Please help me run faster

Join the cross country and track teams at your school.

Until then just start doing some faster running. Understand that on days you go faster you shouldn't go as long as usual.

You can work on your speed by doing strides or hill sprints a few times per week. That will help your legs get used to going faster.

After that you just need to steadily work on improving your ability to run faster while not stressing your breathing too much. Because you're young you probably want to improve right now instead of it taking a year, but if you just keep doing one or two faster efforts per week while still doing the other running you'll find as the months go by that you improve quite a bit.

I was overweight when I started high school. I played no sports my first year, but started running over the winter. I would do maybe 3 miles per day a few times per week. I joined cross country my sophomore year. I had dropped 50 pounds in less than a year. Junior year I was the fastest person on the cross country team. You can improve a lot at that age if you just work on steadily improving everything.

I should add that you don't need to do a lot every day to get better. You still need to recover in a healthy way from your workout if you want your body to make healthy adaptations to the running. There was an old exercise saying that went, "no pain, then no gain" as if the more you did even through pain made you better. Except in running you can't go out and run well the next day or two if you overdo it on a given day. It's much better to be able to run as many days as possible and not put yourself in the kind of pain that would mean you can't exercise a day or two later.

You can easily outpace many of your athletic peers and other hobby runners by taking a year-round mindset to training and of course also training on the weekends. To many high school runners they see their improvement as depending on however many seasons of the sport they play. If you run not only in the fall and spring but also the winter and the summer you'll end up training for many more total days than they do. Some of them might even take the weekends off, but you could use the weekend to run a lot without the schoolday conflicting.

You can easily make up for the fact that you feel like you might be a year or two behind. Just don't try to do it all in one day. Do it over many days.

Joining a Cross Country team is a great idea, but I think it's only as helpful as finding someone you can run with while doing the workouts. There's going to be a lot of stranded-in-the-middle-of-nowhere time, otherwise. Try looking around your local running clubs if people aren't as committed to your liking. It'll definitely help with boredom on those runs

Also, I saw this a lot on another post, but I really wouldn't worry too much about your weight/what you eat. I feel like limiting how much you eat and harping on what the best food is nutritionally on a daily basis, is counterproductive especially if you're only in high school. Don't eat a 16 oz steak before a long run and make sure you eat enough.

I realize at this point I'm bordering on rambling, but you mentioned you were 140 and went to 128. Also that you are just slower and not that you're overweight really.

I run with a soccer player. He is much lighter than I. I'm pretty sure he is faster than I am in a sprint. Despite being lighter and faster than I, when we go for a run he just tends to go around 10 minute pace naturally while I want to naturally move at a faster pace. You two are probably similar in many ways.

What you have to understand is that distance running is what we call "aerobic" sport, which means it's largely based on your body's ability to efficiently use the oxygen you breathe in while you run for a long time. Something like a quick sprint is "anaerobic" or "not aerobic," which means you can do it without really needing to breathe for a few seconds, so it's based more on other things like your muscle and bone movement. Sprinters and soccer players can have great muscles, strong bones, and do athletic things for short spurts, but they might not have trained how to do moderate efforts at medium paces for longer periods of time like only distance runners really do. In fact, almost nobody at a young age has done this. This is because aerobic improvement relies a lot on making adaptations in your body so that you learn how to use oxygen more efficiently. One of the only ways to do that naturally as a kid is to be born at altitude where there is less oxygen in the air and your body is forced to adapt to life with less oxygen, which means you learn to use it more efficiently. Or maybe your school is 5 miles away and you don't have a car and are always late to school, so you need to do a brisk run to school every morning. This is the actual story of some African marathon Olympians, but for the average person they start with a baseline of pretty crap aerobic endurance ability, no reason to run far, and won't run much faster than a 10 minute mile. This is why you see many kids able to run fast, but act like they are dying to jog a whole mile. They have to go slowly to make it that far. Basically everyone is like this unless they try to improve their aerobic ability and generate better red blood cells in their body.

These red blood cells live for about three months, so over a period of time your body is slowly replacing red blood cells based on the kinds of demands you are putting on your body for oxygen. Running improves your red blood cell quality. Run for a few months and you'll notice an improvement. Then do better quality and/or higher quantity running for a few more months and you'll notice even more improvement. Keep building off that over months and years and you'll notice your body uses oxygen much more efficiently and you can easily go faster without feeling winded. But please understand that scientifically it takes day after day for months to have replaced all your red blood cells with much better red blood cells.

And all those kids who take a winter or summer off are going to get absolutely left behind because they crippled months worth of potentially better red blood cells.

