Cadence data has made distance runners look alike

Every watch reports steps per minute, every runner drifts towards the recommended figure, and a useful variety of styles is quietly disappearing.

A decade of wrist devices reporting turnover has produced a curious cultural effect. A single number got repeated widely enough to become a target, runners nudged themselves towards it, and the range of running styles you see in a club session narrowed. Everyone is now approximately the same, which is not obviously an improvement.

The number itself came from observation rather than from theory. Somebody counted the steps of elite runners in a championship race, found the values clustered high, and the finding travelled as advice. But those athletes were running considerably faster than a club runner, and turnover rises with speed for everybody, so applying a figure measured at three minutes a kilometre to somebody running at five is a category error that has been repeated so many times it now sounds like a rule.

There is a defensible core, which I have argued elsewhere. Landing with the foot closer to under the hips reduces braking and load, and for a runner who overstrides, raising cadence achieves that. Fine. The error is treating the recommended figure as a destination rather than a direction. A runner with long legs and good elastic tendon properties may be perfectly efficient several steps a minute below it, and forcing him up will cost him energy for no return.

The part that bothers me more is what uniformity does to racing. Middle distance running used to include people who could change gear by changing shape, dropping into a longer, more aggressive stride for a lap and daring the field to follow. That is a weapon, and it depends on having more than one gear rather than a single optimised cadence held for the whole race. A runner drilled to hold a fixed turnover has trained the variability out of himself.

I would like to see coaching that goes the other way for a season. Deliberately run at several cadences. Learn what the body does at each. Build the ability to shift, because a race is not a steady state and the moments that decide it are exactly the moments where the steady state breaks.

The watch is measuring an average. Races are won in the departures from it.