Only the Strong Finish First

Decent upper-body strength especially helps you when you tire on a run. For an extreme demonstration of this principle, go watch a race sometime. At the finish, you’ll see that the top finishers, no matter how hard they might be straining and striving, are running pretty smoothly. Their shoulders aren’t hunched over or somewhere up around their ears; instead, their shoulders are low, and their arms are driving in sync with their legs. Even when they’re very tired, one of the reasons that they can keep running fast is because their upper body is strong enough to keep up with their legs. Then watch for the finishers farther back. Many of them are tired in the arms, shoulders, and back, and you can see it in their form, which has disintegrated greatly from how it was at the beginning of the race. That’s partly because they’re not as strong relative to the top finishers, no matter how scrawny the first few people across the line might look.