WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting
A couple posts back, I wrote about how Coach Jack Daniels (and others) have written about how important turnover is in an athlete’s speed. Daniels maintains that 180 strikes/minute is the ideal number that will let athletes gain speed but not at the expense of making them think too much or unduly change-up their running form.
That said, on this morning’s 6.11 (I like the random numbers, what can I say!?), which wasn’t really anything besides a maintenance run following Tuesday’s speedish run and in advance of tomorrow’s tempo, for the second part of my run I counted. And counted. And counted. And attempted to do some mental math (not my strong suit, but I managed).
For the record, it is way easier to count armswings than it is to count the number of times my foot hits the pavement.
How’d I fare? Well, from the about 5 times I did counted, the numbers ranged from around 94 to about 100.
Honestly, I haven’t done this (counted) since 2008, at least from what I can remember.
And really, I don’t know that I even counted correctly, since I was only counting right arm-armswings (because again, counting armswings is way easier than counting footsteps).
When I did a little interwebs research about this just now, it seems like my values are either a) at maximal efficiency (which seems hard to believe because I wasn’t going much faster than MP this morning) or b) could stand to see some improvement. I’ll tell myself that the latter is the truth.
In the quest of self-improvement…. because we all know I will probably start counting my armswings and footsteps prolifically now… I happened upon an AWESOME site by a vegan athlete (I’m in love!), Matt Frazier, who also has some great instructions as to how to make your cadence quicker and lighter. While I’m not a fan of the dreadmill, I think next time I have the opportunity to, I’ll hop on a high school track to give his recommendations a try. Thanks, Matt!
So what’s the rest of the week hold? Probably about a 4mile tempo tomorrow, 15 on Saturday, and an hour (or so) easy recovery on Sunday.
It’s looming, folks!
One thought on “WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting”
Chi Running sells a metronome which I purchased that clips onto the waistband of your shorts. They recommend a cadence of 85 to 90, increasing to 91 or 92 if you’re really racing hard. I’ve only used it a couple times. I’m usually paying attention to pace and at least one other thing and adding cadence is too many things for me to think about at once. I’m sure some people find it helpful though.