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Timeless
Running Wisdom

Richard Benyo

Human Kinetics
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benyo, Richard.
Timeless running wisdom / Richard Benyo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-9934-9 (soft cover)
ISBN-10: 0-7360-9934-4 (soft cover)
1. Running--Anecdotes. 2. Running--Training--Anecdotes. I. Title.
GV1061.B446 2010
796.42--dc22
2010036497
ISBN-10: 0-7360-9934-4 (print)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-9934-9 (print)
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Benyo
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This one’s for all the long-running friends encountered
along the roads and trails, so many of whom served as
a welcome aid station in the midst of the human race.
 Contents

Foreword  vi
Introduction  viii

chapter 1 Embrace Simplicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

chapter 2 Tap the Athlete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
  With Kathrine Switzer

chapter 3 Keep It in Proportion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

  With Amby Burfoot

chapter 4 Maintain a Journal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

  With Joe Henderson

chapter 5 Take Your Measure by Racing . . . . . . . . 35

  With Hal Higdon

chapter 6 Eschew Racing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

  With Dick Beardsley

chapter 7 Train Specifically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

  With Mel Williams, PhD

chapter 8 Don’t Ignore Other Body Parts . . . . . . . 59

  With Joan Benoit-Samuelson

chapter 9 Run With a Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

chapter 10 Run by Feel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
chapter 11 Move Up in Mileage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

iv
chapter 12 Move Down in Mileage . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
chapter 13 Create Adventure Runs . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
With Dean Karnazes

chapter 14 Run Under Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

chapter 15 Run Wild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
With Lorraine Moller

chapter 16 Rest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

With Marshall Ulrich

chapter 17 Run Alone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

chapter 18 Run Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
With Bill Rodgers

chapter 19 Join a Club . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

chapter 20 Volunteer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
With Allan Steinfeld

chapter 21 Spectate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

chapter 22 Study Runners and Running . . . . . . . . 148
With Roger Robinson

chapter 23 Teach Others to Run . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

chapter 24 Start Over . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

Glossary  165
Appendix: 25 Pertinent Quotes  169
Bibliography  174
About the Author  176
About the Contributors  177

v
 Foreword
T his book and a pair of running shoes just may be the only two things
you need as a runner. Rich Benyo is the author of the most reputable
running- and fitness-related publications, and he has done it again. In
Timeless Running Wisdom he documents miles of running revelations so
you don’t have to reinvent that painful wheel. The result of his many
experiences is a faster, stronger, and smarter athlete. In fact, he was fast
enough to chase down the greatest runners of his acquaintance, such as
Bill Rodgers, Kathrine Switzer, Dean Karnazes, and my hero, Joan Benoit-
Samuelson, all of whom contributed to this book. They are paving a
smoother road for you, pointing out and even removing the roots and
rocks on your favorite trails so you can glide along, chasing your next
runner’s high. You hold in your hands the best compilation of running
strategy and advice available.
Distance running has a way of unveiling the depths of our character
and in the process teaches us how to pursue our wildest dreams. It isn’t
until we are deep into a run that we find our groove and tap into our
smarter, more profound selves. It takes some mileage under our fluid belt
to experience these ah-ha! moments. This book is a collection of those
moments from people who have logged enough miles to have figured it
all out the hard way. The wisdom of this book comes from many miles
of experience from the most pivotal stars this sport has ever known.
You hold in your hands, bound between covers, stories of the emotional
highs, hapless pitfalls, and stunning awareness that running offers.
From a sport that seems as simple as putting one foot in front of the
other comes a wide spectrum of advice and stories from those who have
repeatedly gone the distance.
Runners will relate to and learn from this book, but you don’t need
to be a runner to take from it the full experience of people who have
challenged themselves and triumphed in their own special ways. The
secrets of their successes are now in your hands. And whether “running”
to you means competing in a race, running errands, or running a busi-
ness, you will gain enough wisdom to make the journey a winning one.
Rich Benyo and his long-running running friends make up my Run-
ning Fantasy Camp. Timeless Running Wisdom presents what is truly the
Dream Team of running’s most notable athletes and personalities. They
own the shoes we’d love to fill, and we are honored that they are more
than willing to help us get a perfect fit.
Consider chapter 1 your first day of spring training. In some instances
the stars of the sport did it wrong the first time and learned from their

