The overlooked triathlon skills every athlete needs with Alison Freeman

For starters, I was so thrilled that the clinic was received so well.

That just was really exciting.

Basically, the clinic and what we covered really stemmed from kind of where I have evolved to in my thinking about run form.

So I've been thinking about run form for probably 15 or 20 years, starting as an athlete myself, not being a naturally good runner.

And obviously everyone wants to be a better runner.

So started thinking about it as an athlete and how can I make myself a better runner? And then as I became a coach and you know, working with athletes directly than wanting them to be better runners.

And so there's a lot of things that I've read and learned and people that I've talked to about it.

And I've really, over this time, kind of honed in on a couple key things that I think are just foundational for improving our running.

And really that it all kind of focuses in on improving running efficiency and So if you're an efficient runner, then you're able to create speed with low effort.

Right.

And that's kind of that's the dream.

So so it's like, OK, so how do we get to run efficiency? And the way we get to run efficiency, one of the big ways we do that is through promoting energy return.

So energy return, you want to think about energy return as free speed, right? Like forward propulsion that you're not having to create on your own.

Yep.

Okay.

So the way we get to energy return is using a little bit of physics.

And I apologize because I am a little bit of a physics geek.

So the idea, yeah, the idea is that you land on the ground with your foot during your run stride, right? And so you land with this foot strike force.

And that force can be returned in one of two ways because we have that whole equal and opposite reaction thing going on.

And it's not either or, but usually a combination of two things.

So that force either gets absorbed into your leg that you landed on or it gets returned as forward motion.

Okay.

So that whole narrative, the whole conversation really is about how do we become efficient? How do we promote energy return and get a lot of that forward propulsion just naturally generated through our stride versus having to produce it ourselves? Right.

So that's kind of the driving force of what I think about as a runner, what I want my athletes to be thinking about, and what I brought to the skills clinic at Feisty.

And so one of the things that we focused on, there's a couple key principles that I like to look at.