Ep #150: Run/Walk Intervals: Not Just for Beginners

Fast forward 10 years, I’m training for my first half marathon. By that time, I’d kind of gotten on board with intervals as a routine training method and as a race strategy, and that was really my primary method of running. And guess what? That half marathon that I ran, I was 10 years older than before. I ran it, 13 miles, at a 13-minute mile pace.

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who has never felt athletic but you still dream about becoming a runner, you are in the right place. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running and life coach and I teach women how to start running, feel confident, and change their lives, and now I want to help you.

Hey rebels. Guess what? This is the 150th episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. What? 150 episodes. My mind is blown. I cannot believe I’ve sat in front of this mic 150 times to record. Isn’t that incredible? I know I talked about it before, but achievement happens one small step at a time.

That’s how you finish a long run, one step after another. When I started this show, I was not thinking about episode 150. I was thinking about episode one, and then two, and then three. And I worked on the episode I was in and now look, two a half years later and there’s all these awesome episodes, kind of like running the interval you’re in and you just keep focusing on that.

And then next thing you know, you’ve run 10 miles. So in all those episodes, I do kind of wonder how many times I’ve used the F bomb. It would be sort of fun to go through and count. Maybe we’ll make that a future contest.

Anyway, thank you so much for riding along with me for all this time. It’s been fun, I love that we get to spend this time together every week. I hope that you will stick around for the next 150, which I guess will be somewhere in the middle of 2023. Seems so far away, but I know it’s going to be here before we know it.

Anyway, before we jump into our run/walk interval discussion today, I need to remind you that the Rebel Runner Roadmap is open for enrollment right now. Yay. It closes again on Sunday, June 28th though, so you need to sign up now. This is the last time this summer I will be offering this program.

Now, the Roadmap, if you’ve not heard of it before is a 30-day class that will get you up and running and using intervals, just like a boss. It will lay the groundwork for you to train for your first 5K, you will learn running form and breathing and pacing and all kinds of awesome mindset hacks that are going to just really turn you into a consistent, confident runner.

Hundreds of women, quite literally hundreds of women have gone through this program so far. It has been a game-changer for them. They are stronger, fitter, more confident, and lots of them have gone on to train for everything from 5Ks through full marathons.

And these are women of all shapes and sizes and abilities. So if you are listening to this show right now thinking, “Yeah, it’s fun to listen to the podcast, I’d love to be a runner, but it’s really just a pipe dream for me,” I promise you it isn’t. It’s totally possible. The roadmap will show you how. Just go to rebelrunnerroadmap.com to sign up.

Okay, so today we are going to talk about run/walk intervals. And we’re not going to talk about how to do them because I actually did a whole episode on that a while back. I think it’s number seven. I also did a whole episode on what to do if you feel self-conscious about doing run/walk intervals and that’s number 105.

So what I want to talk about today is this concept that a lot of people have that run/walk intervals are just your starter plan. That’s just what you do in the very beginning as you work towards getting stronger and faster. And I think this is kind of a myth that most people do believe.

Most non-runners think that this is the way it works. And I believe that that’s thanks to programs like Couch to 5K, which they don’t teach you how to do intervals just for the sake of doing intervals. They teach them to you as a way to run a 5K in under 30 minutes, which is really unattainable for a lot of people.

So run/walk intervals are an amazing strategy for runners at all levels. Brand-new beginners, all the way through to very experienced runners. Run/walk, in my mind, run/walk is simply one more way to be a runner. It’s just one of the different ways that you can be a runner.

And Jeff Galloway, who is an Olympic runner, he’s an Olympian, has written several books on the run/walk method and has taught it for many, many years. So I’m actually going to grab a quote from him to kind of explain why they’re so awesome.

So Jeff says, “Walk breaks will significantly speed up recovery because there is less damage to repair. The early walk breaks erase fatigue and the later walk breaks reduce or eliminate overuse and muscle breakdown.” So what that means is that you can go farther with less discomfort and often even go faster.

