Run Style

Dear Eric

I read your book, The Cool Impossible in 3 days and then re-read it, thankyou so much for writting it and sharing your philosophies. They make perfect sence to me.

My question

I now concentrate on my foot strike, push off, stabilizing my feet with my big toe, cadence, running like I'm riding a bike going down hill, etc. and I find after 10-11km (6-7 miles) my quads are screaming at me to stop and I just can't do much more, is this normal because I'm learning how to run correctly. My normal Sunday long runs for the past year have been 32-35km (20-22 miles) which I do most weeks with a friend of mine. We have several routes, trail, road or a combonation of both to keep it interesting and fresh.

I live in the Yarra Valley (wine growing country) 75km NE of Melbourne, Victoria in Australia and though the land scape is nothing like Jacksons Hole we do have a lot off hilly country here and all of my runs have some hills in them, ecept for the oval where I can do sprint work.

Again thank you so much for your book.

Kind Regards

Robert Burpee

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Permalink Reply by Eric Orton on December 5, 2013 at 9:48am

Robert - thanks for the great post and good question. Changing form while maintaining a high volume run WILL be challenging. So I would look first to SLOW down your speed on the drills first and see if this helps. This is always a good thing to do any what so you can maintain good form without fatigue.

If you still are getting the screaming quads, look to reduce the volume of this run to let your legs and form change catch up so to speak.

AND, be sure and aware that you are taking shorter strides on the downhills and not reaching too far out in front.

My feeling is you are probably running too fast in general and therefore, still reaching a bit. Be patient and let the trail "come to you".

Use this time to run fast and strong up the hills and then back off on drills for recovery and good form work.