How Fast Can You Get Faster? The Truth About Speed Gains

“When will I be faster?”

It’s the question that is at the forefront of almost all endurance athletes’ minds.  I know this because it’s one of the most common questions that the athletes who I coach ask me.  Even if athletes don’t (outwardly) have a time-based or pace-based goal, they usually are harboring at least a little bit (maybe a lot a bit) of a secret goal related to their pace and speed.

While this is certainly a natural part of being an athlete (because doing athletic things - at its core - involves wanting to see evidence of tangible progress), this focus on speed gains has become more prevalent in the last couple of decades since wearable technologies have surged into the consumer market.  More than literally ever before, athletes can track almost every single element of their training.  And this tracking is actually not just isolated to training; the wearable devices that are on the market and being used by athletes today can also track a seemingly infinite number of daily activities.

Somewhat concerningly, it’s no longer enough to just do a thing.  There is an increasing obsession with data tracking, so much so that in order for something that involves moving one’s body to “count” as having been done, it must be recorded on a device.  As an example of this mindset and behavior, I have worked with athletes who have tracked and recorded the following on their wearable devices:

• Walks (even as short as less than five minutes) as part of moving through their day (such as walking from the parking lot to a place or from gate to gate in an airport)
• Snow blowing
• Lawn mowing
• Yard work
• Household chores (such as house cleaning or improvement projects)
• Medical appointments that involve physically moving (such as Occupational Therapy or Physical Therapy)
• Bike Fits

Yes, it’s safe to say that we - culturally as a community of athletes - have become obsessed with data.  Some athletes are more data-obsessed than others, but an increasingly high percentage of endurance athletes are seeking and needing the validation that comes from seeing something tangible (in the form of numbers such as completed hours, completed distances, or recorded heart rates) in order to feel like what they do throughout their days counts.  Thus, in essence, an increasing number of athletes are needing this data to feel like living their lives counts.

To be clear: If you resemble any of these observations, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It’s just a thing that you are doing.  (And to be fair, you may not even fully realize that you are doing it; I’ve observed how this hyperfocus on recording data sometimes slowly creeps up on athletes over time.)  I’m pointing it out because it’s incredibly important to be aware of what you’re doing and why you are doing it.

Speed is Not the Only Measure of Progress

But in a world that is increasingly obsessed with measuring things, it makes complete sense that athletes would be wanting to see progress in those measured metrics.  One of the most tangible and therefore easiest things to want to see progress in is speed.  That fact combined with the fact that speed is how athletes are measured against each other in races snowballs to create a situation where speed and/or pace is the metric and the element of training that athletes become fixated on.

But as I tell athletes all the time: Speed is not the only measure of progress.  In fact, I would make the case that speed is a very limited lens through which to view your endurance sports training.

An athlete who I coach recently told me in January that they have seen ZERO improvement (emphasis is theirs) in their running since September 2024.  I (gently and respectfully) disagreed with this athlete’s self-assessment of their performance.  From September 2024 to January 2025, the athlete had progressed to be able to run three minutes longer at a time as part of their run/walk strategy when running, which is 60% longer than they were able to run at a time in September 2024. They also were able to build to add more than 50% total overall duration to their runs.  They were able to do all of this without sustaining an injury or causing a recurrence of any of their past injuries.

While the athlete was correct that their running pace is the same and they are not faster than they were in September 2024, the fact that they were using pace as their only gauge of progress in their running was exceptionally limiting.  The truth of the matter is that they saw significant improvement in their running over a four-month period of time.  They just weren’t looking at the right aspects of their running to see and appreciate that progress.

I reminded the athlete of the truth that it is quite difficult - if not impossible - to improve both endurance and speed concurrently.  In the interests of building this athlete’s endurance and overall durability and resilience (which need to come first), we did not focus on attempting to improve the athlete's speed while running.  Instead, we focused on the important fundamentals: staying healthy (aka not getting injured) and building overall endurance.

The Fundamentals of Getting Faster

An athlete must be healthy and injury-free in order to see speed gains in their training.  The reason for this is simple: If you are injured, you cannot train.  Period.  In order to stay healthy, athletes must respect their current training capacity by planning training loads - both in terms of volume and intensity - that are appropriate for them at any given point in time.  In other words: they must acknowledge and start and train where they are if they want to actually ultimately arrive at where they want to go.  Any athlete who attempts to improve their speed (aka who attempts to go faster) without respecting these fundamentals has a very high probability of getting injured.  All injuries are a result of mismanaging load vs. capacity.  In my experience, athletes mismanage load vs. capacity by doing too much too soon.  They are doing too much volume, too much intensity, or too much volume and intensity for what their current capacity is.

