Tag: Training

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.

Jogging around

When I began running it wasn’t uncommon for it to be known as jogging. Being a jogger or going out for a jog was the standard term. Yet somewhere in the last decade or so, this term has almost become pejorative and insulting. Everyone now wants to think of themselves as a runner.

In his book Better Training for Distance Runners, which was first published in 1991, Peter Coe describes jogging as “very slow running – 7 to 8 min/mi for talented young-adult men (4:21 to 4:58 min/km) and 8 to 9 min/mi for talented young-adult women (4:58 to 5:36 min/km). For runners not so talented, as well as for older runners, these paces would be slower.” (p.177)

It’s always stuck in my mind that he put a number on it yet revisiting the quote I notice he actually defines jogging relative to ability (or expected ability). He doesn’t simply say “anything slower than 7 minute miling is jogging” he qualifies it. He sees jogging as a slower version of running.

I have to say I don’t find moving at 7min/mile pace to be easy or what I think of as a jog but then I am neither talented nor young!

Even so the idea of jogging is one I feel is underrated. My recovery days are all jogs as I define them and which I suspect Peter Coe would agree with. Very easy runs that barely feel like I’m putting in effort. On a good day this is currently around 8:20/mile, on the bad days it is slower and still feels a little struggle due to soreness or tired muscles.

A while back I was working on building my stride length by running sprints on the flat and hills. I did this through May and then my right hip-glute area felt fatigued. I put the sprints on hold and went jogging. After a week or two the hip area felt good enough to resume the sprints. I then upped them to twice per week and felt the creep of fatigue coming back into my right hip area. After five weeks, there came a point when I knew I’d done enough and I went back to jogging. This time the jogging was very slow by my standards – slower than 9 minute miling and on one run averaging 9:50/mile. It doesn’t really matter whether this is objectively fast or slow, it was jogging and felt very easy at my current level.

I am a big proponent of jogging, without looking at your watch for pace or heart-rate, to aid recovery. As I write above, sometimes I think this needs to be for an extended period until the body feels good. One of the extra benefits is you can still go out for a ‘run’ every day and mentally tick off the exercise box.

For some reason, the vast majority of ‘runners’ don’t seem to embrace jogging these days. They always feel they have to be doing some kind of session. They might throw in the occasional easier day but more often they take a rest day instead. When they have an ache or pain they never see it as worthwhile to go with a period of easy running until the body recovers. I think they are missing out.

Built for speed

It was New Year’s Day 2012. I’d returned to the scene of my first parkrun around the University of Southampton playing fields in Eastleigh. Ten months earlier, it had been a cold, frosty February morning and I’d gone haring off the start line slowly fading to get round in 23:38. Now with another thirty-five parkruns under my belt, I’d almost broken twenty minutes.

As we stood listening to the briefings, applauding new runners and visitors; it became apparent we had an Olympian in midst. Standing 6’2” with bleached blonde hair and broad chested it was hard to miss Iwan Thomas, especially as he stood head and shoulders above many of the other runners present. Like me, this would be his second Eastleigh parkrun.

As we set off running, I kept an eye on him but my legs were fatigued. I’d run all-out the day before at Poole so gradually he opened up a lead of fifty metres. It stayed like that for the first two laps then on the final one, the gap extended and he finished in 20:45; I trailed in almost a minute behind in 21:35. Of course he never even knew we were racing!

These days Iwan Thomas is often seen on television either as a panellist, contestant or doing roving reports on The One Show. As an international athlete, he was a key part of Great Britain’s 400m success in the 1990s. He won silver in the 4x400m relay at the Atlanta Olympics and gold at the World Championships a year later. He and compatriot Roger Black competed in the Olympic 400m final which was easily won by the legendary Michael Johnson. Roger raced as the 400m British record holder and held it until Iwan broke it in a time of 44.36s. This stood for almost twenty-five years and it was only in May 2022 that Matthew Hudson-Smith finally ran faster than either of these legends.

When his athletics career wound down Iwan began trying longer distances. The London Marathon was an obvious choice where he clocked 3hr58 in 2009 and over the next six years he set personal bests of 40:16 for 10K, 1hr12 for 10 miles and 1hr37 for half marathon. He also took up parkrunning and has racked up over one hundred with a best of 19:18 at Netley Abbey where he usually runs. Currently he’s running around 22-23 minutes there as he approaches fifty.