And my clients for sure have experienced all of that when they adopt this method in my programs. So when I first started running, I used intervals just in the beginning until I could run a mile without stopping. And then from there, I was like, okay, I don’t need to do intervals anymore. So I worked up to two miles without stopping and then three and then four.

And actually, worked my way up to doing seven miles in a row without taking a single walk break. And you know what, the farther I went, the slower I got. And at the time, I was in my early to mid-30s. I was probably 50 pounds lighter than I am now at least. And I averaged about a 14-minute mile on those long runs when I didn’t stop and take walk breaks.

Because without those walk breaks, I would start getting fatigued and I would just slow down more and more. So by the end of the run, I was barely shuffling along. I’d do the first mile in about 12 minutes, maybe even 11 minutes. And then I’d just get slower and slower and slower, and over the run, I was probably averaging a 14-minute mile.

Now fast forward 10 years, I’m training for my first half marathon. By that time, I’d kind of gotten on board with intervals as a routine training method and as a race strategy, and that was really my primary method of running. And guess what? That half marathon that I ran, I was 10 years older than before. I ran it, 13 miles, at a 13-minute mile pace.

So a full minute per mile faster than the average I did without walk breaks and I was 10 years older and I was doing almost double the distance that I was doing when I would do seven miles without taking walk breaks. This is kind of a big deal.

So I was older and I was running farther and I was adding in walk breaks and I was going faster. So yeah, it is a game-changer. Now, I know that a lot of you, you like the challenge of seeing how far you can do without stopping. I get it. I actually think that’s a pretty fun goal to play with, especially with something like a 5K.

You’re like, I’m on board with doing intervals for longer runs, but I want to know if I can do a 5K without stopping. I get it. I highly approve this goal. I think it’s awesome. But I also think if you want to be a runner for the long-term, not just the next five to 10 years, but runner for life, if you want to be one of those 80-year-old women, 90-year-old women that you see on YouTube running and still doing it at an age that most people are like, no, that’s not the time when I want to be active, if you want to be a runner for life, I think intervals are really important thing to master right now.

They’re so much easier on your body. You can use them in different ways throughout your training. It doesn’t always have to be the exact same run/walk ratio all the time. You can shorten the intervals and use them as sprints. You can do intervals where you jog up a hill and you walk back down. So those are both examples of high intensity interval training. Great way to increase your aerobic capacity.

If you are currently somebody who runs without stopping and you’re frustrated because you can’t seem to get any faster or you feel like you’re just exhausted at the end, you can throw in very targeted walk breaks like maybe you run for 10 minutes and you walk for a minute.

And notice how that tiny little walk break helps you run faster overall, it helps you feel more energetic, it helps you manage your energy throughout your run, and you might even try a five-minute run and a one-minute walk, or three-minute run and a one-minute walk. But you can play with so many different ratios to get the best combination of effort and intensity and pace and all of that.

So I urge you to play around with it. For longer runs, you can also slow down your pace and settle into a really nice relaxing rhythm of running and walking, and maybe almost in a 50:50 ratio that you can maintain for a really long time. For shorter, maybe midweek runs, you can lengthen the run intervals and practice going longer periods without walking or raising the intensity of your run intervals and just kind of playing around with speed.

There’s so much that you can do to keep your body on its toes. Instead of just settling into that exact same thing every single run, play around with different intensities and different ratios. For example, when I do a long run, it’s usually 30 seconds of running and a minute of walking for the whole thing.

And this feels awesome to me. I can keep that up for a really long time. Miles and miles and miles. My longest training run last year was 20 miles, doing 30 seconds of running and a minute of walking. It felt actually – I was tired at the end but it felt pretty good otherwise.

Now, if I’m heading out during the week for maybe two miles, just a quick run in the week, two miles or maybe even three miles, I might switch that up. I might flip it and do 60 seconds of running and 30 seconds of walking instead.

