THE PRACTICAL ESSENCE OF RUNNING

The best confirmation of theory is practice, where all the concepts, rules, etc., come together in one single act of doing. In running it is changing support from one leg to the other. And real run, no matter what length and speed it is, is only one step at a time repeated through the entire distance. Therefore the whole run depends on how good and perfect this single step is.

Yes, it is as simple as that. But simple doesn't mean easy, because what you have to accomplish happens not over a long time of some distance running, but during a short time of one step, the blink of an eye, so to say.

This is a really short time, but when we are talking about the support time, its gets even shorter. In sprint, for example, the support time of the best runners is around 0.08-0.10, a fraction of a second. In long distance running it is longer, but still shorter then 0.2 second in best runners. Could you imagine controlling your movement during this length of time? Do you have an ability to simultaneously think, feel and act at the same time? Remember the old wisdom about it: "How can you think and hit at the same time?" (Jogi Berra).

The difficulty of performing a single step lies in having to handle too much information from different components of running movement: thinking, seeing, feeling and acting, all at the same time. Feeling is the most important part leading to proper execution of the movement, but before executing it you have to think and imagine how to do it. So, it becomes a very difficult, time consuming process.

We can separate thinking, and feeling from the action, but during the action it becomes a very hard task. Therefore we have to minimize the amount of information in thinking, feeling and acting without sacrificing the essence of running technique. It would be always questionable, how to keep your control of running technique under such circumstances?

Read full in depth article in Dr.Romanov's Training Essays Vol.I - a collection of short articles written by Dr.Romanov on various training, exercise and rehabilitation topics.