high intensity intervals

When running at one pace gets easy, I try to switch it up and do high intensity intervals. You can do this on a treadmill or running outside. 

When I am on the treadmill, I usually just warm up for five minutes on not such a high speed, like five. Then, I go up to six for one minute and then up again to eight or nine for 30 seconds. I keep this rhythm until I reach 15 or 20 minutes, depending on how in shape I am. After that i go down to seven and keep that speed for the rest of my run. 

If I'm running outside, I do something very similar. Usually I'll run about half a mile, and begin the intervals. However, instead of doing it by minutes, I sprint to a designated section of the trail and that makes it a little more fun because I'm not waiting for the 30 seconds to be up. 

These intervals help me improve my endurance and also give muscle tone. It's good to change the routine once in a while so your body doesn't get used to one thing and you stop seeing improvements.    

Changing it up

The scenery as you run, I think is a crucial factor to whether you tire easily and faster. I think we can all agree that with a good view, running is way more pleasurable. There are even inventions now a days to make running on a treadmill more entertaining. Of course you can listen to music and that helps, but if you run for 40 minutes staring at a wall, its not very fun. Some fancy treadmills have a screen that plays a variety of videos with amazingly beautiful scenery. I once chose to run through some city in Italy. As cool as that sounds, its fun the first few times you use all the videos and then it gets boring again. 

For these reasons and many more, I have always preferred to run outside. Wether it be a park or sidewalk trails, running outside is way better. You never see the exact same thing; as weather fluctuates you get to improve and change your stamina; there is the opportunity to take pets with you; breathing fresh air is always a plus too. 

The valley is luckily a place with a lot of parks. This gives you a wide variety to pick where you want to run. The parks vary everywhere from size to difficulty of trails. One of my favorite ones to run in is Bill Schupp park in McAllen. It is pretty big, and the trail isn't concrete. It is made out of loose rock gravel, and dirt. That's the best way I can describe it. I like this because it's not as rough on the knees for me. Running on concrete trails will hurt my knees after a while, and the rocks relieve the tension and change the pressure points on every step. I ran in this park this past Friday with my boyfriend and it was really enjoyable. We like to change up the places where we run and this week we ran here. 

My only complaint about running outside is that the weather can be hard to run in. However, like I mentioned, this can improve your stamina. It was really hard to run only three miles because if how hot it was! With time, you start getting more in shape and it becomes normal to run in different weathers. I can't wait to get used to the heat, because it's about to get a lot hotter.