And I know this is going to feel more challenging and that’s okay. I might sometimes on these shorter runs do a minute of running and a minute of walking, I might even try two minutes of running and a minute of walking. And just kind of play around within the run to see what feels good and what doesn’t.

I usually start my runs out with a slower, less intense effort, and then I increase the effort level so that at the end, I’m pushing myself harder. Some days when I’m feeling bored though, I might just decide like, I might put on a bunch of Lizzo songs and I’ll run through one and I’ll walk through the next and mix it up that way or do some fast intervals and then some slow intervals.

You can even do fartlek intervals, which makes me laugh every time I say the word, but it’s a Swedish word, it means speed play. And it simply means running and walking and changing speeds throughout your workout in a very unplanned manner. Like just let the spirit move you as you see fit.

So there’s so many different ways that you can incorporate intervals into your running that you can just be an interval runner, run/walk interval runner – it’s hard to say. But it doesn’t always have to be exactly the same every single time.

So I highly recommend that you really consider making this a strategy for you. And there will be days maybe where you want to run all the way through, and that’s totally fine. But keep an eye on your future and the wear and tear on your body and maybe this is something you can start incorporating now so that as you age, as you mature as a runner, this is something you might want to incorporate more and more of.

Or you might just say, fuck it, I want to be an interval runner right now, this is how I’m going to do it, and I’ve just given you a whole bunch of ways that you can kind of zhuzh it up and have fun with it every week.

Now, I do know that there are lots of you that think, “Okay yes, I am totally cool with using this method during my training runs, but on race day, hell no. I do not want people to see me walking. I don’t want them to see me give up,” and I’m using give up in air quotes.

I don’t want to hear someone say, “Hey, keep going, you can do it, don’t quit now,” right? Girl, please, do not let other people’s irrelevant opinions dictate how you run. And yes, those opinions, irrelevant. They are not running. Those people saying like, keep going, don’t quit now, they’re not the ones in your body doing the running. You are.

So the only person who gets a say in how you train, how you race, how you do anything is you. I mean yes, you can listen to other people, listen to your coach, listen – allow your friends to express their opinion. Totally fine. But do not push yourself into a position to do something that doesn’t make sense for you just because you don’t want to feel embarrassed by doing something that other people have an opinion about.

Because you know what, here’s the deal. If you trained with run/walk intervals and then you try to race without them, you really are going to be embarrassed when you run out of steam halfway through and have to walk the entire back half of the race.

So seriously, you do you. People will have opinions. They might even share them with you. That is fine. You can still run the way you want to regardless of what anyone else thinks. Because your opinion is the one that matters.

So I want you to own the way that you run, be proud of the way that you run because you know that you’re doing it your way. On your own terms. Got it? Okay, that is it for this week. Do not forget to sign up for the Rebel Runner Roadmap. You will get a live coaching call every week in that class with my no bullshit, straight talk approach to becoming a runner.

I will teach you everything you need to know. You will come out of the class feeling strong, confident, proud, ready to train for that first 5K knowing that you’re a real runner, and for this round only, I am adding a bonus week.

So the Roadmap is a 30-day class, but for this round, the one that starts at the end of June, it’s actually a five-week class. So it’s five weeks instead of four, but you’re getting it for the same price as the 30-day version. How fun is that? So head over to rebelrunnerroadmap.com. Sign up.

Remember, it does close on June 28th, which is this coming Sunday and we are not running the class again this summer, so this is your last chance. Rebelrunnerroadmap.com or you can go to the link in the show notes. We will have it there. I hope to see you in class.

Okay my friends, I love you. Stay safe, get your ass out there and run and I will see you in the next episode.

Oh, and one last thing. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you have to check out the Rebel Runner Roadmap. It’s a 30-day online program that will teach you exactly how to start running, stick with it, and become the runner you’ve always wanted to be. Head on over to rebelrunnerroadmap.com to join. I’d love to be a part of your journey.