vi
 Foreword  o o o  vii

mistakes, allowing you to skip over the rough parts in the road. Or maybe
you’ve already tried it yourself and had less-than-sterling results; it is
uplifting to know that the heroes and heroines of the sport have been
there, have made similar mistakes, and yet picked themselves up and
prospered. This is your chance to learn from the wise without puking
on a nearby runner, suffering the horrid pain of bleeding nipples while
wearing a brand-new white racing singlet, or climbing out of a run that
has the potential to be a six-foot hole. With this book you can access
all the knowledge and suffer none of the pain.
Identify and learn your lessons from the comfort of your favorite
recliner. You know the one I mean: the one that seems to have a magnet
in it tuned to your body in the wake of a long midsummer run. Yeah,
that’s right. The one festooned with energy bar wrappers shoved behind
the cushions and bagel crumbs that stick to the backs of your legs when
you are finally able to pry yourself up. That chair. Your favorite. Com-
bined with your new favorite running book.
You are about to read your way to a better running experience, and
in the process you won’t even get winded. Your most successful self is
waiting within you to be released, and the chapters of this book may
very well be the keys you are seeking. You will be both enlightened and
entertained by the experiences shared by this all-star collection of run-
ning legends.
Let Timeless Running Wisdom be your coach and your training partner,
the best mentor you can possibly find. Read it. Put it away safely on
a shelf. Then read it again when your running needs a fresh approach
or you need to adapt. There are stories in this book for every runner,
beginner or veteran, something identifiable and true.
Deena Kastor
 Introduction
I f wisdom automatically came with age, there would be no such thing
as an old fool.
Someone who’s been around a long time often learns little from
the aging process and the passage through decades of experience, but
instead becomes simply more of what he or she always was, whether
stubborn as a mule or sweet as maple syrup. Nevertheless, by observing
and taking part in a certain activity for an enormous amount of time,
specific, immutable truths become self-evident. Often, those self-evident
truths come to us the hard way—from doing something the wrong way
often enough that the obvious eventually dawns on us: This isn’t work-
ing; there must be a better way to do this.
If we are lucky, a mentor full of wisdom and generosity takes us in
tow and proceeds to head us off from going down yet another blind
alley. We learn also—again, often after some time—that no matter how
much the activity is changed from the outside, inside it is as it always
was. It may be festooned with bells and whistles, but underneath it is
still the same.
When we jettison the irrelevant complexities too often attached to
running, what remains is the simple sweetness of the sport, the joy of
natural movement, and the rich lifestyle that accompanies it. “Sweet
running” occurs when the elements of training and effort intersect
and the training has been just slightly more ambitious than you had
planned. The effort becomes, for a moment or for an hour, “effortless.”
The myriad of training levels involved in running—-physical, mental,
spiritual—-blend in a seemingly cosmic recipe, and we are one with
the run.
The Irish poet W.B. Yeats asked, “How can we know the dancer from
the dance?” So, too, the runner runs. For that period in time, a person
is uniquely both the subject and the predicate—one and the same, both
at once, the beginning and the middle of a sentence.
When does this intersection happen? It can begin as early as two
months into a running program, when the heart and lungs have become
running-fit and the appendages and major organs are coming into their
own. But more commonly, it appears when all body systems are equally
fit and flowing together.
Over the years, running pundits have referred to the sensation as “the
runner’s high.” Elite runners, however, especially of the long-distance
variety, have pooh-poohed it. William Glasser, MD, wrote a book about
this subject in the mid-1970s titled Positive Addiction. He contended

