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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)
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Just got around to reading Pete Larson’s very cool analysis of the strides of the top four men and top four women from this year’s now-legendary Boston Marathon, using high-speed (300 fps) video. He looks at a bunch of parameters, including footstrike and cadence. The “secret” to running 2:03 isn’t, unfortunately, revealed — but there are some very interesting nuggets. For example, Ryan Hall has the slowest cadence of the eight runners, at 174 steps per minute, while Desiree Davila has the fastest, at about 195. The post is definitely worth a read, as are Amby Burfoot’s thoughts on Pete’s data.
And analysis aside, the videos themselves are pretty neat to watch. Kudos to elvin314!
Thanks for the mention Alex – I hope to expand on this a bit once I have some free time.
One way of looking at this is that maybe stride rate/style doesn’t have much of an effect. The fact that each of the top runners varied in their stride rate considerably but performed very similarly (within men/women) suggests that the effect may be minimal. But of course, it’s still interesting to consider anectdotal evidence such as this.