Tag: running

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Arthur Lydiard recording

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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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Bit of an obscure find for distance running fans out there: a three-hour recording of a speech by Arthur Lydiard in 1963 at San Jose State University, with Peter Snell and Murray Halberg throwing in their two cents and answering questions. This was three years after Snell, Halberg and marathoner Barry Magee took gold at the Rome Olympics, and the year before Snell took double gold in Tokyo. It’s on sale at BudWinter.com — Winter was the coach at San Jose State from 1941 to 1970, and he’s the one who hosted the talk and introduces Lydiard.

I’d never actually heard Lydiard speaking; it’s pretty funny in places. For example, Peter Snell’s first 22-mile run with the group:

[With 2.5 miles to go], he started crying like a kid, tears running down his face. And no one would help him. We said, ‘Look, you’ve only got a little way to go, just keep plodding’… He lay on the bed and he sobbed for half an hour like a kid. Now we’re not very sympathetic. We said, ‘Look, Snell, in two weeks’ time you’re going around there again.’

And his thoughts on stretching and other conditioning drills:

I don’t think Halberg or Snell or any of those guys could touch their toes. I honestly don’t. It’s not because I don’t believe in exercises, loosening and stretching. It’s solely because we haven’t got time to do it. And I don’t think it would make them run any faster anyway.

Anyway, a fun little piece of history for any Lydiard fans out there!

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Science of Marathon Training night in Toronto: June 6!

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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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Very exciting news: the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon is having its official launch night on Monday, June 6, which will feature a lecture by yours truly on the “Science of Marathon Training,” followed by an “Ask the Experts” panel discussion with Q&As with some very exciting running stars (names to be announced soon). All the details are available at this page on the STWM site — including a form to register. The event is free, but seating is limited to 200 people, so please sign up as soon as possible to reserve a spot. [UPDATE: The event is sold out as of May 24.]

The event will be held at the Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre, in the Trinity Ballroom, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. (there will be an expo, and the talks will start at 7:15 p.m.). It’s going to be a great night: draw prizes, fantastic panellists, and of course an opportunity to pick up signed copies of Cardio or Weights. 🙂 Hope to see you there!

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What’s the ideal running stride to avoid injury?

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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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This week’s Jockology column in the Globe revisits a familiar question:

The question

Is there an ideal running stride, and can I learn it?

The answer

You may think running has more in common with day-to-day functions like breathing and eating than with more technical sports like golf or swimming: As kids, we learn how to run with no special instruction, just as our ancestors have for millennia. The result?

“Most people run very badly,” says Blaise Dubois, a Quebec City physiotherapist whose multi-day course on the prevention of running injuries has been drawing sellout crowds of health professionals, coaches and running enthusiasts around the world… [READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN]

I had a really interesting interview with Blaise Dubois for this article. We spoke for nearly 90 minutes — so of course, only a tiny fraction of the discussion made it into this article. Hopefully I’ll have time at some point in the next few weeks to go through my notes and write a blog post about some of the other things we talked about. Hat tip once again to this post from Pete Larson’s blog that convinced me to get in touch with Blaise.

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Alcohol-free beer as a recovery drink: better than what?

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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)

***

Way back in October, I got an e-mail from Glenn, a running coach at Concordia University in Montreal, wondering whether alcohol-free beer might make a good post-workout recovery drink. He made a pretty convincing case for it, and I promised to look into it and get back to him with my take…

Fast forward to February (with his e-mail still in my to-do list), and there’s a big flurry of articles about Bavarian brewer Erdlinger’s “Alkoholfrei” beer being promoted as a sports recovery drink:

Promoted as a “sports and fitness drink,” Erdinger began targeting athletes in 2001 in Europe with an advertising campaign featuring a pair of triathletes. Its popularity quickly grew in Europe, where it’s often distributed for free in the finishing area of sporting events.

Sure enough, if you go to the Alkoholfrei website (“100% regeneration”), they have profiles of all the triathletes and biathletes that they sponsor.

So is it justified? Well, it depends on what you’re comparing it to. Most of the articles I’ve seen line it up against sports drinks — the equivalent of classic Gatorade. And actually, in that context, it doesn’t do too badly. It’s a drink with some carbohydrates in it, and not much else. But is anyone really recommending that athletes should pound some Gatorade after their workouts? In fact, as Glenn pointed out in his e-mail to me, a better comparison would be with chocolate milk, which is often touted as an “ideal recovery drink” because it contains protein in a roughly 1:4 ratio with the carbs it contains.

