Learning to Crawl

Running is such a basic movement, you would think after 44 years I might have it down pat. Nothing could be further from the truth. Honing a perfectly round, smooth, and powerful pedal stroke always made sense to me. Be an electric motor, not a piston engine. Luckily, my awareness of good pedaling's importance existed since my earliest forays into serious cycling. For me, bad technique was never habitualized. Running though -- you would think the running motion would come naturally. Wrong. I never gave it much thought, and even less effort, and the results showed. I never knew how to run, but that is slowly changing. This winter I made great strides (hah!) toward a faster, more efficient technique, through practice and the help of the fleet-footed KL.

Making it out the door Thursday morning at 6:35, there was no specific plan for the run. My first thought was to use all the time I had to go on an extended loop. A few steps down the road, a mild connective tissue soreness on the outside of my left knee convinced me something gentler might be a better idea. Fresh off of reading a Friel piece on how improving your economy was just as good as improving your power, I decided to focus on good form, doing my best to keep up a decent pace without pushing. Sticking to my usual 6.5-7k loop through the sheep pasture and around the Clock Farm, I directed my focus onto maintaining a smooth, rhythymic gait, steady breathing, and swift forward progress without excessive effort. It worked, but this efficient style was far from second nature.

The end result was completion of the loop in 33:25, roughly 35 seconds less than a typical "easy" day, 1:25 more than a "fast" day. On this run, while failing to keep the HR in zone 2, my effort was nonetheless at least 10 beats lower than normal for this pace on this loop. It took quite a bit of concentration, but considering the tiny amount of time I have put into running relative to cycling, I should not expect miracles.

Training and efficiency present a bit of a contradiction, although certainly an avoidable one. Attempting to measure a training session by anything other than the ultimate goal of the activity being trained might reward inefficiency. If I run with a goal of pushing my HR up to a certain level, achieving this by waving my arms over my head while bouncing down the trail in a side-to-side motion, what have I accomplished? Along the same lines, if I do a 20 minute time trial interval with a goal of 300 watts average output, but I get there by coming off the aerobars, standing up every two minutes to keep the gear rolling, have I made myself any faster? Working on my sprint, is it enough to get my 12 seconds watts up to 1300? Wouldn't it be more important to measure my speed, acceleration, and timing? Of course it would.

Maximum output AND maximum efficiency together will produce the maximum result. As G recently stated, spinning is useless if the gear is too small to produce high speed. So let your training stress your body in every way possible, adapting it to every conceivable racing situation, but keep your mind on pulling it all together efficiently. This is the essence of good form. Was that a lot of words to state the obvious or what?