An introduction to running (Free)

Overview of Running Fitness

In a time where 250,000 people do Parkrun every week and there are over 2000 marathons to choose from worldwide each year, you may be excused for thinking that the world is a fit and healthy place. Unfortunately, this is not the case and the population is becoming more and more polarised in regard to fitness, where there is no longer much of a middle ground. People now tend to be very fit, or very unfit. By virtue of reading this article here on RunClever, you’ve answered the question of which side of that line you want to be on. Let’s take you back to back to how it all started to help you understand how running fitness for humans has evolved. There are 3 main phases of running fitness in human history and the last one may well surprise you with its relative modernness. Let’s begin an introduction to running…

1. Humans evolved to run

As most of you will know, all living things have been evolving for millions and millions of years, including humans. The most notable point for fitness in human history is 2-3 million years ago when humans evolved to be able to run significantly further in order to be able to hunt animals. This was called persistence hunting and ensured that not only could humans survive, but they would thrive.

At this point, there were of course no training programmes for would be hunters, it was a simple case of adapt or die. This is a classic case of natural selection, whereby only the stronger, fitter humans would survive, leading to the population as a whole being stronger.

2. First competitive running

Over the next few million years, humans generally, but not exclusively, started to rely less and less on persistence hunting, but the next challenge was just around the corner. As populations started to grow and countries and empires started to emerge, wars became commonplace. And to excel in battles, soldiers needed to be fit and strong. There are various stories as to how competition arose from these scenarios, but it seems that soldiers simply wanted a method of proving who indeed was the fittest and therefore toughest. Other ideas are that competition in certain parts of the world grew from religious festivals, however.

Around 2000 BC is when the first records of competition start to emerge with various foot races occurring across the globe. In 776 BC the first Olympic games were held, where Xenophanes famously stated that “Victory by speed of foot is honoured above all.”. From this point, competitive running spread throughout the world and became a mainstay across most cultures.

Did you know?

The first and most popular Olympic running event was the ‘Stade’ in which competitors ran in a straight line for around 192 metres.

3. Running as a common recreational activity

The mid 1960’s…. That’s right, running as we know it only started around 60 years ago. Before this point, it was unheard of for anyone other than a professional athlete to go running, doing so would have been considered absurd and socially unacceptable. Bill Bowerman’s book called “Jogging” in 1966 and Frank Shorter’s Marathon win in the 1972 Olympics are the two big events that running historians point to as the origin of modern running.

Like most things, the new social and fitness phenomenon first took off in the USA where an estimated 25 million people took up running in the 1970s. Hand in hand with this growth came the industry to cater for, and profit from runners with companies like Nike starting out to provide attire. The next couple of decades were a golden age for health as the rise in running for fitness led to plentiful facilities and coincided with healthy home-cooked food being a staple, walking being the norm and the world a safe place for kids to go out and play.

You may be wondering what this all means to you? Well in the past, as described above, running tracks were easily accessible, PE was a high priority in schools and the food available in shops was locally sourced and unprocessed. This meant that even if an individual didn’t focus on fitness in their own time, the general lifestyle that one would lead was one that would maintain your health, not diminish it. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, the closing of facilities, banning of PE and playground games and heavily processed foods filling supermarket shelves means that unless you make time for your health and fitness then it will start to drop off quickly and drastically.

Hence to have any chance of leading a healthy life in the 2020s, you need to make effort and focus on your fitness, as society is now set up to stop you. That’s where RunClever comes in, we are the only ones in the world who bring every single aspect of fitness into one place and give you the support and tools to achieve all your goals.

Routes in to Running Fitness

You will notice that here at RunClever were a little biased, believing that fitness (The ability to execute physical tasks and activities in the required manner without experiencing disproportionally adverse physical or mental strain) and particularly cardiovascular / cardiorespiratory (we’ll come on to those later too) can only be achieved through running; so we will happily use ‘Fitness’ and ‘Running Fitness’ interchangeably.

There are different ways to get into running fitness and RunClever provides the basis for all of them;

1. Educational Organisations

Schools, Colleges and Universities often have strong fitness programmes and provide the inspiration and opportunities for the younger section of society to get into running. RunClever is of course aimed at adults so it will only be University students still in education that may be reading this – So if you are… GET OFF FIFA, STOP DRINKING AND JOIN THE ATHLETICS SOCIETY!

2. Running Clubs

If you are still part of an educational establishment that has poor facilities or like most of the people here at RunClever and are a bit older than that and no longer have access to such facilities, there is likely one or more running clubs in your area. For those that struggle to motivate themselves or who want to make use of facilities a step up from your local mud bath they call the park, a running club can be the answer. They are often supportive, provide a social side and hire facilities such as running tracks. Although these days there will often be a void of coaching and development to actually get you fitter as you set out to.

3. On your own

This is how most people do it, just go out and run on their own in the local area – Well done to those of you that do. We love to see it and when our coaches are out and about and see someone new to running, they like to go and have a chat and see if there is anything they can help with. The problem is that when people go out to run for the first time, there is a lot more to consider than you may think and a lot of damage can be done quite quickly, which is where we try to help; we address everything you need to know to get into running, right down to the tiniest detail to make sure you get it right from day 1.

4. The rest…

Some people will hire personal trainers to get fit, where you can pay up to £150 an hour for a muscley man to shout at you about how you’re not ‘lifting to the max’. Sure, if you want to get bigger muscles and a lighter wallet that will help. But you’ll still be out of breath climbing the stairs and don’t even think about trying a 5km.

At RunClever we have reinvented personal training to focus on cardiovascular fitness and all-round health, always outdoors and always focussed on you.

What actually is running?

Running, jogging, sprinting, darting, dashing, galloping… The act of quickly moving your legs in a certain way, for a period of time has many different names. Alright, running and jogging are the main two! But the big question that is always asked is…

‘Is there a difference between running and jogging?’ – The answer is no – And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It’s something we will come on to later when looking at the running community, but there are a small amount, and it is only a small amount of people that want to feel superior and put others down, claiming that you’re only a ‘jogger’ if going less than a certain pace (usually doing around 10km in 1 hour). But as far as 99% of people are concerned, running and jogging can be used interchangeably.

You may now be wondering, if we’re dismissing this difference of pace based on snobbery, there might not be a difference between running and walking? Well, this is where you learn the first useful thing from RunClever, the act of moving your legs at pace can only be elevated from walking to running if both feet end up off the ground at the same time at some point during each cycle of movement.

Now for some good news that might reassure you about becoming a runner, humans evolved to run and run well. In fact, humans are the best endurance runners on planet earth. Of course, a cheetah or even dog would beat even the best sprinter over 100m but when we get to 26.2 miles (a marathon) upwards, not much can beat a human on land. How do we know this? The good people of Wales have a 22-mile man v horse race every year. 22 miles being the agreed upon point humans and horses running ability overlaps, anything below and a horse should win, anything above and the human should win.

This very same point applies within the confines of humans too, each of us is a different size and shape so each of us will excel at different sports and within running, different distances. A real-world example of this is comparing Usain Bolt to Mo Farah in their builds, muscle fibres and mentalities (we will come on to this important point later, but can you imagine Usain having the concentration to train for a marathon…. didn’t think so).

What we want to do is take people through everything they need or indeed might want to know about running and fitness from the first time you even think about putting on running shoes to breaking the 5000m world record (we can dream).