The Importance of Running Specific Musculoskeletal Strength

  I was doing a bit of running 'research' this morning, ok I was wasting time reading about running on the internet because the wind chill is once again in the @#$%ing miserable level and I'm supposed to be starting a workout.  Anyway I came across a quote from Rob De Castella in an interview back in 1983 talking about how to that point in his running career he had only missed 10 total days of running due to injury.

Deek said, "You've got two levels- skeletal strength and physiological fitness.  If the latter surpasses the former it means you can push the body further than it is really able to sustain.  I think that's when you get injured." * This is something I have thought about through my long injury history and never been able to sum up nearly so concisely but it really drives home a simple point that I believe is largely missing from our current conversation about training.

  It is no secret I have had a long and extensive injury history.  I think that some of this can be simply attributed to my habit of always wanting to push harder and not listening to my body.  Still I think there is more to it than that.

  Separately I have long felt that my limiting factors in performance had become muscular more than aerobic.  This is part of why I felt I didn't have success in my short stint at altitude.  In fact I had the opposite. I think most americans, most first world runners, are undertrained aerobically and go to altitude where the stress on the aerobic system is inherently increased greatly and  they see a jump in performance as a result of this redistribution of effort.  Where as I went up there and put even more stress on the aerobic system and even less on the muscular system and saw a loss of fitness.  Now this isn't to say I or someone else like me couldn't find great success training at altitude just that it would take a well thought out plan to address this balance but that is for another blog.

   I think that most of your good training schedules have a good balance between muscular and aerobic development but I don't think that most coaches put enough specific thought and focus into creating this balance.  Most often I think the balance that is being thought about is aerobic and anaerobic work.  Further more I think too often we think of muscular and anaerobic work as the same thing.  I know when I started out I did.

  The problem with hard intervals lead to severe fatigue and under fatigue our form falls apart so instead of taxing our muscular system in a nice balanced way and teaching good strong muscular pathway our form falls apart and we build bad habits and imbalances.   Anaerobic workouts can be great muscular sessions but only for a very developed athlete who has spent years building great muscular strength so their form doesn't break down under stress.  For the rest of us the solution is to do work that is specifically targeting fast dynamic motion while maintaining relaxed control so that we are teaching good form and balanced muscular development.

  From the beginning of our running we should be doing daily work to build our muscular skeletal system to excel at the specific demands of running and running fast.  How?  Mostly with fast relaxed running.  This can be in the form of strides or short hills.  It can be fast relaxed tempo running.  This can be repeats at all sorts of distances AS LONG AS THE EFFORT IS CONTROLLED!  This is what is always missed.  Also you can do running specific drills, skipping, lunge walking and other dynamic running and core exercises to build a muscular skeletal system that can stay healthy and deliver on all the aerobic power you can build.

  I honestly believe that my biggest failure as an athlete was a failure to develop a strong dynamic muscular skeletal system from the beginning.  I believe if I had done more aerobic work sooner I could have been more successful at a younger age but that it would not have improved my overall development.  However if I had started out doing strides daily, controlling my effort in 99% of my workouts to maintain form and doing dynamic general strength work, like the type of stuff you see from  John Cook or Jay Johnson, I honestly believe I would never have had the injury problems I had in college nor do I think I would have developed my coordination problem.  I honestly believe my failure to do this work from the beginning of my running cost me a career as a at least high level national class marathoner.

  I do much more now to try and develop the muscular strength.  I do the yoga for general strength and when I'm not banged up I do strides daily or close to it.  I have also developed a lot of strength over the last couple decades so my workouts are now a means of building strength as well.  Still if there is one area that I need to do more for it is specific muscular strength and endurance.  So often in my training I am strong.  I can run miles on top of miles and feel fine I can run quickly, say 5:20 per mile or even faster and have it feel like walking but as soon as I need to get just a little bit more muscular sub 5:00 at time, sub 4:40 per mile most of the time, I struggle, sometimes to hold these paces for even a few hundred meters.  It may sound crazy but it is not uncommon for me to find myself in a place where I can run for an hour or more feeling relaxed at 5:20 per mile but I struggle to run even a kilometer at 4:40 mile pace.  In the stretches where I have been able to do all the muscular work I start to see huge improvements in my middle distance racing.  So often I find myself very fit but racing fairly slowly.  Where as if I was maintaining my muscular training better I could be running much much faster, if not quite national class certainly much closer.  Specifically I should often be running in the 23's for 8k instead of 24's and 29's for 10k instead of 30's. sub 14:40 for road 5k instead of sub 15:10.  Now you can sharpen up and run faster with anaerobic work but that isn't what I'm talking about in this instance.  I have run sub 30 for 10, sub 24 for 8k and sub 14:40 for a road 5k without doing much if any real anaerobic work.  I can run those times off good balanced aerobic and muscular training.  Too often I fail to do the muscular work to make running relaxed enough at those paces to hold them without good anaerobic fitness.  This slowed my overall development and means I have a lot of decent races in my history but few very good ones.

   I cannot encourage you enough to plan for muscular development as specifically as you do aerobic development.  These two things are the foundations of all running success.  You can always do race specific and anaerobic work later but if you don't build a great foundation of muscular strength and aerobic endurance all the race work in the world won't be worth a bucket of piss.






