I don’t know about you, but I’m all too familiar with those ‘I’m just not built to run that fast’ thoughts – do you know the ones? Another common one being ‘look at them, they’re just made for it’ as someone runs past you like a duck through water. If you’ve never had those thoughts – count yourself as one of these people that others are admiring 😉
For most of us, running isn’t that easy. In fact, it’s hard. And that’s part of the reason we get such a buzz from it. But in a world of chatter, social media and mega challenges it can sometimes seem like people are constantly doing more than us, running faster or running further. And it doesn’t help when many people’s first reaction to ‘I just had a great 5k run’ is ‘how fast did you do it in?’ – do they even care or is just what we say nowdays?
Our modern society has developed a focus on speed and pace, as though the faster you cover a distance the better runner you are. Sure, if you’re an elite or professional athlete and someone is literally paying you to hit paces. But for the rest of us, we determine our own running success. However, it can be hard not to notice people on Strava, Instagram or Facebook posting their times and comparing them to our own.
Personally, I don’t post my paces and times that often on Instagram, I just don’t think it’s that relevant. But I do notice other peoples – and trust me, there is a lot of people whose easy run pace is a lot faster than my tempo pace. Who can maintain a quicker pace than my fastest pace over a half marathon distance. Who I’d feel like I was ‘too slow’ to go on a run with.
I know that a lot of this is down to training and lifestyles, but as I’ve been thinking about this recently what I’ve become more interested in is the natural differences in our bodies and how this affects our base abilities. Of course, we can all get better, stronger and achieve more in our own ways – but there is a starting point that our bodily make up determines for us.
Here are some reasons why different people naturally run at different speeds:
(Spoiler: they’re all physiological and/or genetic and we can’t change them!)
- Your personal balance of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibres (the former being relied upon for faster, explosive movements and the latter for endurance)
- Your height and the length of your legs will determine how big your stride is
- The capacity of your lungs
- Your genetic flexible ability
- Proportion of your limbs relative to each other and other key joints such as your hips
- Your metabolism
- Your genetic tendon and ligament strength
- Your genetic build, perhaps making you prone to things such as flatter feet and knock knees
- The amount of oxygen your body naturally takes in whilst exercising
- Your natural and healthy weight and proportion of lean muscle mass
- If you’re a woman – you have breasts! They are a permanent extra weight to run with. The average bra size in the UK is a 36DD apparently, which can be an additional 1kg of weight. There is some fascinating research Brooks did which looks at the relationship between bra size and marathon finishing times. It finds that finishing times can increase by 4-9 minutes for each increase in cup size!
Of course there are tonnes of training and lifestyle factors to consider too, but that’s for another time. Here I just want to show that there are genuine reasons why we run the way we do and not as someone else does.
It is, quite literally, the beautiful and individual way that builds every single one of us. Imagine if we were all the same – snooze. So next time you’re envious that person on Instagram runs their ‘easy’ runs at your all out fast pace, or faster (!), give them a like, comment or round of applause and commend their efforts.
Humans are actually some of the greatest endurance animals on this planet. We are essentially born to run over distance (check out the book) and we evolved over time to be better at that movement. If you can walk, you can jog, and if you can jog you can run.
Of course none of us HAVE to run. We choose to, usually…! So choose it because you love it and don’t wonder why you run differently, faster or slower to others. Enjoy improving your own goals, relative to you and only you – compete with yourself 😊
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