Applied Sprinting Techniques

Season 2: The Road To Boston

Chapter 2. Road Work
2.6 Applied Sprinting Techniques

In Chapter 2.4, we talked about high intensity intervals and my fascination about the world's fastest men on track. I have been doing 8x400meter intervals and I was all too happy to run at a super fast pace of 2:40 minutes per kilometer.

My boldest theory was "It would shock the Philippine racing scene if I could carry my 400m speed to a 5Kilometer or longer races." That was an insane theory. But I did learn a lot from my 400meter sprints. Just lately, after about 8 weeks of training, I am able to run sub-20 5Ks.

So you grabbed your calculator or just your mathematically proficient minds and computed a 4:00 min/km. Hey Pandesal Runner, you failed. You weren't able to carry your 2:40 min/km pace! And you close this page with a huge grin and said -- I knew he would not be able to do that all along.

Neytiri of Avatar. This image is from ImageShack.

And I feel you. Like Jake Sully felt Neytiri.

But.. The insane theory was actually productive in a sense. The sprinting speed and the sprinting techniques I learned pushed me to trim my 21-minute 5K training best into just 19 minutes. And we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg here. Eight weeks of training. What if we continuously improve and apply what we have learned on our sprint runs? Could we really be able to do 2:40ish on a 5K race? Do you feel me? Suddenly, my insane theory isn't so insane after all. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe nuts.

I did not carry my 2:40 sprinting speed to my 5K runs but here are my sprinting techniques that I was able to apply for a sub-20 5K.

Sprinting Techniques

1. Speed Form. On trying to record my best 400m interval split, my main concern was my speed form. I learned that running fast need not only require power coming from the legs. It's also about energy efficiency and being able to take advantage of nature - wind, gravity and ground reaction force.

These things were key to my more efficient sprinting speed:

• arm swing
• lean angle
• running tall and
• shoulder and face relaxation

I changed my arm swing from the arms moving across the front of my chest to moving them parallel to my legs (which is completely sidewards). Why? I have two basic reasons behind this. One, sprinters move their arms this way and it is said to be aero dynamic which is able to reduce the slow-down effect of wind friction. Two, this arm swing is more energy efficient. Previously, when my arm swings towards the front of my chest, my shoulder follows the movement. My shoulder expends wasted energy. With parallel arm swings, my shoulders do not move excessively to follow my arms. Hence, I was able to conserve energy.

By leaning slightly to the front when running, we are able to utiize the pull of gravity to push us forward. Try running for a few meters on an exaggerated forward lean. Your balance will be off your center of gravity and towards the front. To sustain forward motion with the help of natural gravity, I lean slightly forward.

Running tall and looking about 50 to 100 meters ahead keep my focus on achieving my goal of reaching that 50-100 meters. It inspires to move quicker and reach that point. More importantly, by running tall and looking ahead, I am able to reduce the stress that my upper body puts on my core muscles. The core muscles are working extra hard to keep me upright when running. Besides doing abdominal exercises three times a week to strengthen my core, I also have to run tall so as not to overwork my core muscles.

Lastly, it is so hard to relax when your sprinting. It is so uncomfortable and ironic to use relaxed and sprinting in one sentence, right? They don't seem to mix. But that's a key to sustaining our sprinting speed. We have to relax our shoulders and facial muscles and just let them move carefree. We should not force speed by stressing the shoulders and the face - they won't help us run faster, the legs and the arm swings do. Relaxing our shoulders and face also help conserve our energy. We should use every little energy we have to run efficiently fast.

2. Minimize the time your foot touches the ground. The less time our foot stay on the ground, the faster we move forward. Picture yourself running on barefoot on a super hot surface. That is how you should minimize the time your foot touches the surface.

On my part, I did months of training to learn and practice forefoot running. I used to land with my heels and then kick off with my toes near the front of my foot (forefoot). The heel lands and then the foot rolls and takes off the ground with the forefoot. To minimize this landing and take off time, what if I just land on the forefoot and strike with it immediately upon ground impact? Wouldn't that be much faster?

