Wanna Run Faster?

November 11, 2010 0 By Jakob

Yesterday I spent some time with a colleague at the BlackBerry Innovation Forum at Hotel Okura in Amsterdam. It gave me the chance to catch up with some good people I haven’t spoken to for years. One of them was Stephan Derksen, an inspiring entrepreneur who’s involved in several projects, which are all really interesting. He has a blog too at http://salesgurunl.blogspot.com/.

Over the past months I’ve been discussing fore-foot running with a bunch of people who I think understand running pretty well, and I have been trying it a few times when I had to run bare-foot.

Yesterday, however, Stephan and I got talking about fore-foot running and after going through some of the basic physics of why it might make sense, I eventually decided to do a few (really) short intervals on the front of the foot this morning. The results are interesting! See the run here and comments below: http://www.endomondo.com/workouts/v7a5sl1c_hs

Before going I had a look at a few videos, like this one:

Armed with my newly acquired knowledge I went out on today’s morning run. Upper body feeling really sore from the swim on Monday and yesterday’s event (standing up all day without moving much simply takes it’s toll on my back), so I ran at a really slow pace. After Sunday’s run I had a bit of soreness in my legs, and as previously said, I just want to train injury free!

Strong head winds motivated me to wait a bit with the intervals, but after about 22 minutes I picked up the pace and shifted to the front of the foot – uphill. Right now that I just really got back to training I don’t want to push myself too much, but without pushing my heart rate into the dark red and without going all out, it felt fairly easy to push my pace below 4:00 minutes per kilometer. As you may remember, that’s my target time for 5 kilometers. I did this a number of times even pushing it as far down as the 3:00-3:30 minutes per kilometer range.

So, in conclusion I will be seriously considering getting myself a front-foot running shoe when I change shoes later this winter, and start focusing on getting my calfs up to strength so they can take that consistent pressure fore-foot running provides.