Beginner running question - tight muscles, no energy

Promac wrote: »

Yeah, I do about 5 minutes of warm-ups before heading out - light burpees and the like to warm up muscles. I don't think stretching before a run is good for you so I don't do it.

Yes, I should have said some light stretching.

It's very hard to pin point exactly what caused your bad run. We've all been there and while I don't agree with the term "just a bad run", there's always a reason.

It can be as simple as being in the right mood or motivation while running, its very easy to feel something is wrong when in fact nothing is wrong. Your mind can play all kinds of tricks to get you to stop. Or even an on coming cold, flu etc.. or a restless night sleep, even though you've thought you had a good nights sleep. Even something a simple a weather conditions/temperature/wind could affect your run today. Maybe even a lack of fuel before your run?

There are just too many variables that can cause a bad flat run. We all get them from time to time. It can be lack of sleep, bad hydration, too many beers the weekend, wife/kids/husband/boss (delete appropriate) giving you a hard time. The list is endless.

When it happens for a couple of runs on the trot then get worried and seek professional advice. Most people here are and I include myself are not really qualified to definitely say what the problem was, and have just given our own experiences on it which was answered on the first reply to this thread.

One of those days is the correct answer here,and if you don't like that well that's fair enough, however your dismissive answers to people genuinely trying to help you has led to some of the later replies.

No one can give you an answer as to why you had this bad run, we are all an experiment of one.

You say that you dont accept it being one of those days and that your sceintific mind demands an answer, well it just so happens that I have a bit of a scientific mind as well. Now no one would ever attempt to make a scientific conclusion based on a single observations, would they?

So what you need to do is keep a very detailed log of everything you do, food you eat, amount of sleep you get, resting HR every morning, bowel movements, urine couour (to determine hydration levels), what stress and pressure you are under in every aspect of your day. Then log the time/duration and speed of every run you do. Running by feel isn't good enough here you will need exact data, get a garmin and HRM.
Now record after every run rate on a scale of 1-10 your percieved effort for the run and any other data relevant (wind speed and direction, gradient, temperature, etc)
After a couple of months you may have had one or two more bad runs in there, now you have somethign to look back over, are there any commonalities in the days leading up to these? Similar temperature, HR, wind speeds, alignment of planets?

Keep gathering this information for 12 months and then do a full statistical analysis on the results. You might, just might be able to see a pattern emerging.

Alternatively you could just take on the advice you already got and put it down to one of those days, as we all do, and go out tomorrow and have a great stress free run. Seriously one bad run every so often isn't worth getting worried about it could be a combination of a dozen tiny things, repeated bad runs would need looking into.

Personally I know which one I'll be doing.

OP, I am a fairly precise kind of guy and attentive to detail, but your query I would put down to a one off. Maybe sore/tired legs, maybe slept a bit funny, dodgy burger the night before etc etc. Even magically if you could look inside your body on that day, inside every muscles etc, you may not find anything out of the ordinary.

You could have come down with a very slight bug that didn't even present any symptons that day, yet it was enough to trigger a response to your running. I assume your warm up on this "bad" day was as it usually is.

To be fair, photography is 100s, if not 1000s of times less complex than the human body. And science isn't even evolved enough to know what causes a stitch, so while you weren't happy with the 'bad day' answers, they are probably as good as it gets.

I've tried not to respond to this one, but with the latest comparison to photography, I just can't leave it go.

Promac, no offence, I'm far from a good photographer, but you can't possibly compare troubleshooting a bad photo with the complexity of why your body didn't perform to your expected levels on one specific morning.
Firstly, take a photograph, you have physical evidence that can help you diagnose what was wrong, such as slight blurs, sections out of focus, colour levels etc, and in the case of digital photos you have tons of extra info such as shutter speed, aperture, ISO, zoom info, etc etc, which all contribute to determining what might have been wrong with that articular photo.

Now look again at your off day - do you have any snapshot of your heart rate, blood pressure, sugar levels to help you?
Have you got a detailed record of all the bugs and viruses that may have been in your body at the time and possibly contributing to a below par run?
Did you notice the colour of your urine before you went for your run to assess how hydrated you were?

All these points have been mentioned, and more, so unless you start to record as much info as possible about every run, then start to see a trend in a specific area when you have a bad day, there's no way to determine why one random day was bad.

Having said all that, there have been days I've gone for a run, felt crap for a mile, considered calling it quits but carried on. Sometimes after another mile I feel much better and finish with having a good overall run.
Other times I still feel crap that mile further, call it quits & just say I'll go out again when I feel better.

Some of the soundest advice you'll get is to listen to your body - if you're not feeling 100% - it's telling you that it doesn't have the ability to be pushed at that particular time.

I know of people who felt crap, but continued to train cos they were committed to a particular training plan, or refused to pull out of a race they started, and ended up injuring themselves & being out of action for months when they should have just packed up and gone home.

I think from whats been discussed on this thread you have two options...

1. Get extremely scientific about recording as much info as possible & map your performance to these attributes to determine causes of bad performance.

or

2. Begin to learn to listen to your body.

Take your pick.