It’s important to remember what training is: Imposing a stimulus (in the form of workouts) on the body with the intention of causing specific adaptations (such as increases in strength, endurance, and/or speed) to occur within the body.  If you are not that active and then you start training (aka if you are a new athlete), you will see relatively rapid increases in both your endurance and speed at the beginning because the training you are doing is a completely novel stimulus for your body.  Thus, the body adapts relatively quickly across multiple systems, and you see the very clear evidence of that when you are able to go a little bit longer and a little bit faster than before.

However, these dual progressions in endurance and speed are relatively short-lived and - assuming that you remain consistent in your training over the course of an entire year - last only a year or two at most because The Law of Diminishing Returns comes into play once you are beyond the initial “new” stage of training.  If you’ve been active and training for more than a few weeks or few months and you decide that you want to train for something different and/or longer than what you’ve recently trained for, such as a Half Marathon or a 70.3-Distance Triathlon, you need to build an endurance base in order to prepare yourself for the specificity of what this type of goal requires.  Building an endurance base requires that you forgo any expectations of significant speed gains for as long as it takes to build said endurance base.  

Establishing this endurance base takes a long time…longer than most athletes expect or want to admit.  How long it takes does differ slightly from athlete to athlete based on the length of the event being trained for (which impacts how big of an endurance base the athlete needs), an athlete’s training history, and an athlete’s innate genetic talent, but it’s very fair to say that it takes at least 6-12 months to establish a true endurance base.  For many athletes, it actually can take several years.  Yes, years.  While you are building this endurance base, you will not see significantly measurable speed gains because you already had a fitness base when you started training for the new goal event (in this example, the Half Marathon or the 70.3-Distance Triathlon), and are therefore subject to The Law of Diminishing Returns.

Establishing an endurance base increases your overall capacity for training.  By overall capacity, I mean you increase your capacity to include more volume and/or intensity in your training.  You can more safely include longer workouts and/or more intensity within your workouts when your overall capacity is increased.  Thus, once you establish an endurance base, you can then layer in speed work.  You need the endurance base first because you need to be sure you can tolerate the speed load for the durations and/or distances that you want to maintain that speed.  If you try to increase your endurance and your speed at the same time, you will almost certainly impose a load that exceeds your overall capacity, which will increase your probability of injury.  And if you are injured, you will not see any progress in your training - endurance, speed, or otherwise - due to the fact that you will not be able to train.  In fact, sustaining an injury will cause you to see the opposite of progressions; you will see regressions.

Too many athletes plan training this way: They pick a race that they want to do, sign up for it, and declare that how many weeks are left until the race is the right amount of time for them to train for it.  Unfortunately, the number of weeks left until your goal event may not actually be a sufficient amount of time for you to build an appropriate endurance base.  A healthier and more sustainable way to plan training would be to understand the timeline you will need to build an endurance base based on what your current fitness level and ability is and then pick a goal race at least at the end of that timeline (or further into the future).  However, many athletes don’t do this because they are impatient and race day would feel too far away for them if they planned things this way.

Multiple studies have shown that approximately 65-75% of endurance athletes hit the start line of a race either currently injured or having incurred some sort of training-related injury along the way.  This number has held steady for decades, despite groundbreaking advances in gear, technology, and medical science.  After so many years of working with athletes, my hypothesis about why this number is so high is that while peripheral things such as gear and technology have changed, people generally don’t change.  Human nature remains the same.  People want what they want in the timelines when they want it.  Athletes do too much too soon and try to get faster too fast.  They impose too much intensity in their training at a time when they are not sufficiently prepared to handle it, and the load they impose on themselves exceeds their training capacity, causing injury.

Other Necessary Adaptations to Get Faster

All good endurance sports training is planned by balancing an athlete’s strengths and limiters.  Limiters are the factors in training that restrict an athlete’s performance or their ability to progress in training.  Limiters can be psychological or physiological, but the main limiters that must be considered when seeking to faster are the physiological limiters.  When you are planning training, you must always ultimately be correctly identifying, respecting, and basing your training on your limiters.  This means that you must plan all of your training based on your weakest link in your body.

There are a lot of adaptations that occur in the body as a result of endurance sports training: blood plasma adaptations, mitochondria adaptations, red blood cell adaptations, cardiovascular adaptations (such as within the structure of the heart itself), muscular adaptations, and connective tissue adaptations.  Out of all of these, connective tissues adapt the slowest, which means that they are the most common limiter that we must consider when planning training and desiring to get faster.

Connective tissues are tissues in the body that connect, support, bind, or separate other tissues or organs.  Tendons, ligaments, and fascia are all examples of connective tissues.  (Tendons connect muscles to bones, ligaments connect bones to bones, and fascia is a casing that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber, and muscle in place.)  In other words, connective tissues are prolific throughout your entire body and are the structures that bind literally everything in your body together.  Their significance in how your body works cannot be understated.  Very importantly in the context of this conversation: Connective tissues do not have direct blood sources and take longer than other body systems to adapt to stimulus imposed on them.  

