A Prelude to a Discussion on Run Fitness, Cadence and Form in the Triathlon context

In the last year or so I've been asked to advised casually here and there about running.

It's because I'm skinny, still a relatively fast runner in both the world of runners and triathlon.

When I'm older and slower, I wonder how many people will query my thoughts?

Not that it matters much anymore, but I ran for the University in town, and I was lucky enough to be on a stacked team of highly motivated talented guys for a couple of years, we were ranked as high as third in the nation and beat many Division I schools at a few good sized meets.

I've been running competitively since I was nine years old, I actually ran the Butte to Butte 10k every Fourth of July in Eugene, Oregon; my first Butte to Butte 10k was '80 or '81.

I always ran the whole distance; I ran 58min and change at the age of nine.

I still have the shirt.. If I wore it, people might think I was some Emo rocker kid who bought it at Urban Outfitters.

If they smelled it, the stench of Grandma's attic would alert them of my un-coolness, or perhaps I would be even more cool due to some strange irony factor...

Anyhow, after college, I chased some qualifying times in vein, managed to get myself into a few big track meets in the Bay Area, even won a decent twilight mile at Hartnell College... That was fun, big field that went out slow. The field was so big that a couple of out of shape college kids were on their last lap and I actually lapped them, I was kicking pretty damn hard and fast.

Those were the days!

Well, that was then, and as they say, this is now. I got tired of competitive running. I knew I had years and years of hard workouts in front of me to get to track nationals, and that would be the pinnacle if I ever got there.

I love triathlon because I am inherently bad at two of the sports, but most of all because I think since I took it up five seasons back it has reduced wear and tear on my body.

The funny thing is that I am not injury prone, I thought about this the other day on a jog. Here I am going on basically ten years of consistent, hard training since college and no injuries have sidelined me.

I have tried to understand why (within the context of the subject of this blog) and it's because:


-I have good run form, but I haven't always.

-I know when to ignore my schedule and take a couple of days away from an activity that is causing an issue

-I'm a root cause analysis thinker with regard to injuries, I don't guess. I ask myself the obvious questions, has there been a change in volume or type of training, or a change in equipment?

-If anything, I err on the side of lower volume, and I rarely, if ever, try to combine a week of high mileage/yards/time on bike with very high intensity in any of sports I train

-I care for my body as if it were injured, that is I use downtime for things like icing, stretching and self-massage with the stick or the fancy balls devised to loosen muscles.

As it turns out, if you do any endurance sports (for more than a season or two) such as marathoning, ultra running, long-course, triathlon, or say, marathon xc mountain biking (something I'm very excited about) you have to be a mature athlete in your mental approach.

Sure, you can start anything gung-ho and even have decent results, (and even not wind up injured) but over the long haul a managed approach is what keeps an athlete injury free and training.

Since the run tends to be the sport that most people struggle with from an performance, fitness, and injury perspective I'll follow up in my next post with a dialogue on developing running fitness, and how to approach cadence and form, and ultimately try to tie together how the synthesis of the approach, over the long haul, keeps you injury free while producing effective results.