Discussion: Development of pure running speed

Traded an email or two with Jon Torrance and he suggested starting a thread here. Without recapping all content I was surprised that his 5K time recently was 17+ and PR over the same was 16:44. Would have thought both would be faster, the latter by over a minute. In skimming his logs I noticed a few things and am curious if anyone wants to second my opinions.

First thought is that as you seek ever higher performance levels sport specificity matters more and more. Specifically, how much biking is too much for a runner?

Second thought is about periodization and work rest plans. How much zone 3 is too much year-round?

If it were me I would be OK with all the 3 time (50%+ year round) early in the year but would trade it out and add to 2/4-5 (maybe 70/30 of the reduced 3) in a competitive period. In "season" racing once a week or more I used to make a major effort to avoid the no man's land peril run/ride that's too fast for recovery but doesn't help your speed. Anyone want to second my opinion or contradict?

Third thought was around strength training which was, I think, adequately covered previously but still underutilized here.

I imagine this thread will yield the usual treatise from our friends from the former Soviet Union. In the mean time, I will make 2 observations.

My fastest 5K (16:10) came when I was riding 500-600 miles per week as a semi-pro cyclist. Not fast by runner standards, but quite a bit faster than I’ve done on pure running training.

Lots of running in the terrain fundamentally alters your stride in ways that make sub-5:00 miles very difficult. As recently as 1999 I was able to run a mile in under 5 minutes (not much under, but under nonetheless). I did a lot of terrain training in 2000 and 2001. My orienteering improved immensely. I stopped rolling my ankle all the time. My times at trail races improved. My mile time went in the tank. I’d be hard pressed to run a 5:15 right now.

My best mile time ever was a 24:04 4-mile training race (6:06) the first month of my senior year in college. I had been doing a lot cross-training that summer - getting up to 60 hours of recorded training in August. A typical week included:

* Push-ups, sit-ups, back-ups 6 days per week.
* One or two long workouts on rollerblades or rollerskis.
* One day of double-poling or running intervals.
* One day of threshold run or rollerblade.
* One or two days of swimming + enduring strength (minimum 20 repeats) + rollerblading cool down.
* One or two days of running.

As the cross-country running season started I had to do a lot more running and a lot less cross-training. My mile time kept getting progressively worse every race, although probably my training volume went down also because of classes etc.

I would say that cross-training in general increases your overall capacity for training, which can help you get in overall better shape.

Let's distinguish between cross-training that’s additive vs. substitutional. In ebuckley’s case the bike time alone would be 20-25 hours a week. That’s by definition additive to any run program. One of the tougher aspects of running contrasted with say swimming or cycling is that your body (or most peoples anyway) won’t put up with 20+ hour 150+ mile running weeks. While better overall fitness will improve recreational running my position is that optimizing 20-25 hours for competitive running performance would have produced a still better buckley result. At one point I was over 40 hours of cycling a week (bike courier by day pedicab rider by night/weekend). mY overall fitness was favorable but I was nowhere near as fleet afoot compared to another period of much lower total time but running-focused efforts.

What we are talking about here is optimizing a 9-12 hr/week schedule for this sport. 9-12 represents a big commitment for an amatuer especially one with a job and/or a family. No one on AP is over 11hr/wk for the last year. At this level adding cross training time will almost always be beneficial but let us assume that is not in the cards and what we are pondering is how to divide the finite time.

I’m suggesting for someone focused on orienteering or running performance consuming 6 of those hours on the bike, only 2-3 running, and the balance a crossover mix is not optimized, and in fact, detrimental.

Stick with those parameters. In 9-12 hours a week how much of it could be biking before you undermine running performance? How would you divide up the time by effort levels? It's worth some thought. I say if Jon gets this mix right he moves up the rankings a bunch and drops a full minute from his 5k PR.

