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Each week hundreds of people head out to the sandhills at Wanda, at Palm Beach, At Stockton, at Kingscliff and other areas around Australia where these natural wonders still exist. People go there to push their bodies and minds to new levels of fitness and exhilaration. Often its champion sports people or professional sporting teams but more often its people training just to improve their own fitness and to attain their own goals.
Just what are the benefits of running uphill in soft sand? Where does this idea, that improvement will come, originate?
Traditionally sandhill running to improve performance is attributed to an old athletics coach named Percy Cerruty who at one stage coached athletes who held numerous world records. One such athlete, Australian miler Herb Elliott, broke the world's record for the mile by the largest margin in history, some 42 years ago. His coach was Percy Wells Cerutty. Cerruty’s most well known approach was to have his athletes run up and down a long sand dune till they were completely fatigued.
Percy Cerruty’s famous phrase was "You have to be a big person to run a four-minute mile." What he meant was to be able to stand up to the pain, the fear, all the impediments in your mind that arise when you're training, you have to be big; but you can't be big out of your ordinary mind. You have to find some other center, some deeper center from which to operate. (Michael Murphy, is the founder of the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California).
Percy Cerruty invented the term “Stotan”. To be a Stotan (a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan) is to push one's physical and emotional capabilities beyond the limit.
But what are the benefits of sandhill running?
• Firstly, just like Cerruty, when you run the sand dunes you are training the mind to go where it’s never been before. Out in the dunes you find another part of you that can show you the reserves of energy, discipline and mental toughness you have never experienced before. Some times you fail some times you conquer but you are always better for the experience. Go somewhere you have never been before!
• You get a maximum (anaerobic) workout without having to move at full speed. This is especially true for the maximal sprints you do. You are exploding and using all of your muscle fibres; you are producing copious quantities of lactate so the result is, even though you are not moving at your maximal speed, your body believes it is and the corresponding adaptation is occurring.
• If the surface is soft you can go to exhaustion and even fall while trying your utmost to break through to a higher level of fitness. So many times you go to exhaustion then find again you can go further. It is a constant battle you will fight with yourself and one that you can win!
• After you finish your session, after a Gatorade and a swim, you feel like you could do it again. For the larger build athletes it doesn’t pound your body, like road runs do, so there is less chance of injury. Downward force and pressure is dramatically reduced with lessened impact injuries. The sand is a natural force dissipater!
• Learning to stay in the moment, taking each step at a time means mental training toughness and even spiritual development can be combined with sand dune training. One group when they were attempting to break through physically and mentally had an ultimate workout called "Death by Dunes." Probably like doing “20 Mexicans” at Wanda. What you learn about yourself, the Zen experience of running the dunes, is part of the experience!
• Finally there is plenty of documented evidence of the benefits of hill running for all sports. The sand dunes are a safe and very hard way to include this in a weekly program.
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