Tag: Training

GPS (in)accuracy

This is the GPS map from an activity I recently did. Can you guess what it was? It starts at the green triangle and ends at the red square.

The answer is I was skipping on the same spot for a minute or so. The Yellow star marks where I was yet you’d never know it from what you see. It looks like I’ve started at the top of the garden, gone over the fence and ended up a couple of doors down. It provides a good example of how inaccurate GPS can be. Not only do I appear to move, but the trail never even touches where I was actually skipping.

GPS (or Global Positioning System) was originally set up for the U.S. military and comprises a set of satellites in geostationary orbit that are able to pinpoint a position to within a few metres. In mid-2023 the system comprises 32 satellites with more planned. it was opened up to commercial interests during the 1990s and these days it’s not the only system available. In recent years other groups of satellites have been launched by Russia (GLONASS – GLObal NAviation Satellite System), China, Japan, India and the European Union. Note that the commercial version of GPS is deliberately not as accurate as the military version.

While GPS navigation units were previously available, the earliest GPS wristwatch was released in 1999 by Casio but this was simply a watch that could tell you where you were standing. It wouldn’t be until the early 2000s when companies like Garmin began to sell watches allowing people to track their runs. Initially only used by hardcore runners, the market has expanded with people now tracking their training by phones or smartwatches.

GPS can pinpoint you to within 3 metres which is incredible when you consider the satellites are situated at an altitude of 11,000 miles (eleven thousand!) or 20,000km in metric. And yet it’s often not accurate enough for runners. I’ve frequently heard runners proclaim after races “This course is long” or “this course is short”.

As you can see in that original picture the accuracy of GPS in any one moment is questionable. It’s good enough for your car’s SATNAV to get you from A-to-B when you just need to know what road to drive down, but runners want it to accurately represent where they’ve just run. And for the most part it does this – but only to within a few metres.

The first thing affecting accuracy happens when you turn on your GPS watch. It needs to lock onto the satellites. My old Garmin FR610 claims to remember where I last was and that it’ll be ready within thirty seconds; but I’ve always ended up leaving it out on the recycling bin while I’m putting my shoes on. Even when the “Locating satellites” screen says it has locked in, if I check the Accuracy it can still be 15 metres away. If you set off before the satellites have truly been located, the distance is going to be inaccurate. Now, in the case of my skipping picture, I’d already been out for a run so the satellites were locked in.

When accuracy is at its best of 3m it means you can only be 1.5m to the left or right which is barely more than arm’s length. But if the accuracy drops to 6-7m that’s like being stood in the middle of the road and the watch thinking you could be on either pavement.

This is where GPS can start to read long. While you may be running a straight line, GPS may be zigzagging left, right, left, right either side of you as it tries its best to read exactly where you are. The straight line is always going to be the shortest route, any digression left or right will add distance. While a centimetre added here or there won’t impact matters a lot, on a longer run it adds up.

It’s harder for GPS to read short unless there is some kind of signal dropout. That happens if you run under a bridge, under trees or between tall buildings which all stop the watch receiving the satellites’ signal. On a couple of rare occasions I’ve had my watch lose signal for no explicable reason.

If you’re on a twisty course going round sharp corners or doglegs then there’s a good chance your watch may think you’ve cut the corner. While it checks your location frequently, probably every second, the quicker you’re running the more ground you’re covering and the greater chance of it being off with its moment to moment measurements. This could take distance off.

Generally though GPS is accurate enough. When you go to a race what matters is the distance that has been professionally measured and certified. even if your GPS tells you the course is shorter or longer. Most likely it will read long because road races are measured using the shortest line through twists and turns – usually to within a metre of the curb. Most runners just follow the herd in front or find themselves dodging left and right to pass others.

For some the days of the GPS watch never arrived. They’re happy to use a smartphone app like Strava which is more than capable of recording their runs. And it doesn’t just use GPS it boosts accuracy by using the mobile phone signal.

In the old days, runners stood around waiting for their mates to turn up, maybe bouncing up and down for some stretches before setting off. These days, they’re waiting for the watch to lock on to satellites or scrolling through their phone apps to press start the moment they set off.

Training for Speed Matters – Part 3

If you missed the previous posts, you can find part 1 here and part 2 here

In attempting any activity the body tries to do it as efficiently as possible. When we pick up a pencil off the table, our fingers know how tightly to hold it, our arm and shoulder knows how much effort is required to lift it. If we drop that pencil and it rolls under the sofa, the body knows it needs to use a different level of effort to move the heavy sofa out of the way. If we go to the gym and try to pick up a 20kg weight it adjusts again. Much of this is learned through prior experience, our eyes know the size and shape of an object and make a best estimate of what it needs to do. We can get caught out trying to lift a small box or can that turns out to be filled with dense material but we quickly adjust to be able to complete the task.

It’s the same with exercise. Walking doesn’t take as much effort as jogging which itself is easier than running. When you sprint it’s an all-out effort and yet, if you try to sprint up a hill the body tries to work even harder.

Although we think of running as needing strong legs – it’s more than that. We also need strong hips and glutes; it’s about the core muscles and to a lesser extent the upper body shoulders and arms. Again, depending on how fast you’re trying to run, the more muscle your body recruits to get the job done.

At a slow walk your arms just swing back and forth; in an all-out sprint you will drive your arms backwards and forwards as well as use them for balance and stability. You only need to look at the difference between sprinters and marathon runners to see how different their physiques are.