Sidebar- Intuitively and in the spirit of intellectual honesty I accept that terrain training will slow road speed but not by more than 15 sec/mile on the 5k. I'm not an orieenteer by background but I quote a thread from last spring in which Sergey wrote "Top orienteering elite runs 10K below 30:00 flat." That would translate to a sub 14:30 5K inclusive of their terrain training penalty.

I'll have to contribute at greater length later but I'll start by commenting that Rich almost certainly has a point but I suspect the price to be paid for cycling a great deal is lower for an orienteer than for a runner. I believe Vlad's document on physical training for juniors mentioned that good orienteers tend to have heavier thigh musculature and slower leg turnover than good pure runners though I'm not sure that there were any hard numbers backing that up. I'd also offer the following translation Spike did of something Holger Hott-Johansen wrote:

"One difference between orienteering and running is that we run in the terrain and up a lot of hills. It demands a different kind of strength. Runners have a different "rhythm" and run with the same stride all the time. Orienteers have a lower cadence, each step is different, the push off* and surface vary the whole time and balance/coordination is entirely different. Speed is also much slower for an orienteer. Do you really need to be able to run faster than 35 minutes/10 km to be nordic champ in Notodenn? [Notodden hosts the Nordic Open Champs this summer]"

Personally, Notodenn must be insanely technical or incredibly unrunnable or both for this to have any chance of being true (unless he was referring to the female competition) but the point remains that terrain running and road running aren't the same thing.

Nevertheless, I'm sure lowering my 5K PR by a minute would significantly improve my orienteering results. My training this winter is intended to address basic speed and aerobic capacity, hence the strides and more consistent I intervals in addition to the LSD (as last winter though more of it this year) and the form exercises intended to improve my terrain running. I suspect I ought also and soon to add some threshhold training, since I currently log zone 4 almost exclusively in the form of orienteering races - still thinking about how to fit that in.

It probably would be a good idea to occasionally (once maybe twice per week) run rather than cycle between work and home. I'm restrained from doing this partly by laziness, partly by a wish to avoid running on pavement, and partly by shortened daylight hours making it difficult to do so by way of a mostly trail run through Rock Creek Park (I probably ought to bite the bullet and buy appropriate lighting). I particularly want to avoid commuting runs on pavement that deteriorate into zone 3 since I don't think there's any chance of my doing any higher quality running training on the same day I do so whereas quality running training in the evening after cycling home is possible. Also, my current training already represents a noticeable increase in running year on year and I'd rather not break any bits of me vital to orienteering performance. Any bits at all, truth be told.

More at some future time.

Just before I got started in orienteering I didn't like running at all,because I was always dead last at all the school runs or not able to finish.After I got hooked to orienteering (1973), all my training since then was more or less specific for orienteering, not for pure running speed.With a lot of dedicated work over the years I mannaged to run 33' 03" personal best on 10 KM, and in the same race my best time on 5 KM, 16' 15" altough some of the training was done on track on ocasion(intervals) ,but most of my training was trail and terrain running and of course orienteering.I always wondered what would'v been my PR on 10 KM with specific training, since I was able to run at a decent speed when I started with very negative results in running.
It was experimented in the past, (in several countries) to bring top track or marathon runners and have them run with top orienteerrs (follow them) and even if the runners PR's were substantially better than the orienteers ones on any given distance, they could not keep up with the orienteers, running a orienteering course.
And on the how much biking you should do, I say if you have time to bike you are not training seriously for orienteering.I think you can do some relaxed biking on the side if you have time, but if you are serious in getting better or stay sharp for orienteering, I don't see were the biking fits in.
This are only some of the the manny other ,small or maybe unsegnificantly looking aspects of training specificaly for orienteering,that I took notice of over the years and helped me to become a better orienteer and maybe trail runner over the years, but not a fast runner as the pure running speed development would imply.

i have a couple of questions... doing hill loops (uphill 1:30-2:20, then across, down, across for a total of 4:10-6 minutes, depending on speed)
I find that the first two loops I'm really quite slow, but then i get a whole lot faster (without putting in any extra mental effort), peaking around the fourth or fifth loop...
also, after running the last downhill and arriving on the flat, I have the impression (correct I think) that I'm really able to motor, much faster than if i'd done a normal warm up on the flat or whatever.

