The Jeff Galloway Training Method

In 2008, I suffered what could some runners might call a catastrophic knee injury, catastrophic not because of the extent of the injury, but because of the effect it had on my running career.  As a result of a combination of the slowness of my insurance company to want to run through the appropriate tests and the general incompetence among most medical professionals to diagnose running injuries, it was about a year and a half before I was back to running and am still not quite pain free.  Combine that with the affinity I developed for fast food during that time and we have a ruined running career.  Not that I was ever close to elite, but I could sneak an age group award fairly regularly at local 5Ks.  The good news is though, I did manage to mostly recover without need for surgery.

At about the time I had given up on my running career altogether, I noticed a series of posts on the Facebook wall of a friend of mine who had broken her ankle and was recapturing her running career using the Jeff Galloway training method.  Jeff Galloway is a former Olympic runner with decades of successful running experience.  The idea of his plan is to break each run up into a series of short runs and walks rather than running the entire distance.  For example, on a 30 minutes "run", one might run for 30 seconds, and walk for 15 seconds repeatedly for the entire 30 minutes.  In addition to reducing the cardio and respiratory stress, the risk of joint and tendon injury is greatly reduced without losing much of the caloric or cardio benefit of the workout.

I began using the method in the spring of 2010.  On most occasions I would run for about 3 minutes and then walk 1 minutes, sometimes slightly shortening or extending a run period such that my walks would talk place on an uphill, thus even further reducing the strain on the fragile knee.  I am not back to pre-injury speed or mileage and I rarely run on consecutive days (another part of the plan), but I am able to run in a way that five years ago I figured would never happen again.

Jeff Galloway's page has a significant list of different training schedules for runners planning to run races ranging from 5K up to marathon.  One area that needs to be greatly improved and/or expanded is the page associated with improving speed.  At my age, I don't know how practical it is, but I would like to knock about a minute off my current mile time and about 5 or so minutes off my 5K time.  That would not get me back to pre-injury pace, but it would get me to about what we would expect me to have regressed to by now without the injury.  Jeff seems to have no practical suggestions for that, despite have a page on his site that appears to be dedicated to it.

If any of you have any experience with this or other similar training methods for old timers like me, I would love to read about it here in the comments section or on my Facebook page.