This is the primary reason why you should be working on your speed – it recruits more muscle. If your top-end pace can’t get you below six minutes per mile –  you are never going to run any distance quicker than this. However if your top-end speed is four minute mile, you can do all the things you could when your top-end speed was six minute mile and everything in between. What’s not to like?!

For many of those runners who are stuck jogging around at ten minute miles. Imagine what training to be able to run at six minute mile pace … or quicker gives them. Suddenly where eight minute miles felt difficult, it begins to feel easier because it’s no longer top of the range.

Yet remember what I said about the body being efficient?  If you never train at high paces to get faster then gradually your body forgets the speed ability it has. This is often why older distance runners are slow – they stopped training their speed and focused on extended efforts. Inevitably there is some loss of speed due to ageing, but nowhere near as much as many runners believe.

It’s not just the skeletal muscles which benefit from training speed, it also works the heart and lungs and usually very hard if you put in a big effort and don’t give yourself easy recoveries. While it is unpleasant to be gasping for air – barely able to jog between efforts – in time it prompts your heart and lungs to adapt.

Your heart grows larger to pump more oxygenated blood to the muscles and potentially your lung capacity increases. The lungs become stronger and therefore more forceful when expelling carbon dioxide and breathing in air.

This training is going to make your running feel easier. Stronger legs, lower heart-rate, easier breathing.

If you decide to start training for speed, ease into it and, of course, if you have any health concerns – check with a health professional before pulling out all the stops and giving speed training a try.

If you’re unsure of how to start, I can help you with my 3-month speed training programme. Just go to the Contact page and message me to get more details.

Training for Speed Matters – Part 2

In the first part I discussed how many runners may be underperforming because they haven’t developed their speed. We saw how quickly Paula Radcliffe was running even when she was in the marathon.

Like Paula, almost all elite runners start out as track athletes usually in events lasting a mile or less. If they discover they don’t have the talent for that then they do longer track events – Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s premier marathoner, began by winning World Championship gold in the 5,000m at age 18. His winning time of 12:52.79 is a pace of 4:07/mile. He ran his best mile a year later in 3:50.

Let’s go back to 2012 when Mo Farah was in the early stages of his Olympic / World Championship dominance. He took part in the BBC’s Superstars TV programme and clocked 12.98s over 100m; followed in by the Brownlee brothers – champion triathletes with Jonny clocking 14.33s and Alistair 14.70s.   Obviously these times are nothing compared to elite sprinters but these are athletes who are better suited to distance events. I doubt they spent too much of their valuable training time on preparing for a TV contest’s 100metres but how would you compare?

Mo’s training is on record with him being able to run 100m off a 2-step start in 11sec, 200m in 25s and 400m in 51s.  When he won the 5000m Olympic title in Rio in 2016, his final lap was 52.7s having already run 4,600m.

I detailed in the Ageing runner series the world records for Masters runners at a variety of distances.  Here I will reproduce the latest records over 200m – ageing is often given as an excuse why runners aren’t fast. I contend it’s more often the case that they’ve failed to maximise their speed before attempting to become distance runners.

 MenTimeMaleDate
WR19.19Usain Bolt20-Aug-09
V3520.11Linford Christie25-Jun-95
V4020.64Troy Douglas09-Aug-03
V4521.65Alexander Kosenkow23-Jul-22
V5022.44Willie Gault07-May-11
V5523.24Willie Gault07-May-16
V6024.00Ronald Taylor10-Jun-94
V6524.65Charles Allie26-Jul-13
V7025.75Charles Allie21-Jun-18
V7527.73Robert Lida05-Aug-12
V8029.54Hijiya Hisamitsu16-Sep-12
V8531.69Hijiya Hisamitsu17-Sep-16
V9036.02Hiroo Tanaka23-May-21
V9545.34Yoshiyuki Shimizu23-Oct-23
    
 WomenTimeFemaleDate
WR21.34Florence Griffith Joyner29-Sep-88
V3521.81Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce21-Jul-22
V4022.72Merlene Ottey23-Aug-04
V4523.82Merlene Ottey27-Aug-06
V5024.33Merlene Ottey18-Jul-10
V5524.83Mandy Mason25-Nov-23
V6027.78Nicole Alexis03-Jul-22
V6528.53Karla Del Grande05-Aug-18
V7031.30Ingrid Meier02-Jul-17
V7531.56Carol LaFayette-Boyd09-Sep-18
V8034.38Carol LaFayette-Boyd31-Jul-23
V8540.20Christa Bortignon27-Aug-22
V9055.62Mitsu Morita30-Jun-13
V9501:13.0Diane Friedman22-Jul-17

Of course these are the world records for Masters athletes who are committed to the sport. You or I will probably never be able to achieve the numbers for our age groups. Yet I feel it’s also worth considering that if you’re a man who can barely run 200m in under 35s, there is at least one 80-year-old woman who could beat you in a race. I don’t say that to disparage Carol Lafayette-Boyd who achieved it last year but more as an encouragement to anyone, male or female of younger years, to reconsider that they might be underutilising their talent.

It’s notable looking at these tables that the best men are still easily running under 30secs for 200m (4min/mile) into their seventies while the women are capable of it into their sixties. Of course these records are set by dedicated sprinters but until you try, you won’t know what you’re truly capable of.

Training for Speed Matters – Part 1

I like to ask runners I’m coaching to run 200m to give me an idea of their speed. I say to them “You don’t need to get the starting blocks out. You don’t need to go 100% all-out and risk injury. Just do a good warm-up, have a little break and then go run hard for 200m and see what your time is.”

