Tag: running

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Another great post on Amby Burfoot’s Peak Performance blog explores an important wrinkle in the ongoing debates about optimal running form. We tend to think that “better” running form is better in all relevant respects: we’ll be faster and less likely to be injured. But that’s not necessarily the case. Amby takes a look at a study from a couple of years ago that analyzed the gait of an ultrarunner who ran from Paris to Beijing in 161 days, averaging 53 km per day. As Amby writes:

You would think that 161 days of a marathon-plus per day would turn you into a lean, mean running machine. But that doesn’t happen, at least not when it comes to running economy… His stride became shorter and “smoother,” the word used by the physiologists to describe his decrease in aerial time with each stride… He reduced his landing force and also his loading rate. But his oxygen efficiency, or running economy, decreased by six percent.

This illustrates one of the conundrums faced by those attempting to run with shorter strides. It may in fact reduce your injury rates. It won’t necessarily make you faster.

The adaptations that this runner’s body made over the course of this epic run make perfect sense: after all, his top priority was to survive each day without breaking down. But it’s a good reminder that, when we talk about “improving” running form, we have to think carefully about what, exactly, we’re hoping to improve.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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A couple of weeks ago, I asked if anyone had footage of fast runners running slowly. The reason: I was curious to see whether the well-known fact that fast runners take rapid strides is (a) because of the way they run, or (b) because of the speed they run at. The Runblogger, Pete Larson, just sent me a couple of great links showing two of fastest runners ever, jogging along comfortably: Usain Bolt and Paul Tergat.

My rough calculations showed Bolt taking 18 steps in 6.7 seconds, for a cadence of 161, and Tergat taking 8 steps in 2.8 seconds, for a cadence of 171. You can also watch Tergat at 1/3 speed here. For the same 8 steps, I get 8.5 seconds, for a cadence of 169 — so let’s say about 170 for Tergat.

The point? Just because they run their Olympic races with a relatively rapid cadence (257 for Bolt!) doesn’t mean they maintain that same cadence when they’re jogging along comfortably. (Okay, I promise I’m done with this topic, at least for a little while!)

 

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Last week I posted some data about my running cadence at difference running paces, which sparked plenty of interesting discussion here and at several other sites including Pete Larson’s Runblogger, Amby Burfoot’s Peak Performance and Brian Martin’s Running Technique Tips. All of those folks also sent me some data on their own cadence-vs-pace curves, so I just wanted to share the updated graph:

Without rehashing the whole discussion from last week, the key point I take away from this is that cadence changes as a function of pace (and in a fairly predictable manner, at that). The runners shown here vary dramatically in age, morphology, speed, running shoe preference, running style and probably many other parameters — and as a consequence, at any given pace they have different cadences.

Some might argue that, if all of us took a course to learn the “perfect” form, our cadences would converge toward similar values. That’s an interesting debate — but not the one I’m focused on here. Because even if we did all have the same cadence at 5:00/km, this data suggests very strongly to me that we’d have a faster cadence at 4:30/km, and an even faster cadence at 4:00/km. The moral: any discussion of cadence, whether of an individual or a group, is meaningless without implicitly or explicitly considering pace.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

Just for fun, following up on yesterday’s post on running cadence, I did a little YouTube surfing to find footage of fast Kenyans running slowly. Because the question I’m interested in isn’t: “Do fast runners take quick strides?” I think that’s reasonably well established. The trickier — and I’d argue more relevant — question is: “Do fast runners take quick strides when they’re running slowly?”

