Southampton Running Sisters Beginners' Course 2009

Southampton Running Sisters will be holding our annual beginners' course on Mondays for eight weeks starting 20th April 2009, to be held at Taunton's College in Shirley.

Normal sessions start with 6.45 arrival for 7.00 group briefing and start. If you wish to enrol please complete and mail a copy of the application form to our membership secretary Tina Dempster (SRS09@srs.org.uk), to reserve your place.

The eight week programme is a practical introduction to running accompanied by a programme of talks on relevant topics from guest speakers.

Please turn up for the first session in loose fitting, light clothing (suitable for gently exercise). We recommend that you wait 'til you had some advice from our coaches and guest speakers before you buy any new clothes or trainers, but if you do feel you need to get some kit, please make sure you get it from a specialist running shop where you can discuss your running needs, rather than an anonymous high street store. This is especially important for running shoes.

For further details about our club see our web site http:/srs.org.uk/ and our training blog http://srs-training.blogspot.com/
Preparation
We often find people are keen to start running before they begin the course, so if you are trying to get your fitness levels up and want to go out jogging for the first time our advice is to follow the simple programme shown below:

FIRST...find out what you can manage...

• have a go at some gently jogging, and see how long you can manage before you become tired/really want to stop.
• It may only be to the end of the street, or it may be a bit further/longer.

Next...

• take a note of how long it takes before you need to stop
• build your jogging programme around your current ability
• the objective it to extend the time/distance that you can cover without a break

Your programme will stitch together a combination of progressively longer jogging stints and progressively smaller walking/slow jogging recoveries until you can run continuously for between 30-45 minutes.

what that means in practice is:

• each jogging session is built up of three repeated parts of
• jog until you are tired, walk/slow jog for a couple of minutes until you feel recovered
• three sessions a week, always leaving a day's break between each running/jogging session

You will be very pleasantly surprised by how quickly your fitness increases, just as long as you get into the habit of running regularly

Variations on the programme are used during the beginners course.
Once you can run for 45 minutes you can build up your stamina by:

• practising your runs regularly
• joining in the various club sessions
• talking to one of our coaches to discuss what you would like to achieve next