So... explanations?? Could it be worth running hills for twenty minutes before starting a 5km race? Are there specific uphill/downhill muscles that make one run faster?

Uphill is slightly steeper than downhill, both are gully/path type trails, rough but not dangerous (touchwood!!), uphill is steep enough for almost all to be run on toes and leave me about to explode at the top when running fast... on the downhill some brakes are applied but the legs are stretched...

I'm pretty sure there are advocates of fast downhill running as a way of training for higher turnover rates than could be achieved on the flat. Though the recommendation I recall involved gentle grassy slopes and it sounds like the loop involved is rougher than that. Still, it sounds like it would be a very thorough warmup. Though I'd be amazed if twenty minutes of it weren't a little bit excessive as a pre-race warmup.

I'm a little bit non-plussed at Mihai's attitude to cycling coming from someone who once told me about a day trip he did climbing a mountain pass on an old school gear-deprived behemoth of a bicycle he borrowed from someone. Though I suppose this illustrates his notion of relaxed cycling. Frankly, even if I owned a car it would take almost as long to get to and from work and do my necessary shopping as it does by bicycle and using public transport, let along walking, would take longer. I'm open to arguments that cycling too much or too hard may be robbing energy from more specific training or developing musculature or reflexes detrimental to orienteering performance but not to the idea that having time to cycle demonstrates a lack of serious intent.

For orienteers, I think it's best if you do all of your running training for orienteering, e.g. in terrain. I think Holger more or less does this. I even asked him his road/track 10k time a few years ago at a World Cup (that I think he won a day of...) and he didn't know, because he never did that kind of race. He said he'd guess it was low 30's...

I'd agree that lowering your 5k time is good. However, if you do so by training on flat easy surfaces instead of the forest, that's not nearly as good as training mostly in terrain, getting fast in the forest, and then doing a 5k road test to see how you're doing.

Let's say that today, you train at a certain level, all on roads. And then you switch to 50% terrain, 50% roads. And you find that your 5k time goes from, say, 18:00 to 18:15. That's probably _not_ bad, because your time on a forest test loop would probably improve, which is more relevant to your orienteering...

Coming from a running background as a first primary sport, I believe there are gains to be reaped in running through biking cross training and in orienteering from pure running speed cross training goals. I also believe in the idea that pure running speed can be developed through training. There are natural abilities that help and limit too—one wouldn’t become a sub 50 second 400m runner on training alone.

On the first question of how much biking is too much for a runner, I think the answer will vary depending on what kind of running you want to excel in. It seems I did some of my best (but not my absolute best) running when I cross-trained with cycling. I suspect the more pure the running, (The spectrum goes something like PURE >100m, 400m, 800m, Mile, 3200m, 10K on track, 10K on road, 10k XC, trail marathon, etc… > LESS PURE—for lack of a better term) the less important cycling as cross-training becomes. The first dichotomy I make is on distance. Running speed in shorter events is dependent heavily upon both form, balance and the ability to contract/retract quickly and consecutively. Cycling gives a runner power but not over the full extension of form needed for sprinting. The second dichotomy I make is terrain. The rougher the terrain, the more the power gained from cycling aids in overcoming steepness, transition slopes and lifting knees to step high over debris. The converse seems true too, when the road is open and flat, the heavier thighs cycling gives one typically are less efficient for turning-over stride after stride on pavement. The inefficiency can also be a drag on performance in longer events.

