I must mention that I need to work more on my flat out speed, as that may be a limiting factor in my ability to bring down my 400 time. I think in order to really get down under 50, I will have to be able to run a 200 in the low 23′s at least. My best is a 23.48, and recently I have only run around 24.30. As my former high school team that I help coach for begin their season in the next few weeks, my workouts will begin to shift to focus more towards building high-end speed as opposed to speed-endurance. This will all be a part of our overall plan to help me reach my peak in the early part of summer.

Next update should be a week from now, and I’ll post my results from the meet!

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Now is the time in my training progression where I begin to “put the gas in the tank.” We use the analogy of an engine and a gas tank to talk about stride building, and running. So far in my training, I have spent the past several months focusing specifically on breaking my hips lose of all the tightnesses, strength imbalances, and compensated muscular patterns that developed over the past year from training without neutralizing the negative effects that it had on my muscular system. If you read back through our philosophy posts, we talk about how the most efficient stride is a byproduct of the body being in the anatomically correct position, which is a result of ALL our muscle fibers receiving the necessary supply of stimulus so that they can do their two fundamental jobs of positioning and movement of the skeletal system. If I had just focused on running, running, and more running, then all I would have to work with would be my current stride pattern, which was quite tight, inefficient, and powerless. Now, though, I have spent enough time redesigning my stride by supplying my muscular system with all the essential and various types of stimulus so that it has become much more powerful and fluid. In essence, I have “built the engine” with which I now get to work with!

Back to the “gas in the tank.” I have not been able nor have really had the need to get out and run all that much in the past few months, other than the occasional strides and various stair workouts. This next month however, I begin a new running progression that will hopefully start adding some muscular endurance to my stride. All the tools are there, I just now need to integrate all the training I have done up to this point into some serious running workouts. To kick it off, I did a workout on the track that consisted of six 400 meter runs, each one divided into four 100 meter segments where I would stride the first 50 meters then accelerate into a sprint for the next 50, then pull back into a stride for the next 50. The demands of accelerating and decelerating were fairly brutal and I was feeling it by the third interval. In between each run, I did several stationary exercises sequenced in such a way that they would help maintain proper alignment and movement of my hips, legs, back and shoulders. Our bodies tend to tighten up and compensate when we fatigue, which results in inefficient muscular patterns that limit our physical performance. These compensated muscular patterns and various tightness must be counteracted or “neutralized” properly by various forms of stimulus in order to achieve the greatest benefit from the workout. In the training programs that are coming soon, we will show you exactly how this is done.

I will continue updating on how my training is going, and mix in some training tips for those of you who are starting your seasons or run for the fun of it. Thanks for reading!

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I won the race, surprisingly, beating out several very talented distance runners. It literally came down to a dead sprint in the end, and instead of losing my stride form, I was able to accelerate and remain smooth and powerful all the way through the line. 

After camp ended, it was time to move down to so-cal and begin my college life. As soon as track started, my coaches had me running with the upper class-men during practice after doing several quality workouts on the hills. Typically, when we would go run long hill sprints, most would fade near the end of the workout, while I would begin to pull away and finish workouts strong. I mostly credit this to the efficiency of my muscular system that I had developed up to that point. Running with much faster upper class-men was intimidating, but at the same time I felt encouraged that I would get better and for sure reach my goal.

The next thing I want to talk about is going to be a major controversy in the near future of sports training, I believe. It has to do with the lifting program that I was forced into. The track team lifted four times a week. Our workouts included all the traditional powerlifting moves; squats, powercleans, deadlifts. After my first morning in the weight room, doing “light lifts” and learning “proper form,” my lower back completely seized up. I literally hobbled out of there like an 80 year old man. Not because of improper lifting form, but rather because of all the time I spent breaking my hips loose to achieve greater power and range of motion in my stride, to suddenly force a ton of loaded range onto a pelvis in a fixed plane without neutralizing the negative side effects causes the muscles around the pelvis to tighten up immensely.

I spent a lot of time trying to undo all the negative effects of the squats and cleans, but gradually over time, my hips began to actually lose their functional range of motion. After a while though, I thought I was getting better, because my weight was going up, and I wasn’t feeling that extreme tightness in my back. My body had adapted to the stimulus by compensating and as a result, a strength imbalance began to form in my body. Remember Law #1, the body will always react and change based on the stimulus it receives. 

