Category Archives: Training

Garmin Art – RichardWalksLondon.com

Training, , , , ,

This blog is called RichardWalksLondon, yet most of my walks are outside of London City itself.  So today I decided to go for a walk around the streets of London.

Starting on the A4 next to Green Park, and finishing near the Southwark Bridge I used my Garmin to write the name of this blog across the streets of London.  This is referred to as “Garmin Art”.

Garmin Art - Richard Walks London (.com) map
Richard Walks London (.com) map

 

Garmin Art is not as easy as I thought it would be

I was limited by the layout of the streets which made it difficult to form the letters exactly as they should appear.  Letters containing diagonal lines such as the capital ‘R’ at the start and the ‘w’ and ‘k’ in ‘walks’ were especially difficult, and in order to do the ‘London’ I decided to drop down to the river after completing the ‘walks’ as I was unable to fit ‘London’ into the layout of the streets to the right of ‘walks’.

‘London’ was further complicated when I found that the street that was going to be the left side of the letter ‘n’ was closed to all traffic including pedestrians, and as a result the ‘n’ had to be moved to the right and became a lot smaller than planned.

I used MapMyRun to plan the route. It took several attempts to work out how to fit the letters and words into the street layout, and the planning time took longer than actually walking it.  In the end the walk was only 10 miles although I have also planned a much larger route (100 miles in total) which I might do during the summer.

The maps for todays walk can also be viewed on:

Somewhere past Feltham

Training,

My wife asked me this morning (at 5am) where I was going for parkrun today.

I couldn’t remember and replied that it was somewhere past Feltham – a small understatement!

It was Upton Court parkrun that I was heading to – a 3 hour, 15 mile walk there followed by a 4 1/4 hour, 21 mile walk home.

Todays map
Today’s journey – the top line is the 15 mile route I took to parkrun, top left is parkrun itself, and then the lower line is the 21 mile route I took back home.

I had decided to run Upton Court parkrun today as it was the closed parkrun to where I live that I hadn’t run previously.

I left home just before 6am which meant that I would have to walk a good pace without getting lost in order to get to parkrun before the 9am start, and covered the 15 miles in 2 hours and 52 minutes.  In order to stay on track I used Google Maps on my cellphone to give me directions and arrived at Upton Court Park with 15 minutes to spare.

After parkrun I decided to take a different route home, intending to walk around the southern side of the Stains Reservoirs, but ended up missing a turnoff and walking around the top of the reservoirs instead.

I did get the opportunity though to walk up onto a walkway that goes between two of the reservoirs and took a few photos, but as the walkway was going in the opposite direction to home I decided not to take the walkway, and saved it for another day.

Stains Reservoir
Stains Reservoir
Stains Reservoir
Have you ever wondered what is behind these fences and hills?
Stains Reservoir
Have you ever wondered what is behind these fences and hills?
Stains Reservoirs
You could be excused for thinking this is a lake, but it is actually one of the Reservoirs
Stains Reservoirs
And looking towards the right
Stains Reservoirs
And to the left
Stains Reservoirs
The reservoir next to the ‘lake’ was almost complete empty

And on the way home I walked through Bushy Park and couldn’t resist taking some more photos of the deer:

Deer in Bushy Park
Deer in Bushy Park

My first video analysis – race walking technique

Training, ,

For only the second time this year I was back with our Tuesday night training group at Battersea Park .  Although tonight there were just two of us – Dan and myself – along with our coach, Mark Culshaw, who had his camera.

Dan and I race at a similar speed over the shorter distances (29 to 30 minutes for 5km and a little over the hour for 10km) but as you will see in the video, we have very different styles.

 

Definition of Race Walking (From the I.A.A.F. Rule covering Race Walking)

  1. Race Walking is a progression of steps so taken that the walker makes contact with the ground, so that no visible (to the human eye) loss of contact occurs. The advancing leg shall be straightened (i.e. not bent at the knee) from the moment of first contact with the ground until the vertical upright position.

 

Race walking events are normally judged under either ‘A’ grade or ‘B’ grade rules.  ‘A’ grade applies both of the above two rules (continuous contact with the ground and straight leg) but ‘B’ grade only applies the continuous contact rule – which at my speed, isn’t a problem for me.

I don’t really have any ambition to compete in ‘A’ grade races although I am sure that I will one day – once I resolve my bent knee problem.

And races of more than 50km in distance (my focus is on 100km+ events) do not usually apply the ‘A’ grade straight leg rule anyway.  It would be almost impossible for a race-walker to maintain a straight leg for 24 hours for example as during races of that length the body goes through a lot of stress, exhaustion, etc, and the athlete needs to regularly adjust their stride and style in order to keep moving forwards.

But having said that, it is interesting to view the differences in styles between Dan and I.

Dan has a faster cadence (leg turnover) than I do (and in most of the video I am trying to turn my legs over as fast as possible).  In training and long distance races my cadence is much lower than in the video.

In the side on shots you can definitely see that my knee is bent.  Coach Mark says that I need to pull my toes up just before my foot hits the ground and that should help to straighten the leg.

As a runner I used to have a long stride and in walking my stride is also considerably longer than Dan’s.  This is probably due to my height as much as anything.

One good thing I have going for me is that I have good arm drive.  In race-walking, as in running, your arms and legs are in sync, and what I discovered very quickly after I took up walking was that if I moved my arms faster, my legs would automatically move faster, and therefore my speed would increase.

 

Anyway, they are some general observations.  I will ask Mark to add his thoughts / comments to this blog post at some stage, and then hopefully in six months time we can do some more video analysis and compare the differences, and (hopefully) the improvements in both my technique and my speed.