Ground that potential energy is not dissipated by the spreading out of the shock wave, instead it's actually returned to your body because you didn't allow to like settle into the ground. So we are trying to remember that same concept, it's more like a tennis ball than silly putty. So we are staying as little time as we can in the ground.
Go to a race sometime, a running race, when you are not running if that ever happens. And go to like mile one of the race and the gun goes off and you watch all the runners coming at you and then by mile one, most of them are being spread out, you have people come through like in 04:45, you know the very first runners and then they will go all the way back to 15, 20 minutes before the last runners get to you.
So watch them come by or even better you just listen to them come by, if you listen to them come by, the elite runners will go by and it will sound like this -- as they are going by, there will just be this tiny little fast motion, it's kind of quiet sound as they go by and the farther back in the field you go as they come by the louder it gets. Until finally it is here and like elephants going by. So there is all this massive sound of people on their heels striking the ground, just massive sounds of feet striking the ground, even if you only had one runner going by that one runner running like a glob of silly putty would sound so different from that elite runner who went by, sounding more like a tennis ball.
This is what we want, we want to spend very, very little time on the ground. We don't want to spend much time there at all. We hit and you get off of it. It's like running on hot coals. Another drill you can think of when you are running. Think about running on hot coals. Your foot touches the ground, you get right off of it again, you don't spend anytime on the ground. Okay, last point is, it has to do with cadence and sometimes quite honestly this by itself makes everything else okay. This is sometimes just the quickest way to change somebody's running technique.
Get in the habit of watching runners run, and check their cadence. You are driving down a street some place and you see somebody running ahead, just kind of notice how quick their cadence is, now by cadence, it's kind of just like the same as on the bike. By cadence I mean, if I want to count my cadence running, I would count every time my right foot struck the ground, so that would be one, two, three, and I would count for one minute, that would be my cadence, it's the same as if I paddle on the bike, we do exactly the same thing to figure RPM on the bike, Revolutions Per Minute. So every time your right foot struck the ground we count it and that would give us RPM.
So kind of like check, see what other people are doing. Watch the elite runners sometimes on T.V. You watch a race on T.V.. Watch and see what the elite runners are doing, check their cadence, take your stopwatch and just watch an elite runner, pick an elite runner, and just count, every time that elite runners foot strikes the ground for like 15 seconds then multiplied by four, it's going to be over 90, I can guarantee you. In fact it was Kenyans, that will be 96 +/- 2, because they all run 96 +/- 2.
If it's somebody else, most American elite runners even, it's like 92 +/- 2. I watched the Boston Marathon this past spring, checked the cadence on the Kenyans, sure enough 96 +/- 2. First mile of the race, 26th mile of the race, 96 +/- 2. Watch the other people in the race, farther back they are so deemed to show you the other runners in the race as they probably want, they are not the lead age groupers count their cadence. You will find out it's usually like 75-85, at some place in that range. Much slower cadence, much slower cadence, remarkably slower. Why is that important? As your cadence slows down your vertical oscillation increases, the slower your cadence is, the more you bob up and down.
So when you get down in the 1970s you are going to be running like a pogo stick, you are running like this. A few years ago I was in a health club in the exercise room, where they got bikes and treadmills setup and they had got a bank of T.V.s and I am toward the back of the room sitting on a stationary bike spinning and I have got treadmill between me and the T.V. I am watching, long behold some tall guy gets on the treadmill, he is like 6.6 ft., gets on the treadmill and I can see the T.V. and then he starts running and I get to see the TV at a cadence of like about 75 RPM, his head was going up and down in front of the T.V., from the point where I can, where he is just standing where I can see it, to the point he obliterates the entire TV with his head on every strike. So I am seeing the TV just like every 75th second you know, every 75th of the second I get to see the TV.
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