The RTS Column - Respect The Speed

by Admin 12. November 2008 18:26

RTS on what makes Usain Bolt so fast, how we ourselves can get faster and why it’s always a good idea to avoid burly men wearing marigold gloves!

Respect the Speed

Howe to run faster and longer How to run faster and longer

I think I entered The Matrix last week. Whilst out for a quick run at lunchtime my wrist-worn GPS bleeped to tell me I’d completed the first mile in a sniff over two minutes. “Hmmm, a world record,” I thought, “I must be on form today”.

Things got better! Within thirty seconds it bleeped again, this time informing me I had covered five miles. I was accelerating, and fast. Bleep followed chirp followed irritating non-stop beep.

In less than four minutes I had apparently run five hundred miles! That put me several times faster than Eurofighter. N.A.T.O. should be offering me a massive contract!

However, as my vision didn’t comprise of columns of fluctuating luminous green symbols I dismissed The Matrix as the cause.

The date was roughly a week after the particle physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at ‘CERN’ in Geneva had started to play subatomic conkers.

Perhaps, as the doom-mongers had predicted, they had inadvertently produced a black hole that was collapsing the universe. Maybe I was running at my normal pace but time wasn’t.

I dismissed these scenarios as low on the probability scale, and switched off my GPS assuming it to be faulty. Disappointed, I accepted the fact that I was probably toddling along at my usual pace of somewhere between slow and not much faster.

Speed! We’d all like more of it, but is it easy to get?

The Need for Speed

Usain Bolt half sprinted, half jogged his way to the one hundred metre Olympic gold in Beijing in a record time of 9.69 seconds. By my dubious calculations, that makes his average speed 23.2 miles per hour. His maximum speed will be faster than that.

In the middle fifty metres he made the rest of the fastest field of runners ever gathered look like they needed mobility scooters. With the race won by the 80-metre mark he had time to do the ‘Y.M.C.A’ dance, spin round and moonwalk over the line to a world record.

Where does his phenomenal speed come from?

Obviously a large part is due to training. But training only fine-tunes the machine. Genetics has given him what the rest of us can only dream of.

Most of the fastest sprinters are of Afro-Caribbean descent. The reason - many Afro-Caribbean’s carry a gene that causes them to produce a high proportion of ‘fast-twitch’ muscle fibres.

This type of fibre provides explosive sprinting power; enabling short bursts of high speed. The down side is that these fibres tire easily and are not suited to endurance events.

Slow-twitch’ fibres, on the other hand, are like the Duracell Bunny – they keep going for a long time. But they can’t produce the same raw sprinting power. Not surprisingly, elite marathon runners generally have a higher proportion of slow-twitch fibres.

So, they don’t go very fast, right?

Wrong!

Haile Gebrselassie has recently smashed his own marathon world record. His time was 2:03:59. That makes an average speed for 26.2 miles of 12.68mph (20.2kmh). Ok, so not as fast as Bolt, but it’s under 5 minutes per mile all the way. (And Gebrselassie is an asthmatic!)

Let's remember that these are elite athletes paid handsomely for running at the (current) extremes of human performance. We will never match these feats. (Unless you mix up the two records! There’s a chance of running Bolt’s distance at Gebrselassie’s pace – an 18 second 100-metre dash) But there are still things we can do to increase our speed.

How to Run Faster

I doubt any of us know our relative make up of slow and fast twitch muscle fibres. To find that requires a biopsy – fibres are extracted (painfully) and studied under microscope. But we don’t need to know.

To run faster we have to, well, run faster. You can’t run a fast race, whatever the distance, if you haven’t run fast in training.

That doesn’t mean setting off like Bolt, and sprinting flat-out until your eyeballs pop out. Blasting off with legs spinning like Billy Whizz from the Beano (if you don’t remember it ask your mum or dad!) increases the chance of injury and is likely to be counter productive.

What is needed is to run shorter than your race distance at faster than race pace (after a good warm-up of course). You can do this with intervals, Fartlek (kind of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along run) or runs of moderately hard intensity that gradually speed up and finish fast. Just so long as you push the pace.

If you mix these runs up with some long slow ones, to build your stamina, you should notice race times coming down. Training programs for all distances are available from various sources, and all follow this general formula.

Avoiding the Risks

But trying to get more speed without following a sensible program can be risky, as I found out.

The other evening I happened upon a couple of ‘hoodie’ youths sprinting along the street. They were really going very fast considering one was carrying a DVD player and the other a flat-screen TV.

Their pace was really impressive. In my search for more speed I asked them where theirs came from. They pointed me in the direction of a seedy looking pub.

The place looked rough, but I went in and struck up a conversation with two fit-looking men sitting in the corner. I asked them, “Are you interested in speed?”

“Pardon?” they replied.

“You know, speed, Billy Whizz!” I answered.

Now, how was I to know they were undercover policemen from the drug squad?

They let me out of the cells the following morning, but not before I’d endured a thorough body search by a burly, hairy officer with very large hands stuffed in a pair of Marigold’s. He certainly tested the twitchiness of my muscle fibres, but not the ones in my legs!!

So work on your speed, but be careful how you do it.

Respect The Speed

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