Practicing Speed

I believe that almost everyone would love to run faster. Each person is different with different muscle strength, aerobic capacity, age, and genes which put a reasonable upper limit on how fast we can go. Still we try.

We build our aerobic base and then we do our speedwork – fartleks, intervals, hill repeats, tempo runs, and so on. These most certainly are needed and help the body to adjust our uptake of oxygen and to pushing ourselves.

There’s three other components to speed that occur to me

1. Lean – if you lean forward, most likely you’ll go faster. Gravity is a good running aid.
2. Cadence – most of the time we have a steady pace on a run, but a faster cadence means more steps per minute.
3. Stride length – the longer out stride is, the more ground we’re going to cover

There’s one other small trick which is kick or pushoff. That is at the end of each stride, push off with the toes that are still on the ground. This really helps, but takes concentration and muscle. I’d probably only use this for shorter races.

I think there’s another great way to help get to speed – run downhill. Find a gentle downhill and then flow with that downhill. Keep your heartrate in a normal zone and enjoy the feeling of going fast! I can easily run downhill at 30-45 seconds faster than flats without any increase in effort. By running downhill you will help the body and legs to know what fast feels like. It’s also a time when you can practice lean, higer cadence, and increasing stride length while going fast – without having to push our heart rate up.

Give it a try – see if it helps your running. And enjoy it.