1. Deliberate running. Let your GPS watch worry about pace, and distance, and time. Make everything about every step purposeful, and be aware of every feeling and what it means. This gets easier with practice.
2. Up and down motion is wasted energy. Eliminate it by never rising above your lowest point.
3. When you leave the ground, gravity inevitably pulls down on you, creating up and down motion. Don’t leave the ground unless you’re running too fast not to.
4. Impact is bad for your joints. Don’t land on your heel, which produces full impact. Land on your midfoot, which is flexible and allows you to use everything from your foot to your torso in shock absorption. Don’t land on your toes, which works the calves too hard.
5. Running is not a lower body exercise! Running is a full body exercise. Act like it is. Coordinate your whole body in the run. Don’t just push off with your legs, push off of your leg with your body! Keep in mind, though, that you should only be slightly twisting your torso. Hands should not cross your center, and feet should land below the hip.
6. Proper breathing is critical! Oxygen is what keeps you going, so if you don’t oxygenate properly you will not run properly! Keep in mind that if you are coordinating your whole body in the run, it will affect your breathing. This makes it important to allow the pace of your breath to correlate with the pace of your step, so that the expansion and contraction of your lungs is in sync with the slight twisting of the torso involved in proper running.
Your movements should be fluid and graceful, with no bouncing. When you find the perfect form, every pace for every distance and every terrain will be an exaggeration of a core form. This is found through feeling
It is only possible to run your fastest and farthest with perfect form. When you reach the edge of your capability, feeling for the perfect form means finding the crack in the wall to go farther and faster.
No matter what type of run you’re doing, all it means is applying different settings to your perfect form and running deliberately. There is only one right way to run, which will look different for different people and at different times and in different places. It’s still all the same way though.
When you’ve been doing it right, the end of a run will mean stretching your running form into walking. Same form, same fluidity and grace. This happens for me without trying; it’s just naturally how my runs end now. I walk the way I run, because it’s easy to walk incorrectly but it’s hard to run to the end of your endurance without getting something right, and that something right will be equally right for walking.
Walking -> Jogging -> Running -> Sprinting -> Charging
All phases of the same form with differing degrees of exaggeration.
Walking – we’re all familiar I think
Jogging – light, easy pace, more brisk than walking
Running – steady, solid pace, should rarely if ever leave the ground
Sprinting – like flying, you will leave the ground but you’ll be going too fast to care
Charging – at this point form has become exaggerated to the degree that center of gravity is low, and the forward motion feels heavy and forceful as though you can barrel through anyone in your path – hence charging, like a bull