Connective tissue adaptations are probably the most undervalued and overlooked adaptions that are necessary to support training-related goals.  Adequate connective tissue strength is necessary for all other strength and adaptations to be able to occur, but most self-coached athletes haven’t even heard of connective tissues.  Even if they have heard of them, connective tissue strength is not something that most athletes value on their own.  That being said, not allowing sufficient time for connective tissue strength development is the source of a high percentage of injuries among endurance athletes.

Just think about it: Tendonitis, Plantar Fasciitis, tendon ruptures, and MCL/ACL tears are all connective tissue injuries.  My experience has been that these injuries can almost always be traced back to athletes doing too much too soon; they progress their training at a faster rate than their connective tissues can adapt, strengthen, and develop.  When the connective tissues are overloaded, overuse and traumatic injuries occur.

When we train for endurance sports, connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and fascia will be strengthened, but slower than muscles and other body systems will be.  Remembering that we always need to plan training based on the biggest limiter that is in place, even if we can do “more” of something because of one body system (such as our muscular or cardiovascular system), if another system is limiting us, we must plan to account for that limiter and ot stay within the limit that it imposes.  For example, your training may feel good and/or easy because your cardiorespiratory and muscular systems are adapting at a faster rate than your connective tissues are.  Although you may feel that you are stronger and capable of adding more volume and/or intensity into your workouts, increasing the load too quickly can place these tissues at risk of injury because they will be lagging behind the other systems in your body that are adapting to your training.

So How Long Does it Actually Take to Get Faster?

Perhaps frustratingly and infuriatingly to many athletes, the answer to the question “How fast can I get faster?” is the same as it is to practically all questions about endurance sports: It depends.  Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer to this question because there are a lot of nuanced elements that need to be accounted for.

How consistent you are with training, the nature of your goals, the event you are training for, how much your training with other elements such as sleep, nutrition, stretching, etc., and your athletic history will all factor into how long it will take for you will actually see speed gains in your training.  Very frustratingly for many athletes, the longer you are an athlete, the harder it is to realize speed gains and the longer it takes.  Professional runner Eliud Kipchoge is a good example of this; after starting to run at the elite level in 2002, he broke the world record in the marathon in 2018 at the Berlin Marathon.  This race was the eleventh marathon he had run in his career.  Four years later in 2022, he broke the world record in the marathon again.  Although he is indisputably one of the best runners in human history, it took Mr. Kipchoge literally decades to see speed gains from his training.

Most athletes are not like Mr. Kipchoge.  That being said, the principle that was in play for his speed gains is in play for all athletes, from the elitist of the elite to the most average of age groupers.  Assuming you are consistent and are putting in the work, it will take months or even years for many of you to see true, sustained speed gains in your training.  Yes, months.  Yes, years.

Last year, Carolyn Classen, an athlete I’ve been coaching for more than five years, achieved her personal best time at the 70.3 distance of triathlon, won her age group, and qualified for the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship when she raced at IRONMAN 70.3 Ohio.  Prior to hiring me, Carolyn had been a triathlete for more than ten years.  This means that she had been consistently training for more than 15 years when she toed the start line at IRONMAN 70.3 Ohio.  It took 15 years for Carolyn to achieve her goal of winning her age group at an IRONMAN 70.3 race.  Her previous personal best time at the 70.3 distance was set in 2021, so more than 2.5 years earlier.  It took more than 2.5 years of consistent work for Carolyn to see measurable speed gains again at this distance of triathlon.

While this may sound depressing, the fact that speed gains are so elusive and the fact that they take so long to achieve is exactly what makes them so coveted and valuable.  It’s what makes them worth striving for.  It’s what drives endurance athletes to set goals that are pace-based and performance-based.  The fact that they are hard to achieve is exactly what makes them great.

The Bottom Line

There are a lot of voices in the endurance space that may try to tell you that it’s possible to get fast fast.  Many so-called experts (influencers) will tell people what they want to hear: That there is a hack that no one has ever discovered before that will yield people the results they want in the (short) timeline that they want them in.  My experience as both an athlete and as a coach has shown me time and time again that this is not true.

You don’t get fast fast.  It takes a long time to realize sustained, measurable, actual speed gains.  That being said, athletes who are patient with this process and who are willing to put in the work will be greatly rewarded.  Paradoxically, you don’t get fast fast.  You get fast slowly by slowly.  If you are seeking speed gains in your training, aim to stay consistent, to account for your limiters when planning for your training, and to be patient.  I promise, if you do these things, you will get faster.