The most recent lady who did this trial recorded a time of 45secs. This is not a terrible time by any means but what it does show is that at best, she will run 400m in 1min30, 800m in 3mins and a mile in six. Her parkrun time will be just under 19mins, a 10K in 38mins, half marathon 1hr20 and marathon 2hr40. Those latter numbers sound pretty damn amazing to anyone who isn’t already a decent runner.

But, and there is a huge but, when you run 200metres flat out – you’re going flat out. Your arms and legs are pumping like crazy. After twenty seconds you begin to hyperventilate and then it all starts to hurt and you’d prefer to stop. When you finished you’re gasping for breath. You’ll probably be bent over double for the next couple of minutes trying to get your breath back.  And that’s the problem – this is your absolute best and it’s only over 200m. It’s not going to transfer as you run longer distances.

It’s more realistic that if you run 45secs for 200m you’re probably looking at 25mins for parkrun, 52mins for 10K, 1hr55 for half marathon and 4hrs for the marathon. Again, these may be times you find impressive.

If we look at world-class runners, even Paula Radcliffe – the former world record holder for the women’s marathon – can break 30s for 200m. And she is a runner who is best suited to long distances. To give you perspective on Paula’s speed, here is a look at her Personal Bests:

DistancePersonal Best timeMile paceKm pacePace per 200m
400m58.9s3:572:2729.5s
800m2:084:122:3732s
Mile4:254:252:4533s
5,000m14:294:402:5435s
10,000m30:014:493:0036s
1/2 Marathon1:05:405:013:0737s
Marathon2:15:255:103:1238s

Even when she runs a marathon, she is covering 200m quicker than all but a few recreational runners and it’s relatively effortless for her at that pace until perhaps the final miles when her fuel stores are depleted and her muscles aching.

Paula started out as a track runner. It was only as she approached thirty years old that she moved up in distance from races like the 5,000 and 10,000m to half and full marathons. While this is often true of recreational runners who begin with Couch25K and then try longer distances, the notable difference is that Paula had been training for the better part of twenty years before she moved up to the longest distances.

I wrote briefly about how her children have taken up running at the ages of 8 and 12 and could already run a kilometre in under 4mins. Her approach hasn’t been to have the kids running mile after mile in training but to run as fast as they can over shorter distances.

The consequence of being fast over a short distance is it allows you to be quick over longer ones. If you’re slow over short distances then all you can ever be is slow over long distances – that’s basic mathematics.

Build speed then build the endurance to cover the race distance you’re aiming for.

The Biggest Mistake in Modern Running

One of the ways many people have got into running is through the Couch25K programme. Having successfully followed it, they now consider themselves a runner. And rightly so. But it’s the next step where the problem begins.

More often than not, many of today’s runners have busy lives. Running only gets a small look-in and when it does they want to make it a significant run. They prioritise the distance of runs over how often they run. So more often than not, they find themselves running at a pace that feels okay but it’s almost always  for five, six, seven, eight miles. On Sundays they might go out and run ten miles or if they’ve decided to run a marathon go even further.

This all promotes an illusion of fitness. But being able to run for a long time is not necessarily indicative of great fitness. Trudging around as many runners do at 10-12 minutes per miles can be tiring for them which reinforces the illusion of fitness.

But if you watch those runners for the next few years you will find they are still jogging around at the same sort of times and paces.

The biggest mistake in modern running is the idea that just going further will help you get faster.

Now this is a dramatic statement and I need to apply a caveat or two here. While you may race faster, endurance never creates speed.

What I mean by this is that if you can run 5K in 25 minutes then a well trained runner could expect to run a marathon in around four hours. If you are running your marathon in five hours then working on your endurance will definitely help you run a faster marathon.

But once you achieve that, if all you do is go out for distance runs then you’re not going to get significantly faster at any of your race distances. You might do another marathon and record 3hr56 or run 24:50 at parkrun but you’re not going to see any significant progress through just distance running.

At some point you need to do some kind of training that actually builds speed.

Here are some suggestions for getting started:

  • Add pickups to your runs once or twice each week. Simply pick the pace up for 10 seconds before returning to your original speed. Some runners like to finish with a fast stretch home.
  • Try a fartlek run. A variation on pick-ups is to do a variety of paces for different durations throughout the entire run. This is particularly good for groups of runners where different runners can lead the pace determining how long it will last before dropping back to an easy pace before someone else takes the lead. The variations can range for ten seconds going very fast to a few minutes getting out of breath.
  • After an easy run do a set of five strides. Run 95% top speed for just ten seconds then walk back to recover. It’s five minutes extra but will get your legs moving quicker.
  • Run to a local hill and run up it for thirty seconds then jog back down. When you’ve done four efforts run home for warmdown.

When you’ve tried these, if you would like a more formalised speed programme then you can Contact me to buy my 3-month plan that will get you fitter and faster. It’s great value and you’ll receive weekly coaching while you’re following it.

Returning after injury

At some stage, every runner picks up an injury or illness or even just stops running for a few months. Typically when they restart they try to get back up to their old mileage and paces quickly. Particularly with an injury this isn’t smart. You have to rebuild carefully from small beginnings and extend the runs as the fitness returns. The last thing you add back is intensity.

To give an example of how it should look, I’m going to rewind to when I last had a notable break.  It was 2018 – over five years ago and as I documented in my running streak I’ve barely taken any time off since then. The only notable breaks were taking a few days off to taper into and recover from a half marathon.

