Has anybody out there increased their stride rate and thus improved their racing times?

I've been trying to pay attention to my stride rate. Normally it's about 160-165 but the last couple days I've tried to pay attention and get it up to 175-180 (rather, 22 right footstrikes in 15 seconds 22x2x4 = ~174). I feel like I'm flying when I do this. I will run a 6 mile loop i like to run for time today and see if focusing on a quicker stride rate will help. I bet that it does but concentrating on it is hard to do.

By the way, I was slogging through an hour long easy run yesterday and a guy ran by me going probably 7 minute pace and I counted his stride rate: 145 strides a minute. This guy was only about 5'10'' and was REALLY overstriding.

I ordered and received the metronome that i linked to earlier in this thread. It's $20 and clips right onto the ear. Took your advice and set it to 1/3 of my stride rate p/min. Right now my setting is 56 (a target of 168).

Yesterday i did my typical 8.3 mile run (good rolling hills) and managed only 5-6 miles at that cadence before falling apart again, so i slowed it down to 54 (162) to finish up. I'm looking forward to getting used to this tempo and then slowly upping it. It hard at this point, however, to imagine actually getting used to that rate.

Interestingly, i completed this run in 60 minutes flat, another drop in time (1:46). The interesting thing about this is that i've been running for only a month after a long, long layoff, and during this month i haven't exceeded 20 miles p/wk. Despite this limited training, i'm running faster times at this stage of training than i did 2 years ago w/ 2-3 months under my belt. I have to attribute this to a more efficient stride.

this is a question I've always asked myself, but I never heard any discussions about it

I'm a runner with a long stride and I feel awkward running the 5k/10k although I did run under 14 min several times (not that breaking 14 is a badge of honor or anything!). Anyway, I was always jealous of people with short choppy strides, "low riders" type runners with less knee drive. Looking pretty in he 5k is not the key to faster times, but like I said I never heard anyone talking about shortening the stride or messing around with someone's running mechanics. After all our sport is dominated by runners who wouldn't care less for running mechanics or the science part of this sport. Kenyans seem to run with longer strides than Ethiopians which seem to give then an advantage in races like mile and steeple but not in the longer races recently>

I pleyed around with the idea of increasing my turnover for a couple of years and i thought it was work for me to some degree: I used to do speed drills follwed by fast strides with emphasis on putting my foot down as fast as I could>

Does anybody think I was dabbibg with the right ideas?

"I never heard anyone talking about shortening the stride or messing around with someone's running mechanics. After all our sport is dominated by runners who wouldn't care less for running mechanics or the science part of this sport."

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To Stride and Condi:

The way i look at this is that some mechanical systems / processes are less wasteful and therefore more efficient than others. If i'm overstriding (which i've done all my life, apparently), then i'm sabotaging the forward motion i just created in my push-off. If my elbows are way out and my arms swing across my chest, then i'm creating cross-motion instead of forward momentum.

In so many other disciplines good form / mechanics is taught, but in running i, at least, was never taught what constituted good form . . . and i suppose this is true for many other people. I wonder if this is because running is view as such a natural activity that it feels wrong to coach it in terms of form? I think there will be some necessary idiosyncracies in each persons gait, but a good coach should look at all aspects of a runner's regimen and speak to whatever area needs improvement. Some people don't need a word about mechanics because they have a naturally fluid, efficient, quick and beautiful stride. I'm not one of those folks. I wish someone had taught me more about form a long time ago.

So I have been thinking about this post on 9.7 mile trail run last Tuesday and read about the term "Pawback" which relates to stride frequency and as I come up a hill at mile 8 I see an animal which I think is a Coyote running slowly in the wide trail in front of me as I come up on it for I am moving pretty briskly it is not a Coyote at all but a full size Bobcat and I got to experience "Pawback" up close and personal. The Cat took a few more strides on the trail in front of me and then jumped of into the bushes to seemingly avoid me. It was pretty cool and surely had an effiecient stride.

stride wrote:

I feel awkward running the 5k/10k although I did run under 14 min several times (not that breaking 14 is a badge of honor or anything!)

Congratulations.

You are Letsrun.com poster # 4356 who has both broken 14:00 for 5,000m and also feels compelled to point out what an abominably awful stankhole of a performance that is.

This is so though there are far less than 4356 sub-14:00 runners in actual human history, if you get my drift.

Out of curiosity, who are you? Care to support that claim?

Nam,

I don't see you posting under your real name as this forum itself seems to be based mostly on anonymous postings.

I guess my 5k times are irrelevant whether considered good, bad or mediocre. The bottom line is that I always felt like I'm overstriding and that takes away from my rythm and ability to sustain a certain pace especialy if I have to lead.

As far as 4356 sub 14s posting here, I don't know. But if you check the USATF listing for the last 7 or 8 years, you're going to find that evey year there are 60-70 runners in the US who run under 14 min for 5k.

If you realy are curious, give me you e-mail address and I will send you my running resume right off of Tilastopaya

J.O.:

I meant to thank you earlier for the advice. Will take it to heart. There are some open cross-country races close by this summer that i'll look into. And because i'm a minimalist, i need to search out some soft trails for the longer runs.

