Think back to the last long race that you ran.
Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
How did you feel after your race?
Were your quads barking at you? Were you pretty for a few days?
If so, what do you think caused the achiness after your race?
The distance, right? Read more
If you are like many runners I know, running faster is one of your goals.
Without a doubt, the most frequent question I get from listeners of the show has to do with running faster during races.
Whether the goal is a PR or a BQ, running faster is something a lot of runners strive for.
So the million dollar question is pretty simple: how does one go about running faster during a race?
If you want to run faster, you need to practice it right?
Yes and no. Read more
Whatever distance you are racing on any particular day, if you have a time based goal you probably have an idea of what your race pace needs to be in order to achieve said goal.
Knowing your race pace, and nailing it during your race, are two completely different things however.
Rarely, if ever, are you going to run a perfectly even race where you hit every mile split on the dot every time.
And when you take into account curves/corners on the course, other runners, changes in elevation, water stops, etc., trying to hit most of your splits spot on is an exercise in futility.
So what you are you supposed to do in order make sure you nail your time goal for the day? Read more
Admit it, you want to get faster.
And that’s ok. Shoot, I want to get faster too.
But whatever your goals are, odds are that increasing your top speed isn’t going to help you achieve them.
Wait, what?
Huh?
Do you want to set a new PR this year?
Do you want to run a BQ this year?
Do you want to get your 5k time back to where it was before you had kids?
Whatever time goals you have, I’m guessing that the key to success is to cover a certain race distance in a shorter amount of time. Read more
Many of the runners that I’ve met, both in real life and that I’ve talked to on the podcast, have expressed a desire to keep running for as long in life as possible.
Sure, they might slow down and may not run as far, but as long as they are able to go running on a semi-regular basis they are fine with going slower.
But that begs the question, is slowing down as you age inevitable?
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to grasp the concept that at a certain point, age related decline is to be expected.
Cars break down more often as they get older.
Not What It Once Was
Computers and smart phones definitely slow down after you’ve had them for a year or two.
So it only makes sense that the human body would as well. (Spoiler alert, we do slow down!)
Researchers in a recent study that was published in Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise set out to try and explain why we slow down as we get older.
It looks like there are too main causes for slowing down as you age, though they are definitely related.
One of the biggest findings of the study is that as runners age, their stride length shortens considerably. A shorter stride is one of the two major causes of decreased speed (the other being a slower cadence), and the older the participants in the study were the shorter their strides were.
The other main finding from this study showed that older runners actually pushed off of the ground with less force than their younger counterparts. Pushing off with less force is going to propel you a shorter distance (hello shorter stride length), so it’s pretty easy to see how a weaker push directly translates to slowing down.