A couple of years ago in the October 2021 edition of Runners World they detailed his ultrarunning in the South Downs Way 100. That’s one hundred miles from Winchester to Eastbourne. A significant motivator for doing this was to raise money for charity due to difficulties his son suffered after birth. Iwan recognised he’s not built to run ultras saying “I’m 15½ stone. I was designed to go from A to B in 44 seconds. I wasn’t meant to conserve energy and not have high knee lift or a long stride.” When it came to the race, he ended up finishing 304th of 308 finishers in 29hr35. It was a tough race and he was left believing he might have completed it faster as he wasn’t physically ready for it. He’d barely trained in the preceding months due to a tendinitis injury and motorway accident; although race organisers had got him to run a 50-mile ultra as evidence he would capable of the longer event.

Back at Eastleigh parkrun, with only 68 of us having braved any New Year’s Eve hangovers it was easy to find the opportunity to say a brief “Hello”. What struck me wasn’t anything he had to say – it was his size and build. I was looking eye-to-eye with him, standing just as tall and strong.

While Iwan is now 15½ stone, I’d guess he was somewhere around 13-14stone in his prime. Research on other elite 400m runners shows Matthew Hudson-Smith is 6’4” / 12st4lbs, Martin Rooney is 6’6” / 12st 11lbs, Roger Black ran at 6’3” / 12st 6lbs and Michael Johnson at 6’1” / 12st 7lbs.  Those physiques are very comparable to my own. I’m 6’2” and have slimmed down over the past two years to just over 12stone and under 10% body fat. In my younger days, I was usually around 14 stone and more muscular.

I’ve been training and running consistently for the past decade and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not particularly suited to distance running. This fits with me being built more like a 400m runner. I’ve always believed everybody is capable of doing everything to a decent standard so it’s a bit galling to have to admit that perhaps you can be genetically limited. My personal bests are all similar to Iwan’s and it’s fair to say they are decent times and many runners would be happy with them. Yet they’re a long way off the best – about 50% worse than the world records and I see many runners around me who naturally run faster off less training.

Does this mean I should give up distance running? Not at all, I’m still determined to get the best out of myself. It just means I’m reconsidering my approach. If speed is where my strengths lie then I need to keep working at that. Looking back to when I started parkrunning, I had good speed but I didn’t understand how to create endurance and stamina or how to convert that speed into better parkrun times. In my pursuit of figuring this out, I got away from speed, allowing it to decay as I spent sessions logging miles and experimenting with different training systems. Now I’m going to dedicating myself to redeveloping my speed.

If you too are interested in improving your speed then contact me to purchase my Get Faster … Speed Training course.

Durations to think about in training

How long can you sprint? Why is the first minute of your parkrun fast? Why do we train differently for a 10K and a marathon?

Each of these questions is determined by what is going on in the body and its capacities. While the exact figure can be a touch higher or lower for you – especially depending on whether you’re well-trained or badly trained – overall they’re numbers that help structure your training. With time and focus you should be able to get a sense of exactly where your numbers are.

8-10secs Sprinting energy

Sprinting is powered by the phosphocreatine energy system, which is sometimes abbreviated to ATP-PC, or called the Anaerobic Alactic energy system. I like to call it the Sprinter’s energy system because that’s more meaningful and tells you what it does.

It produces energy quickly and allows you to move very fast but it doesn’t last long. For a distance runner, it’s useful for getting off the start line or finding a sprint finish or mid-race surge. Surprisingly it’s also the energy system you call upon when you get up off the couch to go make a cup of tea!

This is the system that kicks in when you do interval work – especially if you set off fast.

1min30 Anaerobic limitation

Beyond the sprinter’s energy system detailed above, there is a secondary anaerobic energy system. Its names include Fast Glycolysis, Anaerobic Glycolysis and Lactic Acid energy system. It’s what 400m runners use in their races and is a big contributor to the 800m.

