24 Run Training Like a Navy SEAL

Special Operations training involves running, and lots of it. In this episode we talk with Naval Special Warfare's director of fitness how to run for maximum effect. For more info check out www.sealswcc.com.

00:22

Intro: I’m Daniel Fletcher. Today we bring back the Director of Fitness for Naval Special Warfare, Mike Caviston, to cover a very important aspect of NSW: running. His advice on training, form, and commonly held misconceptions is crucial if you’re planning for a career in Naval Special Warfare, but also helpful for anyone who strives to be a more efficient and effective runner. Let’s get started.

00:48

DF: Thanks for coming back and speaking with us. We’re going to do a deeper dive about running in general. You know, we all do it, civilians, we do it as kids, it’s got some universal appeal to say the least. So, thanks for sitting down with us again.

01:00

MC: My pleasure, looking forward to it.

01:02

DF: We’ll start off by having you just give a brief history of your employment before coming to work where you do now.

01:10

MC: Well, before I came to the center, I was a coach and a teacher. I was at the University of Michigan, and I worked with a number of athletes in different sports, but primarily I was a rowing coach. I was a competitive rower myself, and I got into coaching. And while that was unfolding, I went and got my graduate degree at U of M in kinesiology, and I began teaching, and so I spent about 22 years as a rowing coach and 14 of those years as a lecturer in kinesiology.

01:36

DF: So, you have an extensive background, obviously, it’s awesome to be able to talk to you about this because I think this is something that is personally interesting to me. I’m a runner, and my father is a marathon runner, and so he kind of got me into running pretty early. We all think we know how to run, but in your view, what percentage of active runners are actually doing it correctly?

01:54

MC: That’s a hard question to answer. It’s hard to definitively say what correct running is, and I try not to get too caught up in that when I’m talking to people. I was just working with a group earlier today, the recent class that completed Hell Week, and they’re going through what we call Walk Week, and I’m trying to help them get back literally on their feet so that by next week, a couple of days from now, they can get back into regular training and pass their timed four-mile runs. And so, we review a lot of running technique and give them some running drills and help them get through the aches and pains that accumulated during Hell Week so that they’re feeling a little bit better about themselves. And that’s one of the things I stress to them, is that there’s no absolute right or wrong way to run, but I can give them some guidelines and some things to think about and especially for people that are sort of on the borderline. You know, they’re not the greatest runners, or maybe they’ve been running, and they keep getting injured, and they’re trying to figure out why, then I’ll give them some technical things to think about. But everybody’s built different, everybody has a different body type, everybody has a different training background, so I’m a little hesitant to say, “Oh, this is the correct way to run.”

02:54

DF: Right, and that’s because of you’re saying physiologically people’s differences although we may look very similar…

02:59

MC: Or, or we don’t all look that similar, so we get a wide variety of people here, you know, some football linebacker types that if they didn’t have to go through BUD/S, I wouldn’t have them run more than two or three miles a week. We also get people that were actually very competitive cross-country runners, and so, yeah, they’ve got a runner’s body, and they’ll do very well running. But as a mix of people, people that were primarily swimmers or water polo players, maybe they’re good athletes, but they haven’t really spent the years building up the bo(continued)