I'm surprised by this whole thing. I've been running now for 7 weeks after a long hiatus. The first three weeks i probably averaged 15 miles p/wk. (just easy jogs). The last 4 weeks i've run 16, 11, 22, and 19 miles total. Nothing to write home about, but my runs have felt good, and with the faster cadence & shorter, more economical stride, it's starting to come together.

Ran a hilly 5K race today in 20:29. I ran hard, but not balls to the walls, and recovered very quickly. Just tried to maintain my stride rate (only 168 at this point) and follow that wonderful piece of advice that "Just the Facts" gave about imagining a thread pulling you forward from the hip region (BTW, that's one of the best pieces of advice i've ever gotten re running). 2+ years ago i could never have run a time like that off so little mileage.

Now looking forward to slowly increasing my volume now and upping the cadence a few beats a minute. Hope to run under 20:00 on the next attempt (about 4 weeks from now.)

can someone please post some workouts/drills used to increase cadence (that's it, no more explanations or anything, just what works to increase stride rate)?

quesitone wrote:

can someone please post some workouts/drills used to increase cadence (that's it, no more explanations or anything, just what works to increase stride rate)?

quesitone, I'm the originator of this thread. Over the last several week of trying to increase my stride rate I realized that the primary cause of my slower cadence was poor form. You may have better form and just need drills, but check out the following article. I've found that my stride rate increases a lot by just using better form. My main form problem was having my ankle plantar flexed at footstrike. So you may want to pay special attention to having your ankle dorsal flexed at foot strike. Good Luck!

What you need for drills is a watch, the ability to count your steps for a minute (at most), and some perseverance. No need to get fancy. For the past month now i have been absolutely merciless to myself in the matter of stride rate. Started off struggling mightily to maintain just a lowly 162 spm. But now i can nail 168 with consistency. The last few runs i've been pressing to hit 170–172. In fact, this morning i was able to hold 170-72 for the first 7 miles or so of a 12-mile run.

I count and count obsessively, timing myself for 1 minute segments about every 1/2 mile during my runs. In the between times, i've got the tempo firmly fixed in my head (1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3 . . . ). On occasion i also use a tiny ear metronome (see the link to it earlier in this thread). That would be my preferred method — setting it to 1/3 of the strides p/minute i want so that i can get that 1,2,3 tempo — but it tends to fall off after a while when you sweat a lot. (super glue?).

Within the next month i'll start doing some shorter interval workouts and will set the cadence to 176 spm in hope that 172 at other times will begin to feel easy. I'll probably start with 100's and slowly work my way up over the weeks as i'm able to hold that tempo for longer intervals.

Still seeing very promising results from all this effort. Feels like it's working a whole new set of muscles in my legs (especially the hams), but overall i'm way less beat up at the end of my runs and am finishing with a lower heart rate. Furthermore, my form is drastically improving. There's an economy of motion i never had before.

My hope is that this will all become unconscious behavior over time so that i can leave the counting behind.

"We learn technique in order to forget it." (Robert Fripp, King Crimson)

One of the things I picked up from Charlie Francis is to do multiple repititions of the "quick feet" drill on speed days to boost turnover.

Now, I wasn't short of turnover by Daniels' standards before Charlie. Back in 1996 there was interview with JD in Runners World where he talked about cadence, so I checked it during a warmup. At 1.5 laps into the warmup, I was at 172, and after 1 mile, I was dead on 180. But there was an interview that Charlie Francis did with Testosterone Mag, where Charlie said that Ben Johnson had a peak cadence of 5 steps per sec, and what Charlie did to achieve this was multiple reps of the quick feet drill for about 15 meters each time, and with about 1-1.5 minutes rest. Nothing else specific to cadence or stride length.

I do the multiple reps of quick feet on pure speed days, and just a single rep on other track days as part of warmup (I also teach this for my high school kids). My turnover for pure sprinting is way up there now, but my cadence for distance running is also up there--a little over 200, which is up from about 180.

This is REAL simple: no metronomes, no counting, no thinking, no towing, no running downhill, no nothing. You don't even need a watch....but it works.

Speed Kills wrote:

One of the things I picked up from Charlie Francis is to do multiple repititions of the "quick feet" drill on speed days to boost turnover.

.

Did you pick up any good drugs from him? Steroids probably help turnover too!

All such talk is totally against the rules on his website (for obvious reasons) and will get you banned. None of the drug talk you see here. But his methods still work.

SK: Thanks for your response.

So, 15 meters with as quick a turnover as you can manage. Seems like an easy drill, and it seem too like you'd just be getting started when it's time to shut it down.

When you say you do multiple reps on pure speed days, how many would that actually be? One last question: are you saying these drills took you from 180 to 200+?

bump

i think yours is not really a stride length problem, but more of a lactate tolerance problem. if you are trying to improve your 600 meter time, three things you might want to work up on:

a) increase general conditioning.

b) improve on lactate tolerance.

c) improve lactate threshold.

if you can do the above i guarantee you that your time for the 600m repeats will drop.

Just run, baby. Don't over analyze.