Flashes of Panic

In my discussion of Arthur Lydiard’s hill training phase, I mentioned the several ways running hills improves a runner’s form, specifically full extension of the foot and toes of the driving leg—essentially, loading more and more work further forward on the foot. This is putting a terrific amount of stress on the arch of the foot, the calf muscles and achilles tendon, the plantar fascia and toe-pointing muscles… in other words, most of the places runners get injured. In the base phase, in addition to developing the aerobic system, we developed some toughness in the connective tissue and muscles. In the hill phase, we built more specific strength around the feet, ankles and knees. (Running myth dissolved, by the way: “running is bad for your knees.” If running is damaging your knees, you have a biomechanical issue which needs to be dealt with; a properly trained runner actually has better knees than a sedentary person, and I’m told there are scientific studies proving it.)

The next phase, which is the one most often left out of a Lydiard-esque training program, is a program of exaggerated drills performed on short hills. We called them “bounding,” Lydiard calls it “springing,” and the core of the drills is something like a high-knees drill performed on a very steep hill. You really have to see it demonstrated to understand what’s going on; no text description will ever do it justice.

We did three basic drills. The first and toughest was the springing drill. We would push off one leg and leap up, pushing hard off the lifting leg and lifting the knee of the lead leg high, as though we were hopping up on a steeplechase barrier or jumping on to a wall or tall step. Coming down, we landed on the lead leg, bent it slightly to absorb the landing, then launched again off that leg. Each stride was like crossing a small stream, but instead of trying to cover ground, we were leaping for altitude; the pace at which we advanced up the hill was actually slower than walking. The emphasis was on fully extending the trail leg and getting a good push off the toes, lifting the lead knee as high as possible. Your legs start burning very early on in this drill; it’s the hardest part of the circuit and it controls how long you keep up the workout. (When you can’t do another one, you don’t.)

It also looks hysterical, especially if it’s a small group of grown men. When our coach showed us the drills, on a strikingly low-traffic road outside Emmaus, he observed that not only did the road have the right hills in the right places for the workout, but it was also off where few people would see us. “The first time I did this,” he said, “I heard a car coming up behind me. When I heard it slowing down, I knew they were rolling down the window, and I expected they would throw something or shout at me.” (One of my training partners was actually beaned by a Gideon Bible thrown from a car window in this area.) “Instead,” he reported, “I heard them singing inside the car: ‘Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail…’”

We would bound to the top of a fairly steep hill, and at the top, switch to skipping. This is just what it sounds like, except that here on flat ground, we maintained the emphasis on driving up into the air. Skipping is the same as bounding, except that instead of landing and leaping in one continual motion, we would land on a foot and take a little shuffling bounce on that foot to set up the take-off. For some reason, this made the motion much easier; the temptation, while bounding, was always to shift into a skip.

After skipping for a little while, we shifted into a slow jog which set up a series of three short sprints separated by easy jogs, the first of which was on flat ground, the second down the hill we had just bounded up, and the third down a different, more gradual incline to the base of the hill where we resumed bounding up. We would start with two or three of these circuits, each somewhere on the order of a mile in total, feeling completely trashed at the end, and continue working on them once a week or so (often while still running hills on another day of the week) until four or five started feeling easy. At that point we were strong enough to move on to “true” speed work.

The drills explained at the seminar (happily accompanied by video clips) were similar, but included some others which may be familiar to soccer players and sprinters: high knees drills (running while concentrating on lifting the knee of the lead leg,) high kick drills (where the back-kick after toe-off carries the heel right up to one’s butt,) and others which I don’t remember, all performed largely on a hill.

A lot of coaches, observing the differences between the fastest runners and slower ones, note that faster runners are more likely to spend time on their forefoot than on their heels; many seldom touch their heels to the ground at all, which is why track spikes have minimal cushioning in the heels, and in the forefoot, spike plates designed to maximize the application of force to the track. Unfortunately, plenty of coaches draw the wrong conclusion here, and assume that to run faster, their athletes need to practice running on their toes, not their heels. This is putting the cart before the horse. An athlete with a proper aerobic base, moving through the hill phase and into these drills, is going to naturally move off their heels and more towards their forefoot simply because it’s more efficient, and their body is seeking efficiency. (Our bodies are, for the most part, lazy. If we give them a lot of work to do, and properly structure the work, they will naturally favor the way which gets the work done with the least possible effort. It’s worth noting that the race winner, because they finish first, actually spends the least amount of time running; you might argue that rather than being obsessively dedicated, they are the most successful application of laziness.) In other words, if you train a runner to run faster, they’ll eventually move to a forefoot foot-strike all on their own. I’ve certainly noticed that tendency in myself.

Still on the plane. More to come.