For distance runners, they’re using it when they run intervals at the track which last within this timeframe. Being anaerobic it gets you out of breath and you find yourself puffing. This isn’t to say there isn’t some contribution from the aerobic system but for anyone with good speed, it’s mostly coming anaerobically.

For most parkrunners, you’ll see the first 1-2mins are quick and then their pace drops away. This is because they’ve mostly run on anaerobic energy and then they’re having to rely on the aerobic.

8min Running at VO2max

V02max is a scientific measure of your aerobic capacity. The body takes in oxygen through the lungs, the heart pumps the oxygen around in the bloodstream for the muscles to use. There is a limit to how much oxgyen you can transport and exercise scientists finding this out by doing treadmill tests and collecting the air their subject breathes in and out. I did a VO2max test at college and it is not a pleasant experience. It’s nice enough at the slower speeds but once you get up to speed and are beginning to exceed your VO2max, you quickly begin to accumulate oxygen debt and then you’re hanging on mentally to continue running as the treadmill pushes you. Eventually you have to stop, or I suppose you could collapse and fall off the back of the treadmill if you have the willpower to push on!

In real terms, we have the ability to run at our VO2max pace for up to eight minutes. We can go faster for shorter periods of time, we can go slower for longer. Reigning Olympic 1500m champion, Jakob Ingebrigtsen set the 2-mile world record in June 2023 at 7:54 which means he was running on his VO2max for the race. A world-class woman like Sifan Hassan has run 3,000m in 8:18; so she’s probably thereabouts.

None of this makes a lot of sense from the ordinary runner’s perspective other than to recognise that a high aerobic capacity is very helpful for good distance running. Even when you have talent it takes time to build this aerobic capacity.

12min – steady state reached

Another thing I learned at college was a phrase used by one of the physiology lecturers “it takes twelve minutes to reach steady state”. As I wasn’t a distance runner at the time or interested in physiology/biology lectures, it didn’t mean much to me. It probably doesn’t to you.

What it means in practical terms is that this is how long, on average, it takes for the body to warm-up. If you go running off down the road your legs may feel good but your breathing will struggle. You’ll settle down after a few minutes but it actually takes longer for the body to properly warm-up.

Personally I take a good 15-mins or so to reach a point where my speed has picked up and my breathing can cope. Other runners may take a little less than twelve minutes. Either way there’s two offshoots to this – firstly your quick jog down the path and back for a minute at parkrun isn’t a proper warm-up. Secondly if you’re going out for a run and it only lasts 20 minutes you’re not actually getting lots of training benefit from it. Of course this applies more to regular, committed runners who do significant volumes of training than those who only run once or twice per week.

40min – optimal production of human growth hormone

During exercise the body produces many hormones but let’s focus on human growth hormone. As the name implies this is important for repair, growth and replenishment within the body after a bout of hard exercise.

At the beginning of any run the production of this hormone begins to ramp up and at an hour it has reached its highest level at 600% of where the body started out – a sixfold increase. At forty minutes we’re already at 550% so while the next twenty minutes will raise the level higher, if you’re time pressed or out for a recovery run this is the optimal duration. You’re getting close to the maximum but in only two-thirds of the time.

Combine this with my comments above on warm-up taking twelve minutes and you can see why a run lasting at least thirty minutes is beneficial.

1hr – limit at lactate threshold

The lactate threshold is much talked about. It’s sometimes calculated as the fastest pace which you can run in an hour, something of a self-defining quantity. Once you go past the hour, the pace has to drop and you’ll be into Steady State and closer to marathon pace. While you wouldn’t train at this pace frequently or for this duration, it is worth knowing that when you’re putting together endurance training sessions, it’s good to go out for an hour.

1hr30 – glycogen depletion

If you’re training at a decent pace or you’re aerobically inefficient then you can expect your glycogen stores to run out somewhere around an hour and a half. This is why elite marathoners take on fuel during races. Even though they’re highly efficient, when they’re due to run for over two hours, their glycogen stores won’t quite be able to last them running at marathon pace for that long.

Running out of glycogen is the infamous “hitting the wall”. That usually takes place around twenty miles which fits with elite runners having stores for around 1hr40-45. Often they start a race a little slower and therefore preserve their stores.

