I’ve been working with a running coach for just about two months now and I am really enjoying it. One unexpected source of satisfaction I’m experiencing comes from doing speed work. This is not something I ever thought I’d love. But lately I’ve welcomed it.

It’s not as if it’s all speed work all the time. Yesterday, for example, it was 45 minutes easy followed by 6x100m strides with 100m slow jog in between. That’s just a tiny bit of speed work in the scheme of the overall run. But it added something purposeful.

What is speed work? The idea is to maintain a certain pace for a certain interval of time or over a particular distance. The strides are on the short side. Sometimes the assignment is to push the pace for longer, like a kilometer or, in the case of a tempo run, for the duration of a shorter run (like 20-30 minutes). The goal: to get faster.

My coach Linda talked about the perils of the “one pace wonders” — the many people who just go out and run at the same pace all the time. No wonder they make little progress.

Here are six reasons why I love incorporating speed work into my training:

1. It adds variety to my training, not just in distance but also in approach. Each workout is a bit different and that helps avoid monotony.
2. It lets me experiment with different paces. I learned this in the pool, where we would aim for different paces (slow, medium, fast) to learn what our body could do and also to get faster. But I’d never done it in a structured way in my running. Now I have a good sense of pacing for different types of runs.
3. It gives each run a clear training purpose. For example, I could have gone out yesterday morning and just done my 45 minutes easy and called it a day. But what exactly would the purpose of that run have been in the context of my overall training? Sundays are for the long slow runs. So a mid-week 45 minute run wouldn’t really achieve the goal of logging the mileage. But going for 45 minutes and then doing some strides that really push me beyond comfortable, even for short bursts, and then doing a short recovery before doing the same again helps condition my body to push harder even after I’ve got some distance under my belt.
4. It’s over more quickly. A lot of the scheduled speed work is short and sweet. That’s perfect for mid-week runs when I don’t always have an hour or even 45 minutes. I can do some interval repeats where I really push, followed by short recovery periods between them, and have a tough workout behind me in under 30 minutes sometimes.
5. I always manage to surprise myself with how fast I can actually go. Maybe I can’t (yet) sustain those fast paces for 10K or even 5K, but it’s gratifying to know that I can do a 5:00/km pace at all, even for only a short distance. Sometimes I can do even better than that. This amazes me.
6. It works! Go figure. If you do regular speed work you actually start to run faster.

So those are six reasons why I love speed work and will keep doing it.

How about you? Do you mix up your training and try different things? Do you incorporate speed work? Tell us about it.

Lots of my friends are sharing this piece, On the invisibility of middle aged women. 

The author, Dorthe Nors, talks about wanting to speak for “for the many women who are no longer young, no longer the sexy one, no longer worth helping out in the subway, no longer worth stopping your car for when she stands there with her grocery bags and her saggy breasts, no longer worth the intellectual conversation, no longer on screen, no longer in the movies, no longer counted, no longer… somebody—or as I asked an older Swedish feminist once: What would you say is the strangest thing about becoming an older woman? And she answered: Woman?! I’m no longer a woman, and then she laughed her heart out, because what else can you do when the only alternative to becoming an older woman is dying young or—as many women choose in their fight to stay visible—subject themselves to Botox, knives and scissors, pain, and ridicule.”

In the comments thread under all my friends’ Facebook shares, there’s this: Amy Schumer’s Last Fuckable Day. If you haven’t seen that, go watch it. It’s funny.

But that’s about beautiful women in movies. They’re extra high visibility so the slump to invisible might be felt as a sharp shock. How bad middle aged invisibility is depends on how visible you were in the first place. Another friend commented on Facebook that there are a variety of perspectives on whether this is a loss, how much of a loss it is, and how much or how little you care. In my recent blog post Midlife is an odd time of life I wrote that some women find invisibility a relief. It was never attention they wanted. Others never got the attention in the first place. Too plain, too fat, too whatever we never got the attention and so don’t feel its loss. Youth may be necessary for male attention but it isn’t sufficient.

We live in a society where looks matter a great deal. Even in my world, the university, they matter a great deal. Attractive actors who just memorize a script get better teaching evaluations than actual professors. Worse yet, students seem to learn more. They pay more attention and retain more knowledge when it comes from a good looking source. Yikes. We joke, but it’s not really funny, that for women the best route to getting higher teaching evaluations is losing 20 lbs.

So if women range in attractiveness in our youth but no women are noticed in middle age, then middle age is the great leveler. If you’re among the always invisible you can say to the others, welcome to my world.

Maybe we can teach people to care less about looks. That’s a great strategy. Start to care about something else besides looks and the way people look at you. Maybe focus on being a good friend or contributing actively to politics. It’s good for the world and good for happiness in old age. See Women who care most about their looks have the toughest time aging.

A similar thing is true about menopausal weight gain. Those of us who’ve always been chubby might not think it’s such a big deal. See The unexpected advantages of growing up chubby.

For me the kind of invisibility I’ve worried about is usually not random men thinking I’m good looking, or noticing me, it’s being seen as who I am. Sometimes that’s wanting to be seen as an athlete and other times it’s wanting to be seen as a member of the queer community.

What’s your experience been? Do you worry about the invisibility of middle age? Which bits bother you? I’m curious. Let’s chat!

By MarthaFitat55

I had an interesting cardio experience the other day after my workout. I tried to take my sports bra off after a particularly challenging session where I worked my arms extra hard.

It had gotten rolled up in a weirdly awkward place and the more I tried, the more difficult it was to peel this item of clothing off my body.

It isn’t an unusual event for women who exercise.  My trainer once texted her husband for help when she got stuck trying a new one in a shop. But I was home, by myself, and unable to fish my phone from my pocket. Eventually I worked my way out of this predicament, and I think it left me more tired than the original set of exercises.

But while practicing deep breaths and making myself relax, I had time to think about my alternatives.

Going without is not an option. I need the support. Avoiding the uni-boob arising from compression type sports bras is also important because it’s just plain uncomfortable.

Recently I followed a number of sewists on Instagram. These women sew their own clothes, and one of them shared her latest creation, a fancy bra. I took a look at my current bra and have been thinking about making my own.

I should be more precise: I’m thinking about finding someone who could make one or two for me. While I know how to sew, I don’t work with stretchy fabrics.

I also think it might be a better option than trying to find something that fits but was made in a sweatshop or using child labour. I’m still thinkinG about my choices, but I know one thing for sure. The next sports bra I own has to have an escape mechanism.

Have you ever gotten trapped by your workout gear? What do you look for in exercise clothing? Please share in the comments!

— Martha lives in St. John’s. When she’s not playing with heavy plates, she writes.