viii
 Introduction  o o o  ix

that long-distance runners can sustain such a seemingly boring activity

because they become addicted to the rhythm of the activity, that a
runner’s high is possible when a runner who is in good condition
runs well in an uncritical way. Glasser contended that elite runners
do not experience runner’s highs because they run too self-critically,
measuring their breaths and monitoring the current condition of their
legs. They are more like highly technical space shuttles than red tail
hawks joyously swimming along a river of wind.
John Jerome speaks of “the sweet spot in time” as it applies to sport
in his 1980 book of the same title. Speaking of throwing rocks at bottles
lined up on a riverbank, John speaks of the increasing efficiency he
experienced as his arm warmed up and his eyes became better at esti-
mating the distance. “Mostly I recall the haunting power I felt on the
occasional throw when I knew as the stone left my hand that it was
going to hit its target”(p. 14).
Some would refer to that experience as peak performance, but it’s not.
Peak performance is much rarer than hitting that sweet spot in time.
When the famed late mythologist Joseph Campbell was interviewed
by Bill Moyers on the classic PBS series The Power of Myth, the subject
of peak performance came up. Moyers asked Campbell if he’d ever
enjoyed a peak experience. My wife and I were at the time watching
the series with a group of Palo Alto intellectuals who were stalwart fans
of Campbell. When Moyers posed the question, several of the group
perked up, certain that Joseph Campbell would cite a moment while
taking part in a Malaysian tribal ceremony or riding the ropes that
connected to the bells in the cathedral of Chartres or while reading a
good book. He disappointed them. Instead of describing some exotic
ritual, Campbell cited two peak experiences—both of them somewhat
exotic to the sedentary lifestyle of the Stanfordites in attendance. His
two peak experiences came when he ran the anchor leg during two
different races for his Columbia University track relay team; when
he accepted the baton on those final laps, he knew that there was no
human being in the world who would catch him.
Was it sweet running in both of those instances? Yes, it was. But
Campbell undoubtedly had other periods of sweet running. Peak
experiences are rare; sweet spots, especially in running, are not neces-
sarily so rare. In fact, they can be fairly common, if we learn to bring
together all the critical—but not critiqued—elements and to ride them
in an uncritical way.
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a professor and former chairman of
the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He has
spent decades studying this phenomenon on the broader scale in life;
in his studies and his writing, he refers to it as “flow.”
x  o o o  Introduction

“The best moments usually occur,” Professor Csikszentmihalyi con-

tends in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “when a person’s
body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accom-
plish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus
something that we make happen” (1991, p. 3).
“Optimal experience,” then, does not come to those who sit and wait.
Like the sweet spot or the runner’s high, or peak performance or sweet
running, or just plain running wisdom, we must actively seek it—or at
least prepare for it actively on a physical level. We must eschew the sed-
entary notion, or as running guru Dr. George Sheehan frequently used to
say, “Never trust an idea that comes to you while you’re sitting down.”
Many runners experience sweet running on their own. Any runner
who has trained vigorously and wisely for a marathon and who leaves
the starting line conservatively usually experiences a sweet spot between
miles 7 and 16, once the deep muscles are warmed up and the rhythm
of running has established itself, and before the weariness of running a
very long distance arrives. But many a marathoner has lost a marathon
during that period of sweet running by mistakenly assuming that he or
she somehow magically trained beyond the perfect level, only to proceed
to outrun his or her fine-tuning in a greedy effort to take advantage of
prowess that, at least that day, is not present in such abundance.
This book is not about training to run, but rather, about running to
train yourself to get more sweetness from your running, from exacting
more wisdom by squeezing from running what is simplest and best.
This book does not describe what training to do as much as it discusses
how to do it in all its forms, from running fast to resting, from learning
the historical footsteps in which you run to experiencing the joys of
running wild and alone—while, as often as possible, licking and then
savoring the sweetness from it. Hopefully, this will spare you the chore
of laboring too many years to gain wisdom, when on some levels it is
self-evident and available to those eager to embrace it.
Too many runners, especially those new to the sport or lifestyle, spend
way too much time and energy asking this question: Am I doing this
right? This tendency is especially overpowering for new runners who do
have a background in sport. Is there a right and wrong way to run? Of
course, but there are as many right ways of doing it as there are runners.
Stand at the finish line of a road race and watch the runners approach.
Does every runner exhibit exactly the same running style? No way.
Some are human examples of poetry in motion. Some tend to flail
and waste a lot of sideways motion. But does the runner with the
classic style always beat the runner with the flailing arms? Certainly
not. Watch a film of the late great Czech runner Emil Zatopek, who
won the 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, and the marathon in the 1952
 Introduction  o o o  xi