As my lifting got better, my running gradually go worse and worse. I also began to notice little pains developing in various places in my body. My ankles would hurt, then my knees, then my lower back. Nothing too major, but it was there, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t feel like the fine-tuned athlete I had been only months before, but rather I felt like a deteriorating runner who was toeing the line between healthy and injured. 

Finally, competition season rolled around. One thing I noticed about my running was that I had an incredible amount of muscular endurance, simply due to the fact that I had done so much more running this season, beginning in September, and having the sunny, 70 degree weather of so-cal all the way through the winter. The difference was my dwindling speed. I had really lost the range and power in my hips, and I didn’t have the natural talent to back it up like the other guys on the team. I went from being in the front of the pack in workouts to fading to the back. My 400 times weren’t all that bad, consistent mid-53, but I seriously lacked in speed. My 200 time never dropped below 24.

Near the end of the season, I suddenly got to the point to where I couldn’t run anymore and had to sit out our last meet.  My hips had lost so much of their range of motion due to tightness at that point that my knees were being stressed at awkward angles, resulting in a pinched peroneal nerve in my knee. It hurt to even bend my knee slightly when I put pressure on it. I could walk around, but I couldn’t run. I knew at that point that I would never achieve my goals if I remained training my body with this style of training. I decided to transfer up to a school in Oregon close to my high school so I could help coach for my former team as well as train using the runwithpower system.

Next I will talk about the process of restoring the efficiency of my muscular system over the past summer and where that has gotten me now, and my plans for the future. I have a meet coming up this weekend where I will run the 200, and hope to set a new personal record, going under my current time of 23.48.

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It was a little over half way through football season, and I got tackled while going in for a touchdown. My leg was planted and bent sideways, and the rest of my body was forced down from the impact. When I got up, I could feel something was not right. At the time I didn’t know, but I had a grade 2 MCL tear. Again, it was only because of the training I had done up to that point that saved my knee partially and didn’t end up tearing the MCL as well as the ACL completely. The doctors saw the MRI scan and told me I wouldn’t be able to play for the rest of the season, but I ended up only missing one and a half games.

I immediately went into some big time rehabilitation from the moment the injury happened. As a result of the injury and rehabilitation process, my muscular system changed significantly, as well as my running stride. I had not run extensively during the remainder of the football season except when playing in games, and it still hurt and I had to be careful. Once the season ended, I decided not to play basketball, but rather continue training through the winter to get my knee totally ready for track.

By the time track came around in the spring, it had been about 4 months since I had really sprinted, and my sprint stride had changed so drastically that I had lost a lot of my speed and power. It was like starting over with a new stride. When I got out to run, my legs felt weak and my stride felt clumsy and wobbly. Trust me, it was really frustrating. I actually began making some progress early in the season, but then my running seemed to literally fall apart. It got to the point to where I was not injured; nothing was technically wrong with me, but I just couldn’t find any speed or power in my stride. In one meet I ran the worst 400 time since my freshman year. (I won’t even say what that time was, it’s too embarrassing.)

Scott changed up my training for a couple weeks to help develop some quick strength and power in an effort to save the season. I did about a 3 week period right in the middle of my season of very intense lower body lifting, which didn’t help at first. Surely enough though, I ran some better races, and each week that passed, I noticed a little more spring coming back to my stride. Finally, just as the district meet came around, I ran a 52.11 in the open 400. I was back to where I needed to be. Then the strangest thing happened.

It was probably about 20 minutes after my 400 that suddenly out of nowhere my right hip flexor started hurting. It felt like I had strained it, but for some reason I hadn’t noticed it while running my 400. I was forced to choose between running either the 200 or saving myself for the 4×400. I chose the 4×400 and jogged the 200. With three of my teammates depending on me, I knew I had to give it a shot. We warmed up, and my hip flexor was hurting really bad at this point. Once I got into the race though I was able to push it out of my mind. I usually anchored, but we decided that I would run third. Unbelievably, I ran the best relay leg of my life with a 51.5 and put our team in first place handing off to our last runner. We ended up getting second, but still it was a school record and my best run up to that point.