The anaerobic and speed side of distance running is still quite important and has less to do with oxygen efficiency and red blood cells, but it's like 10% of the puzzle when aerobic running is 90% of the puzzle. If you can run year-round and just steadily improve your paces or distance on a few different runs per week, you'll end up significantly better aerobically.

Sumin wrote:

GoneIn10minutes wrote:

i run 10 minute mile, you want to fight dude?

Sure but 1 mile race first....Ill lap you by the time you get finish and put my spike up your ass.

That's not how fights work. That's called running away. It's ok, that's what 95% of LRC would do.

Thanks for the advice! Why I say that I have good athletic genetics is based from my parents, not my build. My Mom was a swimmer (she was pretty good, got first place a lot) throughout high school and well after college. She also would run 5 miles about everyday during college. My Dad was also a swimmer and was swimming from elementary school through high school. Then he played college football (for quite awhile cause he went to school for more than 4 years). He does hard labor for work, and still bikes for at least an hour everyday. They're not pro athletes, or marathoners, but I'd say rather athletic.

Not a dating service this time wrote:

Maybe try some more quality workout sessions or try adding something like fartleks into your routine. Is there anything hilly nearby? Structuring your workouts might also be something to consider (not sure if you're doing that).

A strong core (sit-ups, blah, blah) also helps.

Thanks, and what does structuring workouts mean?

Thank you this was a lot of help, and makes me feel better about the situation.

Thank you so much, I'll try this. I honestly think you're right that I might be a little iron deficient. It's kind of hard for me to see symptoms in some things. I have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), and lots of physical symptoms from it. I.e, muscle tension, uncontrollable shaking and sharp pain in chest (anxiety attack), and sleep deprivation (I sometimes have nights where I wake up every hour in my 8 hr "sleep"). It's just hard for me to separate my anxiety from my physical health.

Thanks. You'd have the potential to be a good runner although it doesn't say what your best race distance might be. Did your parents swim sprint distances or long distances? If the former, perhaps your potential is in running sprints (100m, 200m, 400m) or in the 800m. As someone said previously success (speed) in distance running depends a LOT on aerobic ability, which is trainable. Even a race as short as 5k needs a LOT of aerobic ability. The only way to get this ability is to run a LOT over a long time (months and years). Just be sensible about building up your mileage. Once you get to the amount that is right for your life situation (school etc) then stay around that and work on improving the hard sessions. This amount might be 25 miles per week or 40 miles a week, whatever is right for YOU. More is not necessarily better! You mention having trouble with sleep so you should address that as sleep is very important in the recovery process. Without good recovery you won't improve.

First off, at 15 your body is still undergoing significant changes in heart rate, heart stroke volume, lung capacity, bone density, muscle mass, height etc. You're too young and inexperienced with competitive running to worry about genetics effecting your performance. Worry about it after a few seasons and if you make it to college level performances. Just focus on building a good foundation of fitness and mechanics

It seems like you simply want to build some aerobic endurance to breath a little easier while running. The best method to improve this is long, slow running. Running 30-40 minutes 2-3 days a week at 10-11min/mile is a great start. If you want to improve your aerobic power (the maximal pace you can handle over a long distance) you need to do some intervals. A good start is running 3 minutes hard and then jogging 2 minutes as rest (or fast walk if you really struggle with endurance). This can be repeated 4-6 times. It looks a little like this: 5 x (3min hard + 2 min easy).

You can do this 1-2 times a week and change up the time you spend running hard and resting. A shorter variant I personally like is: 10 x (1min hard + 1 min easy). With these workouts, it is a good idea to do a 10 minute easy jog with some drills before you start, and a 10 minute jog after you finish. Always warmup before doing intervals. Also don't do hard interval workouts in consecutive days. Give yourself one or two easy days inbetween.

You shouldn't be running more than 5 days a week. Excessive training at 15 does a lot of long term damage to the body. A good beginning goal is to try and reach 200 minutes of total running per week. With the information you've given of your fitness, this will probably put you between 15-18miles/week. That's okay. Focus on being consistent with 200min/week of running and try to improve how many miles you can run each week off 200 minutes. If you can reach 20miles/week off of 200 minutes for 2 weeks in a row; start adding 5-10 minutes to each long run. The goal is so always run a set time at a specific pace and try to improve the miles you can travel in that time. Endurance comes from total time spent running, not total distance ran.

With your pronation and shoe issues, the shoe issue can easily be fixed by visiting your local running store. The pronation issue takes time, patience, and strength training to improve to the proper mechanics. It isn't something that can be easily explain in a Letsrun post.

You should really join your high school XC/track team. I'm sure you could atleast train with the team and run some smaller meets.

Glad I could help! Here’s an example of my run last night, where each slow mile was followed by a faster mile