Breaking the Wall

Jake:

That is a good thought. Overall we've done a very limited amount of speed training, but we've done some. I have patterned my kids training after the East African experience, which I summarize as "run to school, run back, sprint when you see a hyena" but I still do not fully understand the principles behind it, so this will be a learning experience.

Benjamin just demonstrated to me that speed can be developed by mostly aerobic running, and we are not talking just middle distance speed, this includes top end speed. Maybe not enough to be a world class sprinter, but definitely enough to win the kick in a serious distance race.

One question that arises is if possibly top end speed is just there and does not need to be developed at all. I thought so for some time until a few years ago when I invited some random neighborhood kids to run an all out 100. What I saw was quite revealing - they were about 11-12 years, old, and none of them could crack 17. In fact, all of them except one did not even crack 18. Benjamin at the age of 7 was able to beat all of them except the fastest. That surprised me - I recall from our PE classes in the Soviet Union that 18 for 100 was not a problem for most boys that age, and the fastest random boy out of a reasonably sized crowd would be breaking 15.

So since then I've been thinking about what the difference was caused by. Back then when I was 11-12 it was early 80s. The Soviet TV was extremely boring. A joke is told about a man that turns on channel 1 and sees Brezhnev. He switches to channel 3, and sees Brezhnev again. He switches to channel 11, and sees the same thing. Then he switches to the learning channel, the only remaining one, hoping for a change, and he finds it - he sees a KGB agent shaking a fist at him saying: "If you keep switching channels, you'll be in deep trouble!" That joke was not too far away from reality.

Video games were practically non-existent. A kid had only so much attention span for a book. So he had to find something to do, and he found it outside. It was usually soccer during the summer, and ice-skating/ice hockey or cross-country skiing during the winter. School recess usually involved some kind of a wild running game with younger kids running for their life away from the older kids who have been commissioned by the teachers to keep the young ones from running around, or some kind of fighting among the kids the same age which involved the victim running away from the pursuer, both exercising their top speed. Some disagreements involved post-school-hour resolution. I recall frequently having to run 200 meters all out from the school doors to my apartment to avoid getting beat up. Lenin's teachings of class struggle were clearly being remembered by the younger generation, but it resulted in an overall speed conditioning.

So based on this observation and others, I have developed some suspicions about how speed is developed in a child. If you are sedentary, it is unlikely to develop. But if you run a lot, and only occasionally and in a very unstructured way at top speed, you develop not only endurance but top speed as well. Going along with Lydiard we can say that developing endurance helps developing speed. Why? A kid that has endurance is much more likely to put his engine in top gear and go for it when playing, when he is excited about something, etc. So he gets more practice. He is also more conscious and aware of himself because sprinting does not hurt so bad, so he can a figure out a better sprinting form.

Long story short, if you run a lot of distance at an easy pace, and occasionally sprint, you will have the speed over long and short distances.

Breaking the Wall

November 05, 2024