Speed. Where can I get some?
Do you want to go faster? There’s no catch, no hard sell, say yes if you want to. Oh, so you do. Now, is that ‘I WANT to go faster’ (and will do what it takes), or is that ‘Yes, well I’d quite like to go faster,’ as in ‘I’d quite like to play the saxophone,’ (but can’t really be arsed to practise for an hour a day for the next two years, do exams, perform in front of people and risk humiliation, let alone actually buy a sax.’? Getting faster when you are a novice and intermediate comes naturally. It will happen whether you want it to or not, as long as you run consistently and train with variety, and race fairly regularly. Eventually a runner reaches a plateau, and maybe assumes that that is their speed ceiling. This is where apathy can kick in. It’s all too easy to choose the path of least resistance, and decide to move up a distance in your events: my 10k time has plateau’d, so I’ll start doing half marathons.
If you WANT speed, then you’ll want to have a think about what makes you faster, and then to train those components of your fitness. Put some focused work in. Runnersdaily is going to look at these components over the next few training blogs, and help you work out how to make yourself run faster.
First, we’ll look at strength. No first, we’ll look at genetics, and then move on. Elite sprinters, milers and marathoners are blessed with genetic advantages specific to their event. Things like muscle fibre composition, oxygen uptake and so on. You could devote your life to running a 2.15 marathon and never get close, all because of your damned parents. (Never mind, you’ve got your mum’s eyes…) Elites are actually abnormal, physiologically, and often psychologically too. So let’s think about all the rest of us normal people, and get back to this strength thing.
I’m choosing this because I think that average runners are usually woefully lacking in basic strength, and also because it is a good reference point when looking at traditional views of what speed is.
Speed is usually thought of as stride length x stride rate. Increase one or the other, or both, and you will run faster. And studies show that both those factors will increase when more force is applied to the ground. In other words if you get stronger and apply more force to the ground, both stride rate and stride length can be increased, and you will run faster.
So far, so good. But not so fast… there is another factor. Weight. If it was just about power, then the one with the most muscle would be the fastest; but we know that a 13-stone sprinter will most likely defeat an 18-stone sprinter, and this is because he will apply a greater percentage of bodyweight to the ground, even though the heavier guy will apply more absolute force. And although this concept is taken to extremes in sprinting, and less thought about in distance running, it remains vital to both the all-out speedsters and the long-distance guys. Why? Because of how stride works.
Stride rate has two components: contact time, how long the foot remains in contact with the ground, and what is called ’swing time’, the time it takes for the foot to travel through the air from leaving the ground to land for its next stride. Studies by Harvard researcher Peter Weyand seem to show that contact time is critical and swing time isn’t. Yet coaches in both short and long disciplines have tended to focus on speeding up swing time as a means to improving leg speed. (I know I always did, in good faith, obviously, and am now having to reassess my own coaching practice and methods, since I think that Weyand’s points are valid).
At this point, your take-home message is: if I get stronger without increasing my weight, I can move my legs more quickly, and thus run faster.
Without increasing your weight. There’s the rub. It also follows that if you lose weight - fat, not muscle mass - then you will be able to run faster, and not just from a power-to-weight point of view but also because VO2 max depends on bodyweight: if you lose weight you increase VO2 max.
Can we get stronger without increasing weight? Here’s sprinter Allyson Felix’s coach on this subject:
‘Allyson increased September’s 125 lbs deadlift to 270 lbs in mid April (as witnessed by Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated) and to an estimated 300 lbs by June. Her body weight increased a paltry 2 pounds from 121 lbs to 123 lbs. Meanwhile, her 200-meter sprint time dropped from 22.83 in 2003 to 22.11 in 2004 (adjusted to 22.30 for altitude, a ½ second or better gain!). She had run the fastest 200 meters in the world (without resorting to drugs) for all women.’
Felix’s natural talents are a factor here, you might say, but this is largely applicable to her top speed: the point is that huge strength gains without costly weight gains allowed her to make a significant speed improvement.
Next time we’ll look at the principles behind strength gains that apply to sprinters and distance runners alike.
Happy lifting!