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DEEP DIVE
A subscriber asked me this week whether he needs a synthetic track to train sprinting properly. It is a common question, and the answer is no.
But the reason is worth understanding, because a track does one job better than anything else.
Start with what a track is genuinely for.
On a firm synthetic surface, in spikes, the ground gives you energy back on every stride, and the grip is total, so you can run absolutely flat out without holding anything in reserve.
That combination is the only way to reach true top-end speed, and the only place you can practise starting out of blocks the way you will race. If you want to run your fastest, you want a track. There is no getting around that.
So the track matters. But look at how narrow that job actually is.
Top-end speed in spikes, and block starts. Everything underneath it, your acceleration, your power, your speed endurance, and the sheer volume of running that builds and holds all of it together, none of it needs a track at all. Most of it is better done somewhere softer.
To see why, you have to notice that the very thing that makes a track fast is also what makes it punishing.
That energy coming back to you off a hard surface, through a stiff spike, is force. Your shins, your Achilles and your feet have to absorb every bit of it, stride after stride, session after session.
It is the same return that flatters your times on race day, and it is quietly hammering your lower legs every time you train on it.
Do a full week of hard running on the track and you will feel it there before you feel it anywhere else.
Which is why the surface you race on is not the surface you should do most of your training on. And that is not a compromise you settle for when you cannot get to a track. It is how the best sprinters in the world already train, on purpose.
The Jamaican groups that produced Asafa Powell and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce do the bulk of their year on a grass track, in flats, and only move across to the synthetic surface in the weeks before they need to be sharp.
For them, grass is not the fallback. It is the default, and the track is the thing they visit at the end.
There is a second reason grass earns that place, and it runs against the obvious.
Because a soft surface gives you less back, your muscles have to make up the difference. On a track, a good chunk of each stride is handed to you for free by the surface. On grass, you have to produce it yourself.
The free energy that helps you on race day is doing you a quiet disservice in training, because the whole point of training is to make the engine work, not to have the ground work for it. An athlete grinding out accelerations on grass is getting more out of each one, not less.
I will not oversell the health side of it. The research on surfaces and injury rates is genuinely messy, and I am not going to promise you that grass keeps you healthy.
But sparing the legs where you can is basic coaching, and there is one line even the messy research agrees on.
Keep full-speed sprinting off concrete and tarmac completely.
That is a straight road to shin and Achilles trouble, with nothing on the other side to make it worth the risk.
So the whole thing gives you a simple way to run your surfaces.
Do your acceleration and your speed-strength work on grass, or on a hill if you have one nearby. A hill is hard to beat and it costs nothing. It forces the drive mechanics you want, it loads the legs honestly, and it does almost none of the impact damage that flat-out running on a hard surface does.
Do all of your tempo and easy volume on grass too, in trainers.
You will run a shade slower and take a lot less pounding, and on the easy days that make up most of your week, that is exactly the trade you want.
Then save the track, and the spikes, for the work that genuinely needs them. That means your true top-end speed and your block starts, and mostly in the weeks when you are sharpening for a race.
If you have no track at all, do not let that stop you for a second.
A flat, safe stretch of grass and a straight hundred metres will build very nearly the whole sprinter.
Walk it first for ruts and holes, keep your fast running off the concrete, and get yourself onto a proper track when you’re training in spikes.
And if you do have a track, take the more useful lesson from all of this. You are almost certainly on it too much.
Training mostly on the surface you race on feels productive, but it quietly beats your legs up for no extra return. The best in the world do the reverse. They build on grass and use the track when it counts.
A track is where a sprinter gets shown off, not where one gets made. If you have not got one to train on, don’t let that stop you from training. If you have, use it for the job it does best, and do the correct work where it belongs.
A note on Stephen Francis
While I was putting this weeks newsletter together, I saw the news that the sport lost one of it’s greats. Stephen Francis, the coach who built Jamaica's MVP club and guided Asafa Powell, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Elaine Thompson-Herah and so many more to the top of the world, died earlier this month at age 64. A huge amount of how the best sprinters train today carries his fingerprints. Thoughts go out to his athletes, his family, and everyone at MVP. Thank you, coach.