* P.S. a bit of an aside but the article the quote comes from is in the August of 1983 Runners World.  It is mind blowing to me that they would run an article like this complete with discussion of his racing career, a sample training week and intelligent conversation about his thoughts on his current training and where he would like to take it in the future.  I just can't imagine coming across the same type of article with one of the Geoff Mutia's in this August's Runners World. link to article http://www.juanjosemartinez.com.mx/files/deek_training_log.pdf

Workout Wednesday Australian Quarters

Welcome to the first installment of workout wednesday.  I will focus mostly on interval workouts in these posts.  Today I want to talk about one of my favorite sessions.  I call them Australian quarters.  Some call them Deek's quarters session after their most famous practitioner. Robert DeCastella, aka Deek.

  They are an invention of Deek's coach Pat Clohessy, himself a world class runner in his day, and were a staple for most of Pat's runners traditionally done every thursday.  Done throughout the training cycle and across events with subtle adjustments to meet the time of the season and the event being focused on.

   First a few facts about Deek, a four time Olympian who was overall the finest marathoner of the 1980's.  He had a lifetime marathon best of 2:07:51 set winning the Boston Marathon, but he produced a half dozen sub 2:09's and a bunch of 2:10 and 2:11 efforts over the years.  He won the world championships marathon in 1983 and finished in the top 10 in three Olympics.  Additionally he ran world class performances in cross country, on the roads and was a sub 28 sub 13:30 man on the track.  All of this despite being a rather stocky man with very limited speed.

  The workout is very basic. You run 8x400m with a 200m QUICK jog before EVERY repetition including the first one.  This means that you will cover 3 miles during the workout when the rest is included.  The trick is that the 200's must be run at a solid pace.  Somewhere around what you run on your fastest regular training runs or even a bit faster.  This session is sneaky tough but by forcing the pace of the recoveries it leads to enormous gains in latic threshold and race specific speed.

  I have an friend who early in indoor track his senior year in high school had a PB in the mid 4:30's for the mile.  On a recruiting visit he joined some red shirt athletes in a workout, behind the coaches back obviously, and they happened to be doing Aussie Quarters. The plan was to do the 400s in 70 and the rests in 45. My friend was surprised it was so slow he often did 400 repeats faster than 70 and 200 rest seem like quite.  Still he knew these red shirts had all run miles under 4:20, much much faster than he had ever approached.  He said the first rep felt easy as expected and the second seem pretty much the same. He said as they started the third he had this feeling like he hadn't recovered at all and he barely survived the rep.  The fourth rep was his last by 200m he was off the back and as he crawled in to a mid 70's finish he knew his day was over.

  He went home very humbled.  But this young man was not one to take a defeat as a negative.  He examined the workout and decided that he should be able to do it. 45second rests were 6min mile pace which he routinely ran on training runs and 70's were pretty relaxed for 400 reps.  He talked to his coach and they decided to attempt this session once a week until he could master it.  The results?
Over the first month or more he struggled but finally he found a way to approach the workout that lead to him finishing the workout and getting closer and closer to his goal.  During the outdoor season he master the workout and as the weeks went by his times plummeted and by the end of the season he ran 4:15 mile.

  The part that my friend missed when he first heard about this session was just how fast that rest makes it. 70 plus 45 is 600m in 1:55.  That means running this workout involves running 3 miles in 15:20!  Which was about as fast as he had ever run in cross country.  This workout forces you to learn to truly relax at both your rep speed and your recovery speed. There is no faking it or lying to yourself.  Believe me I have tried and it has without exception lead to me not finishing the workout.

  How fast?  Well in his training book Deek says if you run under 14:30 for the whole workout it is time to find a race as you are super fit, under 15:00 is bread and butter you are doing well. Over 15:30 and it was time for him to get blood work done as something must be wrong.  However Deek was a 2:07 marathoner!  Personally my goal is to break 15:00 and my fastest ever session was around 14:30 and I have qualified for the world championships.

  So what should you do?  Well generally speaking your reps should be at 3k to 5k race pace, as slow as 10k pace if you are getting ready for a marathon. Your rest pace should be as slow as a quick training run.  This is a great place to start or to even keep the pace if you are training for 3k to 5k racing.  If you are looking to a longer race than you should drop your rest pace down towards 95% of marathon pace or even in the final weeks before a marathon very close to marathon pace.

 When should you do this workout?  This is one of those rare workouts that can with a little adjustment be done pretty much year round, as long as you have access to a track.  It can be adjusted to be a fairly easy session in the base and early season and you can really crank it down to be a monster late in the season.  The biggest advantage of this over traditional intervals is the faster reps make it a very very aerobic battle.  In HS I routinely ran 8x400m in 65 seconds or faster, often with very short standing rests but I never came close to averaging 70 seconds per 400m for a 2 mile, 9:20.  Why?  I was teaching my body to get very good at fast reps but that isn't the test it was taking.  It was trying to run very fast for 2 to 3 miles continuously. This workout teaches your body to do that. I have no doubt that if I had replaced my faster 400 reps with aussie quarters at 70 and worked on getting the rest 200 down towards 45 I would have easily run 9:20 or better.

  What system does it work?  Really it would be easier to answer what system it doesn't work.  This type of session is obviously anaerobic. It is most directly tied to latic threshold.  But the recoveries make you super efficient at marathon pace and a bit slower which is aerobic training to a t.  Athletes who do a lot of workouts like this traditionally move to the marathon with far greater ease than normal.