Let me go down one more avenue before throwing out my answer to Rich’s questions about a 9-12 hour a week runner-biker athlete. I believe our starting point and background affects the “right” mix of training needed. A person’s weight and distribution/composition of weight affects how one progresses. If you start with heavy muscle mass or the other more common mass your running or cycling training must support it. Getting faster might involve building more muscle and weight just to move. This can lead you to a plateau. Longer slower hours preferably in the heat with less torque required for hills or terrain will reap weight losses. When enough weight has been lost, training can shift again to building speed without requiring as much mass and thereby improving one’s overall performance through better efficiency/endurance. This is a long-term aspect of training not usually realized within shorter than 6 months. Lance Armstrong is a well known example though his weight loss was from illness. I think someone starting light and lean could gain more pure running speed by doing intervals on a track. If the goal is to run over rougher terrain, then more cycling would help.

Okay, here’s the end of my discourse. Rich asked how much cycling an athlete training 9-12 hours needs. Presuming this is Jon Torrance and his goal at least through the Canadian National Team, I think 65% or 7.8 hours should be running or running in the woods. Jon is already strong from cycling and would benefit from more running. For yourself Rich, if your goal is being faster in the WV 24hrs, I’d say doing 90% or more cycling would be right.

What about me? I have no real competition goals. Orienteering, running, cycling are all entertainment for me now. I long ago made a perhaps poor choice to put school and career first. Work constantly gets in the way. If I were to do this right I’d train better and be much poorer economically. I do my best with what time is left over and live with a level of frustration in competition. I’m no Peter Snell who was able to reach the highest level while working the whole time. I think that for most of us achieving top goals would require more dedication.

I am a good example of how running training does not necessarily translate into orienteering speed. I used to be a better runner than Ted and my PRs are better than Jon's and apparently Mihai's but I have never been as good an orienteer as any of them are now. (and it is not just my iffy navigation skills). When Ted first started on blue he would pass me in the woods and I would run him down on the trails. Compared to my running friends, I am very good on uneven terrain but compared to orienteers I am slow in the woods.
My log says it all. Hours of low level dancing, and most of my training miles on the road, hardly ever on trails and never in the woods.

I agree with Jon on the cycling. I think that biking can be a substitute for hill work and may be better O training than the junk MSD miles I put in. I would not advocate biking as the primary training but a bike commute provides the base for the running or orienteering specific training to be build on. I think Eddie trains much the same way.

For pure running speed, I have never found any way to achieve it except dedicated speed work and for me it means interval workouts on the track. I do not have the discipline to push myself without a group doing the same workout, a coach to tell me what to do, and a clock and split times to keep me motivated. Just a few speed workouts and the pace in all my workouts improves including orienteering races.

Specifity does matter. If you want to be fast runner on track - train in track. If you want to be fast runner in woods - train in woods.

Way to increase your speed is to do intervals and tempo runs (prefarably together with faster runners), plus strength (hills, weights), and endurance (long runs). Cross training is good during base periods but not too much :) Running on track is good even for orienteerers in winter time as often woods and trails are not suitable due to the snow cover (you have to have good traction to run intervals). Don't forget to move to trails as soon as they are dry!

If you run on trails and in the terrain - your pure running speed on track will decrease. Better to set your own race loop in woods and check periodically for the progress. Or select same 5-10K trail/dirt road races each year.

Most of the elite orienteerer are very good runners and have 10K PRs at around 30:00. Some successfully compete at x-country national and international races (see, for example, Pasi Ikonen and Carsten Jorgensen).

Just remember that it takes approximately two years to go from 4-5 hour/week to 6-7 hour/week and another couple years to go to 10 hour/week. It takes years to build your base! 50-60 miles (80-100K)/week is bare minimum for 10-20K runner/orienteerer. Unfortunately only a handful of people train at this level in NA. And their results show this. Good luck in your training!

