some runners opting to stay inside on the couch rather than braving the elements to get in proper milage. The answer to your question lies in a number of factors: what was your aerobic base at the end of last season, how much training have you been able to maintain over the winter and what is your race schedule for the coming season? Without knowing those details, I would suggest doing a long run in the next week or so to gauge fitness and make your decision from there. If you feel as if you are capable of completing the distance injury-free, I’d say go for it, but I would advise you to treat it as a training run, especially if you are under trained. It is only the beginning of the season so there is no reason to get injured, especially on the first race of the season! Use it as a warm up race to get your head in the racing space and pick up your training from there.
How many hours of sleep should a runner get a night?
A quick look at the sleeping habits of elite runners will show a range from 6 hours to 10 hours a night. The amount of sleep that each athlete varies because everybody’s quality of sleep differs. If you are a sleeper who can be unconscious within moments of shutting it down for the night, you could get away with 8 hours a night but if you tend to toss and turn, you may need up to 10 or more hours, especially in times of peak training.
It is never worth it to sacrifice sleep for training, in my opinion, especially if the quality of sleep is compromised. There is quite a bit of evidence that shows that the more rested a runner is, the higher their performance on race day.
A few ways to ensure that you are getting adequate sleep is shutting down electronics at least an hour before bed and setting a bed time routine in place to ready your body for sleep. Another option is monitoring the quality of your sleep which can be done effectively with a sleep app such as SleepBot and SleepCycle.
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