I thought so. It hurts to learn the forefoot running method and it takes a lot of time to practice and learn. I think it's worth it.

3. Faster Strides. How do you run fast? You run a measured distance in as less time as you could possibly do. How do you that? Fast or speed is measured in terms of distance over time. To run faster, either we increase the distance covered by each of our footstep or we increase the frequency of those steps.

In a mathematical equation, SPEED = DISTANCE / TIME. For computational purposes, let us have Ds to represent the Distance covered by our one stride and Dt to represent the Total Distance we need to run.

Dt = SPEED * TIME.
Example:
5000m = 1m/s * 5000s. (5000s equals 1:23 hours)

From this equation, it tells us that a 5000m distance can be covered in 5000 seconds if our running speed is about 1m/s. The distance is constant. The time it takes for us to cover that distance varies depending on our running speed. The faster we run, the less time we need to cover 5000m. Speed is therefore the factor in this equation that we could improve on.

Now, back to our original question. How do we run fast? How do we increase our speed. We modify 1m/s. If we stride longer per second, maybe twice the length we come up with 2m/s.

5000m = 2m/s * 2500s. (2500s equals 0:41 hours)

But increasing our stride length have two major issues: (1) Stride length depends largely on the length of our legs (measured from the hip to the heel). Although it's mathematically possible as in the above equation, it is not physically probable to grow our legs twice as long. Hehehe. (2) Forcing longer strides would risk us into injury. Over extending our legs over long distances would be both hard to sustain and injury prone.

Our next option is to increase the frequency of our strides. Suppose we could now do two 1meter strides in one second instead of our previous 1meter stride per second, what do we get?

SPEED = Ds / s = (2 *1m) / s
Dt = SPEED * TIME
5000 = 2m/s * 2500s. (2500s equals 0:41 hours)

By illustration, we run faster by increasing the frequency of our strides. We run with faster strides.

Others

It would be much helpful if you would practice the above techniques on your interval runs and on to your tempo runs up to actual races. If I may just add, high speed running over longer distances would require us to keep focused and to be in control of our speed. We have to focus on keeping our running form, foot landing and kick off and always going for faster strides. Focus on the techniques and your goals.

We must also be in control of our speed. Over long distances, it may not be enough to run efficiently on our top speed. We must find that right amount of speed that we could control and sustain for the duration of the race. In my case, I could run 2:40 min/km on 400 meters but I could only sustain 4:00 min/km for a 5kilometer run. So I must control myself to run within my limits and be able to finish the distance strong from start to finish.

It took a lot of heart and dedication on my part to keep on running and keep on trying to improve my speed over weeks and weeks of training. Don't get discouraged if you did not get it the first time. Try again. Then do it again. And again. It's not too hard if you really want it bad enough.

Lastly, I believe that there are two other factors that could help you and me run even faster. But I have not been able to do them yet. Which are? One, Lifting my back foot near my butt after kick off could actually propel me to run faster. The high back foot would create momentum to keep us running forward and then gravity would also aid in pulling that leg back and down to the ground. Two, the lighter we are the faster we could run. I haven't trimmed down to 140 pounds and under to test this and I haven't been able to lift my back foot as high as I need to.

Training Invitation
If you happen to be interested to train with me, the Pandesal Runner, and do a sub-20 minute 5K run one of these days.. You can drop an email to jayson.deuna@gmail.com and we could have a training session at Velazquez Park Makati on an early Tuesday morning. It's the running grounds for a lot of Makati runners as well as my company running group. See you there!

Warm Up Drills:

1. Dynamic stretching
2. Fast turnover - High Butt Kicks
3. Power - High knees
4. Balance - Toe Tapping

The Training Run:

1. 1K Warm Up Run at 6:00 min/km pace
2. 5K Tempo at 4:00 min/km
3. 1K Cool Down at 6:00 - 7:00 min/km