Cadence

Getting back into the swing of the things this year and trying to dust off some old tricks along the way. It’s always amazing to me the stuff we swear makes us faster, but then stop doing.

For me one of the key ingredients to my success is easily run cadence and turnover. Don’t get me wrong, we all need to focus on cadence, but some runners do it more naturally than others. I am one of the “others” in this case.

The last couple weeks I have made sure to watch my foot pod numbers on my Garmin much closer. You can see in the screen shot below how the average pace per week is directly inversely related to my cadence. When cadence goes up, speed goes down, and vice versa.

I have all my athletes self-monitor run cadence. There isn’t an athlete I have worked with that hasn’t experienced quick gains by doing so yet it is one of the easiest things for me to start to ignore.

If you look at the 2 charts below you will see that one is a weekly look. It takes into account all the runs for the week as well as times I wore my foot pod. If you think about how hard it would be to drop 15 sec a mile on average in just three weeks based on pure fitness, it would take a lot of work. This was just my focusing on technique and skills.

 The other chart is showing my daily runs, which at times I forget to wear my foot pod but it shows you in more detail how important cadence is.