Helsinki Olympic Games. His running style has been described as that
of a “man recently stabbed through the heart” (Sandrock, Running, p.
3). But another observer cautioned track experts not to pay attention
to what was happening with Emil’s upper body, but rather to observe
what was happening from the waist down. To date, no other runner
has accomplished the Olympic long-distance “triple” that Emil did,
and probably no runner ever will.
If you’ve checked out the table of contents, you may have noticed
pairs of chapters that seem to contradict each other—such as Run With
a Plan (chapter 9) and Run by Feel (chapter 10), and Run Alone (chapter
17) and Run Together (chapter 18). I’ve done this for runners who have
been at it for quite a while; often, what works perfectly well one year
may contain the kiss of death for a running program the next year.
This book refrains from overglorifying the marathon, which has
grown to become the holy grail of long-distance runners. Jesse Owens
never ran a marathon, and he was a “real runner.” You don’t need to
run a marathon to be considered a real runner, although training like
a marathoner will greatly enhance your pathway to sweet running and
the attendant wisdom—no matter what the distance.
If I’d wanted to push the marathon, I’d have titled the book Timeless
Marathon Wisdom. Besides, the marathon doesn’t need a push from me.
In fact, it might be good if the marathon were given less emphasis, so
that we’d have fewer runners who get into the sport and immediately,
without putting in their time and without learning to run shorter
distances, take on the marathon and fall out the other side injured or
burned out—or both.
Like the human body itself, which becomes more efficient the more
you use it, running becomes sweeter the more you integrate it into your
life. The wisdom comes from allowing that to happen. Relax in your
running and allow your own wisdom to sweeten the whole process.

Before we get to the body of this book, let me give you 10 bits of run-
ning wisdom that some of us learned through trial and error (mostly
error):
1. Did it this way: To reward myself for putting in 18 weeks of hard
training toward a marathon, I bought myself a brand-new running
outfit so for once I’d look color-coordinated in my finisher picture.
Result: Chafed and bloody inner thighs and a grimace on my face
in my finisher picture.
Wisdom: Never, ever wear or use anything in a race that you haven’t
broken in during practice runs.
xii  o o o  Introduction

2. Did it this way: I thought I could run through a sore calf muscle
if I warmed up sufficiently first.
Result: My calf got worse, and by overcompensating for that pain,
I developed an additional injury on the opposite side of my body.
Wisdom: When injured, cut back or stop running entirely. Or, train
in a different environment that does not aggravate the injury, such
as running in a pool.
3. Did it this way: Not wanting to have a race number flapping against
my chest, I pinned it to my shorts.
Result: Paper cuts on my right thigh.
Wisdom: Take a look at the professional runners. Where do they
put their bib numbers? At the middle of their chests, of course.
4. Did it this way: Wanting to ensure that I’d have enough carbohy-
drates on board, I ate a hearty breakfast before a long run.
Results: First, I felt like a slug; second, I fertilized a farmer’s field
by throwing the hearty breakfast back up so that I ultimately had
no reserves of carbs.
Wisdom: If you want something in your stomach before you go
out on a long run, eat something bland (a bagel, for instance)
long enough before your workout or race so that it will have been
absorbed by your body so your stomach doesn’t divert blood from
the working muscles.
5. Did it this way: I thought that if one long run on a weekend was
good, two of them would be twice as good.
Result: The following two weeks were pitiful as I dealt with legs
that didn’t want to move.
Wisdom: Alternate between hard and easy runs so that your body
can adequately recover from the harder or longer workouts.
6. Did it this way: I ran all seven days of the week.
Result: Weariness and heavy legs.
Wisdom: Rest days are recovery days that lead to higher-quality
training days down the calendar.
7. Did it this way: I started out fast to put some time in the bank.
Result: The final miles had no sparkle to them; in fact, they were
a downward spiral.
Wisdom: You can’t cash in on time put in the bank if it hasn’t had
time to mature.
 Introduction  o o o  xiii