With training the body learns to store more glycogen but to achieve that you have to get the body to deplete its stores or close to it in training. If you keep doing long runs taking gels or supping energy drinks the body has no need to learn to store more.

2hr30 to 3 hours – diminishing training returns

In their Hansons’ Marathon Method book, the Hanson discuss why long training runs lasting over three hours are not beneficial to runners. I detailed some of this in the 20-mile myth. Their point is the longer you run for, the more damage the body has to recover from. Slower marathon runners are prone to spending four hours or more on their Long Runs week after week which leaves them struggling for motivation and the body to recover. It’s best not to run too often for longer than 2hr30.

With many of these variables, training improves them. An untrained sprinter may have a ATP-PC system that only lasts a few seconds initially, like their Lactic Acid system. Distance runners can extend the time they spend at VO2max or lactate threshold pace.

The First sub 3:50 woman

Elite women run fast. We know the sprinters are very fast running under 11seconds for a 100m. On Friday June 2nd at the third Diamond League meeting of 2023, Faith Kipyegon showed she has great speed reaching 25km/hr at times. It was that speed, combined with endurance, which enabled her to become the first woman to run 1,500m in under 3:50 – a pace which would have brought her in for 4:06 for a mile.

As the reigning Olympic and World Champion, Kenya’s Kipyegon who is approaching thirty years old was heavily favoured to win in Florence, Italy. While pacemakers are still present to lead runners out in the early laps, modern athletics now has a moving set of lights around the edge of the track to help with even pacing. These had been set at 62secs per 400m which equates to a 3:52.5 time.

The blue and yellow lights indicate the required pace

I took a look at the race to see how it was run and find out how the laps broke down. Due to its distance the 1,500 metres is unusual in starting at the beginning of the back straight – which allows athletes to cover 300m followed by three laps of 400m.

The splits as best I could determine them were:

  • 100m – 14.5secs – imagine that. How many of us can even run that from a standing start without blocks even without having to run a further 1,400m?
  • 300m – 46s – first crossing of the finish line
  • 400m – 1:02.37s – first lap of the track
  • 700m – 1:48.2s – second crossing of the finish line. Just before this around the 600m mark the first pacemaker dropped out
  • 800m – 2:04 – second lap of the track taking 61.63s. The other pacemaker drops out at 900m
  • 1100m – 2:50 – third crossing of the finish line – one full lap to go
  • 1200m – 3:05.28 – third lap of the track taking 61.28s. The last 100m has only taken 15-16s
  • 1500m – 3:49.11 – a new WORLD RECORD.  The final lap has taken 58.81s – a pace of 3:57/mile

It’s a truly remarkable performance which saw Britain’s Laura Muir finishing eight seconds behind in a season’s best time of 3:57.09 and Australia’s Jess Hull setting a national record in 3:57.29 as she finished third. Both runners had worked their hardest to keep up with Faith Kipyegon yet they ended up thirty metres behind. No-one in the rest of the field could even crack four minutes which begins to give an indication of the gulf that exists between Kipyegon and the others.

Faith Kipyegon flies down the back straight on her way to a new world record

Watching her run, she has decent compact form and is very balanced. Every stride is powerful and I’d estimate she’s taking around 200 steps per minute. This isn’t unusual for a middle distance runner or for a shorter runner. Faith is listed at 1.57m / 5’2” and weighs 43kg / 93lbs. What’s surprising is when you calculate the distance she’s covering with each step it works out at around 2.08m and that’s over 30% longer than she is tall. And she’s doing it for almost four minutes!

As a coach, these are the things I think about and marvel at. I’ve previously written two articles on stride length (first and second) as well as what elite runners speed is. Developing these can take time but is worthwhile even for distance runners. Consider that on average Faith Kipyegon’s new world record is the equivalent of running fifteen consecutive 100m races in 15.2secs and there are no excuses available about having little legs!

Experiencing Aerobic Limitation

I spent a rainy bank holiday morning sprinting up a nearby hill repeatedly. It’s a key part of getting faster and one that I’ve not done since last summer. Having woken at 6am, I grabbed a bowl of cereal then did the crossword while breakfast digested. About 8:15am, I headed out the door and there was light rain falling. The session I had in mind is not big – a 15 minute warm-up run, 5 mins of drills to help the mobility, the main session of 10 hill sprints and then a ten minute warmdown. But it is time-consuming because each sprint is followed by three minutes of recovery. In the end, it took over an hour to complete. What interested me is what the session told me about how to train for distance running.

