Sacramento Running News

Can you really get fitter in 10 seconds?

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology that purported to have found the secret sauce for training.

You could, the authors say, knock some serious time off your races  by reducing your mileage and running some short, but crazy-fast intervals.

While interesting, I wondered, really, was there something new under the sun? How different was this from normal interval training?

Can you really get something for nothing?

Steve Magness, writing at The Science of Running, pokes any number of holes in the research methodology and findings of the original study.

So the results in this study should not be surprising.  It took a bunch of people used to running easy mileage, and added some intensity.  You would expect massive improvements.  Yes, they dropped the volume, but with runners running so little that’s not going to matter a whole lot over 7 weeks.

Maybe there aren’t any magic formulae. Maybe the reason the elites run so much is because you’re going to have to if you want to run as fast as you can.

Maybe I can’t get fabulous abs in ten days.

The fortunate thing for most of us is that running is fun. With the right group, even running intervals is fun. I wouldn’t cut down my mileage unless I had a really good reason, and fortunately, it looks like I still don’t have a really good reason.