Well, I am still in the category of - "it takes years to build your base" and will not quote any run times at the risk of taunting, but I would like to ask what does one do if there is no terrain? I live in a rain forest where most of the time if you step off trail you are eaten by brambles, salal... etc. However, I have never found myself to be a particularly slow terrain runner (at least compared to those in NA). So this leads me to think that perhaps some of these things we are attempting to train are more genetic/predisposed than you think.
I think that different types of intervals (hills, speed) and long runs (particularly on bumpy trails) are crucial to orienteers living in terrain deprived environments.
I may be a bit off topic here...

In theory, one way to develop blazing speed is to train where there are many attack badgers. However, in practice I must admit it has not done much for me.

On the topic of cycling for cross-training, I will suggest a twist that will make it more running specific. Try riding in your biggest gear and stand the whole time. This is something that Bill Koch used to do.

That last suggestion is certainly a far cry from Rich's suggestion, in parallel with this discussion, that I might reduce the deleterious impact of whatever cycling I feel I must do for utilitarian reasons by lowering the overall intensity while raising the cadence (basically "spinning' in the traditional sense, referring to the easy distance training pro road cyclists tend to do in the spring).

Details of what changes I'll make remain to be pondered but, on balance and unless I end up horribly injuring myself following his advice :), I suspect I owe Rich thanks for forcing me to consider the proper place in my training of the bike commuting I've been doing since my early teens.

5K and 10K pb's are: 16:10 and 34:34
(last run in 1993 in an attempt to make Cdn team).
Salal, if no terrain then run in snow, but you don't have that either. ;-) so take up urban sprint racing!
Seriously though not all terrain is the same. I recall Bmay mentioning on Attackpoint a year or so ago that one year he did a lot of road running. That was OK for most terrain but when he felt the lack of specificty at GLOF in Ontario because of the leg lift over rock and branches. We have done a fair bit of snow running this winter and on a hilly course and then terrain running on weekends. If you have a race coming up where the woods are clean and not hilly then trail and road will be OK. If you have a race where it is hilly, soft ground, rocks, etc then listen to the #1 orienteer in the World - Holger H-J ..Train in the terrain!

So if there is a theme here it's that specificity matters. Let's assume that we have agreement on training as much as possible in the same mode you want racing performance.

Seeing as we've got Jon thinking let's not muck him up.

Regarding my specific recommendation to Jon I was trying to get him to shift his biking to be more of an active recovery on some days and use his limited run time for quality efforts as well as move more of his effort out of zone 3 and into 2/4. An easy bike commute can be really good for recovery and the bike serves a very practical purpose in his life. My suggestion took into acocunt the desire to not buy a car or spend a large portion of life on a bus.

Jeffw's recommendation would effectively be a substitution for a higher zone. I seriously doubt Bill Koch was a 9-12 hr/wk guy. He was an olympian specializing in a different sport (the 30 km xc ski) in the 70's and what people remember of the outliers of his activities likely has no relevance here. While I think high effort bike would be beneficial to Jon I don't think it would be as beneficial relative to Jon's stated goals as having the higher intensity workouts being sport specific, and in fact it's not so different than his current stoplight-to-stoplight zone 4. If Jon does this I think he either doesn't get enough quality running or he undermines his recovery from the quality runs he does get.

I think if he can get his running percentage of time up from 20 to 50% then active recovery is the best use of his cycling commute for optimizing running performance. Just allow another 10 min/day. Even then it doesn't have to be all slow commuting. Further I think anyone advocating high intensity all the time is out of touch with the average human being's need for recovery.

Run more, ride less= General agreement. Make more of the high effort training sport specific, more of the recovery crossover=0pen issue. Anyone want to provide more thoughts on these aspects of the real life case study?

For the record- I am not anti-bike commuting and in fact for much of the year I am a bike commuter. Weather cooperative I also run errands this way as much as possible. The factor reducig my biking of late is infant care not strategic training imperative and like Nadim at this point my athletics are all about entertainment (and calorie balancing).

Well this thread has been pretty much beat to death, but I'll make two points:

1) DO NOT DO WHAT JEFF SUGGESTED. Any serious cyclist will tell you that this is the quickest way to knee surgery.

