The secret to running fast (Read 2999 times)

I'm with Nobby on this. I'm helping out a local HS track team and there is a young guy who is amazingly talented but very lazy and never puts effort into training. Then there is another boy who is the same age (15) and a decent runner but is extremely dedicated, hard-working and positive. I explained the importance of training to both boys.

 

Natural talent boy will run 65 second 400m repeats one or two times in practice then quit. I've tried to talk pacing with him - we won't listen.

 

Boy 2 runs ~70-75 in practise and tries hard and paces through workouts - but does not have the speed boy 1 has.

 

We has a track meet last week and both boys went head to head in the 800, which I thought natural talent boy would win for sure! He went out very hard and quit when he was passed. He ended up running 2:35! My little guy who works really hard actually beat him - 2:20!

 

He told me he couldn't believe he beat the other guy. I told him if he continues to train the way he does, he will continue to win.

 

Way to go; good on ya, Kimmie!!  Now THAT, to me, is the real life story, not on paper or in the lab.

 

Say, how did you do with your 3k last weekend?  How did your last km go?

Hi Enkie!

Spaniel,

now that you mention it....I had switched to tempo only training (plus long and hills) before I got sidelined by illness last year.  I gave up on intervals for reasons I won't go into.  So HMP tempos and 10K tempos and increasing the time I could sustain those speeds and I felt like I was improving quite a bit and couldn't wait to PR my next HM coming up soon.  But then I got sick, damn!

 

Lopez

Hi!

the master's forum is so boring without you.

 VO2max can only be measured in a lab, charts don't mean anything.

 

Your buddy may or may not be more talented.  Training is a function of work over time.  1800 miles in a year is good, but did you follow that up with 3-4 more years of that?  Did you experiment with your training to find what worked for you?

 

My 10K PR only improved about 10sec/mile as well from my junior year of HS until the end of college, despite pretty good coaching.  It was only later that I changed up my training and found that I needed nearly double the volume (80-100 mpw) and more long aerobic tempo-type workouts to take another 3 minutes off.  My teammates did very well of lower mileage, higher intensity training.  Not me.  Maybe you are the same way.

 

I'm in complete in sync with Spaniel here.  This is the VERY reason why I hate this genetic talk.  Those who don't see marked improvement quickly enough, quickly conclude that they don't have "genes" to be a good runner.

 

By the way, it is a typical high school runners, and unfortunately coaches as well, thinking.  Low mileage and high quality and they'll quickly improve their times.  So quickly they conclude that that's the way to go about--only to find out in the third month that they hit the wall and go stale.  So when that happens, what would they do?  They do more speed.  We call that "panic training".  They go deeper and deeper into valley of fatigue. 

 

Yoshio Koide is one of the best marathon coashes in the world right now.  He had coached 3 different runners to double Olympic medal (Yuko Arimori: silver and bronze in 1992 and 1996), world championships gold medal (Hiromi Suzuki: gold in 1997) and Olympic gold medal (Naoko Takahashi: first woman to run sub 2:20).  He was one of the best high school coaches in Japan in late 1970s and early 1980s.  He told me in person that he experimented with high school runners in his earlier days.  He divided runners into two groups; one would run 20k everyday.  The other intervals.  He said all of interval group would run very well right away.  But in 3 months time, they'll hit the wall and the endurance group would pass them in the end.

 

My conclusion, and how can it be otherwise, I have a limited ability to increase my aerobic capacity compared to others.

I've been told my form is good.

Lousy genetics.

 

Sorry, I don't believe it.  One way or the other you're training wrongly.  Back in 1961 a group of 20 heart patients, ages between 50 and 74, who, at first couldn't even run a half a lap around a local track without stopping, came out 8 months later to run 20 miles without stopping.  Eight of them ran a full marathon...around 4 hours.  So all these 20 people had great genetics?  What's the odd?

I would also add "miles per week" to that tlist of terms to ignore.  What's so special about 100 miles per week?  A far better improvement metric would be time spent running.

