Mark: What do you think, man, did that title catch your attention? Well, it certainly got me
thinking anyway. See, as runners, we do things like speed sessions, tempo sessions, threshold
sessions, so on and so forth but anything around those, we're often told needs to be nice and easy,
and nice and slow but here's the thing, see those nice, easy slow runs can quite often feel anything
but easy. In fact, they can quite often feel quite hard and quite laboured. Why is that? Well, today,
we're going to delve into this a little bit deeper, and hopefully find out why.
[music] Well, let's take a look at what is likely
the biggest contributor to why running slower can feel harder, and that is our run form and
technique. Now as we start to slow down, this can alter our technique, and the most obvious being
our cadence, or our stride rate, in other words, how many steps we take per minute.
Now, for most, the natural tendency without even realizing it is actually to keep our stride length
the same as we start to run slow, which may not sound like a bad thing, but actually,
there's a direct correlation, or should be a direct correlation between our stride length
and our speeds. As we go slower, we should actually reduce our stride rate but for most,
we keep the stride length the same and therefore start to overstride.
If you think about it, you start to overstride, you don't have that inertia or that speed
when you're running faster, it's very hard to get up over that leg and into
the next. That's a very basic physics there, but hopefully, you understand. That is why you
can feel a little bit more laboured. Now obviously, it sounds very easy,
just shorten your stride length, but, yes, it's easier said than done. Let's look at how you can
tackle this. There are a number of methods that you can use. One that I quite like because it is
really quite easy you can do wherever you like is just simply imagine that you're running on ice.
Now, if any of you have tried running on ice before, you know that if you overstride and
take big strides, it can be quite treacherous on the ice, you want to keep it short and snappier. A
couple of key cues for this are almost to imagine that you're landing under or very close to your
center of gravity and on the midfoot of your soul. If you want to take things a step further, you can
also use a metronome and you can get metronomes on your phone and just play that whilst you're
running, so you can time that with your cadence. [music]
If you are someone that is running with this lower cadence, then it's likely that you are
feeling more force and more stress through each foot strike and therefore it's not
uncommon to feel increased foot and ankle pain or perhaps tighten cramping calves,
shin splints symptoms, or even knee issues too. I want to look at reducing the stress or this force,
and one of the best cues I was ever given was actually to think about running lighter,
rather than running slower. Now, ironically, we quite often
feel more discomfort and more pain when we run slow as opposed to when we're running fast,
and that is due to a lot of the reasons that I've just mentioned, which is an odd phenomenon
but I'm sure many of you experienced before too. Let us know if that's the case in the comment
section just down below. [music]
Another problem of running more slowly is that well,
it takes longer to cover the same distance and we have less to think about and focus
on when opposed to doing an interval session or speed session because then you
can focus on the intervals, the speed that you're running at and so on and so forth,
but unfortunately, when we're running slowly, boredom can start to creep in and everything
just suddenly starts to feel a bit harder. Now, there's a few solutions for you here,
you could listen to some music, maybe even an audiobook or a podcast or
plan an interesting route, maybe something you've never done before, it just keeps you
entertained and interested in what you're doing or failing that, why not run with a
friend or with a running club and that can just really help to pass those miles more quickly.
[music] Some of you may now be wondering,
well, surely, how slow do I really need to run on my easy run on my recovery runs?
Well, there's a bit of a comparison, the Kenyans, some of the best runners in the world
are well known for their Kenyan shuffle. As the name suggests, it really is a shuffle far
slower than many of us are doing on our easy runs, and myself included, for that matter.
I very often fall into that grey zone of running a little bit too fast on my easy runs. There's a
lot of benefit to these easy and slow runs but if you aren't already doing them at a good slow pace,
and I suggest coming down to that pace gradually for many of the reasons that I've mentioned today,
particularly with the technique and form because if you don't do it correctly,
you could feel too much force and too much stress through each of those foot strikes.
Do that nice and gradually but I hope you have enjoyed today's video today. I
know it's a bit of an odd topic, but hopefully, something that some of you can relate to today.
I know myself, I much prefer going out and doing interval sessions or threshold
sessions partly because I just get bored. Let us know in the comment section down below
if you're the same, I'd love to hear from you. Yes, very, very odd topic I know, but if you have
enjoyed it, please do give it a like. Don't forget to give us a follow over on GTN on social media
and give us a subscribe just below. [00:05:37] [END OF AUDIO]