Today I ran a hill circuit I created in Balboa Park in San Diego — a variety of bounding and sprinting drills to the top, turn left and jog to recover across the flat portion at the top, sprint down, turn left and sprint and across the flat portion at the bottom, and start the …
When I was five years old, I was sitting in my parents’ living room after an exhausting day of kindergarten. My twin brother was sitting next to me, drawing a picture. My mother, who was always interested in my brother’s drawing talent (she used to tell him that he should follow his childhood dream of …
Coach Jason’s Thanksgiving Fact of the Day Ever wonder what the difference is between your turkey’s white meat and dark meat? It’s the difference in muscle fiber types. The dark meat of your turkey dinner is composed of slow-twitch endurance muscle fibers and therefore contains lots of myoglobin (the protein that transports oxygen inside your …
With 5 weeks to go until the New York City Marathon, I’ve started to include some interval training in my marathon preparation. Once per week, I’m going to the track to push my heart rate to it’s maximum to attend to my VO2max. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Given the popularity of VO2max and it’s …
Do these 5 things to become a better runner: 1. Polarize your training. When you run easy, run very, very easy. When you run hard, run very, very hard. For a distance runner, hard doesn’t always mean faster. Hard can also mean increasing the volume of work performed at a given speed. Running for close …
I love the heart. When I speak at conferences, I often make the joke that, as a distance runner, I have a great capacity to love because I have a large heart. That one-liner always produces a few laughs from the audience (but has seldom helped me to get a date). One of the most …
There has been a lot of commotion lately about Tabata training. Everyone in the fitness industry is using it. It’s based on the research of Izumi Tabata and his colleagues at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Japan. The protocol they used, which was based on the training that Japanese speed skaters were …