Running 101 - A Science Backed Guide for Beginner Runners

Intro: So, You’ve Decided to Start Running

So, you’ve decided to start running. Congratulations! Not only are you about to embark on a journey of improved health and wellness, but you’re also about take part in an activity that endless individuals derive deep satisfaction, accomplishment and mental clarity while doing. Exciting times are ahead, indeed. These can be tricky waters to navigate at first and maybe you are feeling overwhelmed and clueless as to how you should approach this newfound activity. No worries, I got you. As a former beginner and long-time advocate of running, I have made pretty much all the mistakes you can possibly make along my own path, so to speak, and am here to share them with you!

These tips and tricks will not only ensure that you safely start this process, but also ensure that you can effectively and efficiently increase your mileage and get faster each week.

Section 1: Foundation

1.1 Understanding You Starting Point

Before starting any new fitness regimen, you must take a close look at your own fitness level and determine what your starting point is. In your current state, can you run 5km? What about 1km? What about down the block? Key point here, it absolutely does not matter where you are starting from because as you’ll find, the body is quick to adapt. There is no shame in setting your initial running goal as “around the block”. What we are aiming to do is prevent injury by ensuring that you are not blazing out of the gate and trying to run hero distances.

Those that train smart, can train longer. Set a realistic goal for your first run. This should be a distance that is manageable, not push boundaries. An effective method of finding your initial running distance is to run for time versus distance. Essentially, you’ll set out and aim for running 20 – 30 minutes. That absolutely does not mean that you will run for 20 – 30 minutes straight. It is perfectly acceptable and wise to mix in some walking along the way. If that means for your first run that you are running for 1-minute and walking for 5-minutes, so be it. We are playing the long game here!

I would suggest continuing in this fashion for the first week or first few weeks, running 3 to 4 times per week, while recording your total distance completed in an excel sheet or otherwise. Utilize a GPS watch to determine how far you ran during each training session. We’ll use this as your starting point.

1.2 Get the Right Gear

I cannot emphasize how important it is to treat yourself to a pair of actual running shoes and no, for the love of God, your Nike 407s do not count as running shoes (or everyday shoes for that matter). Think of true running shoes as protection devices. Running shoes are specifically designed to minimize the impact and strain on your feet, knees, joints, hips etc. etc. and thereby reduce the potential for injury (simmer down, barefoot advocates, I have a whole other blog on my thoughts in that regard for you to read). A solid pair of running shoes is not a cheap investment but as a beginner, this investment will last you a LONG time. You can count on getting in anywhere from 500 – 800km as a rule before having to replace your runners which is a ton of running for a beginner.

I would recommend going down to your local running shop (not a big-chain store) and getting a proper assessment done by a professional. They’ll be able to determine what your natural gait is and recommend the proper shoe.

What do I mean by “natural gait”? Boiled down to a core concept, this is how you walk or run. What happens when your foot lands on the ground? Does it stay neutral? Roll inwards? Outwards? This is called pronation and it is a key indicator that a professional uses to assess your running style and thereby determines the proper shoe for your needs. Ensuring you have the proper shoe for your natural gait is vitally important in preventing injury over time.

Section 2: Building in Your Routine

2.1 Start Slow: The Rule of 10 – 15%

We have our starting point, we have our proper gear, its time to build up some mileage! The name of the game here is “slow and steady”. The overarching cause of injury in runners is attempting to run too fast, too soon. The impact of running places a tremendous amount of strain on the body and it is crucial that you habituate your body to this stress before increasing the strain. Studies show that each strike produces a force that is 3 – 4 times your body weight. Let’s take a 150lb runner. That means you are placing 450 – 600lbs of force on your body every single time your foot hits the ground. Multiply that by the average strikes in a 5km run, around 6250 steps, and you have a total force of somewhere between 2,812,500 and 3,750,000lbs (insert mind blown emoji here). I am not even going to touch the calculations for longer runs, you get the picture. It’s truly inconceivable that our bodies can handle this immense level of stress to begin with.

2.2 The Power of Rest Days

Never underestimate the power of rest days. In fact, rest days are so vitally important to your progress (especially as a beginner) that many in the fitness realm have begun to coin the phrase “you’re only good as your recovery”. When you are resting and recovering, your body is reacting to the stimulus you have placed upon it during your training sessions (running, lifting, what have you) and inducing adaptations in the body to better handle that stimulus the next time you encounter it.

For beginner runners, that means limiting your runs to 3 days per week and eventually building up to 4 days per week over time. A good rule of thumb is to work on building up your mileage for up to 3 weeks (10 – 15%, don’t forget), taking a slight de-load (approximately 25%) in the 4th week and then going into the next month of training you’ll add a day of running which will be approximately half the distance that you typically run on any given day.

I should note that mixing in an additional day of running is typically only required when you are getting into heavier distance goals such as trying to PR a half-marathon or completing a marathon. For the average individual, 4 days per week is more than enough.

If you are looking for some tips for your recovery, you can check out my blog on the topic here.