At the start of year I was running really well. I’d cracked the endurance conundrum and found myself comfortably running for 8-9 hours each week and covering 60-65 miles. I had organically built this mileage up and it all felt very comfortable. In fact, in late 2017 I’d been trying to limit myself to 8hrs per week but I began to feel like I wasn’t getting any benefit and needed to do more.

You can see from the Strava data that my mileage was consistently high through Jan-Feb as I prepared for an April half marathon. March began to taper down and then I had a minor accident slipping on some ice. I believe this was the beginning of the injury I had that summer. The half marathon went badly and when I returned to running afterwards I had some pains and while I hoped to be able to run through these, by the end of May I had to admit defeat and accept I needed to let the injury recover.

I had some kind of core injury which stopped me from doing any kind of sporting activity. I don’t believe there’s been a longer phase in my life where I was inactive than the following two months through June and July. With the core being literally the core, there was nothing I could do, I couldn’t go swing a golf club, I could barely do garden work. I just rested.

People I spoke to wonder how I was surviving without being able to go exercise. They know how it dominates my life yet I was quite comfortable sitting in a chair and reading, waiting for it to heal. Despite barely eating over the next two months I put on almost twenty pounds with the activity and my waistline went up a couple of inches. No-one would have accused me of being fat but I was bigger.

My one deference to the inactivity was a weekly lap of the road I live on. Being a crescent, it’s a very convenient loop so I would run a single lap each Sunday to see if the injury was still affecting me. Each week, I would discover it was still painful despite running for less than three minutes at a slow pace.

Eventually though, one day I sensed a difference and felt ready to return. Here’s what my training return looked like:

Week 1 
Mon 
Tues2min test – the green light to restart
Weds15 min run
Thurs 
Fri14 mins30
Sat16 mins30
Sun 
  
Total4 runs totalling 48mins

Having felt good on the Tuesday test I was excited to restart. So I began with a single fifteen minute run. On reflection, possibly even this was too long and it should only have been 5-10minutes but it didn’t present issues. To be on the safe side, I took a rest day on Thursday and then ran again on Friday. I ran the same route and came in thirty seconds faster. I then ran again the next day and as I was a little quicker again, I tacked on an extra 400m loop of my road to take it past fifteen minutes. That was it for the week. Three main runs of fifteen minutes and lots of recovery time.

Remember I had been running an hour every day for weeks on end less than six months previously so it’s a huge cutdown.

Week 2 
Mon15 mins
Tues30 mins
Weds 
Thurs35 mins
Fri15 mins
Sat33 mins – hilly parkrun
Sun 
  
Total5 runs totalling 2hr04

I had some coaching working to do on Monday so I ran the warm-up and had some aches and pains until I got going. Given that’s the case, I now question why I did a thirty minute run the next day but this is the curse of the returning runner. Wanting to pick back up sooner than they should. Sensibly I then took a rest day.

On the Thursday, I ran a fairly flat route and still had some pains but usually only at the beginning of runs. The Friday was a short recovery run.

On Saturday I went back to parkrun. I ran 33mins which is about 10min30/mile and my notes states “hardly an ache at this pace”.  That’s the key with all injury recovery – you have to stay ‘below’ the injury. Certainly in terms of pace but also duration. If the injury starts to flare at a particular pace or after a certain distance, you back off to build the fitness you can without worsening matters.

Anyway I was very pleased to have now achieved two weeks of training without relapse.

Week 3 
Mon45 mins on the flat – dedicated 4.5 mile route
Tues20 mins recovery
Weds45 mins on the flat – dedicated 4.5 mile route
Thurs30 mins on the flat
Fri 
Sat29 min parkrun – 4 mins quicker than last week
Sun1hr22 long run – dedicated 7.5 mile route
  
Total6 runs totalling 4hr14

Following the Sunday rest day, I went for a run on the prom at the beach. It was a forty-five minute effort and my notes state it wasn’t enjoyable. I guess because I’d managed to run for two weeks without injury returning I felt I now had to just rebuild. Running is always tough when your fitness is lacking so I just felt I had to go through it. Note I still did a short recovery run the next day and generally ran in the flattest places possible to keep intensity to a minimum.

After another Friday rest day, I knocked 4-mins off my parkrun despite trying no harder and then on the Sunday went for a long run. It was tough. It started out quite slow and the ‘new territory’ of the last three miles had me running at 11min30/mile pace – for some that may not seem that slow but consider I was capable of running close to 6min/mile at the start of the year.

Week 4 
Mon20mins Recovery
Tues40mins Steady
 30mins including 10mins faster (coaching)
Weds20mins – Recovery AM
 20mins – Recovery PM
Thurs40min Recovery
Fri 
Sat30mins at Chichester parkrun
Sun40min recovery
  
Total6 runs totalling 4hr23

The following week I continued running and managed to do six days on the road. I even did a couple of small double sessions on the Tuesday and Wednesday. After a Friday rest, I went to Chichester parkrun as I was visiting friends and ran it in 27mins but on the Sunday morning, after a late night out I had nothing in the tank so only managed a 40-min run.

Training by time – you can see I did much less after returning from injury

By this point I’d completed four weeks and felt confident the injury wasn’t returning. Within a month I was running 23mins at Hasting parkrun and training continued on from there. I slowly rebuilt my running and it was almost six months before I was regularly running eight hours per week again. There simply wasn’t the need until I’d rebuilt my fitness.

