Beginners and Winners: How To Run Stronger, Further, Forever!

"Life is difficult. This is the great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult -- once we truly understand and accept it -- then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. - The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck. 

 

When I first read this, it stopped me like a big slap in the face. This is the same magic and medicine that comes with running. When you've been out there in the eye-stinging humidity and nothing feels right, those predictable thoughts come to mind, "Why am I doing this? What's the point," and soon your remember that life is difficult. 

And it's those difficult days that are the most rewarding, where everything gets stripped down to a choice. Running can be hard, but it can also be a gift. Going for a run was your choice, your decision. And just like this three-word gift provided the foundation for my decisions, you can build your own foundation to make running becoming easier, and like Bruce Lee says, “flow like water".

Foundation

Photo courtesy of Eric Orton

We as runners and athletes need a foundation to call upon to guide us. Whether you are a beginner, winner, or anywhere in between, it is this foundation that points us downstream with confidence to ride the monster wave to big running goals.  

To understand the idea of foundation, look at your vehicle.

Just like your ride, your body needs fuel to move, but it also has a foundation and suspension system that provides the riding experience. This riding experience would be much different if there were not springs and shocks helping to provide a smooth, comfortable ride.

Our feet, calves, legs, muscles, and tendons propel our body forward with elastic energy like a spring or rubber band. Would you use a dusty old rubber band you find in the corner of your kitchen drawer that cracks and breaks with the slightest tug? Or would you rather have the brand new band that is taut and snappy? It’s that springy foundation that we want to build first as runners.

Health and Performance

Photo courtesy of Eric Orton

The three foundational pieces necessary for run performance and health are core foot strength, cadence, and leg stiffness.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me make my own declaration that might hit you like “life is difficult” hit me.  

Most chronic run injuries, or what I call dysfunction, takes place when RUNNING EASY.  Yes, when running easy. If we can’t run “well” easily, we have no foundation to rely on or call upon to keep our rubber bands nice and snappy and healthy. If we are not efficient when running easy, which is what we do most of our running time, we spend more time on each leg, with each step, increasing our ground contact time. You may even have a ground contact data point on your smart watch. To remain healthy and improve performance, it is crucial for you to decrease your ground contact time and this is done through foot strength, cadence, and leg stiffness training.

 

If you have read the worldwide best seller, Born To Run, you are familiar with author Christopher McDougall’s story of going from a broken down, always injured runner to completing a 50-mile race. As his coach, I had to take him from the couch to a mountainous ultra marathon in the deep crevasses of Mexico’s Copper Canyon in less than 8 months. 

To do this, I attacked his foot strength, cadence, and leg stiffness and in a few months he went from not being able to run to doing over 3 hours with no problems - that ain't the 10% rule.

But first we needed to create a foundation, a suspension system of leg stiffness for him to call upon. That allowed him to run faster, farther, forever, which was his lifelong goal.

As I mentioned, this foundational training will help beginners, winners, and everyone in between build a better suspension system that will create stronger, more efficient running with every step you take.

The below drills, skills, and exercise are the first step in this foundation.

Foot Core

Photo courtesy of Eric Orton

As runners, it is impossible to separate foot strength from leg strength and stability. Utilizing the foot properly helps you activate and fire muscles all the way up your body that helps create muscle equilibrium and takes away the tug and pull of dominant and weaker muscles that cause tightness and dysfunction that lead to a parade of problems that most runners deal with. 

This is not a function of being a runner, but a function of not using your body well. It doesn’t have to be this way and using your body well, starts at the feet.

Here are a few simple but POTENT foot core exercises to help you get started and rebuild your foundation from the ground up. 

One-Leg Barefoot Balance

1. Balance barefoot on one foot on a hard surface with your heel a little elevated off the floor to stabilize only with your forefoot.
2. Use a chair or poles or the wall to help you stabilize when needed. 
3. Repeat 2-4 sets of 30-90 seconds per foot or until fatigue. 2-3 times per week and/or done as a run warm up before you head out the door

Awareness: This is a stabilizing exercise for the stance leg, not a range-of-motion exercise for the moving leg.

