I volunteered to do some coaching as part of the FRA Junior Do. Along with Steve Pearson, we had a group of 8 U18/U16 girls and 1 U16 boy. Many of the girls were England or GB internationals.
Steve lead a warm-up, with some silly skips and carioca. I then did a session on the high knee drill, starting with the correct position whilst standing, then 3 steps to a standing balance before moving forward on the drill. There was a wide range of skill level in this, despite the fact that they all did the drill at some point in their training. I extended the drill to a running version, that allows them to elongate their stride whilst still doing the drill. This tends to make them look like track runners!
Steve did some further drill work before we moved onto some downhill running.
We started on a quite gentle, if slightly rough descent. On the first run down we just observed. Rather surprisingly, the descending styles were quite nervous and tentative. The second run down I got them leaning forwards and backwards, so that they could tell the difference in speed between the two. They then did another run down leaning their whole bodies gently forward. This showed them generally overstriding. We talked about what happens when the foot lands in front of the centre of gravity – braking. They the tried running with slightly shorter strides. They all look better. After a few more goes at this they tried running down a steeper slope a couple of times.
After this there was a talk by Andi Jones about his running. His training blog is here. It’s quite interesting if you want to know how to run 120 miles per week.