ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It’s race season here in Florida, with lots of options to lace up your running shoes whether it’s your first time, or it’s been a while!
Kaleigh Gibbons, Head Coach at Orangetheory Fitness Tyrone is helping you train.
She says to focus on these three things by incorporating them into your workouts:
Endurance running, sprint training, and hills:
- “With hills, you’re going to get more of that strength training, you’re not going to be flying up hills your speed’s going to be slower and accepting the slower speed to get up the hills.”
- “Endurance, being able to get those longer runs in at a slower speed.”
- “The interval training, sprinting, recovering, sprinting recovering, that’s going to help increase your speed on your longer runs.”
Gibbons suggests two longer runs a week while you’re training. One long run and then she says, a second that’s about 80 percent of the first.
“You’re going to build each week, you’re going to add that mile onto each of them and you’re going to gradually increase it.”
Rest and recovery days are also important to avoid injury.
“If you’re really pounding the pavement, you definitely want to rest your body,” says Gibbons.
She continues explaining you should listen to your body, “if you’re sore, you start moving, once you start moving you start to feel good that’s you being sore. If you start moving and it starts to feel increasingly worse, most likely that’s an injury.”
You’ll also want to space out those runs. “If you’re somebody that does an afternoon workout one day and then wakes up and does a workout the next day, that’s not giving your body enough time to recover.”