How to Run Better Without Running

Dan Gable, legendary Olympic wrestler and coach, once said, “If something is important, do it every day. If it’s not important, don’t do it.” There’s a lot of truth to that, because a lot of what we do, even with running, involves honing skills that only come with hours of practice.

In fact, it’s said to take ten thousand hours of practice to truly be considered a master at something. That’s two hours of training a day for fourteen years, which is a lot of work and dedication. But, you know, there’s something to be said for the idea of less is more. It’s actually possible to get better at running without running.

At least, for controlled periods. You can’t expect to not run for years and then suddenly come back and smash your previous records, but a short period away from pounding the pavement can actually be just the thing to bust you through a plateau. The trick is that you have to be able to do it right.

Runners notoriously have the some of the highest injury rates in athletics. While these are not generally as dramatic as Joe Theisman’s femur getting snapped like a twig by Lawrence Taylor, it is an insidious problem that will creep up on many if not most runners at some point.

The trouble is repetitive stress, where the body repeats the same action over and over and over. While practice is necessary and good, you can easily get too much of a good thing by doing the same thing all the time, every time. Think of office workers who eventually need surgery because of typing, now imagine the pounding your knees and ankles take.

Even beyond the damage repetitive stress is doing to your body, there’s also the fact of accumulated fatigue. Virtually anyone who trains to get better, which everyone who takes running even a little seriously, is going to be fatiguing their body little by little, in ways that aren’t obvious except over the long term.

The answer to all of this is to stop running. Now, obviously, you should be just sitting on the couch instead of running, although there is something to be said for the rejuvenating effects of vegging out for a week or two every year or so.

No, instead you’ll want to replace your running with another hard aerobic activity for six weeks or so every so often. The best time to do this is right after a hard race, to give your body some time to rest and recover.

Try to pick and activity that will keep your lungs and legs in shape while giving them a new stress to adapt to. Try running stairs exclusively, or taking up biking for a while. The trick is that you need to work hard.

If you do it right, you find that when you come back to running you will be able to with a lot more vigor and energy then you previously had, and you may even gain the momentum needed to hit some brand new personal records.

Paleo for Running

Running, like pretty much everything else under the sun, has its trends and phases. Nutritional advice comes in and out of fashion as scientists, trainers and seemingly everyone else in the world offers up opinions and evidence on what may be optimal for people seeking to get the most out of their running. Paleo nutrition, which is a diet designed with the idea of eating foods that only our ancient ancestors would have had access to, is the latest idea to come along, but is it one that runners should embrace?

The basic idea behind eating paleo is that we’re only ten thousand years or so removed from our Paleolithic ancestors, hence the name, and that our digestive system and metabolism have not had time to adapt to foods that were not included in the Cro Magnon diet. In other words, grains and sugars.

The theory behind the paleo diet is that we’re not adapted to these foods and that consuming them in mass quantities is detrimental to our health to greater or less degrees, resulting in what’s called the diseases of civilization: heart disease, diabetes and cancer. If we eliminate the foods that didn’t existed when our bodies evolved, then we would be healthier and fitter.

This is at odds with what a lot of runners have adopted as their mantra, which is carbs, carbs, carbs. While the paleo diet is not necessarily low carb, it’s a lot harder to eat 500 grams of carbs in green leafy vegetables than it is to chow down on bread or pasta. But is this carb focus really optimal?

The idea is that running needs energy, and energy comes from carbs. Which is true, for about 400 meters. But long distance running pulls much of its energy from your fat stores, since the amount of energy stored as glucose in your blood, which is what carbs convert to, is really pretty minimal. So runners may not need all those extra carbs anyhow.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that paleo diet is the way to go. Some runners have tried and done extremely well. Ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes has switched to a paleo diet, and it hasn’t seemed to negatively affect his running, although he does rely mainly on fruit for his carbs.

The problem is that while the paelo diet sounds great in theory, that’s all it is right now, a theory. There is anecdotal evidence from looking at what the few remaining hunter gatherers eat and what the historical record tells us, and the idea makes logical sense, but that doesn’t men it’s true.

What is true is that the paleo diet recommends you eat meat, fruits and vegetables, eliminating processed foods and sugars, which is a healthy diet by pretty much any standard except hardcore vegans or carnivores.

Fartlek Training

Probably the worst thing you can say about fartlek training is that it kind of has a funny name, which probably still gets giggles at high schools everywhere. It’s appeal to lowbrow humor not withstanding, incorporating fartlek training is probably one of the best things you could do for your running training.

Fartlek is a Swedish word meaning speed play, and the basic idea is to intersperse periods of different running speeds into your running. This isn’t quite the same as interval work, although the basic idea is similar; you want train your muscles in new ways to increase your overall speed.

The average runner, someone who runs to keep fit and maybe does the occasional race, usually trains by doing a warmup, a run at a fairly steady pace, followed by a cooldown. This is an effective way to train up to a point, but you will reach a plateau fairly quickly where you are going to need more to increase your speed.

By incorporating the fartlek concept, you are exposing your body to new stresses to cause it to adapt, and you do this by incorporating a variety of running speeds into your run, rather than just holding a steady pace.

The word play in the translated title is actually the key to making this system work the way it’s supposed to. Think of kids who are out playing, who will walk, run and jog at seeming random intervals. This is what you are trying to emulate.

So at one session you might spend ten minutes running at a steady pace, then sprint for a minute, then walk for a minute, then sprint again, and so on. The idea is keep the shifting speeds random and unpredictable. If you feel like running fast do it,, if you don’t, walk for a while.

There are a couple of reasons this works. One of the big ones is that your body basically has two energy systems, the aerobic and the anaerobic, and fartlek training helps you train then both. A lot of runners only focus on developing their aerobic energy system, which leaves them using only part of what their bodies are capable of.

Another way that it helps is the related concept of muscle fibers. Your body has slow twitch muscle fibers, which are more endurance oriented, and fast twitch fibers, which are more power and speed oriented. If you want to maximize your speed and continue to improve, you absolutely need to make sure you develop both of them.

Of course, subjecting your body to new things is also just plain good for you. Your body is unimaginably complex, and every bit of novelty is going to cause some kind of adaptation that will work to your benefit,, even beyond the big energy systems and muscle fiber benefits.

And fartlek training is just fun. Bounding and sprinting, setting mini challenges for yourself like running a certain number of telephone poles’ distance full title before slowing down, makes even a route you’ve run a thousand times seem like a brand new world.