How do I get as Good as This?

How do I get as Good as This?

Take a look at how this woman is running. It is a beautiul piece of effortless and very skilled running at different paces.

I looked at the video and though how do I get to run like her? I can run a LOT better than I used to but my technique is far from what I see in the video. Luckily I know Jacky (the woman in the video and she replied to my post on the Fetch forum. This is the advice she gave and I thought it deserved to be blogged so that it may help other people to undertsand how they run. The following is an extract straight from the forum…

“Ian, hope your foot recovers well. I’m sure it will, your attitude is good.
Quote Ian; “…….crikey how do I get that good?”
Jon gave some excellent advice which I very much agree with. Furthermore, patience, perseverance, dedication and a curious attitude to learn again and again. Well you know that;-). Beside a lot of aspects that you mentioned so well in your blog, what I think is evident to “get it right”, is the ability to unweight efficiently after passing midstance (pose). Without that ability, you’ll spend too much time on support, your pull will be delayed (as you can’t pull a weighted foot), the release of muscle-tendon elasticity energy will be reduced and you’ll not get in pose on time. Consequences; braking motion (“running on a flat tyre” sensations) and landing in front of support. No matter how well the level of your drills! We unweight by falling over BOF, which is a major important phase in the running cycle as this is where we can accelerate our body moving forward. We should be aligned like “carbon”, when we allow gravity to pull us forward from pose. Strong (stiff), to allow reactiviness and to make sure the energy loaded in the soft tissues will not disappear in the ground. But nevertheless RELAXED and FLEXIBLE.

Errors that lead to inefficient unweighting (falling) from support can be:

1. Running too upright, keeping shoulders back (BOF, hip, shoulders not aligned), which will keep the BW back longer then necessary and increase ground reaction time
2. Bending in the waist, as this will move the bum (and GCM) back and will delay the pull as the swingleg will lag behind to counterbalance the movement of the torso in front. If the relative light leg is not capable to counterbalance the torso in front, the calves will start to tense up to hold your shin back from coming forward to protect you from falling leading to calve soreness.
3. Not allowing the hips to move forward (sitting back), caused by increasing the angle of knee bend of the support leg which is no good in this phase of running. Reason could be fear of falling, wrong perception of falling or being too relaxed instead of reactive. Which will keep the bodyweight back and increase time on support where it should be moving away from support (our GCM should rise).
4. Too much tension in the calves, leading to a shin not coming forward over BOF and push-off action, (is upward) which will delay the fall. Reason again; fear of falling or wrong perception of falling. A fall with relaxed calves is far more intense.
5. Active use of hipflexors to move the thigh in front of the body (forward and up) as this will activate the abdominal muscle to stabilize the pelvis (backward rotation) which will restrict your falling ability’s

Summarized:

Move away forward from support efficiently and don’t let the pack of legs behind! Good drills to practice unweighting are for example, the falling from pose to the wall drill and the forward COS.

For the ones suffering from calfsoreness:
Don’t focus or even think about landing on BOF. It’ll lead to active landing in front of the body. A BOF landing is a consequence of falling from pose to pose in the most efficient way which will lead to a landing under the body. Think pull, don’t push the foot in the ground.

Allow the heel to drop to the ground after touchdown and don’t bend in the waist (k-stance).
Jacky

Quote Richh: “I think Jackie’s frame rate may be strange. Let’s convince her to post a new video of her superb running!”
Hi Rich, thanks. Actually I only feel motivated to video myself if my running feels off and I can’t get my finger behind the cause of it. When my running feels smooth, I know it will look smooth. But I’ll see what I can do …….. I never stopped working on technique (of course) and I my biggest improvement has been the fine tuning of perception of unweighting and pulling. I’m able to sense very slight deviations in alignment and pulling and how it effects on my running. About the framing; it was 25fps vid, so for every frame you have to add 1/5 frame when you count frames. Youtube has improved quite a bit on the quality of downloaded vids and the footage of this version (recently uploaded) is a whole lot better.”

See above for the video Jacky refers to.

Thanks Jacky, very informative and helpful.