I often say to runners who are coming back from injury that it’s better to take a little longer and avoid relapse than to get into a depressing cycle of restart, relapse, sit and wait then restart, relapse, sit and wait …

Of course many don’t want to hear that. They finally feel fit, they have goals, they feel they’re getting older and will lose their speed. Having been patient and unable to run for some time they want to get going again. What they don’t consider is that it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. The swing between the two extremes of thinking they are either ready to run or still injured. Consequently when they restart, they dive back in rather than testing their fitness step by step.

My advice to any running returning from injury is :

  • Restart with very short runs to test how the affected area responds – run for only 5-15mins.
  • Rest the day after each run to give extra recovery time. If you run the very next day it might be too soon.
  • Don’t be too quick to add on mileage and every time you do, let it consolidate.
  • The last thing you add is intensity – wait until you’ve rebuilt a solid base of running.

In fact, much of the mileage you may have been doing before will have been because of aerobic efficiency. That will naturally return as your fitness rebuilds.

One final thought – when you restart after an injury, invariably you will encounter some pain. Sometimes it is hard to be sure of why this is happening. It could be the injury hasn’t fully healed in which case you have to give it more time. But it could be some scar tissue from the injury healing and this needs to be broken down. How do you know which is which? You can never be sure, so err on the side of caution, take the rehab slowly and see how it proceeds.

Hansons Marathon Method

My run training odyssey which began with Maffetone Method, had tried FIRST training now became interested in “a renegade path to your fastest marathon” – Hansons Marathon Method. Looking back this is a little strange as I wasn’t interested in running a marathon. And the grammarian in me is distraught at the lack of an apostrophe in their title!

Brothers Keith and Kevin Hanson have been developing their eponymous method since Kevin’s first marathon in 1978. As he states in his foreword “What I found were cookie-cutter approaches … always including a long run that was usually 20 miles in American publications and 30 kilometres (18.6 miles) in foreign magazines. I came to find the reasoning behind this prescription was simple: These distances were round, even numbers”.  As he goes on to say there wasn’t any science behind them and he needed to find a better way to train for the marathon.

Not only were the Hansons interested in rethinking how to run marathons they wanted to revitalise American distance running. To do this they decided to replicate what the Greater Boston Track Club had done in the 1970s by taking talented post-collegiate runners and giving them the opportunity to continue their training. The Hanson bought a house in 1999, recruited three athletes and provided them with the essentials to live and train together. When Brooks Sports came onboard as a sponsor they were able to buy a second house and recruit more athletes. Twenty years on, they support twenty athletes in four houses and have seen high level success. The most notable was Desiree Linden winning the Boston Marathon in 2018.

Their coaching isn’t only geared towards elite runners. They’ve helped thousands of novice and recreational runners to complete marathons along the way. Their book, authored by Luke Humphrey one of the their training group, is very well written and packed with information from physiology to nutrition, stretching, strength training and kit. And of course it contains two 18-week training plans – one for beginners and another for advanced runners.

The USP of their plans is the idea that a runner shouldn’t train further than 16 miles on their long run. Instead they go into it with tired legs by running on the preceding day(s). I’ve previously recounted the details of this in “The 20-mile myth” as well as how I used this principle method for my daughter’s first marathon where she never ran longer than 17 miles / 29km in training yet, on race day, was able to speed up from that point and finish strongly.

While regular running, six days per week, to build aerobically is key to their training, it isn’t just a long run and easy runs. There are two SOS workouts each week – Something of Substance. In the first half of the 18-week plans the first SOS workout has you improving your speed while in the second half the focus is on strength. The second SOS workout is a tempo run at your marathon pace which builds from five miles up to ten as the weeks go by.

I picked up my copy of their book at a time when I was just reading how the elite Kenyans approach marathon training differently to westerners. Traditionally western runners building their long run mileage up to twenty miles at relatively easy paces and then look to add speed in the last few weeks. The Kenyans take the approach of running at the pace they want to run their marathon and gradually increasing the distance for which they can hold it. So when I saw the Hansons were doing something similar with their second SOS workout increasing the distance, I decided to give their method a try even though, as I said before I wasn’t going to be running a marathon.

Principally this was the training method I used over the latter half of the year albeit with some hiccups and digressions. The first block ran for six weeks through May-June. I used the basis of their Strength workout progression each Tuesday and the Tempo on a Thursday. Where their Strength workout is a 7-week progression, I only did the first three weeks then repeated them at a faster pace. On the Tempos I increased the distance each week whereas Hansons tend to progress matters more gradually by only increasing it after three weeks.

There’s a reason I didn’t specifically stick with the detail of their plan and it’s that I quickly found myself getting faster by the week. This raised a question I couldn’t quite see how to resolve. When you begin a Hanson training plan, you decide what your target marathon time will be based on a recent race. But when you see yourself getting quicker at the shorter distances and the workouts are becoming easy, it seems pointless to continue training at this. So this is why after three weeks, I went back to the beginning and stepped up the paces. While all the training suggested I was going to be in a better place, race results said otherwise. I had run a 41:43min 10K in early May before I started the training and ran a 41:24 10K at its end on a hillier course. It seemed to me that for all the hard work and miles I’d put in this was a poor return especially given I’d run quicker 10Ks previously.

