A Journey Along the World's Great Treks

Race Walk Faster by Training Smarter is for the countless coaches who say they do not know how to coach race walking, and for every athlete interested in training for our great event. Our previous texts, Race Walk Clinic - in a Book and Race Walk like a Champion, explain the techniques of race walking, and the latter text contains a general overview chapter on how to train. However, that chapter alone is not enough to completely develop a systematic training schedule suited to your specific situation. The needs of youth, high school, collegiate, elite, and masters athletes vary based on physiology and racing schedules, and one chapter cannot cover all of these intricacies. Race Walk Faster by Training Smarter is an entire book devoted to training. We lay out the information required for a race walker to train at any level, and we assume no prior knowledge related to endurance training. The concepts are not hard to learn. Coaches of distance runners will find many of the concepts familiar - and not surprisingly, since race walking is an endurance event within the sport of track and field. The principles behind training a race walker are not much different from the principles behind training a distance runner for races of comparable length and time. Sure, race walkers take longer to complete the same distance, but concepts like periodization, proper recovery, and peaking all apply.