Tips for Weekend Jogging

You want to progress intelligently with your running. That usually doesn’t mean doing most of your running for the week on the consecutive days of the weekend. But that’s what you’ll see a lot of time-pressed runners do, figuring that they’ll trash themselves on Saturday and Sunday and then have the work week to recoup and do it all again the next weekend. That’s not a good approach unless one of your main goals as a runner is to get injured. Still, if it’s always a major effort to find the time to run during the work week, you can use the weekends to your advantage. Say you’re running four days a week. Have Saturday and Sunday be two of those days.

That means you only have to squeeze in two runs between Monday and Friday. Just be sure to plan intelligently. It’s usually best to do your weekend running in the mornings. You can still sleep in some, go for a nice run, enjoy breakfast with your family, and then have hours free for whatever else you want to do. One time-honored running tradition is to do the longest run of the week on the weekend. The runs before and after that longest run should be relatively short, easy runs. So you could go for a short run Saturday morning, still have almost the entire day for other activities, and then do your longest run for the week on Sunday morning. The short run on Saturday is just a warm-up to loosen you up for Sunday’s run. Or you could do your long run on Saturday and find a little time on Sunday for a short run that will help to work out the kinks from the previous day’s effort.