Consequently, given my disgruntlement at the meagre 20sec improvement, I went back to working on my speed with short intervals. Then I picked up an injury doing something stupid (won’t detail that!) and managed to rebuild my fitness for a 1hr37 half marathon in mid-September.

Coming out of the half marathon, I went with another block of pseudo-Hansons. The first three weeks I did the Strength work intervals at 7:10/mile and the Tempo at 7:25 then moved them up to 6:55/7:10 for a second block. Allied to running fifteen miles on a Sunday, by the end of these six weeks I was beginning to feel fatigued and once again I changed direction as I had another 10K coming up in December. Through November, I peaked and come the 10K I broke 40mins for the first time – 39:57.

My view of the training was it could be a good system to follow for a marathon and certainly it helped in the run up to my best ever 10K. The idea of longer tempo runs lasting up to an hour is now one of the key tenets of all my training plans. I’ve also continued to use the Hansons Strength workout progressions particularly when I’m training for a longer distance race.

My only significant doubt about the Hansons book is their Beginner programme peaks at 57 miles which is perhaps fine if you’ve got a decent running base and its your first marathon after many other races but is too much for anyone who isn’t going to run close to 3hr30 in their marathon. Even then I’d say it may be too much. I reckon 45-50 should easily be enough as a peak for a slower runner and only once they’ve built up to it.

While I was very much into training to pace at the time I’ve gradually moved away from it and now work more often based on feel. There are obvious problems with working to pace if you can’t find a flat course or it’s windy but those weren’t my concern. While training to pace worked well for me then, I found if I misjudged it because I lacked a recent race time, it was either unachievable or at worst could lead me towards overtraining. I don’t want to blame Hansons for that as I think it can be a feature of all pace-based training if you get the volume / intensity wrong.

I also passed on the Hansons ideas to a couple of sub-3 marathoners who tried an Advanced version of the training. This was in the days before I was coaching. This isn’t the Advanced programme in the book but a bought plan which has a little more variety and really doesn’t look much like what is in the book. Being designed for faster runners it doesn’t have the 16-mile limitation on the long run. Both runners profited off the training and were racing quicker as the weeks went by. One of them who had a previous marathon PB of 2hr37, took two minutes off his half marathon time and three minutes off his marathon. If he hadn’t gone into it with an injury he picked up in the last week, he would likely have run close to 2hr30.

What you can learn from Hansons training is good ideas about how often to go out running and what sort of distances to cover. The idea of doing frequent runs at expected marathon pace is a great one as are the demonstrations of how to progress sessions by extending the distance rather than trying to run faster.

While you can buy a copy of the Hanson Marathon Method or their Half Marathon Method for a few pounds or dollars and follow their plan which is designed to apply to millions of runners – if you would like more personalised coaching I’m here to help. I will identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie, what will be achievable and how best to fit training to your lifestyle and circumstances. Sprint over to the Contact page and drop me a line!

FIRST Training – 3 runs per week

The marketing sounds great – train less, run faster. The FIRST Training system is one which Runner’s World first promoted in 2005 then followed up with a book. I was lent it in 2012 by a parkrunner who reckoned it was great and I quickly devoured my way through it.

My gut feel after reading was it worked for many of their testimonial runners because it found a mid ground which many runners don’t fall into. You either have dedicated runners who are doing too many workouts and running too fast on their easy days; or recreational runners who simply do all their training at the same pace. With the dedicated runners, FIRST would give them more recovery by getting them to do less. With the recreationals, it would get them running faster instead of jogging around to log miles.

A couple of years on I decided to give FIRST training a try, this followed my unsuccessful months of MAF training. I had ended that when I began to go backwards and became concerned I was somehow overtrained. To try and alleviate the effects I did less and less training during the dark months and things just got worse. With hindsight the idea I was overtrained was a preposterous notion. I’d read the words in Maffetone’s book about anaerobic training, read elsewhere about over-reaching and was prepared to believe my sluggish performance and rising heart-rates were a sign of this. Certainly it’s possible to fit my symptoms to the descriptions of overtraining and this is the danger of reading words in a book rather than talking to some who knows. (This seems a good opportunity to plug my Training Reviews if you think you might want a check-up!)

So with its three runs per week FIRST training seemed like a perfect compromise for getting me back into serious running while allowing decent amounts of recovery.

FIRST training stands for Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training. It is a method create by two long-time triathletes who were finding it difficult to fit the demands of training for three disciplines into their busy lives. What they found was they could cut their training down to three runs each week and still produce good race times. They then followed this up with a study of twenty-five runners – fifteen of whom recorded marathon PBs.

The three runs in the FIRST system are an interval session, a tempo run and a long run at marathon pace. Looking closely at their programme now, I see how I trained was only an approximation of FIRST training as all their workouts have different distances over the weeks. Their intervals range from 400m to a mile, tempo runs from 3-8 miles, long runs build up to 20 miles for the marathon.  I simply did kilometre reps, a 20min threshold run and a 10 mile long run that grew to 14 as I got fitter.

What’s hidden in the details of the original FIRST promotions, but stated more clearly later, on is that  it’s a 3+2 system. Three runs with two cross-training workouts lasting 40-45mins. This is another reason why I was only doing an approximation of it; I didn’t have the inclination to cross-train.  On the flipside, my coaching commitments meant I often jogged a couple of very easy miles on a Tuesday evening and I was still a keen parkrunner so did a 30-minute 4th run each week at Bournemouth parkrun.

All in it I wouldn’t begin to claim this was a scientific approach to evaluating FIRST training’s effectiveness but I certainly got a flavour of it.

