Tired legs v. conditioned heart

hope your right, not to hijack the thread, but I was have a great build and have been sidelined with a cold for a week.  Hopefully the muscles will be rested, though I have a suspicion that it doesn't work that way.

To OP: lungs get fit faster than muscles.  Keep at it, it will come.

It's a muscular endurance issue.  It is very common for your cardiac fitness to be ahead of your muscular endurance.  Continuing to run is all you need to do to 'fix' it.

You don't want to push the muscular endurance too hard -- that's when injuries occur.  (One thing that sometimes happens is that as the muscles become less and less able to take the pounding over the course of a run, the work that they were doing gets transferred to other things, such as connective tissue, or lesser used muscles.)

Basically it is because your body is not yet conditioned to run these distances from the standpoint of the impact on the joints, the eccentric demands on your muscles and the ability for your muscles to fire efficiently (and properly) during a run of this duration.  As a result, you have experienced the tight and sore muscles that indicate you have challenged your fitness.  Of course the upside of this is that your body will now heal fitter than ever and next time it will be a little easier.

It is not a strength or nutrition issue; rather it is basically an endurance issue that will be solved by more endurance training.

Shane

Just a note; there is no such thing as muscular endurance, just endurance.

Shane

I'd be interested to hear more about that view.  (I'm not being facetious -- I really would like to hear where you're coming from here.)  The term is certainly very commonly used by exercise scientists.   I regularly see it used in their journals.

Could you provide a link to some of these articles; I don't recall seeing it in any article off the top of my head.  Anyway, the best explanation I've ever seen regarding "muscular endurance" came from Paulo Sousa over on ST:

If you are willing to wade through a long thread, there is some great info in this thread.

Shane

I don't know about "muscular endurance" per se, but for sure, to get stronger on the run, you definitely need run-specific leg conditioning.

In my rampup from <30mpw to 70+mpw over 2 years, the thing I noticed most was that my "running efficiency" improved more than anything else. I don't mean changes in form (like swimming), but rather, the difficulty of running a certain pace got much easier, particularly with longer distances. In particular, the "leg burning" and "leg fatigue" I'd get with low-mileage training really became a non-issue until marathon distance. Half marathons became a question of how high I could pump my HR, and not how long my legs would last.

I am nearly certain that this is sport-specific. Even with my AG-winning running ability, when I hopped on a bike with no dedicating training, I was a merely average cyclist who could grind a little longer due to the strong heart. The legs were a real problem on the bike, though. As for swimming, being a novice swimmer, for SURE, there was almost no overlap - my arms simply don't have the capillaries to sustain a hard effort, and I got passed by grannies in the pool despite decent form (11 strokes/25m) and hard efforts (150+ HR). 

Your leg strength/endurance will improve very rapidly if you can maintain/increase your mileage gradually. Much faster than your VO2max. It's likely not nutrition at under 90 minutes of runtime (I'd say under 3 hrs, nutrition is a relative nonissue.) I wouldn't expect to have rock-solid legs at 10-13 mile distances until you've built up to regular 16-20 mile runs (if you so choose to prioritize.) You should however, be solid on 5ks & 10ks with a weekly run of 90 minutes ish.

Thanks for the link and the clarification.  I'm not sure I agree (see below), but I do appreciate the point of view, and I'll definitely read the thread as soon as I have a chance.

To answer your question: limiting to articles that are primarily concerned with 'muscular endurance' (at least in their own terms), and limiting to recent years of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (which for those who might not know -- if anyone except Shane and I are reading the thread at this point! -- is the journal of the American College of Sport Medicine), I find, for example:

"Muscle Strength And Muscular Endurance Does Not Influence The Cardiopulmonary Parameters In Hiv-1 Infected Individuals", 39(5): S171.

"Effects of an 8-Week Mat Pilates Training Program on Body Composition, Flexibility, and Muscular Endurance", 38(5): S279.

"The Effects Of Ketoisocaproic Acid Supplementation Alone On Muscular Endurance", 37(5): S348.

"Weekly Strength And Total Exercise Volume Changes During Super-slow, Traditional Strength, And Muscular Endurance Training", 37(5): S187.

"Assessing Upper Body Muscular Endurance Performance In Small-college Football Players", 37(5):S86.

"Effects of Ephedrine, Caffeine, and Their Combination on Muscular Endurance", 35(6):987.

There are plenty others, but you get the idea.  (I don't claim that anything follows from the above except that sports scientists do in fact use the term.)

I think that a really good source for (at least one set of views about) endurance is the book Endurance in Sport (part of the Encyclopaedia of Sports Medicine series) edited by Shephard and Astrand, and containing a series of essays by several sports scientists.  In that book, you'll find a section entitled "Biological Bases of Endurance Performance", with several articles that speak to different things that contribute to (or detract from) endurance.  Some of these things are probably not best considered 'non-muscular types' of endurance (I suppose we are getting dangerously close to pointless semantics here...), but some, I would think, are.  For example, in addition to an article 'Muscular Factors in Endurance', there are articles about visceral and cutaneous blood flow, the pulmonary system, the endocrine system, etc.  (Some of those other articles are about specific aspects of the muscles involved in the activity, and so are probably best understood as about an aspect of 'muscular endurance', if you'll permit me that term for the moment.)

As I understand it, the term is used by sports scientists in (at least) two (related) ways.  In both cases, it refers to a ratio of the peak force generated by a given muscle after some time, to the peak force that it can generate in a single (and rested) effort.  In one case, the time in question refers to a moment after some duration of a single contraction of the muscle (as in doing the plank core exercise), and in the other case, the time in question refers to a a moment after some number of repeated contractions of the muscle (as in running).  That, for example, is what you find on p. 312 of the book I mentioned above.

Again, thanks for answering my question -- I look forward to reading that post.

--Michael

Make sure to set some time aside; it's a long one

Thanks for the references; it would appear that the term is becoming mainstream.  I hadn't seen many when it comes to endurance sport but it appears to used often with some other activities which means that if it isn't in the endurance sport articles, it probably soon will be.

Thanks for the book reference, I'll try to track that down as well.  My concern with the use of the term is that then references (like Friel's TTB for example) then break endurance down into three different abilities to train (anaerobic endurance, aerobic endurance and muscular endurance).  This leads to added confusion when it comes to training (and then the creation of even more terminology).  IMO, we would all be better served if we simply discussed training in terms of the energy systems that were being stressed in a particular workout.

Anyway, thanks again for the references, I'll try to track those down.

Shane

Add in some cold water soaks after your runs, these help a lot with misc post run issues.  I'm in FL and love this time of the year when I can go into the backyard ~55-70F pool right after a run and soak the legs, colder the better.

Great job on the run build.  Maybe we'll run (no pun intended) into each other at Musselman next year!

So... would a world class marathon runner be able to row as long and at as high an intensity as a member of an olympic crew team?

I'd assume they both have highly developed cardiovascular systems.

Might his arms get tired?

Nope.

Sport specific muscular adaptations and all that.  The same reason the crew member couldn;t run as far or as fast as the marathoner.