2.3 Mixing up Your Routine

If you really, truly desire to do some physical activity on your rest days and you are inclined to disregard my above advice then it is recommended that you mix in some cross-training. What do I mean by cross-training? This is really any other type of physical activity that isn’t your desired sport. Cycling can be an excellent alternative to running when you’re feeling bruised and broken. Not only that, but the inherent biomechanics required of cycling assists in developing musculature of the lower limbs that are essential for running. Furthermore, the low impact nature of cycling can boost the development of your cardiorespiratory system while minimizing the potential for overtraining and injury.

On top of cycling, as a runner you should be and absolutely must supplement your routine with strength training. There is fundamentally no argument against the benefits that strength training provides for runners, this isn’t even a question anymore. There are three major goals that are achieved by adding in strength training alongside your running routine, namely, strengthening muscle and connective tissue to prevent injury, increasing speed by developing neuromuscular coordination and control and improving running economy and efficiency. All of the above are surely important outcomes for a runner and therefore strength training is simply a no-brainer. If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of strength training alongside a running regimen, take a look at my full post on the topic here.

Section 3: Running Smart

3.1 Listen to Your Body

Following specific running protocols is smart. Increasing your mileage incrementally by 10 – 15% each week is smart. De-loading by 25% every 4 weeks is smart. LISTENING to what your body is telling you is even smarter. If you wake up the day of a long-run and you’re gearing up and can tell something is just off, please consider taking a rest day instead. You can postpone your long-run until you are feeling fresh and get in some cross-training if you really feel like you need to get some type of physical activity in.

What we are aiming for here is staving off overtraining and potential injury. Incurring a running injury is detrimental to your training and the downsides to taking one rest day pale in comparison. True overtraining and serious injuries can take months and in some cases years to recover from.

3.2 Monitoring You Heart Rate

If you are presently without some type of biometric monitoring device, this is your wake-up call to go out and get one! Not only are they excellent for monitoring your running pace (something you will naturally become obsessed with for better or worse), but vital for monitoring your heart rate which is a key metric to pay attention to as a runner.

To consistently progress in an efficient manner, you are going to aim for keeping your runs at a relatively low heart rate. This seems wildly counterintuitive if you are new to running. Common sense would posit that hitting your training as aggressively as possible would lead to greater and faster adaptations. How could running slow possibly result in more benefits than running fast and hard? Again, our answer here lies in the concept of overtraining. The human body can only recover from so much stimulus and stress and continuously smashing runs with everything you got is a recipe for running your body into the ground (pun intended). A far better and scientifically proven method of progressing is to run at a slower pace in something called “Zone 2 Training”.

Zone 2 refers to heart rate and specifically at a heart rate that is 60 – 70% of your max heart rate. Expectedly, most individuals do not have a great handle on what their maximum heart rate is, so don’t take it to heart (gawd I need to stop). While there are specific laboratory-based and field-based tests for more accurately measuring maximum heart rate, for the average person, 220 minus your age is generally accepted as a decent predictor. So, 220 minus your age multiplied by 0.6 to 0.7 will give you the desired range for your heart rate during 80% of your runs and, if you really want to avoid too much confusion, a simpler and fairly accurate way of predicting if you are in Zone 2 is subjectively assessing if you can have a conversation without becoming out of breath but you’d prefer not to.

3.3 Proper Warm-Up and Cooldown

Hopping out of bed and throwing on your running shoes and immediately hitting the pavement is akin to starting a diesel truck in the dead of winter and stomping on the gas to test it’s “0 to 60”. I realize that analogy may soar over the heads of some readers (lucky you) but the point here is, you have to get your body warmed up and primed for activity.

Warming up your body prior to running has several benefits, most importantly injury prevention and improving athletic performance. I am certainly not talking about static stretching as my millennial peers will recall being preached during gym class for the entirety of our schooling years. Static stretching has since been proven to result in more sport-related injuries than if you had done nothing at all! A far superior alternative is to go through a series of dynamic stretching and mobility exercises related to the activity you are about to take part in. I won’t go into great lengths regarding the specific exercises one may choose prior to running as there are a myriad of options and YouTube videos available for advice and it is beyond the scope of this article. Bottomline, take the 10 – 15 minutes it takes to warm up before heading out on the road.

Not to be outdone, a proper cooldown is equally important to ensuring adequate recovery (especially overtime) from your training sessions. While static stretching has been proven to have valid applications in this regard, there are additional benefits to a proper cooldown. Allowing your heart rate and blood pressure return to normal before leaping back into your daily routine can have induce many benefits on your cardiovascular health and ensuring adequate recovery. In fact, well known commercially available biometric monitoring devices have demonstrated increased recovery scores from allowing 10 – 15 minutes of deep breathing exercises following a rigorous bout of training. Better recovery leads to better workouts which leads to better results.

Section 4: Nutrition and Hydration

4.1 Fueling Your Runs

When it comes to calories burned during exercise, running is king. In fact, a 155 lb male runner will burn on average over 800 calories per hour. When we start getting into serious long distance running lasting an hour and a half or more on a regular basis, fueling your runs becomes crucial. Not just pre-run fuel either, you need intra-fuel and post-run fuel as well. If you are taking in adequate carbohydrates on a regular basis, you have approximately 80 minutes of fuel in the tank before you run dry, and fatigue starts to set in. Of course, your body will inevitably progress to fat oxidation, and, under extreme demands, amino acids found in skeletal muscle protein however, the energy supplied from such sources can only fuel low to moderate type activity and is not ideal for performance.