Re-evaluating FIRST training now a decade on with a better understanding of running, I think it has some very strong points. The range of workout distances is great because these implicitly challenge the runner over a variety of paces. Your 400m efforts will naturally be paced quicker than mile efforts. The downside of FIRST’s workouts is a lack of clear progression. The distances seem to jump around and I couldn’t identify a pattern other than for the long runs. When I coach, I like to progress in a logical fashion, You take the runner from point A to Z with points B, C, D etc clear to see.

There is one notable failing if you follow FIRST training accurately and that is the idea of doing two days cross-training each week. Why not just do easy recovery runs at the correct pace on those days? While there may be some benefit carrying over from cross-training, going swimming or cycling isn’t going to produce the same benefit you would get from running. The principle of specificity tells us the best way to build running fitness is by running. Even running on a treadmill isn’t going to provide exactly the same benefits as running outdoors where you will race.

My experience was that I enjoyed the training. I always felt strong and ready to run when I got to the workouts. This is probably the thing which stands out in my memory about it. It was enjoyable and I got myself back up to fitness with it.

The results were decent enough although I didn’t really have a benchmark to test against but I saw the workouts getting quicker and heart-rates getting lower.

For example, my 5K tempo runs began in January at 24:30 with heart-rates in the mid-170s and maxing in the 180s. By the end of March, they were down to 22:30 with heart-rates in the low 160s and maxing in the low 170s.  The route I followed had a long uphill in the 2nd kilometre then after that the remainder was a gradual down. This led to uneven splits and needing to gauge my efforts by breathing but in the early weeks the fastest kilometres were around 5min/km (8min/mile) and by the end they were sub-7, that is about 4:18/km.

Likewise my 5x1K intervals went from totalling around 21:30 (avg 4:18/km) down to 19:45 (3:57).  A decent improvement over three months.

My long runs began on a ten mile route averaging 9:18/mile and by the end they were around 8:30/mile on a longer fourteen mile route.

Those are decent improvements albeit only getting me somewhere closer to where I’d been a year before. Of course, MAF training had taken its toll and, at least I now felt like the days of overtraining had been banished and I could get back on with training.

The one negative for me was I didn’t like running only three days per week. By the time I got to mid-March I was ready to do more running. I had to talk myself into sticking with the programme for a couple more weeks so that I could feel I’d given it a decent shot. Compared to MAF it was night and day. I got tired of MAF because I wasn’t seeing any tangible results and I was forever trudging round holding back on my pace. With FIRST I was holding back on how often I went running but every time I did run I enjoyed it and felt like I was improving. Trouble is, I just wanted more.

Once April came around, I went back to running six days per week. What I noticed is how quickly my heart-rate began to drop on all these workouts and long runs. During FIRST training, my heart-rate was always up at 150 or higher, once I introduced more recovery days It generally stayed a little lower despite me running similar workouts. By the end of the year I was running my fastest ever 10K so while FIRST kickstarted that, it was other training which got me there.

Running Locomotion 101

Running seems easy. It’s the act of putting one foot in front of the other quickly. One of your legs swings out in front of you and you move onto it. Then the other leg moves out in front of you and you do it again.

This much everybody agrees on.

Yet the mechanics of running aren’t taught at school, it’s something we pick up from watching others. Some people seem to intuitively understand what to do to run fast while others seem to lumber along.

If you start to think about it, or look for guidance from the internet, it quickly becomes a morass of information. Is running the same as falling with gravity, repositioning your legs quick enough to avoid landing on your face? Or are you almost jumping or hopping forwards with each step and lifting your knees high to extend the stride? Which muscles do you use when?

Consider that the only thing which moves you forward is pushing the ground away behind you. Powerful muscular contractions of the glutes and hip muscles ‘out the back’ allow you to skim forward over the ground.  Then when the step is complete, you do the same with the other leg. You don’t waste muscular effort repositioning the foot in front of you, you let the body’s natural stretch mechanisms do it.

It’s just like using a slingshot or catapult. You use all your effort to pull the elastic back to its maximum stretch and then, when you let go, it fires forward.  You can’t make a catapult go forwards faster by doing anything other than letting go.

Just like the elastic on the catapult fires past the Y-mechanism eventually it slows down as it runs out of energy. Likewise the leg and foot shoot past the body and end up in front. That’s when you, as a runner, go back to putting the effort in to getting the foot and leg moving backwards to power the next step.

These are the first principles:

  • Use effort to drive the leg backwards with each step.
  • Let elastic energy in the hip flexors pull the leg forwards.
  • As the leg comes forward, muscular effort is only used to stabilise rather than power.

These simple principles will help you begin to sort through the advice you read. It won’t cover everything but it’s a good starting place.

On form – Heel-to-butt kick

Watch any elite runner and you’ll see their heel kicking up to their buttocks as the leg moves forwards. I have a whole bunch of terms for this – butt kick, heel lift, back lift which I am going to use interchangeably through this article.

From an efficiency perspective it is very important. The days of people owning mechanical clocks are now all but gone, so the majority of people probably have little idea about how the length of a pendulum affects its movement. Basically a long pendulum swings slower than a short one and vice versa. You can test this by grabbing a piece of string, tying an object to the bottom and swinging it at different lengths.

Applying this concept to running – a short leg will swing quicker than a long one. Tall people tend to have slightly slower cadences than shorter people and it is why, when small children run their legs appear to go like the clappers. Of course, once you’re fully grown you can’t change the leg of your legs, you’re stuck with your genetics, unless a disaster happens.

