a few days to accustom leg and arm and body muscles to the activity. The beginner can then start adding time on his or her feet.
When you can do 15 minutes every day, or at least every other day, step up to 30 minutes, followed by two days at 15 minutes, another 30, another two 15s and so on. Always give your body adequate recovery. Then go out to 45 minutes, with two 15-minute days in between, and then on to an hour plus two 15s when you can handle it. Then you can start to bring up the intermediate days – alternating an hour, two half-hours, an hour and so on.
Now you can extend that long run as you like. This is the most effective way to do it. Some people start running 15 minutes a day every day, then 30 a day, then 45 a day. It seems to be the faster way to achieve fitness but it will take them three times as long to achieve the goals they would get if they used patience. You cannot neglect those vital recovery days.
As we have said, the world’s first group of joggers in Auckland were about 20 businessmen. Most had had mild heart attacks. They were aged from 40 up to 70 or so. Inside eight months, eight of them ran a full marathon. Since they couldn’t run 100 metres when they started, their results demonstrate the reaction you can expect from a systematic approach. One 74-year-old had had several heart attacks and couldn’t run 50 metres. Inside six months, he ran 20 miles without stopping and had lost 60 pounds in weight. A friend just up the road lost 60 pounds in a year and had already tackled and completed a full Ironman. He was 47 and he had done nothing before he started. He was a huge man then and was still bigger than average – the difference is that he after he was fit and confident.
He is not an unusual case. One of the remarkable aspects of jogging has been the discovery by so many who have taken up running, even late in life, of potential they didn’t know they had to be quite successful athletes.
They have found that, provided they keep training systematically and don’t suffer any major setbacks – like being knocked down by a car, for instance – they can continue to improve and can even run better 10Ks or marathons after ten years of running than they could after two. This is the most significant result of the continual build-up of the basic ingredient in running, endurance.
This has been reflected in a number of sports with the emergence in masters classes of quality athletes who are comparative newcomers.
When you start jogging, you are almost certainly going to get sore muscles. By all means, try massage, but the important thing is to out and jog again the following day, even if it’s for only a slow ten or fifteen minutes at the most. Allow your heart to push the blood around and raise the blood pressure and use the exercise to flush out waste products which are causing the muscular discomfort. Let the heart do the gentle massage for you.
If you stop the exercise until the muscle ache disappears, you’ll have to begin again and work through sore muscles again. You’ll have gained nothing.
Hot baths help. So does turning a cold hose on your legs as soon as you finish a run, or a wade in the sea or lake. You can use ice packs if any soreness is bothering you and follow it with an application of heat. The cold brings the natural cortisone to the area, which stimulates the circulation and helps the recovery process. The heat prevents stiffness.
Another source of soreness is the tearing of muscle tissue when you first subject muscles to a new exercise. They will probably have been gummed together all the time you weren’t training. Increased circulation is probably the best remedy for that kind of soreness.
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