Setting off on my warm-up it took three minutes for my body to crank the pace up and reach eight minute miling. My route is a mixture of ups and downs such that, by the end of the first mile, I’d been hitting sub-6 pace on a steeper downhill stretch – 7min38 popped up on my watch. The second mile came in at 7min04 and then I tacked on another thirty seconds back to home. What surprised me was how relatively hard I was finding it. My breathing was beginning to huff and puff like I was running a parkrun and my heart-rate reached 160bpm at the end. All in all, I was glad when I finished my warm-up and could walk back round the corner to do drills.

With the rain falling steadily and knowing I’d be standing around between the hill efforts, I elected to keep the drills short. Just one repetition of each drill taking 15 seconds and then a stride back to my start position with around 30s time to recover before the next. The stride reinforces what I’m programming as well as warming the legs up for the quicker, more violent efforts up the hill. Once again, by the end of these I was puffing and my heart-rate had steadily increased to 155bpm; each subsequent effort building the heart-rate higher than the one before.

Finally I was ready. I walked to the base of the hill and then spent a few minutes chatting with an old chap about goings on. The important thing about hill sprints is to attempt them with fresh legs so I didn’t mind an extra few minutes spent conversing. Hills sprints want to get maximum effort from the muscles which is why they only last seconds and then you get a nice long recovery. The short timeframe allows your ATP-PC energy system to be the key producer of energy while the long recovery ensures it has recharged.

The first effort I sprinted up the hill and my legs were turning over so smoothly. I was barely breathing, it was how I’d feel if I was out for a jog. Then I started to walk back down the hill and the oxygen debt kicked in and within fifteen seconds my heart-rate had reached 139bpm having started down at 90bpm. The second effort felt a little harder on the breathing especially afterwards and my heart-rate reached 143bpm. By the time I’d ambled back downhill to my starting place, it was back to 114bpm and I was feeling okay. After that my heart-rate never got out into the 140s again. Sometimes the oxygen debt after each effort resulted in very quick gasps for breath yet it didn’t take long to be back to normal. As the sprints went on they got a little slower, this is unsurprising because the muscles are beginning to fatigue and they can’t power getting as far up the hill.

After my 10th and final effort, I walked down until one minute had elapsed then began a warmdown run. My legs felt like they were springing along yet the pace was barely quicker than nine minute miling.

What intrigued me about this session was how two such different ways of training – the warm-up and sprints both taxed me in different ways. The warm-up pace picked up gradually to be a little quicker than seven minute miling where I still had room to run faster. Yet it would have been hard to stay running like this for an extended period of time. By contrast the hill sprints which are an absolute blast of maximal energy felt so much easier.

According to the wisdom of heart-rate training I could have done sprints all day long as I maxed out at whereas my warm-up reached 160bpm. Yet I know that wouldn’t be a good idea – no-one would do that, neither a sprinter or distance runner.  It highlights one of the problems of heart-rate training.

What really came home to me from the warm-up is that the thing limiting my distance running is not speed related. This is what I experienced when I first began parkrunning a decade and more ago. Every week I would run and feel there was more available in the tank yet not understand what was stopping me.

The limitation was not one of being able to run very fast for a short time as it is with anaerobic limitation, it was one of being able to run fast for a relatively long time. That’s where aerobic development is required. It took me the next five years to really begin unravelling this conundrum in detail. I read many books which talk about it needing to be done yet it’s not until you viscerally experience it that it becomes clear what is going on.

I meet many runners who haven’t yet had this realisation that being able to run fast 200s, 300s, 400s is not necessarily going to turn them into a faster distance runner. Sometimes it does but more often than not it’s about building speed through good distance training.

Maybe this is something I can help you with? Not everybody wants to be coached for a race, sometimes they simply need a training review. Understanding what they need to do next to get to the next level – is it speed or endurance they should work on. Just head over to the Contact page and give me some basic details and we can arrange a 1 hour consultation.