Once Upon a Time

Sep 15, 2011 by

Once Upon a Time

I have to admit a little pride here. Lately, my cross country running teenager has exploded to a new level of speed. He set personal records twice in the opening 3 meets, by almost 1 minute each time, and the speed gap between us continues to widen. And I love it. He’s been working hard, and I’m proud of him.

First Place 40 Yard Dash 1978!

I was fast once, too. 4th grade field day. 40 yard dash. 1st place. Here’s a picture the ribbon to prove it. However, my childhood sports journey took a more traditional route of baseball and basketball, so I never built any long distance speed. Now that I work pretty hard at training for long distance running, including workouts to get faster, I get frustrated at my lack of progress at improving my pace, especially in the 5K.

Why don’t a improve faster? Besides age, some of it is probably due to not training correctly. However, I have a theory on speed in older runners: If you ran track/cross country as a teenager and returned to running later, then you can regain some speed, at least compared to others in your age group. Conversely, if you didn’t run early in life, then you just won’t get fast. To me, learning speed as a middle age runner with no past running experience is very much like learning a new language or musical instrument as an adult. If you had other languages or musical training as a child, you can be fairly successful, but if not, the road is quite bumpy and frustrating. It is a theory for now – or at least a rationalization for my lack of speed. I’ll need to poll some of the 40-50 year olds that can still break 20 minutes in 5K races to learn about their pasts. In the meantime, I’m going to keep working on improving pace with weekly speed workouts, not accepting the fact that I just may be a slow old guy now!

Speed Training

To get faster, you are supposed to do speed work, which trains your body to not hit the wall so fast.  One of my favorite speed workouts for beginners is this:  Go to a local oval track.  Walk or slowly run a lap or two to warm up.  Then do the speed workout by running the straight always at an increased pace over your normal pace.  Not an all out sprint, but faster than normal.  Then walk the curves.  Work up over the course of a few weeks to be able to do this for 10-12 laps.

Here are some links to additional speed workouts:

Runner’s World

Active.com

POFIFOTO!

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