Mastering the Run-Through: A Key to Enhanced Performance and Injury Prevention

What exactly is a ‘run-through’? The name is derived from a component of a track athletes warm up where they do short, mild intervals to prepare them for the upcoming harder efforts in the main set of the session. These intervals end by ‘running through’ the finish line and gradually slowing to a stop. Suddenly coming to a stop is never advisable for any interval but especially not during a warm up.

Run-throughs are not only useful as a warm up tool for a hard track session. They are also good to do before a race, especially one which is going to start fast and hard. Jogging slowly for 10-15 minutes before a race will warm up the muscles and get the oxygen carrying blood circulating but it won’t prepare the legs for the aggressive contractions that are required by a hard start to a short race. During our warm up we should therefore also incorporate some run-throughs. 30-40 second intervals where we gradually increase our pace and effort from the warm-up jog to our expected race pace by the end. This will obviously not feel hard over such a short distance and we will allow complete recovery between each of these. Now the legs and body will be ready for that start and we’ll get nicely into our race pace and rhythm without shocking our system.

Run-throughs are also useful as a training tool. First up, in our pre-race run, the day before a big event. We should never have a complete day off from running on the day before an A-Race. Save that for two days out and then do an ‘activation session’ the day before to stretch out the legs and ‘wake up’ the body after a day of doing nothing. This pre-race session should obviously be easy as we don’t want to build up any fatigue that will hamper our performance during the race but we can add in 4-5 run-throughs towards the end of the run where we do as we will in the warm up on race day, gradually increasing pace from a slow jog to goal, race pace over 30 seconds or so. As for the race-day warm up, complete recovery with some walking and slow jogging should be done in between each one.

Run-throughs are also very good to add at the end of our weekly long run. Many runners make the mistake of running their long runs too hard. So, it is very important to make sure that we spend the hours in our endurance sessions at a nice, easy, aerobic pace. This does has a side-effect of leaving our legs feeling heavy and sluggish to finish and this can be alleviated by adding in 4-5 thirty second run-throughs at the end of the session. Here the emphasis should be weighed a lot more to starting nice and slow and just allowing the legs to stretch out through the course of the run-through, rather than trying to achieve too high a pace by the end. We just want to build to a pace that is a bit faster than our long run pace, resulting in a slightly longer stride length. We should find that our pace gradually increases through the set of 4-5 intervals as the legs ‘open up’ and we find our rhythm.

If we are training for longer events like marathons, this is a useful technique to practice running at our goal pace on tired legs at the end of a long session. It will also help to prevent the dreaded ‘plods’ that can result from endless weekly volume at lower speeds and effort levels.

When doing run-throughs we want to focus heavily on our form and posture. This is more important than the speed we achieve and heart rate is irrelevant over such a short space of time. We want to focus on running tall, with a straight line running through our neck, down our spine and on through the hips. Our stride should be snappy with light contact with the ground and we are looking for a good pull-through from the hamstrings, hips and glutes to generate a good stride length and efficient forward motion. We are not sprinting though. Our arm carriage should be the same as when we are racing. Nice and relaxed shoulders and arms without excessive swing.

Adding in 4-5 strides at the end of our weekly long run and the one or two easy ‘recovery sessions’ in the week will make a significant difference to our running form and contribute significantly to preventing overuse injuries that stem from bad running posture resulting from fatigue.