Here’s how some of these options stack up, in grams per 100 mL:

Carbs Protein Fat Calories
Alkoholfrei 5.3 0.4 0 25
low-fat choc milk 10.4 3.2 1.0 63
Original Gatorade 5.8 0 0 21
Gatorade Recover 2.9 3.3 0 25

Now, there are some other details like electrolytes, and Alkoholfrei likes to point out that it has vitamin B12 and so on — but to me, these are irrelevant details. When you’re recovering after a workout, you need fluid, carbohydrate and protein. If you get that, it’s highly unlikely that you’re NOT going to get the electrolytes you need.

So the verdict: Alkoholfrei looks a lot like plain old Gatorade — primarily carbs, though it does have a bit of protein. As a recovery drink, it’s not bad, as long as you’re also eating some food to give you some protein. But it’s not “complete” in the way chocolate milk is hyped to be. I guess the conclusion is sort of like those breakfast cereal commercials: alcohol-free beer is “part of a complete, balanced post-workout recovery protocol.”

(Last thought: of course, calories matter too — and that depends on how vigorous your workout was. Unless it’s a particularly vigorous workout, you really don’t need any recovery food/drink at all beyond whatever meal is coming up next — or at least, you certainly don’t need 500 mL of chocolate milk or three alcohol-free beers!)

[Thanks again to Glenn for putting the topic on my radar.]

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More about stride length, rate, and “cruise control” for runners

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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)

***

I posted last week about a newly invented “cruise control” device for runners, which controls pace by cueing stride frequency with a metronome. That ignited an interesting discussion about how we change pace while running: do we take quicker strides, longer strides, or a combination of both?

For starters, Pete Larson send me a paper with some nice clear data that shows how the two factors interact (at least in one physically active group of 24 men and nine women between 18 and 34 years old):

The x-axis runs from 0 to 12 m/s, so the data runs from 2.5 to just over 9 m/s, which is 6:40/km to under 2:00/km — i.e. sprinting). Sure enough, stride length is a much bigger factor than stride frequency at typical jogging/running speeds, but the frequency curve is never perfectly flat.

I also exchanged a few e-mails with Max Donelan, one of the co-inventors of the cruise control, who explained a little more about how the device works and what sort of interactions between stride rate, length and running speed they saw in their testing. His answers were very interesting and well-explained, so with his permission I’m going to post them here rather than trying to summarize them. One of the most interesting points, I think, is that when his metronome cues runners to increase their stride rate, they also automatically increase stride length to arrive at the pace they’d naturally associate with the new cadence. Makes sense, but that hadn’t occurred to me.

Q: I’m also curious (as you saw in my blog entry) about how effective cadence is at controlling pace.

A: We have tested a number of subjects running at a range of speeds. It is absolutely true that some runners increase speed predominantly by increasing stride length. In fact, I would say that most runners that we have tested increase stride length more than frequency. However, all the runners we have tested also increase their frequency when they increase speed. We have yet to find a runner that only increases stride length or only increases stride frequency. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter whether people increase speed predominantly with increasing stride length as long as the relationship between speed and frequency is not perfectly flat (and we have yet to find a subject like that).

Of equal importance is a second phenomenon which is less intuitive. When someone is running at a particular cadence and you ask them to match a faster cadence, they not only increase their stride frequency but also their stride length.They alter both frequency and length to converge on the speed that they normally prefer at the new cadence. For example, a 10% increase in frequency might yield a 40% increase in length to get a 54% increase in speed. This allows us to use frequency to have control authority over speed.

Q: What sort of testing did you do?

A: We initially determined how frequency and length change with increases in speed by having subjects run at different steady state speeds on a treadmill. We carefully calibrated the treadmill speed and we measured step frequency with pressure sensitive foot switches. Stride length is simply speed divided by stride frequency.

To study how runners change both speed and step length when you give them an increase in cadence to match, we had them run overground with a metronome beeping in their ear. After a few minutes, the metronome frequency would rapidly increase to a new frequency. Subjects were instructed to match the beat. They were free to choose whatever speed they liked and, in principle, they could have stayed at the same speed. We measured step frequency with the same pressure sensitive foot switches. We measure and record overground running speed using a high-end GPS designed for quantifying acceleration in race cars.

We test our cruise control algorithm also during running overground. When we implement cruise control, we get runners within 0.5% of their desired average speed. This compares well with recreational athletes who average an 8% error, and collegiate runners who average a 4% error:

Green et al. Pacing accuracy in collegiate and recreational runners. Eur J Appl Physiol (2010) vol. 108 (3) pp. 567-572 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00421-009-1257-5

For the recreational runners, an 8% error means that they will only be within 4 minutes of their target time for a 50 min 10 K. Running 4 minutes too fast may mean a surprisingly fast personal best, but it may also mean crashing and burning.

Very interesting stuff — both from a practical point of view (i.e. the cruise control), and for understanding more about how we run. Thanks to both Max and Pete for their contributions.