Running Shorts

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while, but just haven't really gotten around to it. This is for anyone using the summer to gear up for a fall season of racing, whether that's a marathon, road races, or cross country. That said, this is especially for you high school and college athletes. Summer is the most important time of the season. It's when you build your base -- everything that's to come later in the fall is determined by the quality of this base. In fact, some might even say that your end-of-season peak is limited by how well you trained over the summer. Arthur Lydiard believed this. And his philosophies still form the foundation of modern-day distance training. You've probably heard (and maybe internalized) many of the common critiques of Lydiard-style training: it's old and outdated , or it's too hard, or, most common, it's just a lot of long slow distance. And low slow distance makes for long slow runners . The lat...

This is a post for all you high school track and cross athletes looking to make the leap to the next level. This is a post for all you collegians at that level, shooting for the next step. This is a post for all you post-collegians eyeing the next Olympic Trials. This is a post for all runners, of all ages and abilities, who want to PR, PB, BQ, OTQ, or any other acronym you can think of. You want to get better? You can put away your training manual. Set aside the Hanson's program, or Pfitzinger, or Daniels or Higdon or Galloway or anyone else who writes a mass program. Most importantly, if you own Run Less, Run Faster : burn that crap. There is only one Way. Here it is: You need to run more. How much more? I don't know, but definitely more than you're doing now. Could be 30 miles a week. Could be 120. That part's up to you. It can't be that simple, can it? It is. For real. Running is a simple sport; stop trying to make it more complicated than it nee...

This week I want to feature the Fast-Finish Long Run . I've written about n ot doing easy long runs before , and this is one that can be a staple of your training no matter what distance you're training for. A Fast-Finish Long Run is exactly what it sounds like: a long run where you run the last portion of it fast. It could be as simple as closing out the final 15-20 minutes of a run (no matter the distance) at an up-tempo, aerobic threshold-type effort; or it could be as tough as the marathon-specific session of 10 miles easy straight into 10 miles at marathon pace. The Fast-Finish fits anywhere within that spectrum. The point of a long run is to build up aerobic endurance, but sometimes we end up just slogging around at a slow pace, not really stimulating any aerobic gains while just beating ourselves up. Adding on an up-tempo finish at the end can stimulate that aerobic stamina without being too destructive. (Sometimes, running faster can be less stressful on the body t...

Since Thursday, all I've been doing has been watching the Winter Olympics. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but not really. While watching cross country skiing, I got to thinking: why isn't XC running a summer Olympic event? As a runner, former XC athlete, a huge fan of the sport, of course I'm totally biased. But XC running would actually be the perfect Olympic addition. Here's why: It's the ideal combination between individual and team competition. Obviously, at the front of the race you'd have athletes racing for gold, silver, and bronze...that's the same as any other racing event, and every other Olympic event. The difference, however, is that after the three medalists are determined, interest in the race doesn't end -- it gets more intriguing! When the top runners finish, the team race begins: five team runners with the lowest combined score (with a potential sixth runner acting as a tiebreaker). So in the same event, you have individual...