Next, I will talk about my training over the following summer and my preparation to run track in college, as well as the results of going back to a more traditional style of training.

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One thing that I have learned about this system that makes it so much different from other systems and training products is that it is not a “quick fix” or produce “immediate results.” Just to throw out one piece of advice for anyone who is browsing around looking for training products and systems: don’t buy into systems that claim to “instantly make you faster” or “help you achieve peak performance in such and such weeks” and so on. Reaching your true potential is not easy and will not happen overnight, especially if you are really training correctly. Sure, some systems may produce some immediate results through some “secret technique” that get you excited, but they cannot really help you attain your full potential.

My junior year was all about redesigning my muscular system. All sorts of new stimulus was being placed on my body, and it was beginning to change my stride. Over the course of several months, my hips and back began to loosen up, gaining new range of motion that I didn’t have before. New range increases the potential for power in the stride, so things were going well.

I decided to play football my junior year after taking my sophomore year off, and it was a good season for me, aside from the various muscle strains that seemed to bounce around various places in my body. Ultimately, I probably would have never been able to make it through an entire season being so tight in my hips except for the excellent training I was doing that helped me to quickly heal and continue playing. Just a side note, since coming back from college to resume my training with runwithpower almost 9 months ago, after being unable to run at college due to injury, I have been injury-free and feel better training and running than I have ever felt in my life.

Anyways, I played basketball that year too, and the transition from basketball to track is a difficult one, especially for a 400-meter runner. Basketball tends to tighten up the hips from all the loaded lateral demands. Yet, track was going well. The transition into track was much easier due to all the additional training that we had to do to try and maintain good hip mobility. My 200 time had dropped significantly, about a full second from the previous year. Before transferring I had been stuck around a 24.4, and right out of the gate as a junior, I had run a 23.5. My 400 time was coming down too. I had managed to run a 53 even, and that was becoming consistent. Then I had a big setback. Only two days before the first major meet, the Oregon Relays held at historic Hayward Field, our team ran at a low-key league meet, and I strained a hamstring running the last leg of the 4×1 relay. It had been a cold day, and after warming up well, the race was delayed a bit and I ended up standing around for a while getting cold. I actually jogged an embarrassing 60 second 400 two days later. 2 weeks later was districts. I actually did well there, running a 52.14 in the open 400 and a 51.5 split in the 4×400 relay. Unfortunately that was the end of my season.

So that sums up my junior year. I had definitely improved and was heading in the right direction, but just came up short on time in my opinion. I feel that if I had just had a couple more weeks of good weather, I might have actually jumped down into the low 51’s. I guess we’ll never know, right? Next post I’ll go through my senior year, and talk about my two MCL strains and how that affected my training significantly.

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I remember in 6th grade there was an 8th grader I knew, and he ran around a 65 second 400. The 5th and 6th graders had an elementary track team, and the 7th and 8th graders were the middle school team, and both teams ran at the same meets. I had run around 67 seconds in my 400’s to that point, but I remember the day when I tied his time with a 65 of my own, and that seemed like a major accomplishment. I think that was the point where I decided that I wanted to focus mainly on the 400. All through middle school, I ran mostly the 400, and varied running the 200 or the 800. I remember in 7th grade wanting to run under 60 seconds, but just coming short of that mark, running a 61 or 62. In 8th grade I made a big jump down to about a 57, which mostly can be attributed to physical growth and maturity. I had never really trained up to that point; track practices as a middle schooler and before were basically unproductive, and I’m sure if you have ever been on a small private school middle school track team, you know what I mean.

The summer before my freshman year was the time when my goal of running under 50 seconds really began to take form. Watching Jeremy Wariner run a 44 flat to win the 2004 Athens Olympics, as a 20 year old, really changed my entire perspective on the 400, track and field, and running. I just turned 20, and I have not yet reached my goal. I have gotten within a second and a half in the past 2 years, but this year I hope my training comes together perfectly and finally break the 50 second barrier.

Now you have a little background into my passion for running. In the next post, I would like to talk about my high school track career and the different phases of my training, the positive aspects as well as the setbacks, and how those affected my performance. Thanks for reading!

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