8. Did it this way: I went into the marathon with too little training.
Result: I used the final six miles to offer penance for all the sins I’d
committed in the first 10 years of my life.
Wisdom: You reap what you sow. Sow too little and reap a lot . . .
of pain.
9. Did it this way: I didn’t hydrate because I believed that only weenies
drink fluids before and during a race.
Results: Dehydration, desiccation, and DNF (did not finish).
Wisdom: Stay hydrated before, during, and after a race, but don’t
overdo it. Learn how much hydration is just enough for you.
10. Did it this way: After crossing the finish line at a marathon, I saw
a nice patch of grass and dropped onto it.
Result: My legs felt like someone had poured concrete down them.
I needed help to get up and limped away like a rusted robot.
Wisdom: When you cross the finish line of a race, keep moving
to pump some of the waste out of your legs; after the race, walk
at least a quarter-mile for each five miles raced. You’ll come back
surprisingly well over the next several days.
And, of course, the obvious admonition: Do as I say, not as I did.

Because, even after all of these decades, my wisdom in running is lim-

ited, I prevailed on some of my long-running running buddies to share
some of their hard-won wisdom. Enormous thanks to this all-star team!
Here’s a thumbnail on each of those long-running friends, which isn’t
all that easy to do because an entire book could be written on each of them.
Kathrine Switzer is best-known for entering the 1967 Boston
Marathon as “K.V. Switzer” with no intent to defraud, but rather to be
part of her Syracuse team, then being assaulted by Jock Semple, a race
official; but she is more famed to many of us as the gal who worked tire-
lessly behind the scenes to get the women’s marathon into the Olympic
Games. Oh, yes, and she’s a terrific writer.
Amby Burfoot is one of the sages of long-distance running. Winner
of the 1968 Boston Marathon, we were fortunate enough to hire him
as the East Coast Editor of Runner’s World back in 1978, and he’s been
a stalwart of that magazine ever since. Amby is one of the nicest guys
you’ll ever meet, and a mighty fine scribe.
Joe Henderson was the first full-time editor of Runner’s World when
Bob Anderson moved the magazine from Kansas to Northern California
xiv  o o o  Introduction

in 1970. I got to work with Joe at Runner’s World when I took over his
editorship in 1977, and had even more fun than a writer is supposed
to have when we collaborated on The Running Encyclopedia. Such col-
laborations often result in feuds, but the experience brought us closer
than ever.
Hal Higdon and I used to cover auto sports back in the 1970s; he’s
the author of some mighty fine auto racing books, including Showdown
at Daytona. He knew I’d run in college and when Joe Henderson’s posi-
tion at Runner’s World was opening up, he twisted Bob Anderson’s arm
to get me the job. But I still like him anyway.
Dick Beardsley personifies the word “indomitable.” In the wake of
emerging as one of America’s premier marathoners, he went through
some of the most disastrous accidents anybody could imagine, but he
emerged from every one of them filled with enthusiasm and high spir-
its. He set the course record at the Napa Valley Marathon, where I’m
chairman of the board, and we love to have him come back and visit
every March.
Mel Williams is the definition of the Renaissance man: an accom-
plished academic, age-group winner at places like the Boston Marathon,
world-traveler, and friend to everyone he meets. He is also one of the
spark-plugs of the running world in and around Norfolk.
Joan Benoit-Samuelson is to most runners the personification of
a gritty, hard-working runner, gloriously triumphant at the first-ever
women’s Olympic marathon in 1984. I’ll never forget the first time I
met her, way back in 1979, when she won the Runner’s World Nurmi
Award as the best U.S. female runner and arrived wearing a sensible
Maine sweater and becoming emotional over her award. She is one of
the sweetest people in running, until she pins on a race number.
Dean Karnazes has probably done more to get people thinking in
terms of doing outrageous running challenges than anyone else on the
planet. He is constantly thinking up challenges to which he can apply
his considerable talents, like running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50
days. He’s a marvelous spokesman for the sport of ultrarunning, which
is a world out there in the outer limits where the air is rare.
Lorraine Moller was perhaps the most dominating female mara-
thoners of her era, winning an outrageous percentage of the marathons
she entered. She won three of the Avon International Marathons while
no other woman won more than one. She won numerous times at
Grandma’s Marathon and at Osaka Ladies’ Marathon. Her recent auto-
biography, On the Wings of Mercury, is a must-read.
 Introduction  o o o  xv

