The Olympic games in London have ended and this last week I was getting in as much track coverage as I could.  You saw Usain Bolt duplicate what he did in Beijing by winning 3 gold medals.  The first person to ever win the 100M and 200M in consecutive Olympics.  You witnessed Allyson Felix become the first American woman since Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988 to win 3 gold medals.

I didn’t get to watch as much as I would have wanted to since I was on vacation, but I did have some interesting observations in the brief time I was able to see some races.

The running mechanics for the distance runners and sprinters were almost identical.

When I first started track way back when, you would always hear that if you wanted to sprint you would run on the balls of your feet and if you were going to be a distance runner you would have a shorter stride and run more on your heels.  This was all supposed to conserve energy.  That isn’t true anymore.

I watched the 5000M on Saturday which Britain’s Mo Farah won.  He also won gold in the 10,000M earlier in the week.  At no point during the race were these distance runners on their heels.  These guys had fairly long strides and on the balls of their feet the whole time.  During the middle of the race, they were somewhat conservative with their arm swings.  But, during the last lap or two, they all were pumping the arms hard.  The same range of motion that a sprinter would have.  During the home stretch, if these guys weren’t 40 pounds lighter than the sprinters, you probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between these distance runners and the sprinters.

Watching Usain Bolt was pretty amazing, like it always is.  Standing 6′ 5″, he has an incredible stride length.  When he is at optimum speed, it can cover almost 10 feet.  In the 100M dash, he took around 42 steps to win the race.  The difference between a sprinter like Bolt and someone slower can boil down to one thing: a sprinter’s foot contact generates more force than a slower individual and doesn’t spend as long on the ground.

A slower runner can’t generate that force and spends more time on the ground during running.  Thus, that runner can’t acquire the stride length that a sprinter can and the stride rate is slower.  A slower runner can improve this by improving the strength and power in the lower body.

Here is something else that I read about the sprinters in these games.  Specifically, all the 100M gold medal winners in all the games.  This was taken from a piece in the The New York Times that showed a graphic of where all the gold medal winners from 1896 to 2012 would place if they ran against each other.

Usain Bolt would lead the race with his 9.63.  Carl Lewis with his gold medal times of 9.99 (1984)  and 9.92 (1988) would be 10 feet behind him.  Jesse Owens’s time of 10.3 (1936) would be 21 feet behind Bolt and Tom Burke who won the first gold in 12.0 (1896) would be 65 feet behind.  That is an indication how the training and nutrition has really changed these athletes for bigger and better things throughout the years.

What was also telling is the other graphic which showed today’s fastest 8 year-old ran the 100M in 13.46 seconds which would have been a second off of the bronze medal in 1896.  The current record for 15 and 16 year-olds is 10.27 which is faster than Jesse Owens and would have been good enough for a bronze medal as recently as 1980.

As much as we say that Usain Bolt is the best ever and no one will ever run faster, history indicates that this might not be the case.

Here was the final observation I noted as I was watching the male and female sprinters.  Boy those female sprinters looked jacked, ripped, shredded (insert adjective here).  Basically, their bodyfat was low and their muscle tone was incredible.

In fact, I thought they looked more ripped than the majority of the male sprinters I was watching.  Is that good or bad?

Anyways, going back to my first point, there was little to no difference between the form of the sprinters and the distance runners.  This should indicate to you that good running mechanics are necessary for any runner.  Work on that first, then you do the type of training you need for the length of your race.  And don’t be surprised in 10 years if we are talking about a sprinter who runs a 9.4 or 9.3.