 

Disagree.  One is no better than the other.  What's so special about 10 hours of running per week?  They are both merely numbers to show volume.  Alone, they are meaningless, unless you can couple that volume to intensity to get an overall picture of training load, which IS important.

 

Don't make me break out the TRIMP score calculator.

I think that training is very important to reaching the best you can and most of us don't reach our potential.  But it is silly to assume potential has nothing to do with it. 

 

 I will say it is annoying when friends I used to finish behind or around and who train much, much less and much less thoughtfully (considering paces and purposes of workouts) and now beat handily started telling me I am "lucky" to be so fast! 

 

So they both play a role.  It's very stupid to dismiss conditioning.  But it's also ridiculous to dismiss genetic potential and assume times come down just to training.  Because while most of us are nowhere near our genetic potential, it will impact how fast we are at any given percentage of our genetic potential. Some people are more suited to distance running, physically.  Just as men and women have physical differences and the fastest women won't likely ever beat the fastest men in a 5K, individual people have physical differences (build, hormones, whatever) that will impact the effort it takes for them to reach a certain pace.  They can train better and beat a lot of people and absolutely crush their former selves, but still won't be capable of anything just for desire and training.

I see not wanting people to use genetic potential as an excuse, and I definitely have seen it, best thing I did for my running was throw out assumptions of what I can do... but places here there seems an excessive disregard.... you can't compare two people's times and know for sure how hard they trained. 

 

Case in point, my (step)brother just started running a couple months ago from being sedentary for many years, runs about 9 easy treadmill miles a week, and can run 24 in a 5K; I had well over 20,000 miles under my belt and began speedwork before I did that!  (thankfully, I can run faster than him still, though I had to do lots more training and experimenting with what my body liked to do so)  I feel it is safe to say that if we both kept tweaking and finding what is best for us, he'd be faster than me. My greater drive in this area will protect me from that, but saying there isn't genetic differences is silly. 

I think that training is very important to reaching the best you can and most of us don't reach our potential.  But it is silly to assume potential has nothing to do with it. 

 

 I will say it is annoying when friends I used to finish behind or around and who train much, much less and much less thoughtfully (considering paces and purposes of workouts) and now beat handily started telling me I am "lucky" to be so fast! 

 

So they both play a role.  It's very stupid to dismiss conditioning.  But it's also ridiculous to dismiss genetic potential and assume times come down just to training.  Because while most of us are nowhere near our genetic potential, it will impact how fast we are at any given percentage of our genetic potential. Some people are more suited to distance running, physically.  Just as men and women have physical differences and the fastest women won't likely ever beat the fastest men in a 5K, individual people have physical differences (build, hormones, whatever) that will impact the effort it takes for them to reach a certain pace.  They can train better and beat a lot of people and absolutely crush their former selves, but still won't be capable of anything just for desire and training.

 

 

I see not wanting people to use genetic potential as an excuse, and I definitely have seen it, best thing I did for my running was throw out assumptions of what I can do... but places here there seems an excessive disregard.... you can't compare two people's times and know for sure how hard they trained. 

 

 

Case in point, my (step)brother just started running a couple months ago from being sedentary for many years, runs about 9 easy treadmill miles a week, and can run 24 in a 5K; I had well over 20,000 miles under my belt and began speedwork before I did that!  (thankfully, I can run faster than him still, though I had to do lots more training and experimenting with what my body liked to do so)  I feel it is safe to say that if we both kept tweaking and finding what is best for us, he'd be faster than me. My greater drive in this area will protect me from that, but saying there isn't genetic differences is silly. 

 

I do see your point; but all I read in your post is resentment that you "have to work harder than your step brother".  I never EVER saw life that way.  I do what I have to do to get where I want to be.  It's just a matter of whether I get there or not.  Whether I'd have to work 2 hours a day or 12 hours a day is irrelevant.  To me, whoever brings up a topic of "genetic" or "luck"--all they care about is that; whether they have to work harder at it or not and be pissed about having to work a little bit harder than others.