It is no secret that RUNNING is the key to success when it comes to improving your ability to RUN.  While strength training is a vital component to get faster, if you aren’t actually practicing the skill of running, you will not improve. Tom Brady didn’t develop the ability to throw tight spirals by solely doing wrist curls – he practiced the actual skill repeatedly over time.  Without that regular, practical, application of the skill in practice, he’d just have strong, well-defined forearms! Great for bodybuilding, not for quarterbacking. 
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Point being, if you want to improve your running, RUN!  As athletes, unless you are a bodybuilder, powerlifter, or weightlifter (Olympic lifts), strength training is a tool that supplements your actual activity and makes you better at whatever it is you’re trying to improve upon.  Whether that is running, riding a bike, or tossing your kid as high in the air as possible while freaking your spouse out (my personal favorite), the time spent strength training is utilized to improve our abilities at all of those things. 

So how do we balance the two?

There are many ways technology can help make us better runners. From Fitbits, to Bluetooth headphones, to heart rate monitors, there really has never been more technology and data available to us than there is right now.

That's great, right? It is...but only if you're using that data to your advantage. While real-time results are great for singular workouts, your devices really pay off when you're able to analyze your workouts over time, allowing you to gauge real progress (or regress when life gets in the way). The lesson being, take advantage of your data by recording each workout. Or put another way: if you have all the gear, make sure you have an "idear" of what those (often) expensive devices are doing for you.

Olympic Gold and Silver medalist Frank Shorter once said: “Hills are speed work in disguise.” As coaches who have grown up and gone to schools at places that always seem to be at the top of a hill, we can’t agree enough with Frank that hills should be an important part of your training routine. The best part about hill training is that depending on the length and grade of the hill you are running on, and the time and intensity your training plan calls for, you can accomplish many different workouts. One of the biggest advocates of hill training was famous coach Arthur Lydiard. He used hill repeats to great success when training his athletes for races from the 800 meters to the marathon. We have listed a few different benefits of hill work that you can do reap in your training right now to make yourself stronger:

When I was in high school, I was a track and cross-country athlete.  I was not a large kid.  And when I graduated back in 2002, at a height of 5’9 ½ (don’t you dare short-change me that half-inch!), I was 140 pounds and that was a direct result of my awesome two-day a week weight room regimen of two sets of bicep curls and three sets of talking with my friends.  And while I wasn’t the fastest in the country, in the state, or even on my own team, I could run a pretty quick 5K despite my lack of strength training.  Fast forward to college, where I spent the majority of my first four months in the weight room and the cafeteria, which resulted in a 35lb weight gain by the time Thanksgiving came around.

As you can tell from this story, my goals and focus in high school were different from my goals and focus in college.  As a high school cross-country athlete, my goals were to be best distance runner possible and I felt that lifting was a barrier to achieving that.  When I entered the world of collegiate track and field, my goal was to gain muscle mass and strength to make myself stronger and more explosive for multi-event competitions like the Decathlon. Now that I’m a coach, I realize that my biggest mistake was thinking that strength training meant abandoning my ability run distance! I used to believe that weight training had no place for endurance athletes and the only strength gains that were important were the adaptations that took place during a run.  This was a mindset that I, and many other distance runners, had despite the overwhelming scientific evidence disproving this theory.