26/07/2026
If I bought you a Ferrari, would you fit it with bicycle wheels?
This is exactly what many of us runners do with our bodies (not Ferrari’s unfortunately 😜…)
We can spend months building an aerobic engine but never strengthen the body that’s responsible for putting that fitness onto the road.
Your fitness is the engine.
Your strength is the tyres, suspension and brakes.
Without them, all that horsepower is harder to use.
I’ll tell you something most runners never think about
Running is brilliant at improving your cardiovascular fitness, but it’s a poor way of building physical strength.
It asks the same muscles, tendons and joints to absorb thousands of impacts, over and over again, using the strength you already have.
A strength session does something completely different.
It increases your ability to produce force, absorb force and control force.
Why does that matter?
Because every running stride is a controlled single leg landing followed by a powerful push off.
If you can produce more force into the ground, you can travel further with each stride without necessarily working harder.
If you can absorb force better, your joints and tendons take less of a beating, helping you recover quicker and stay consistent.
Here’s another way to think about it, imagine two runners with exactly the current ParkRun PB time
One is significantly stronger.
Who do you think is more likely to hold their form long into a longer distance run or race?
Who is less likely to leak energy through collapsing hips, excessive movement and tired legs?
Usually, it’s the stronger runner.
That’s why strength training isn’t about becoming a bodybuilder.
It’s about becoming economical.
Small improvements in running economy, repeated over thousands of strides, can make a huge difference by the end of a race.
So before adding another few “easy” junk miles
Think about if you’d get more from another slow run or from building a body that gets more from every single run I already do?
Build the engine.
But don’t neglect the parts that transfer that engine’s power to the road.
That’s where stronger, faster and more resilient runners are built.
Need help with your training? Drop me a message, I’d love to hear from you 🏃♂️ 😁
