Back in the day, I thought that if you just wanted to run faster you had to simply run fast - all the time. Boy, was I wrong. I did get faster, for a season. But, then I ended up burnt out and inured. If you want to get faster, a huge piece of growth in speed is running slow (more on this later) and having a day a week or so dedicated to speed work. Speed work looks different from person to person and if you’ve never done speed work before you will want to start adding it in cautiously. Fast running and teaching (yes, teaching - your body learns how to run fast!) your body to run fast adds a lot of stress to the body, so you want to build the speed conservatively.
However, if you want to get faster and start incorporating speed into your running routine right now, strides are a great way to start doing that! Strides are fun, easy, and a great first step to add that element of speed work into your weekly running routine!
What are strides?
Strides are 20 second long bursts of fast running (NOT sprinting around a 8/10 effort). You can run these on pavement, the track (always nice to have that extra soft surface) or grass.
When should I run these?
Ideally, strides should be preformed at the end of an easy run or before harder effort portions of a speed workout or before the beginning of a race. Strides wake up your legs and teach your body how to be more efficient, have a better, more economical leg turnover, and help your body learn how to move faster (i.e. run faster)
How do they look in a weekly routine?
Once you finish your run, run fast for 20 seconds, building through the entire 20 seconds. Walk back and recover for around a full 60 seconds (this should be the amount of time it takes to walk back to your starting point.) Run again the designated amount of time. Usually 3-5x, per set. You can do these after your easy runs, each week -
2-3 x a week.
And there you have it, simple, effective speed work that can help tremendously, in your journey to becoming a faster, more efficient runner!
