4 Ways to become a Faster Runner

For a while after you start running, getting faster comes naturally. As your cardiovascular fitness and endurance increases, you will find yourself automatically picking up the pace. It would be nice if this natural acceleration would continue indefinitely, but it doesn’t. Eventually, you are going to start to level out as your speed and fitness plateau. If you want to continue to get fast after this point, you are going to have to add work to specifically develop more speed.

With that in mind, here are some things that help you get faster as fast as possible:

Turnover Matters

Turnover, basically, is how many times your foot hits the ground in 60 seconds. This is an important part of your pace, and if you can train yourself to get more footstrikes per minute, you will get faster.

You can measure your turnover by counting how many times one of your feet hits the ground in a minute, although you might want to recruit a friend to run the stopwatch. There’s no real trick to improving turnover, you just need to focus on getting more footstrikes in.

Get Stronger

Strength matters, even in running. The harder you can push off with every step, the faster you are going to be overall. Running guru Percy Cerutty was one of the early proponents of weightlifting for runners, and the principle remains true.

Ideally, you want to gain strength without gaining weight, so you need to keep your reps low and focus on continually increasing the weights you use. If you do this right, you will notice an increase in speed almost immediately.

Run Hills

This is actually another way to get stronger, and it works well in conjunction with resistance training. You are working against gravity while you run, and this causes a direct increase of strength in the muscles you use to run.

Find a hill where you can for about a hundred yards, at an incline that is challenging but impossible. Work up to running up (and walking back down) the hill 10 times, once a week. You don’t want to do too much hill running, as it can affect your motor patterns for your regular runs.

Sprint for Speed

A little science: you body basically has two energy systems, the aerobic, which uses oxygen as fuel, and the anaerobic, which doesn’t need oxygen. The faster you run relative to your max, the more you shift into the anaerobic. While you can condition yourself to run pretty much forever in the aerobic zone, you can only go so long in the anaerobic.

If you include sprints in your workout, you train your anaerobic system, and increase the threshold at which you switch over. Basically, this allows you to run faster, farther, which is good stuff. Like hill runs, you’ll want to a mile or so of sprints, preferably 400s, once a week, not too close to your hill runs.

There are other, more complicated ways to run faster, but these basics will increase the speed of any runner, regardless of experience level.