One-Leg Side Lift

1. Balance barefoot on your right forefoot using a chair, poles, or wall to help stabilize. DO NOT try and do it without this balancing help.
2. Keep your right leg straight, raise your left leg sideways.
3. Raise your left leg only as high as you can while maintaining level hips, and then go back to start position.
4. Repeat 2-4 sets of 15-20 reps with both legs or until fatigue. 2-3 times per week and/or done as a run warm up before you head out the door.

Awareness: This is a stabilizing exercise for the stance leg, not a range-of-motion exercise for the moving leg.

One-Leg Knee Lift

1. Balance barefoot on your right forefoot using a chair, poles, or wall to help stabilize. DO NOT try and do it without this balancing help.
2. Keep your right leg straight, lift your left knee in front of you as high as you can, and then back to the start position.  Keep your movements slow and controlled.
3. Repeat 2-4 sets of 15-20 reps with both legs or until fatigue.  2-3 times per week and/or done as a run warm up before you head out the door.

Awareness: This is a stabilizing exercise for the stance leg, not a range-of-motion exercise for the moving leg.

 

Cadence

As runners, our cadence, or the time we spend striking the ground, can affect our chance for dysfunction or injury. The slower our cadence, for example, the more time we spend on the ground.  

For example, heel strikers go from heel to forefoot before leaving the ground again to run forward. This can cause undue knee and ankle flexion, which leads to a chain reaction - more quad muscle power instead of glute action, pushing knees too far forward and stressing the achilles, calves and shins. 

Simply put, if we strive to improve our cadence and reduce ground contact time, we are eliminating the chance for the above biomechanical dysfunction to occur. And when do we typically have our slowest cadence, when running easy.  

It is normal for cadence to naturally increase when we run faster, and why including faster intervals can be a very good training tactic for all runners.  This is why it is crucial, for running health and performance across the board, to improve your cadence when running easily - when it is the most challenging.

The key is to improve over time. One of the most common mistakes runners make when working on cadence is they want it to be instantaneous or just a decision to be able to go out and do it. It takes time and practice.  Embrace the goal to just get better over time.

 

Here are some training tactics to help you on a path to better cadence.

Running In Place Practice: At home before a run, take your shoes and socks off and run in place barefoot.  This is a very simple way to understand foot strike placement and to practice the muscle memory and strength for good cadence.  While running in place, put the song Rock Lobster by the B-52s on your playlist and run in place to the beat of the music. The beat will help you to “feel” quick cadence. 

Nose Breathing: One challenge new runners have when starting to run is running too fast or speeding up to get their cadence. We need to keep it easy and to help with this do nose breathing intervals where you breath only through your nose with a focus on a higher cadence. This will keep your effort honest and help you improve through time. Practice running as long as you can while nose breathing and then taking a walking break to recover, breathing normally. Practice this frequently and overtime you will be able to run easily, longer and longer.

Not All of the Time: Don't focus on running with higher cadence all of the time. Pick specific days where you work on this. If you focus on it every run, your brain will get overwhelmed and you will get frustrated. Pick and choose your spots weekly and within a run.

Avoid this Mistake: Many runners make the mistake of lifting their knees and legs too high or too fast to get better cadence. Switch this up and think about providing quicker force into the ground, as if you were squishing a tiny bug on the ground.  

 

Leg Stiffness

It may surprise you, but leg stiffness plays a huge role in running. It improves cadence and your ability to run strong, efficiently, and economically – all essential for running. Stiffness is very different from tightness.  As runners, our most important ability is our availability, and leg stiffness is that ticket for admissions.  Why is this so? 

Good leg stiffness allows our body to land and get off our feet quickly and efficiently. Our feet and calves work like springs and rubber bands and every time we land when running, these rubber bands are stretched and then released as our foot leaves the ground, propelling us forward. This helps quicken our cadence, reduces ground contact time, and avoids the biomechanical malfunction we have been discussing.

 

Have fun with this and don’t see this as something more to have to do separate from running.  Integrate all of this into the runs you are doing or at home as a warm up before your run, and embrace how running can be strength training in and of itself.

Running can be hard, or not. Run Strong, to Run Free!

Guest blog by Born to Run Coach, Eric Orton