Interesting article. Reading down, researchers sent one-minute videos of five runners to 121 coaches and asked them to rank the runners from most to least efficient based on the video. The coaches completely failed. However, in my opinion, there was a major flaw in the study. Can you find it? What's your take?
"The runners ranged in economy from 40.2 to 49.4 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, running at 7:30 mile pace."
I know my efficiency gets better at faster paces and isn't so good at 7:30 pace (or wasn't when I was good).
You can't pick out the good runners if a group is running together at 7:30 pace.
But even at race pace we focus on odd arm and head movements without seeing what the legs are doing.
If their efforts are propelling them forward and not side to side then it's a matter of the relationship of the hips to the foot strikes and how much they are getting out of each stride while landing centered.
I don't believe in coaching someone's form but doing a lot of running and a lot of drills trains the body to run efficiently.
I would agree that 7:30 pace is a bit slow to gauge form.
There is a difference between running economy(how efficient someone is at a certain movement pattern) and running technique. The body will become efficient at a certain movement pattern if you do enough of it.
I'm the OP. Here's my take. You want to train to optimize efficiency at race pace, whatever that pace is for that runner. 7:30 is an arbitrary pace that might be too fast or too slow.
Case in point. Years ago, Jim Spivey jumped into one of our 400m intervals. We were running at 90 seconds... 6:00/mile pace... and Jim was noticeably bouncing. Spivey is a three-time Olympian so I was surprised that he looked inefficient. Later, I figured it out.
At 6:00/mile pace, Spivey was jogging! No wonder he didn't look efficient! It still makes me laugh today when I think about it.
fisky wrote:
I'm the OP. Here's my take. You want to train to optimize efficiency at race pacee, whatever that pace is for that runner. 7:30 is an arbitrary pace that might be too fast or too slow.
Case in point. Years ago, Jim Spivey jumped into one of our 400m intervals. We were running at 90 seconds... 6:00/mile pace... and Jim was noticeably bouncing. Spivey is a three-time Olympian so I was surprised that he looked inefficient. Later, I figured it out.
At 6:00/mile pace, Spiveywas jogging! No wonder he didn't look efficient! It still makes me laugh today when I think about it.
Huh? That makes no sense. Spivey was not looking efficient because he was jogging?
And why cite Hutcinson? Show me one good article by him? This one is just as bad as the others I have read.
fisky wrote:
I'm the OP. Here's my take. You want to train to optimize efficiency at race pace, whatever that pace is for that runner. 7:30 is an arbitrary pace that might be too fast or too slow.
Case in point. Years ago, Jim Spivey jumped into one of our 400m intervals. We were running at 90 seconds... 6:00/mile pace... and Jim was noticeably bouncing. Spivey is a three-time Olympian so I was surprised that he looked inefficient. Later, I figured it out.
At 6:00/mile pace, Spivey was jogging! No wonder he didn't look efficient! It still makes me laugh today when I think about it.
I think this just gets at the problem though-- you don't really know if Spivey was inefficient at that pace, even though he looked bouncy. It was probably his easy pace, so may well have been very efficient.
I should read the actual study, but it seems off that they asked whether any coach put the runners in order, instead of an average ranking (so you could say whether the coaches are seeing something, even if the ranking isn't exactly right).
Ho Hum wrote:
I think this just gets at the problem though-- you don't really know if Spivey was inefficient at that pace, even though he looked bouncy. It was probably his easy pace, so may well have been very efficient.
I should read the actual study, but it seems off that they asked whether any coach put the runners in order, instead of an average ranking (so you could say whether the coaches are seeing something, even if the ranking isn't exactly right).
Yeah exact order seems like a stretch. If one guy is a 41 and the other is a 42, having them in the wrong order is a minor issue. If one is a 50 and the other is a 41, now we can talk.
I would love to see ANY studies that suggest things like drills, form work, and so on actually improve running efficiency. Feels like other than working on overstriding, not much seems to really make a difference.
Yeah, need to read the study, but if they're just judging this based on rank, it's an absolutely awful study.
Highly likely that there's a bell-curve of RE. The real question is how good to coaches do at pinning the athletes on the right place on the bell curve. Even asking them to pick a handful of 'high conviction' athletes and assign them to either above average or below average would be helpful.
You have to consider what each runner's economy curve is based on their natural abilities. An 800m runner is efficient at 800m pace not at 10k pace for example.
how does that work? wrote:
You have to consider what each runner's economy curve is based on their natural abilities. An 800m runner is efficient at 800m pace not at 10k pace for example.
Sure, but if there's any merit to being able to see what efficiency looks like, presumably the average 800 guy running at 10k pace would look less efficient than the average 10k guy running at 10k pace.
There are probably lots of ways to measure this, but if it's limited to how well you did at exactly ranking people, then this is bogus and doesn't say anything.
I'm the OP. Nearly two decades ago, I realized that my race form was different from my training form. Well, duh, you might say, but it was radically different. In full race mode, I was a forefoot striker, but I couldn't hold it the whole race. In training I was an extreme heel striker.
I thought, "Why not change my slower training form to be more like my race form? Maybe it will let me hold my faster race form longer in a race."
The result was that I switched to a forefoot strike for my recovery and training runs at 8:30- 10:0/mile pace. I immediately slowed 30 seconds/mile at the same effort. Sure, it was inefficient, but my goal was to maintain race form longer, not to do training runs faster. It worked.
tl;dr
Training economy is not as important as race economy. Determining economy at anything other than race pace for that particular individual isn't useful information.