Run Faster by Running Faster
by Steve McGill
While relaxing in the hotel room at the end of the first day of my most recent camp this past June, I was talking with my coaching partner Kevin Howell about training methods. The day before, Kevin, who coaches at the DII NCAA level, had been attending a conference for college coaches in Chicago. He came back from that conference raving yet somewhat bewildered by some of the things that he had learned there. All of it made sense, he said, but much of it contradicted what he had learned over the years and what he was using with his athletes. In this article, I want to discuss the things Coach Kevin and I discussed, how it does indeed make a lot of sense, and how both he and I (each in our own ways) have actually been incorporating much of this “new” philosophy into how we coach our athletes.
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The conference Coach Kevin attended was conducted by one of the coaches of a major-conference collegiate track powerhouse. Think he said it was a strength/speed coach of a school that has produced many NCAA champions and a good number of sprinters and hurdlers who have gone on to have more success on the international stage.
The coach’s premise was simple: speed should be emphasized from the outset, during fall training. No building up to speed. No “conditioning” period as we used to call it back in the day. The coach’s logic was that running a higher volume of reps at less than full speed with shorter recovery periods does not train the central nervous system to do what it must be trained to do, which is to explode and react. So, running at sub-optimal speeds trains the body to go slower, and what’s the point of doing that if we’re trying to train the body to run faster?
The coach also explained that training at shorter distances is preferable to longer ones. Maximum speed can only be maintained for about three seconds, approximately 30 meters — in the 100 meter dash, that would be from about 40-70 meters. Therefore, logically speaking, if the goal is to get faster, it doesn’t make any sense to run distances over 70 meters. After 70 meters, we’re decelerating. So if we’re trying to get faster, we should be training at distances of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 meters. Everything after 70 meters is speed-endurance, which is fine, and which is necessary too. But if we’re training speed in a particular workout, we don’t want to run distances that aren’t specifically geared toward increasing speed.
My question for Kevin was, what about 200 meter runners, 400 runners, 400 hurdlers? Do the same principles apply? When it comes to training speed, Kevin said, the answer is yes, according to the coach who conducted the conference. Even 800 meter runners should be doing these shorter sprints, even in the off-season, if, again, the goal is to get faster. That doesn’t mean that short sprints are the feature of every workout five or six days a week; what it does mean is that such training is included in the program from the giddy up instead of waiting to gradually increase speed throughout the winter and then even more in the spring and then even more in the summer (for those who make it that far).
In realizing how much sense this approach made, Kevin brought up a girl who used to run on his high school team back in the early 2010s when he and I used to coach athletes together on the weekends. This girl was a 100 meter specialist who also ran the 200, but never touched anything longer than that. One meet late in the season, Kevin needed this girl to fill in as a 4×400 leg because one of the girls who usually ran it was hurt. Well, this girl went out there and ran the fastest split of the whole team. “She didn’t die at the end?” I asked. Kevin explained that she didn’t, and that it now makes sense to him why she didn’t. By training over shorter distances all season long, she had a level of speed the other girls didn’t have, and holding her speed wasn’t a problem because she had the balance, core strength, bounce, and force application necessary to run a strong race all the way around the track. Kevin kept talking about balance in particular. Sprinting at shorter distances with long recovery periods increases core strength, so the athlete develops the ability to maintain balance. Though sprinters run in a straight line, those who lack core strength will have more lateral movement in each stride; their weight will shift more — to the left, and then to the right, with every stride. Sprinters who are stronger in their core minimize this lateral movement, which leads to more force application, which leads to more bounce, which results in longer strides. Because of the efficiency of the movements, the athlete will fatigue less than an athlete who is not used to running at full speed. We’ve all seen athletes whose running form falls apart toward the end of a race. Kevin’s point (via the coach running the conference) is that the breakdown began before it became obvious. Their running gets wobbly, Kevin said, because they’re not used to running that fast; their body can’t hold the positioning.
Listening to Kevin made me think about how I coach hurdlers, and how it has evolved over the years, especially in regard to fall workouts. All the way up to about three years ago, I was big on volume-based hurdle workouts. I used the quickstep drill as a hurdle-endurance workout, as it functioned as a variation of the back-and-forth workout that I’d borrowed from Jean Poquette — high school coach of Renaldo Nehemiah. In recent years, however, while I still have my hurdlers drill a lot to improve their technique, we do a lot more work out of the blocks in the fall, working on the first hurdle, working on the first three. The logic being, if you can hurdle at full speed, you now know what an actual race will feel like, and we can always go back and work on technique on other days. Even in the championship season (and this has always been the case with me), I won’t have my athletes clear more than seven hurdles per rep in a workout. My go-to championship season workout involves three reps over seven hurdles with 15 minutes rest between each rep. The logic is, if you can do three quality reps over seven hurdles in practice, you can do one quality rep over ten in a race.
The recovery periods are important too, although I haven’t emphasized them as much up to this point in the article. Longer recovery periods allow the body to go at full speed every rep. So let’s say a 400m runner does 3×200 for a workout, and their 400 personal best is 48.00. Assuming that there’s a 2-second difference between the first 200 and the last 200 of the 400, that means we’re talking about coming through the 200 in 23.00 and running the last 200 in 25.00. That athlete, in this 3×200 workout, would want to run each 200 under 23.00, as doing so will most likely lead to a faster 400 time. To hit times that fast, the recovery time needs to be in the 10-15 minute range. I’ve always been a coach who is willing to give athletes more recovery time to maintain the quality of a workout. But now I’m realizing I should be doing that even more, and that the increased recovery time should be built into the workout when initially planning the workout.
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