The Masters Athlete Series: Sprinting for the Long Run

After telling you to go for walk instead of a run (at least every once in a while), I am now telling you somewhat counterintuitively that old women and men should sprint.

Most older athletes get automatically cornered into the long-distance type of running. There are two problems with it especially if you are a beginner and/or not doing any other sport/cross-training:

1. You already need a base fitness to run (and not the other way around) – jogging alone does not sufficiently improve your fitness without some additional type of strength training
2. The repetitiveness, time-intensive nature and chronic stress of endurance type running can lead to frequent injuries, fatigue and the wrong hormonal milieu for an aging human being – triggering stress hormones instead of the desired anabolic growth hormones to counteract muscle loss

Let me suggest an alternative ingredient to your program – even though I am usually the only one doing them (at least at my age) even when on the track: do some sprints as well.

Before we go at the why and how a word of caution: with the popularity of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) many of you might say that you already go to the track once or twice a week and run fast. Running 400m repeats with short and incomplete recoveries or some type of the popular 4*4 minute repeats is not sprint training because you run at fast but sub-maximal speed (for the nerds: around 85% of maximum heart rate and in between the lactate threshold 2 and V02max) and not all out at maximum speed. High-intensity training has its place as well, especially for competitive athletes in preparation for the competition phase, but needs to be dosed very carefully for the average athlete because it is very costly in recovery terms.

Sprint training is different and when I started sprint training, I had to seriously unlearn some endurance type-habits such as

• learning that it might be worthwhile to properly warm-up for 20 minutes to prepare for the acute stress of a session
• learning that distance does not equal work: a typical session for me could well be an extensive warm-up, 5 flying 50 meter sprints, some strides, a short cool-down and me going home after 45 minutes
• learning that the real cost of sprinting is not only muscular but neurological as well. In order to really go at maximum speed and with good techniques, you need to take to 2-3 minute breaks, something that gets you funny stares from the leisurely joggers on the track as you seem to be spending most of your time walking up and down the track

The benefits are amazing though and include health, performance and mood:

1. Health: one of the key problems to fight for the masters athlete is sarcopenia or the loss of muscle mass as a result of aging. There are two types of muscle fibers, slow and enduring (type I) and fast, powerful but fast-exhausting (type II). You tend to lose type II or fast fibers at a faster rate than type I fibers, which is why many older athletes prefer endurance type activities because their performance in these activities does not decline as much. Wrong answer though because you use it or lose it. There are only two ways to properly recruit type II fibers: sprinting or heavy weights. Many people do not have access to a full Olympic weightlifting set-up (and are not properly trained in its technique) and might be afraid of heavy weights but everyone can find a grass patch for some sprinting (and knows the basic technique already). Also, there is a significant neurological component to sarcopenia, i.e., it is not only the number and size of your muscle fibers but also the brains ability to recruit as many as possible of them. There are few more explosive, powerful movements that involve a coordinated contraction of all major muscular chains than sprinting (other than possibly Olympic lifts again which are beautiful, powerful but difficult)
2. Performance: Even if you are an endurance runner, sprint training improves your running economy and makes you faster even at sub-maximal speeds. In my view, the benefits go beyond the weight room as they are more specific and in particular address the elastic and energy-returning properties of the entire movement apparatus (joints, sinews, connective tissue) and not only improved muscle mass. Still, improved muscle mass is a side benefit, just look at legendary sprinters and masters sprinters and how much better they look than pure endurance athletes
3. Mood: First of all, it feels great to be sprinting and lets you travel straight back to early childhood and/or that exhilarating feeling of running away from the teacher/police/neighbor when you were a little older. Secondly, the recovery cost are actually very modest. I definitively cannot do more than one such work-out a week, but feel surprisingly fresh both right after as well as on the next day, which you can use for any other work-out. Also, to add a little female perspective to our oftentimes overly male dominated sphere of masters athletics: sprint interval training seems to be particularly suited to counteract some of the specific side-effects of menopause.

All nice and fine but is sprinting not dangerous and prone to lead to injuries? Indeed, you need to ease into it like all new activities and deal with the exercise paradox that goes far beyond sprinting: while sprinting can lead to injuries such as hamstring tears the best protection against it is being a well-trained sprinter and doing resistance training.

Here is a great practical resource that helped me in getting started. It is a guide to sprinting for general fitness from the track team at Altis.

The Evolution of Running: Before running, there was Lucy

Lucy as she is commonly known (her real scientific name is AL 288-1) is still hailed as possibly the oldest direct ancestor of the human species. Her skeleton was found in 1974 in Ethiopia and is estimated to be 3.2 million years old. 

Australopithecus afarensis – forensic facial reconstruction. Cicero Moraes

Lucy became famous because the features of her skeleton presented clear evidence that she had been walking upright and also provided further proof that humans first evolved out of Africa.

