Follow Up From Session #2

Wow - a great session last night. The knee-down drill (kicking up, then letting gravity create propulsion) was an eye-opener for a number of people, the setting in of the sense of letting the energy for forward movement come from an external force. This also highlighted the lean: we lean from the ankles with relaxed lower legs, while keeping the body's column alignment.

We also spent time on armswing and cadence, so let's review.

First, guidelines for the arms:

• Hands start at 90°, but the angle will open and close a little bit
• Hands stay in close to the chest
• Hands never cross the centerline of the body
• Elbows move actively back, and passively release forward
• Elbow the person behind you
• The range of motion is elbow and wrist to ribs; the hand only comes forward to bring the elbow to the side of the ribs, and only back enough to bring wrist to ribs
• At a slow speed, armswing is very gentle and relaxed; as speed increases, so does the rearward effort of the armswing
• The arms do 50% of the work of our running

Next, cadence and gears:

• The target cadence is 85-90 strikes per minute, counted on one foot
• The way to increase your cadence is, using a metronome, find your current, habitual cadence; spend two weeks running at that cadence; then, increase your cadence one beat per week until you're in the target range
• Regardless of our pace or speed, we keep the foot cadence the same
• To increase speed, we increase our lean (from the ankles), which will increase our stride length
• Each gear is just one more inch of lean at the nose; 1st gear = 1 inch; 2nd gear = 2 inches...

And we spent time on how the feet leave the ground:

• The ankle lifts, peeling the foot up off the ground; visualize a postage stamp being peeled up off the roll
• The toes dangle in space, with no holding in the lower legs
• The ankle lifts just high enough to get the dangling toes off the ground
• There's no pressure or pushing in the ball of the foot as it leaves the ground

Finally, the 3-step process to engaging gravity; we have been using this all along, but it was codified for the group who stayed after 7pm:

• Check in with the posture (lengthen the spine, level the pelvis)
• Drop the focus to the bottom of the feet
• Lean from the ankles

The next time we're together is next Thursday, April 22nd, at 630pm. I'm on spring break, and will be taking a few days to go camping early in the week. We will start off with the body-looseners, a set of pre-run (or anytime you're feeling stiff or just need a boost of energy) openers for the joints; we'll then warm up with a lap or two, and then I want to provide some individual focus points for everyone. If we have time that night we'll do some speed play on the track (with everyone working at their own pace!). That night will have moments of generating a lot of heat, and then some moments of standing, so bring an extra layer in case it's cold and windy again.

Your homework this week: focus on the arms, keep working on posture, and just generally try putting everything together! Any questions? Post or comment, and we'll work it out!

-Michael