Friday Tri: 10% Rule for Running and Illness

In running, there is a good rule of thumb that you don't increase more than 10% per week in mileage. Also, you don't increase your longest long run from week to week by more than 10%. So this means you can't cheat by taking a day off and then adding that to your next day's workout if it ends up being more than 10% more than the long workout the week before.

If you are sick and you haven't done a workout for a couple of days, or even a couple of weeks, you are going to have to go back that many days or weeks in your workout plan. You aren't going to be able to just keep going on the plan, even if you're completely recovered from the illness. And please PLEASE do not try to "make up" your missed days by adding them onto your workouts moving forward.

Do I workout when I'm sick? It depends, honestly. If I have a fever, I don't workout ever. But I mostly choose based on how I feel. If I feel like crap, I don't work out. If I can't get out of bed, I don't work out. If I just have the sniffles, I still workout, but mostly because I feel better when I workout. Still, I usually cut the mileage in half and also make it a lot easier.

Back to the 10% rule, if you are starting from scratch, you're going to have to start at some distance. For me, I started at .1 mile on a treadmill. Then I went up .1 mile at a time. I think this is a pretty reasonable increase. I also always took Sundays off, so there was one day a week where I had complete rest. I think that whether you are religious or not, one day a week off is a good plan.

A lot of people who run or do any form of exercise do the same thing every day, the same distance and the same pace. I don't think this is a good idea because your body tends to get used to it and then you don't have any more fitness gains. If you are getting older, you are going to lose muscle mass unless you fight against it with varied workouts. That's why you do weight lifting one day, and then different kinds of running, like hard running one day and a long run a couple days later. But if one week your longest long run is 6 miles, then the next week, it should be 6.5, not 7.

If you are doing something like biking or swimming, where there is less impact on your joints, you can possibly play with the 10% rule a little bit, even increase it up to 20%, though you should realize that this will increase your risk of injury or just as bad, discouragement and your need to recover.

Even the best runners have a limit as to how many miles they can do a week without injury. This tends to be right around 100 miles. For a good runner, that is about 10 hours a week of running. That's not that many hours of running, at least to a professional athlete. Add in some stretching and some weight training, and you have maybe twelve hours.

A professional swimmer like Michael Phelps will put in 5-6 hours a day, 6 days a week in the pool, which is more than triple what a runner can do. A professional biker will do about the same as a swimmer in terms of hours, maybe more. Running is just extremely hard on the body. It has certain benefits, like being weight bearing and it is possibly the most difficult workout possible, since you have to move your entire body weight without any assistance.

People who are starting out in a workout routine will probably want to keep their running pretty limited. Maybe once or twice a week for just a few minutes, like 4 or 5. Those who are more fit can run up to three or four times a week. I don't actually recommend running more often than that. I don't run more than that, even when I am in hard core training for a 50 mile running race.

I have a lot of friends who are exclusively runners. Frankly, I think they are crazy. They get injured fairly often and then they go crazy because they have nothing else that they like to do for fitness, and even though they know they should stay off their legs, they can't do it. They keep pushing before they are ready and often end up extending their injury phase. I sometimes want to shake these runners and tell them to find something else that they like to do. It would probably improve their running if they had some cross training skills. And not getting injured is possibly the number one important thing that you can do for your fitness. Obviously, we don't always have 100% control over this, but we do have some control.

When people hear that I have done ultramarathons and Ironman competitions, they seem to think that I must be running every day for hours. It isn't true. One day a week I do a long run, sometimes two days a week. Then I do other things with my time. I want to keep my muscles working, and make sure that my heart is being conditioned, but I don't want to kill my knees or hips which are both problem spots if I do too much running.

At my peak, I will be running 70 miles a week, and that is 40 miles one day, 20 the next, and then a couple of four or five mile runs in the rest of the week. But that's unusual for me. Most days I run 2-3 miles after a warm up bike. Some days I do the elliptical machine instead of running because it's easier on my knees, and then I go swimming at the gym. Some days I just do a long bike and don't do any running at all. From November to April, my average running miles per week is about 20.

Back to the 10% rule, please exercise reasonably. Even if you are only walking, I have had friends who decided to walk 10 miles one day after years of inactivity. And then they can't move the next day. That's just silly.