Like Steve Austin with a bellyfull of bad Taco Bell

[Not Stone Cold Steve Austin, you whipper-snappers. I'm talking about the Six Million Dollar Man.]

One of my favorite all-time pickup lines, one I have never used in combat but think would totally work anywhere but around runners, comes from Seinfeld. He says to this chick, "You may not know it by looking at me....but I can run really fast." The chick then ovulates and marries him because he's richer than Scrooge McDuck.

I figured out how to run really fast. And when I say "I figured out..." I mean that I read some advice from a bunch of other people and tried it out. Here's how you do it.

Move your feet really fast.

No, I am not drunk [yet.] This really works. Up to now, I had been running like a rhinoceros, plodding along heavily, with each foot on the deck until the last possible moment. Dumb and inefficient. I shorten my stride and move my feet faster; the net result is that I move down the road faster without a significant increase in effort [according to my HRM.] You know how in cartoons when the character is going to run away, and his feet spin out really fast, and there's that sound effect that sounds like a cross between a bongo drum and a jack-in-the-box? Move your feet like that. When I do it, it reminds me of what my fingers are doing when I walk my index and middle fingers over my lips really fast and go wooba-looba-leeba-looba-leeba-looba like I'm crazy. Kids love that.

For the longest time I thought that running fast meant you had to lift your knees and really stride it out. You know, like chickie-poo here. I never tried it with the bikini, but that's how I thought you had to run if you wanted to run fast. And I guess if you were sprinting to get my phone number, like Hilary Swank is in the preceding picture, perhaps this is how you ought to run. However, I learned this is a stupid way to run if you want to go any significant distance.

Distance runners gain speed by shortening their stride and increasing "turnover," which is fancy talk for the rate at which your feet go flappity-flap. You want references? Try any running book, running magazine, or running website because I am apparently the last guy to get the memo.

So I mount the treadmill last night armed with this new information, and I try it out. I try and minimize the time my foot is on the ground, shorten my stride, all of it. And the amazing part is that I ran about two minutes per mile faster than I had been. With my feet doing the Flintstone Flop, I actually started getting some speed going. I could not maintain that speed (~6.3 mph) for much longer than a mile, because I had not trained with that stride, but I can easily see me sustaining it indefinitely with a little practice.