Most of us live busy lives and sometimes it’s hard to find time to run. Also that can become an excuse to skip out on your run, so here are some tips for Time management for runners.
Running can sometimes take up a lot of our time. Especially when we’re training for longer races like a half marathon or a marathon. And with work, family, things around the house, there are not always enough hours in a day.
But you want to train for a race or you want to stay healthy or lose weight, whatever the reason, you somehow have to fit your running into your schedule.
First of all let’s have a look at when you run. Do you run in the morning? Or do you go out after work? What would be the best and most economic time for you to go on your run?
Maybe by shifting the time of day for your run it opens up your schedule or you will be more likely to go. For instance if you’re tired after work and that keeps you from running, maybe before work is an option for you. Also, when you run in the morning it can give you that energy to face the rest of the day.
The other way around if you can’t get yourself out of bed early to go running, maybe going for a run after work is a better option for you. Try and figure out what time of day feels best for you and also fits in best with your schedule.
Getting ready to go running can sometimes take up a lot of time, specially when it’s early in the morning and you’re dragging your feet a little bit. A way to speed this up is to lay out your running gear the night before. Make sure you have everything ready to go so that when it’s time for your run all you have to do is grab your gear, put it on and you’re out the door.
When you’re having trouble deciding where to run or how long to run, it can cost you time trying to figure this out. What you do is make a schedule and write down the distances you want to run. Figure out what times are better for longer runs and what times are better for some shorter runs and adjust this accordingly in your schedule. Now it’s always good to run different routes and to know how far those routes are. What I do is I go on Google earth, use the ruller tool to set out a course, this way I know pretty much exactly how long that route is. And when I need to run a 5K I’ll run the 5K route I set out, when I need to run 16K I run the route I set for that. When you have these different courses ready to go you don’t need to spend time figuring things out right before your run and running these different courses can also work as great motivators to get you out running.
When you are training for a longer race a lot of people tend to only run longer training runs, which is absolutely fine, but if you are strapped for time a great alternative could also be switching one of your training runs for interval runs or Fartlek runs. These are high intensity runs that give you a great workout, but are usually a lot shorter in time. If you're not familiar with Fartlek runs, I recently wrote an article about it, it’s basically speeding up and slowing down your run throughout the session and should take about 30 minutes.
A great tip to safe time that I know some runners use, but is clearly not for everybody, simply cause it has to really fit your situation, is running home from work. If that is an option for you it could safe you a lot of time and perhaps stress in traffic. But yeah that would depend on your distance from your work, if you could get dropped off or ride with somebody on the way to work, if you could carry your work clothes with you in a small bag on your run. So not ideal for everybody, but for some it might be worth considering.
Now of course the best way to safe time on your running is to run faster, the faster you run, the quicker you’re done. But that is probably not the easiest solution, so I hope some of these tips can help you out to safe you some time so you can fit in your run training with all the other things you need to get done.
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