As a professional runner, I’ve always been concerned about time and how i can shave off minutes, seconds, or even 100th’s.
This isn’t something that stops at professional athletes though, everyone has goals and it feels great when you can achieve them. I wanted to share a few tips on how to help you reach your next target in the most effective and efficient way without hurting yourself.
- Do some easy runs. About once per week go on a run where you only give about 75% of your max and cover a distance of about a third of your weekly total. This is great training as it’s actually when your heart works the hardest.
- It’s important to learn to breathe right and also to be able to recover quickly. This can be trained with repetition runs where you run from anywhere between 30 seconds and 1 minute and then recover for 3 times as long as the run was.
- Try intervals. Running harder for periods of time will adapt your body to running faster and with more intensity. Try it for a few minutes and then back to your regular pace for 10-15 minutes.
- Focus on your stride. By this i mean how many steps you take in a minute. A good standard would be somewhere around 180 per minute.
- Finally, do not over train because that will most likely cost you time in the end.
I hope you find these quick tips useful. If you’ve used some of these before maybe you can tell us what was most effective for shaving time from your race results.
Feel free to give the community some more advice in the comments.
Photos by David Baird
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