Marshall Ulrich never met a challenge that he didn’t like. Besides

racking up more miles than any other human being on the treacherous
Death Valley course, he ran across the U.S. in 2008 (while injured) and
climbed to the summit of the highest peak on all seven continents. Yet
to his friends, he’s just plain ole “Marsh.”
“Boston Billy” Rodgers probably did more to get American baby
boomers out of their easy chairs and onto the roads than anyone else
before or since. An affable guy-next-door kind of fellow, Billy made win-
ning races look easy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He won Boston
and New York four times each, and was famous for remembering virtually
any running statistic there was but forgetting where he’d parked his car.
Allan Steinfeld has long been one of the quiet “movers” of the
sport. Allan worked with Fred Lebow to grow the New York City Mara-
thon to the pinnacle of big-city marathons. He took over from Fred
when Fred was diagnosed with brain cancer, and carried the marathon
to new heights. Self-effacing and modest, Allan was present behind the
scenes for nearly every significant running advancement over the past
three decades.
Roger Robinson has long been a triple-threat: accomplished aca-
demic (his lectures at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ were con-
stantly oversubscribed), his writing on running has been a staple in the
running world for decades, and he had a reign as one of the best masters
marathoners in the world, winning Boston and New York and at one
point going unbeaten as a masters runner in more than 100 races in a row.

It has been an honor to work with such a wonderful team of friends

on this project.
Most of these running relationships go back decades and have grown
more precious and dear as the years have marched on by us, leaving
most of these folks unscathed—except for the occasional ache or pain,
and the inevitability of hair turning grayer, making them appear even
more mature . . . and therefore, wiser.
It’s with great humility that I thank them for their generosity in
coming forth and saving my sorry ass from looking like a know-it-all
who doesn’t.
Wisdom: Run long enough and often enough and you accumulate a
wonderful array of friends.
Rich Benyo
Sonoma County, California
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 1
chapter

