Fleet Feet
Monday, February 4th, 2008
(Photo credit: AP)
To be honest, I didn’t watch much of the Super Bowl last night. I was otherwise occupied frantically plowing through two weeks’ worth of laundry and packing for a business trip that includes time spent in both Minnesota and California. Still, I feel ashamed.
The only stretch of the game I watched uninterrupted were those last 46 seconds, when New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady heaved a couple of desperate long bombs toward receiver Randy Moss. After witnessing those final, cling-to-the-armrest-suspenseful moments, I’m not sure my heart could have taken much more anyway.
While I’m not a huge fan of football — mainly because it just doesn’t occur to me to watch it — like my fellow EL senior editor Laine, I am a huge fan of perfection, so I had hoped the Patriots’ record would remain unmarred.
End result aside, I was moved by the tremendous effort Moss made to get open for his QB, and by the simple way Brady summed up his teammate’s efforts in today’s New York Times: “He ran so hard the whole game.”
Not only that, but as the last seconds ticked away, he still ran so dang fast, pulling away from his defenders with apparent ease. Pulling away, even, from the pass, which just could not get to where Moss was going.
But then, the gleam of speed is one of my favorite aspects of almost every sport. It’s always been that way in my family; my younger brother excelled at the facets of sport that required skill and patience, as did my mother, while my father and I ruled the raw end.
But is speed really hereditary? And how much can you do to get faster?
A couple years ago, I wrote an article on the topic of fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibers for Experience Life called “The Fast and Slow of It”, and although I recall the topic being much more complicated than we had space for, the case is essentially this: Most of us are born with a fairly even mix of fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibers, which means our talents regarding speed or endurance are determined mainly by the way we train.
Which is to say, maybe I just chased more butterflies than my little bro. But that chasing pays off, in terms of developing speed.
Last night’s game reminded me not to overlook the importance of adding in a little bit of speed training, even during the start-over stages of fitness I’m in now. As I think back on speed testing I’ve done at rugby tryouts over the years, my 40-meter-dash scores have certainly reflected how I’ve been training (or not), so I may as well start off on the right foot.
In a cursory mine of a bajillion speed-training results from various sources, including my favorite fitness site, Peak Performance, it seems much of the focus is on plyometrics (see basics here), overspeed training (and here), Olympic lifting (click me), and increasing stride length and/or rate.
So the goal, for me, will be to get back into shape gradually … but not necessarily slowly.