The best example I found was this 10-minute clip posted in 2007 by Toby Tanser, which shows all sorts of footage of Kenyan runners at different speeds:

Now, if you spend a little time with a stopwatch, you quickly find that when the runners are shuffling along slowly, then tend to have a slow cadence in the 160s, and when they’re running fast, their cadence tends to be above 180. But that doesn’t really answer the question, because it’s not necessarily the same runner. So I’ve cued to video to 2:49, where you see a clip of Hilda Kibet (1:08 half-marathoner, 2:24 marathoner) jogging slowly, and then another clip of her running quickly around the track. My measurements:

Jogging slowly: 18 strides in 6.7 seconds = 162 steps per minute

Running fast: 16 strides in 5.0 seconds = 190 steps per minute

I realize this is pretty scanty data! And I also realize that there’s a fairly extreme difference between how slowly she’s shuffling in the first clip, and how quickly she’s hauling in the second clip. But that’s the whole point: you can’t talk about cadence without considering speed.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

My wife is out of town at the moment, which means I’m doing lots of running on my own. Plenty of time to ponder the meaning of life — and, when I get tired of that, to count my footsteps. Sparked by interesting discussions with the likes of Pete Larson from Runblogger and Dave Munger from Science-Based Running, I’ve been wondering what my own cadence is like — particularly in light of widespread belief in the magic of 180 strides per minute. Over the past few weeks, I counted strides for 60-second intervals at a variety of paces. Here’s what I found:

Most surprising to me was (a) how consistent my cadence was when I repeated measurements at the same pace, and (b) how much it changed between paces: from 164 to 188, with every indication that it would decrease further at slower paces and increase further at faster paces. This certainly confirms what Max Donelan, the inventor of a “cruise control” device for runners that adjusts speed by changing your cadence, told me earlier this year: contrary to the myth that cadence stays relatively constant at different speeds, most runners control their speed through a combination of cadence and stride length.

So the next question is: am I a freak, running with a “bad” slow cadence at slower paces, but a “good” quick cadence at faster paces? To find out, I plotted my data on top of the data from one of the classic papers on this topic, by Peter Weyand:

The graph is a little busy, but if you look closely, you’ll find that my data is slightly offset from the Weyand data, but has essentially identical slope. So compared to a representative example of Weyand’s subjects, I have a slightly quicker cadence and shorter stride at any given speed, but my stride changes in exactly the same way as I accelerate. So I’m not a freak: the fact that my cadence increased from 164 to 188 as I accerelated from 5:00/km to 3:00/km is exactly consistent with what Weyand observed.

One key point: I’ve highlighted two key “speed zones.” One is the pace at which typical Olympic distance races from the 1,500 metres to the marathon are run at. This is where Jack Daniels made his famous observations that elite runners all seemed to run at 180 steps per minute (which corresponds to 1.5 strides per second on the left axis). The other zone is what I’ve called, tongue-in-cheek, the “jogging zone,” ranging from about 4:30 to 7:00 per kilometre. This latter zone is where most of us spend most of our time. So does it really make sense to take a bunch of measurements in the Olympic zone, and from that deduce the “optimal stride rate” for the jogging zone?

This isn’t just a question of “Don’t try to do what the elites do.” If Daniels or anyone else had measured my cadence during a race, it would have been well above 180. But at jogging paces, it’s in the 160s. I strongly suspect the same is true for most elite runners: just because we can videotape them running at 180 steps per minute during the Boston Marathon doesn’t mean that they have the same cadence during their warm-up jog. In fact, that’s a pretty good challenge: can anyone find some decent video footage of Kenyan runners during one of their famously slow pre-race warm-up shuffles? I’d love to get some cadence data from that!

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t think stride rate is important. I definitely agree with those who suggest that overstriding is probably the most widespread and easily addressed problem among recreational runners. But rather than aspiring to a magical 180 threshold, I agree with Wisconsin researcher Bryan Heiderscheit, whose studies suggest that increasing your cadence by 5-10% (if you suspect you may be overstriding) is the way to go.

[UPDATE: Make sure to check out the interesting discussion in the comments section! Also, Amby Burfoot did his own cadence test and posted the data. I’ve added it to the graph below to show how it compares to my own and Weyand’s data. Feel free to try it out on your next run, and I’ll add your data to the graph too!]

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