In other ways though, Lucy still was more like an ape. Her diet was likely vegetarian as indicated by her conical and ape-like rib-cage with space for a larger stomach and intestine to digest large volumes of plant matter.

Also, her brain was relatively small (500cc) and not significantly different from her ape relatives and – bipedal as she was – she certainly was not a runner.

In 2004, Daniel Liebermann, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a passionate runner himself, published a paper in Nature that changed our view on human evolution as humans developed a capability to not only walk but run for long distances at a time.

He describes that at around 2 million years ago, three things happened in parallel in our evolution as early humans: we started eating meat, our brains started to grow significantly and we developed anatomical and physiological adaptations that made us particularly good runners.

His hypothesis simply is that running is what makes us uniquely human and that running allowed our brains to grow.

The basic argument goes as follows. Humans have developed some specific features that allowed them to be skilled endurance runners such as: 

1. Early humans first showed “springy” feet (an arched foot, long Achilles tendon, closely packed bones in the foot and short toes) that allow for the return of energy from the impact of landing to push off and thereby reduce the energy cost of running
2. They also developed various mechanisms for stabilizing the head during running to counteract the significant vertical forces – you can easily observe these forces when running behind someone with a ponytail which is bobbing up and down while the head is perfectly stable
3. In addition, they had a slim torso, a narrow waist but wide shoulders and short arms – not very good for climbing trees but excellent for the necessary counter rotation of the head, arms and pelvis versus the trunk when running
4. They grew big muscles on the butt (despite them not being of much use in walking)
5. And very importantly, early humans developed superior temperature regulation by having sweat glands all over the body and a slim and naked torso which allows them to run even when it is hot

As a result, early (and current) humans can run for a long time at speeds that require four-legged animals (like the gazelle we would like to hunt) to have to gallop. Usually, quadrupeds cool down by panting as they lack sweat glands. Galloping though does not allow animals to pant and so they overheat if they have to gallop for extended times. 

Which leads us to persistence hunting, a form of hunting up until very recently still practiced by some indigenous populations like the Kalahari in Southern Africa. A group of people try to jointly outrun an animal preferably in  the middle of the day when it is particularly hot. The animal needs to rest to cool down but is tracked down again by the hunters who keep chasing it until it collapses from heat exhaustion (usually after the runners have covered a distance anywhere from a half-marathon to a marathon) and the hunters can easily kill the animal even without sophisticated tools or weapons. 

If indeed early humans were able to use their running skills to kill animals they could eat its meat. Meat has a much higher energy density than a pure plant based diet which in turn allowed brains to grow. Brains are expensive organs to maintain as they use a constant and high amount of energy independent of activity even when we are resting.

Therefore, having a more energy rich diet meant that we could afford a bigger brain that uses up this energy. As a consequence, it is easy to see how running started the feed-forward cycle of brain growth that was to follow over the next 2 million years. 

Indeed, you can still try persistence hunting at home (even if I would not recommend it) — Michael Baughman, an avid outdoors enthusiast and runner in 1978 wrote an article for Sports Illustrated about running down a deer close to his home in Oregon. When interviewed years later on his pursuit, he neatly summarized all the characteristics about this most ancient of human pursuits referring to the advantage of an open landscape (just like the African Savannah of our ancestors) for tracking the animal which outruns you on shorter distances as well as the advantage of the heat which we can take much better than the animal:

The country I did it in was quite open, with occasional willow thickets and fairly gentle hills. It was almost always possible to see for hundreds of yards. Deer are like sprinters, and a conditioned distance runner should be able to exhaust one if the country is open enough. It took about four hours, and I estimate I ran about 15 miles. It was also about 80 degrees on that day, which probably helped because deer do not do well in the heat.

For today’s runners, there are a few key lessons to learn from our ancient relatives:

1. What is good for our survival in evolutionary terms usually feels good as well – that is why easy running gives so much pleasure 
2. There is an intimate connection between endurance running and cognitive performance – given how difficult it is to track an animal when doing persistence hunting, running sharpens the mind and leads to better thinking (not only a stronger heart)
3. Also, do not be afraid to take a break and walk (some call it extensive interval training) – while there is something magical about the long-distances our ancestors ran, they did so while taking frequent walking breaks to relocate the animal and probably ran at no more than 70% of full capacity when hunting (and at very different speeds than when running away from a lion). Also, they usually did not run on consecutive days but only for 1-4 days a week. So do not feel bad about taking a walking break when running (especially if you are an older runner of today as taking a walking break greatly helps recovery) and do not forget to take your days off
4. Last but not least, running always used to be a social activity as these persistence hunters never hunted alone. Enjoy going for a run with your friends (and do not only sign up for an app that pretends to replace those social aspects), find a training partner, sign up for a running event or even better organize one yourself.