Yet shortening one’s leg is effectively what an elite runner does when they kick their heel up to their backside. As the foot passes closer to the body and above knee height they have essentially halved the length of their leg. It is now only as long as their femur measures from hip to knee. This is sometimes referred to as shortening the lever. A shorter leg comes forwards quicker than a straighter leg helping to reposition it ready for the next step.

With recreational runners we rarely see this butt kick taking place. With some runners it is like they are walking fast, keeping their legs straight – moving them back and forth with a high cadence and barely leaving the ground. To varying degrees, other runners will lift their trailing foot off the ground – some lift it just a few inches whereas others may have it passing the support leg  at calf or even knee height. Once in a while you see recreational runners who have an exaggerated back lift even if they are only moving at a moderate pace, such as eight minute miles. It is almost certainly something they have been taught to do and there are certainly many coaches / Youtubers who advocate doing this. The trouble is while deliberately lifting the heel to the backside seems desirable for the efficiency reasons previously mentioned, it is not.

Don’t initiate ‘the pull’

It’s likely ‘shortening the lever’ will help you run faster, at least in the short-term. To do it you just pull your heel to your butt – to do this you engage the hamstrings. The problem is, this isn’t how it should occur or what the hamstrings are best used for. What they should do is control how quickly the lower leg unfurls once your leg is out in front of the body. This isn’t a conscious process, it just happens with every step you take. Like any muscle they will eventually become tired and fatigued so if you are mistakenly using your hamstrings to actively pull your heel, you’re going to tire them out needlessly.

How to butt kick

The reason you don’t need to actively lift your heel is because when you run correctly it naturally happens. In my look at glute-powered running, In a previous post, I discussed how an elite runner like David Rudisha uses his glutes to swing his leg from in front of him to behind. At some point the thigh physically cannot go any further back and he tips up into a toe-off.

Looking at a snapshot of what happens a few frames later we see his thigh has barely moved but the lower leg has begun to lift. This is momentum transferring down the leg through what is referred to as the kinetic chain. It generates power in many sporting actions from kicking a football, throwing a javelin,  swinging a golf club to delivering a knockout punch. Energy is generated by big powerful muscles and then transferred to the smaller extremities to achieve a higher speed. It’s the same process that allows Indiana Jones to to crack his whip – his arm and body begin the movement and then the energy transfers through the handle and down the whip to create the cracking sound.

For Rudisha, after the leg appears to momentarily pause, it then begins to move forward. This is powered by the elastic energy that has been stored in the muscles on the front of the hip and thigh. When the leg was moving backwards these muscles were being stretched like an elastic band and now, just like when the elastic band is let go they ping back to their normal length. This pulls the thigh forward, but it doesn’t affect the lower leg so that continues its journey towards the runner’s butt.

Eventually the lower leg either runs out of momentum or reaches its closest point to the  butt. If everything is timed well, it is enough to carry it under the runner’s body as a shortened lever.

Composite image of David Rudisha’s stride showing the heel lift and pass under the body

Not everybody butt kicks

Given that I’m describing this as a natural sequence of events, you might expect everybody to lift their heel to their backside and kick butt yet this isn’t what we see. The main reason is you have to be running at high speed for it to happen. You won’t see any sprinter who doesn’t butt kick and this isn’t taught to them except by bad coaches – it just happens.

Your legs have to be moving back and forth quickly to create the momentum in the lower leg. Quite how fast you need to be is some undefined combination of factors such as pace, leg length, foot weight and stride rate.

All elite distance runners back kick because they are rarely run slower than five minute miles. The women’s marathon is the slowest elite distance race and Tigist Assefa can be seen butt kicking on the way to her marathon world record.

Tigist Assefa running behind two pacers demonstrating a high heel lift at 5min/mile

Yet if you see an elite distance runner out for a jog, at say nine minute mile pace, their heel doesn’t kick their butt. The foot will come off the ground but it is not the efficient shortened lever. At slower speed the leg just doesn’t have the momentum to carry the foot up to recover close to the backside.

There is another reason why we often don’t see any backlift in recreational runners and this is because many over-rotate their hips which I discussed in this post. Instead of the leg swinging straight backwards and forwards with a long range of motion to create power and momentum, a shorter stride length is creating by turning the hips. Arguably this may simply be a factor explaining why they’re slower at running but I noticed in the footage of Tigist Asseffa breaking the world marathon record, she appears to have one foot lift higher than the other. I suspect this is due to over-rotation of the hips as it is reflected in one shoulder rolling more than the other. She is not the only long distance runner who seems to have some inefficiency in this area.

Final thoughts

Kicking the heel to butt for more efficient recovery is something which occurs with good running form and mechanics. Attempting to force it by pulling your heel up is unnecessary and will tire the hamstrings. Arguably it could be beneficial to slower runners but the counterargument is that spending the time learning to pull the foot up is training time that could be used to improve speed so it happens naturally. Ingraining bad form is unlikely to be a good idea because it is harder to undo later on. To get the natural heel lift, you need to get the glutes firing and the leg swinging through to an extended toe-off.

The information detailed here is based on personal experience and that contained in Steve Magness’ The Science of Running Book. Magness was the Cross Country coach at the University of Houston where he was able to speak with Tom Tellez, the track coach who coached many athletes including Carl Lewis who was the 100m world record holder during the 1980s and 1990s.