180 a minute revisited

I woke up this morning at 0430 hours to complete a 4 mile easy run. I actually made it out of the house at 0453 because I didn't really want to run. It was 68 with about 78% humidity and I forget what the wind was doing, I'm sure it was blowing out of some direction or another, either way I didn't care too much that early. I ran my first mile in a very stiff and crabby 9:13, mile 2 was a little more loose, but still reasonably pedestrian, 8:58. Mile three was better because I was a little more awake and loose and I covered it in 8:42. Mile 4 was 8:34 for a total time of 35:28. I went inside, started my coffee pot and read the newspaper. After that I took a shower and woke up my son, fed him and took him to the babysitter. I was a much happier boy after I got my coffee and played with Nathan for a bit.

My pal Nate left a comment on my original post about running 180 strides a minute and he said a lot about stride length and frequency and other things that I can't properly articulate right now for some reason. I think the whole 180 a minute thing is a bit of hooey when you're running easy days. I think that if you concentrate on it when you're doing faster practices it will help your running efficiency because you teach yourself to spend more time moving forward and less time on the ground.

I agree that I have gotten more efficient than when I first started running. My cross country coach told me that I took long loping strides and had a considerable amount of vertical movement. Vertical movement is bad because you're wasting your energy going up-and-down instead of forward. He made me work on it and I got better but he always nagged me about my turnover rate. I don't know that my turnover is any better and I don't concentrate on counting it in speed workouts because oxygen debt makes it hard to remember what number I'm on.

I think that my turnover rate suffers in the late stages of a race and that if I was able to remember what comes after 19 I would find that I'm not very close to the golden land of 180. I think that just counting to four, like in a double-time marching cadence from BMT, would help me to increase stride rate in the late stages of a race. Counting to four isn't very hard.

I need to close because my son is tearing the computer room apart. I'm glad he can only army crawl because the mayhem he is creating is confined to one room instead of the whole house.