FPO
Chris Mautz/fotolia.com

Embrace Simplicity
Chris Mautz/fotolia.com
A few days ago, I beheld a truly wondrous sight. I was lumbering
(which is my form of off-season jogging, complete with long pants
and the sartorial appearance of the homeless) down a paved bike and
pedestrian path near our home. Coming toward me was what appeared
to be a cut-rate cosmonaut.
He was a mid-20s fella lumbering no faster than I was, and I’m pushing
three times his age. The poor lout was burdened by more than a mule’s
load of equipment. He wore a heart-rate monitor strapped around his
chest with the receiver on one wrist; a wrist-mounted GPS thing-am-a-jig
on the other wrist; a hydration system strapped to his back; a portable
CD player with headphones, the player strapped to his left upper arm;
a pair of high-tech computerized running shoes; a Batman-like utility
belt loaded with GU packets and other stuff I did not recognize; and to
complete the ensemble, ankle weights.
I sent out sensors to determine whether the ground under him was
quaking. We do, after all, have frequent quakes here in Northern Cali-
fornia. As we passed each other, I said, “Hey! How’s it goin’? Nice day,
huh?”
He said nothing, acknowledged nothing, moved forward like one of
those automated vacuum cleaners you see advertised on cable channels
at night that won’t change direction until they bump into something.
I literally stopped in my tracks and watched him slowly trundle away.
What, I asked myself, has become of running as the oldest, simplest
sport in the history of humankind, the sport that started with the ulti-
mate prize: life itself? You outrun the saber-toothed tiger, and you live.
You don’t outrun the saber-toothed tiger, and you are removed from the
gene pool in favor of someone who can. You run down the antelope by
wearing it out, and you and your tribe eat and live one more week. You
fail to run down the antelope, and you and your tribe die out in favor
of a tribe that can consistently run down the antelope.
In our modern world where saber-toothed tigers come skeletonized in
museums of natural history, we pay people to capture and butcher and
sometimes even serve up the antelope with a garlic-and-caper gravy. We
take home medals to prove that we entered and completed the race and
are quite the fellow or gal, and all is well with the world. Now, let’s eat!
After the burdened man disappeared, I looked down at myself and felt
diminished, out of it, retro. Given that it was early December, I wore a
pair of briefs covered by a pair of tan rugged slacks, an old sweatshirt,
a pair of socks, and a pair of well-broken-in running shoes. I did wear a
digital watch, but the chronograph feature wasn’t engaged. I was out for
a run: to hear the birds chirp, to smell the dog crap that self-righteous
dog lovers had “forgotten” to clean up, to check out how high the creek
had risen after the last rain.

2
 Embrace Simplicity  o o o  3

I started running again, shuffling along, puzzled enough by the ques-

tion of whether the guy I’d just passed was enjoying himself that I felt
compelled to haul down from the mental archives the exact moment
running had gone from the simplest, cheapest sport in the world to one
of the most technical. I asked myself whether we had gained anything
in performance when we made the devil’s deal to have technology
dominate our runs.
The topic had come up a few weeks earlier as I worked on an issue
of Marathon & Beyond. The little bimonthly carries a column each issue
called “On the Mark,” wherein a reader sends in a question and I send
it out to a handful of experts, who answer it in their own unique ways.
On occasion, I pretend to be an expert and answer the question myself.
This was one of those occasions. The question was from a young
woman who had yet to run a marathon and who trained with a guy
who purchased every technical toy that hit the market. Jayne Doddard
concluded her question with this observation: “I swear that one of the
reasons my friend doesn’t run faster than he does is he spends so much
time and energy consulting his ‘stuff.’”
I concluded that Jayne already knew the answer, but she had hooked
me with her question, so I jumped right in:

It sometimes takes an enormous stretch of the credible to encom-

pass the beautiful simplicity of running and the complex tech-
nological morass it can become.
In the mid-’60s, when I ran college cross-country, the biggest
technological innovation was that we got to train and race in
lighter-than-walking-around training flats. Our team practiced
in red cotton shorts and plain gray T-shirts. Our meets were
timed with a manually wound stopwatch, and our coach timed
our workouts with his high-tech wristwatch—high-tech because
it was a ‘self-winding’ watch that was kept wound by the fact
that the front end of his ’62 Rambler was out of whack from his
summer trips to Bogotá, Colombia, to brush up on his Spanish, so
the vibrating steering wheel kept his watch wound tighter than
Ringo Starr’s drumhead.
We ran pretty well in those years. Good enough to place second
in the Pennsylvania State College cross-country championship
meet in the fall of ’64.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, while I worked at Runner’s World,
there were innovations galore. Every week the mailman brought
packages of everything from Bone Fones (a radio device that you
4  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

