Jul 16 in General Discussion
How To Run Faster
There are a lot of factors that contribute to running faster and your overall time on your half or full marathon.
But for this post, I want to talk about one running strategy.
To give you some background I have personally coached hundreds of runners and I regularly get asked how to run faster.
You are a competitive person with ambitious goals so you want to improve your time.
But the problem I see is that most runners don’t have a plan on how to run faster.
They just hope that they will get faster and that their times will magically improve. Unfortunately that’s just not how it works.
To get faster, you have to have a strategy.
And I like to use the same strategy that I use when I lift weights.
The reason to lift weights is to get stronger and so you measure your strength by the amount of additional weight you can lift from when you first started or after a certain period of time.
If you started out lifting 20 pounds but now you can lift 40 pounds you have just doubled your strength.
And the way you increase your strength is the same thing I do to increase my speed.
When I’m in the gym I’ll start off with let’s say 20 pounds and then after a week or so I will increase it to 25 pounds and then 30 pounds and then 35 pounds and then 40 pounds.
But the key to increasing the amount of weight you can lift comes down to intentional effort.
If you just go into the gym and lift weights without a goal, purpose, or a plan, then you will lift the same amount of weight week after week.
You won’t make any progress and you will feel like you are just spinning your tires.
It’s the same thing with your running.
You have to deliberately try to run faster.
And the way to do that is first you want to control all the outside factors to the best of your ability.
Your sleep, nutrition, recovery, strength training, weekly mileage, routine, and even the weather.
Once those factors are controlled, now you can isolate your speed.
So what I like to do is I will run the same distance week after week after week.
And I will intentionally try to beat my previous time.
So let’s say you run 4 miles in 40 minutes. Next week you would try to finish that same run in less than 40 minutes and then the week after that try to do it even faster than that one.
And what you’ll see overtime just like your strength is that you will gradually get faster.
The goal is to intentionally focus on trying to run faster and having the mindset that I will beat my previous time no matter what.
It’s very easy to coast on a run where you run at a comfortable pace, but like I was saying earlier, the problem with that is there is no growth in comfort.
You have to intentionally be uncomfortable so try running at a speed that is uncomfortable for you for as long as possible.
Then once pace becomes comfortable, continue to push and get back to being uncomfortable. Then repeat until you are happy with your speed and or marathon time.
If you got value out of this post, share it to one of your running buddies who are also trying to get faster.
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How To Run Faster
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