This answer isn’t going to be the one most people want to hear, but it is the answer that will give you the results that you are after. If you want to run faster and longer without getting tired, you will have to train and condition your body to do so. This means performing cardiovascular exercises that are aimed to break your body’s plateau and limits. In other words, you need to train harder than you have before to get your body used to a new level of fitness and speed.
In this post, we provide actionable advice that you will be able to use so that you can run faster and longer without getting tired.
Set your benchmark by doing a 1-hour run.
You will need to run as quickly as you can for 1. You will use this as a benchmark for your training.
- Measure the following.
- The distance covered in an hour.
- Average speed (It’s handy if you have a training watch)
- Splits
- Average heart rate
Once a month, you are going to do another trial run to measure the improvements from the training that you have been doing.
Do endurance training.
The first thing you need to do is improve your endurance and cardiovascular strength by doing running. These runs will usually be tempo runs over a time duration.
You will need to condition your body to the sport that you are playing or the event that you are training for. If you plan to do an activity like soccer or rugby, you need to condition your body to run at a high intensity for 60-90 minutes. If you run the 400m, you need to condition your body to run at top speed for less than 1 minute. If it is 10km, then you will need to condition your body to run for 50 minutes or less at a high intensity.
You can only achieve this by training your body to run for longer durations at a higher intensity. This will involve a combination of tempo runs for time and tempo runs for distance.
When you are going for distance, you will be aiming to improve your time and you will measure your splits.
What kind of long endurance run should you be doing?
You should be aiming for a 1-2 hour long run at least once a week. Long distance runners measure their weekly running distance and it is common for them to run over 40km a week. (This should equate to around 4h worth of endurance running). You can use this as a benchmark and then scale up your endurance training from there.
Introduce fartlek training into your workout.
This involves running at different paces. However, your body won’t ever stop while you are running. Usually, it involves a combination of running at faster and slower paces. For example, you may run a 4km run with a combination of 1:10m splits on each 3rd 400m and the other 400m being run at 1:30m pace.
This will help you build your stamina and strength endurance.
The video below shows a good demonstration of fartlek training.
Interval training.
Interval training is the most powerful training that you can do to maintain your pace and minimise the deceleration when running. Top athletes will usually conduct intervals at 80-90% of their maximum performance.
Once you have your benchmark, you will be able to plan your interval training sessions.
Your initial recovery time may begin with walkback recoveries or 2-minute recoveries. Eventually, you will want to work up to less than 30 second recoveries.
You can see more about interval training in the video below.
Explosive training.
If you want to build your overall speed, you need to improve the power that you execute. To do this, you need to improve the strength and speed that your legs produce.
The best way to do this is to conduct plyometric exercises. We have provided more details on plyometric exercises here.
Increase your stride length.
Improving your stride length is a great way to increase your speed quickly. You can do this by improving the amount of power that you execute with each stride, accelerating off each stride and improving your ab and hip flexor strength.
You can conduct exercises that we have detailed here.
