Art of Running - Great Brickhill

Today I went to Malcolm Balk's Art of Running workshop in Great Brickhill with my friend Kevin and his fast son, here we are.



There was a real mix of new runners, Iron Men, improving runners and completely new runners.

In this blog I aim to capture the main points for me to work on and some of the drills we did that should help achieve the faster speed that will come from the better form.

Three key points:
1) head
2) footfall
3) don't push off

Firstly, and my wife spotted this during the 10km, I am hunched up. You can see this on my 10km photos and the ones below. There are three elements to my hunch, or what Malcolm calls running in the sitting position.
1) No neck, head is down and forwards
2) Chest, collapsed in and down
3) Bum sticks out at back




To help us not do this Malcolm recommended what he does, every time an ad comes on TV get of the sofa and onto your knees. Get into the slump, then correct it and hold the good position for the duration of one or two ads. Nice tip.

After finding where the pivot point in our heads were we worked on this in pairs by holding the partner's neck while they ran and then let go. Then we did some negative training by trying to run in the sitting position and seeing how hard it was compared to running with the head up open and free.

The footfall landing video was a shocker for me. I was sure I mid sole struck, but the left leg was a horror story. The knee locked and the heel crashed in. Interestingly the right leg was better. That explained the tibialis posterier in a second.

I was also very clearly pushing of with my toe. This sends the runner up and encourages the other foot to swing out and land infront and heel first. Opps.



Before working on the footfalls we did the following warm up which I really liked.

Light jumps with feet together and landing on the mid sole and just touching the ground with our heels. The build up to lifting the feet one after another and then finally moving forwards into a slow jog.

Then while running we worked on 180 cadence through all paces, 10min mile, 8 min mile, 7 min mile. Malcolm's metronome beeping away was awesome. I need to get one if only to annoy the heck out of my running buddies.

We worked on the pony prance to try and get the footfall landing underneath our hips and not in front. As it moves back is the ideal. At slow pace step over the ankle. At faster pace make the circle bigger and put more energy through the machine, step over the mid shin and so on until full pelt is up to the knee.

Good drill to try more often.

We did much of this bare foot around the cricket ground. Shade cold at first but I soon began to enjoy the grass and leaves underfoot and it certainly stops you heel striking with no shoes on. Once the shoes went back on it felt like I was running with a brick on each foot.

Malcolm suggested doing this once a week for five minutes or so.

At the second screening Malcolm made me do my run past twice, I was so loud on the way down. He said something that stuck. "What you can't hear won't hurt you." Light as a feather I floated back up - better. I worked out what I was doing. To try not to heel strike I was smashing my mid sole hard into the ground to make sure it hit before the heel and locking the ankle in the process. As I unravelled that I was depressed at the amount of work I still have to do on all this.

But later I realised that was the wrong way to look at it. If there had been nothing to correct I would have wasted an afternoon. I now have things to work on and I know why my left leg is in a worse state than the right. These things will by definition make me much faster and I now have a running buddy who's got the same theory around the corner. We agreed to go for an easy run together to practice. I fully intend to do that.

And finally this one is for Kenny. Malcolm took me aside and said "Hey Niall it's a shame I don't live here. I'd have you under 40mins for a 10km in no time. You know what your trouble is - you go out with those nutters from work and kill yourself every run trying to be competitive, don't you? What you need to do is go out dead slow more often and work on the technique."

Any fat slobs fancy a slow run in zone 1?