I do not believe there is any more functional (applicable to real life) strength a person can develop than running.

Happily, running is the most popular exercise regimen in the world and the most heavily participated recreational athletic event. Sadly, the way it is practiced, encouraged, and dogmatically taught is almost exactly wrong.

My corrective guidance on running begins thus: beyond the most elementary conditioning, endurance running is counterproductive. By ‘beyond elementary conditioning,’ I mean after an untrained non-athlete has developed the ability to run one mile / 1600 meters in less than nine minutes for men, less than ten minutes for women.

Once this basic level of running ability and confidence has been achieved, anyone who aims to use running as a fitness mode should replace jogging or distance running with sprinting.

The vast majority of people hate running, but want the results of greater aerobic capacity, higher metabolic rate (fat burning), and a sexy body. If this describes your attitude towards running, the following wisdom will be bittersweet. The bad news first: you have to work harder. The good news is, you need to spend a lot less time running. The really good news — you can achieve all the benefits of traditional running and a whole lot more with less running, less time, and more enjoyment.

(A less appreciated ancillary benefit — your running will be more purposeful, more intense, require more concentration, all of which makes it more involving. The ‘performance metrics’ (how you measure your progress or ability) also are more fun, and the rewards will be quicker: it’s much easier to measure your progress on a 400 meter run than on a 10K or 1/2 marathon, you can repeat it more quickly, and with less training- and life- schedule accommodation.)

Once You Can Crawl, Do This

If you are considering or already have a traditional running regimen, drop it and replace it with shorter workouts like the following three examples:

1. 4 x 400 meter sprints with 2-4 minutes rest between each
2. 4 x 800 meter sprints with 4-6 minutes rest between each
3. Tabata sprints, which will very closely resemble the “windsprints” you may have used in sports training.

When you’re ready for more variety, training in 100 meter and 200 meter sprints will develop yet more explosive power and add new metrics to test yourself on — which itself is engaging. Sprinting power is what you need for self-defense purposes and responding to emergencies, and what all women should definitely be training. Workouts like Pandora and Aphrodite are examples of whole-body workouts based on 50 meter sprints.

Finally, every few-to-several weeks you can run a 5k or 10k to demonstrate the strength you’ve developed with your more intensive running training; and prove to yourself that working harder but shorter actually has made you fitter, and faster at longer distances. You will only be confirming what has already been proven in research and by tens of thousands of athletes who have embraced the virtues of intensity and power (power = work / time).

Behold, running enlightenment:

1. The 1996 research that demonstrated greater endurance gains resulting from intensive, anaerobic sprints, yielding the Tabata protocol
2. A more accessible secondary source which explains how the new insight overturns the conventional wisdom. Bass quotes the exercise physiology texts that codified the old dogma, which frames the contrast nicely.
3. Journal of Physiology, January 2008, study showing sprinting yields physiological adaptations of endurance training at significantly less volume of work
4. Journal of Applied Physiology, 1999, study shows experienced endurance athletes improved their performance by adding explosive sprinting; also shows irrelevance of V02 metric to performance
5. Enlightened endurance training: Brian MacKenzie of CrossFitEndurance.com, went from being an ultramarathoner, to a CrossFitter, to a CrossFitter who significantly improved his performance in the world’s most difficult ultramarathons while reducing his training volume to only 5.3 hours per week — using CrossFit
6. A good article by Mark Sisson / Mark’s Daily Apple commanding much of the wisdom against traditional ‘cardio’ training; I especially recommend his recap of costs and benefits at the bottom
7. This wisdom is going mainstream: a great introductory summary in SportsMedicine.About.com
8. Finally, Art DeVany doesn’t pull punches. He tells you flat out that marathoning is destructive, and he can back it up. This is one of his earliest and most inflammatory pieces; but he has an entire category devoted to recording the detriments of the traditional endurance approach.