2) True interval work (not speedwork, but moving up to the aerobic threshold and then backing down) can be done on the bike without putting any real stress on the skeletal muscles. This is why pro cyclists can race 20 out of 22 days. Thus, cycling done with discipline can allow you to shoehorn in a couple really quality aerobic workouts without interfering with your running training. The same can be said for swimming. These facts are well known to top triathletes and exploited in their training schedules. The proper cadence for such intervals is between 100 and 120 rpms. Anything slower and you're blowing up your quads, quicker and you nuke your hamstrings.

Just to add something in defensre of Jeff W's suggestion. Top cyclists in this area (Boston) have a workout in which they use top gear, and I think I've seen it in a cycling mag.
In this case it is similiar to doing 1 leg knee bends, or using a weight machine to do leg presses., and is in fact similiar to running up stairs or a very steep hill.
I have found my cycling and hill climbing complement each other, as they should, you are using the quads to do most of the work.
As the hill flattens, other leg muscles come into play.

Also I found from coaching the juniors for JWOC competitions, most "continental " terrain is fairly smooth by comparison to east coast terain. If you wantto train in the type of terain in much of Europe, you should probably look for a golf course if you live in the east, or move to Platt country. (Mikell, have you actually ever SEEN an "attack Badger"?, Please post photos so we know what to watch for while running on the "Plains of Despair")
I found the best way to get speed needed for that type of terain was on the track, there was simply no terain loops available which were smooth enough.

At the Northeast Junior training camp we had a mile run many years. The finishing order for the run was not too different than that for O races for the same competitors. Speed counts.

Yes, top cyclists and olympic skiers can benefit from gear mashing workouts. I used to do them quite a bit. But that was after setting a low-gear base of around 3000 miles in the early season. As most people on this list don't do that in a whole year, I would strongly recommend against big gear work.

Jeff, I might joke about some things, but never about badgers. Some nights I can't go to sleep, when I know I am planning to do some training in sage areas the next day (sage areas are perfect for badger ambushes.) I lie there in bed and imagine all the things that might go wrong. Their low slung, flattened bodies are perfectly configured for the attack, and their armaments of powerful claws and snapping jaws of dagger teeth are only surpassed by their blood curdling assortment of snarls, hisses, and growls that petrify most of their victims.

They come after me about once or twice a year, on average. Of course, if you can withstand their initial rush (so far I've been lucky) and can make a tiny break, you can usually get away because, after all, their short stumpy legs are more evolved for digging and disembowling work rather than efficient distance running. Rarely have they pursued me for more than about 4 or 5 kms. But even then you can't take it all completely for granted, because if you stop to chug a Dew or do a gu, they'll be right on you again.

Having said all that, I'd much rather face down the occasional badger than have a pack of deerflies after my ass. I don't know how you folks manage the summers back east!

Like Eric had observed, I also agree that the disscution about the topic was a dead beat, but that might be, because as I mentioned you do not need cycling for the orienteering training,as I have done practicaly null cycling in my entire life. Also after I have read Nadim's coment I have to say that for me the specific orienteering training got me to the point that in trail races where usualy we the orienteers we have to run at at a higher pace, the rougher the course/terrain is the more advantage I have and that cames from all the years of specific orienteering training.My opinion is if you waste the time you have on cycling instead of doing some long /medium dist.(1-2 hours) of rough trail/terrain or maybe line-o, than maybe your first calling is not for orienteering or running, I am saying running,since I don't believe orienteering was even mentioned in the first comment, but my impresion was that this is an orienteering related site so that's why I made all my remarks in reference to orienteering, presuming that eventualy someone wants to get more specifc orienteering pure running speed not road or track which is not realy relevant, unless you are realy good at both, but that is hard to achieve and requires some natural abilities and 12-14 hour /week, training and 400- 500 km/week or more and no cycling in those hours or km.