Back in the early 20th century, Finland was a distance running powerhouse. It’s prize athlete, Paavo ‘The Flying Finn’ Nurmi, won nine gold medals at the 1920, 1924 and 1928 Olympics. Nurmi was renowned for his innovative training methods, one of which was his daily walk-and-sprint session. In many ways, the session can be seen as a microcosm of polarised training – the principle of doing most of your running easy and a small amount of it very hard. Here’s what you need to know to put it into practice yourself.
The Benefits
A fundamental principle of distance running is the importance of a strong endurance foundation. It’s likely that a high volume of walking played a part in that development for Nurmi, with a wide range of metabolic and cardiovascular benefits. The sprints provided an ideal counterpoint to this easy exercise, stressing his muscle fibres, tendons and neuromuscular system to ensure that he could still generate force quickly when racing. From an injury perspective, walking is significantly lower risk than running, as the impact forces are lower. As such, this is a session that you could perform multiple times a week.
The Session
Nurmi brought so many novel training approaches to running. However, a core foundation of his training was a daily walk, often of five or more miles, adding a handful of sprints. This is similar to adding in strides at the end of an easy run. Aim to do five or six sprints, getting up to around mile pace.
Adaptation for Mere Mortals
This is simply a case of ‘if it’s good enough for Paavo, it's good enough for me’. Of course, five miles might not be realistic for those with time constraints – so instead, think about the importance of daily activity, active commuting and day in, day out sustained low-intensity exercise as being a valuable part of your overall plan.
Rick Pearson is the senior editor at Runner’s World UK. He’s been with the brand since 2017 and loves testing PB-friendly shoes for on and off road. Rick is a sub-three marathoner, 4-something miler and once completed 100 miles in less than 24 hours. He occasionally likes to remind people of these feats on the Runner’s World podcast, which he co-hosts.
Rick’s running CV also includes racing a steam train over 14 miles (he won, narrowly) and a horse over a marathon (he lost, comfortably).
Tom Craggs is Runner’s World’s Head Coach. He’s also the World Class Programme Endurance Performance Lead with UK Athletics. As a coach and PT with more than 10 years’ experience, Tom has worked with beginners to elites, including Team GB distance runners and Paralympic medallists. In addition to his athletics coaching qualifications, Tom holds an MSc in Performance and Coaching and Reps Level 3 Advance PT qualification. He’s passionate about helping runners of all abilities to get the very best from themselves.