Luckily, all the above can be mitigated by supplementing our runs with exogenous carbohydrate sources. There are endless endurance fuel products on the market to choose from. Everything from liquids, to gels, to solids, pick you poison, it’s out there! Fuel choices can be highly individualized, so it’s important to experiment and find something that agrees with you and your body. In terms of the carbohydrate quantities, a general rule is to take in approximately 60g of carbohydrates every hour starting after approximately 45 minutes. This will ensure that your body has a fuel source to utilize before you run out of energy and allow you to maintain performance in your run. It also makes the run infinitely more enjoyable as anyone who has ever “bonked” (aka run the tank dry) will know all too well.

4.2 Staying Hydrated

DRINK WATER. That is all. Of course, the topic of hydration can be dramatically more complex than this depending on several factors. There are some general rules when it comes to hydration that will suffice for the average active individual namely, 17 – 20oz of water 2 – 3 hours prior to training, 8oz 20 – 30 minutes prior to training, 7 – 10oz of water every 10 – 20 minutes during exercise and another 8oz within 30 minutes of finishing exercise. As basic as these recommendations are, most individuals don’t come anywhere close to meeting them (if they even hit those numbers throughout the entire day).

Proper hydration is vital for improving the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to working muscles through the circulatory system as well as removing waste by-products. The human body is a marvel of biological engineering. It’s a machine whose systems must be meticulously maintained for optimal performance, which is exactly the role that adequate hydration plays. Without adequate water intake, our muscles quickly fatigue, soreness sets in and a build up of lactic acid and other waste by-products accumulates within the bloodstream. Your muscles will literally scream at you as they slowly starve of oxygenated blood. As mentioned above, for exercise lasting 60 minutes or less, this is a moderately easy fix. You’d be hard pressed to find a gym not equipped with a water fountain and there are a plethora of water carrying products for your road and trail running needs. Adequate hydration is therefore, one of the simplest areas of focus for boosting and maintaining performance while running.

For bouts of running lasting longer than 60 minutes and at higher intensities, we now must consider replacing sweat loss (of which there are sophisticated equations to utilize) and electrolyte intake (again, math is our friend here). As this is a beginner guide, both are outside the scope of this article and better left for a separate discussion.

Section 5: Staying Motivated

5.1 Setting Realistic Goals

Motivation varies widely between individuals and the reasons you set out on a run may be different from another’s. Some run for peace and mindfulness, others for weight-loss and still yet, others run to achieve a goal such as running their first 5k, 10k, half-marathon or marathon. Whatever your reasons, the importance of setting realistic goals cannot be stressed enough.

It is imperative to your long-term motivation to set small incremental goals. In this manner, motivation is enhanced with each subsequent win. Beginning your running journey by setting a goal of running a marathon within 3 months when you aren’t regularly getting off the couch for a walk is the quickest path to failure and a total loss of motivation. It is far wiser to start with running something along the lines of a 5k in 4 to 6 weeks. Then a 10k. Then a half-marathon. Then a marathon. Then… who knows, maybe you become a lunatic and start heading into ultra territory, I cannot say! The point is, setting realistic goals that are achievable within an adequate period increases intrinsic motivation by giving you a tangible result for your effort (like a shiny new race metal, for example). Each time you can surmount a challenge you previously though unattainable, you give yourself room to dream a little bigger, or farther, in this case.

5.2 The Social Aspect of Running

There is an interesting unspoken comradery between runners you’ll soon discover. It’s akin to becoming part of some secret club that you never signed up for, like PC Optimum, but without the points. As you set out on your regular routes, you encounter many of the same individuals who begin eagerly greeting you with a small wave. Strangers too. Involuntarily, you begin doing the same, and it feels good. There is an overwhelmingly social aspect to running that is the cherry on top of the sport.

Runners want to meet runners and talk about running. They want to join communities and groups with other runners and have people to discuss nutrition and pacing and races with. They want other individuals they can set out on a 21km Sunday long run and suffer with. Running is a sport where runners praise each other for their accomplishments. Just look no further than the app Strava which is basically Facebook for endurance athletes with far less bickering and boundlessly more likes and praise. Alongside the physical and mental benefits that running has to offer, kinship is certainly high up on my list and it can be highly motivating. So, I encourage you to seek out other runners and individuals you can share your passion with as not only will this boost and maintain motivation, but you will likely form some truly great friendships along the way.

Conclusion: Your Running Journey Awaits

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the intricacy of running but, with the above, you now how have the tools to set out on the road (or trail; blue pill, red pill) and begin your running journey. There is significantly more to learn about the sport but let this be a starting point. You will naturally seek out additional information about pacing, types of running workouts, nutrition, hydration, gear, gadgets, mobility, stretching, recovery etc. etc. or it will find you through your new community or the new social media accounts you to choose to follow. So, be receptive, be experimental and enjoy all that running has to offer!