slung over your shoulders and that played music for you while
you ran by sending vibrations through your collarbones) to the
Genesis Biometrics pulse monitor (RW, November 1980, p. 94:
‘Only Genesis—monitors pulse rate—computes exercise time
within your specified zone—measures recovery time to base
pulse rate—provides audible alert system—paces rhythm with
adjustable metronome—tells time in hours and minutes.’ And if
you ordered it off the ad on page 94, you got a pair of running
shoes free.), which was larger than Dick Tracy’s wrist-radio and
had a wire connecting it to a gadget you slipped over your finger
so it could monitor your pulse. The only problem was that if you
moved, it didn’t register anything; you had to stand still for it to
slowly compute your pulse.
None of the stuff made us run any better. Running better came
from . . . running harder and smarter.
Come to think of it, there was one electronic device that made us
run better in the ’80s. It was a wrist chronograph that provided an
audible beep to dictate the wearer’s running rhythm; if someone
near us in a race was wearing one of those damned things, we were
motivated to run faster to get away from the infernal beeping.”

And so the answer (or rant) went.

I thought now about turning around and running after the weighed-
down runner to ask him a question: Why? I couldn’t imagine that he
was enjoying his running any more than he enjoyed staying late after
work to take on a few extra projects the boss had hitched to his annual
review.
At the occasional running seminar, I’ve been known to refer to long-
distance runners as aerobic astronauts, but this guy trumped even them.
The poor guy was prepared to go into deep space without missing a beat.
Actually, he’d never miss a beat because it looked as though every one
was counted.
Running and other aerobic sports are touted as stress relievers, and
technically, they are—if we let them work naturally without strapping
on more technical junk than tinsel on a Christmas tree.
Let’s face it: Some stress is good. Without physical stress, we’d all turn
into jellied blobs—just like sedentary people do. To function, a muscle
must be stressed on a regular basis. Opposing muscles must be stressed
or else the muscle pushing or pulling in one direction will overpower
its opposite muscle.
But more psychological stress we don’t need. We certainly don’t need
to go out and pay good money to add more stress by accessorizing our-
 Embrace Simplicity  o o o  5

selves with gadgets that measure our every bodily function. We can get
all the stress we want free of charge.
You’ll recall Yeats’ quote in the introduction with the corollary that we
cannot separate the runner from the run. Of course, this is true only if
we are careful not to burden what happens naturally with technological
flotsam and jetsam.
How can daily running slip into sweet running if we are burdened like
mules? Hell, even a mule wouldn’t stand for that kind of overload abuse. I
do occasionally run across mules along the pedestrian path I was traipsing
that day. Sometimes I stop and converse with them; they may be stub-
born, but they ain’t dumb. Every time I see them, I think of the old mule
skinner axiom: The dumbest mule is smarter than the smartest horse. A
horse will keep running until it dies. A mule will stand its ground and
say, “Hey, man. Screw you. I ain’t movin’ until you remove some of this
crap from my back.”
Perhaps we can forge a new axiom: The dumbest mule is smarter than
the smartest horse, and the dumbest horse is smarter than the smartest
techie runner.
Sounds plausible.
Does high-tech running produce enormous benefits? Chapter 2 presents
some prime statistics that prove that it does not. An enormous amount
of technical crap has been invented and marketed over the past 20 years,
and the average marathon time in the United States has slowed by more
than an hour.
If we want to experience better running, sweet running, we need sweet
music to accompany our running. And the sweetest music is the rhythmic
sound of our lungs drawing in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. It
is the rhythm of life itself. Even against a backdrop of honking car horns
and steady white noise, the sound of rhythmic breathing asserts itself as
the dominant beat. Throw in a bird chirp as a counterpoint, and it doesn’t
get much better.
Do we need to measure our every heartbeat while on a run? Certainly,
heart-rate monitors have their place. They’re especially useful for holding
us back on scheduled easy running days so our bodies can repair them-
selves, thereby increasing efficiency. They are also good for holding us back
in the early portions of a race, although the anxiety of the race situation
often results in false readings of our readiness to run harder than usual.
Do we need high-tech everything to run, or are we merely extending
the overload of our daily lives to our running because we need to be con-
nected to an electronic teat?
How much stuff do world-class ballet dancers strap to themselves? If
it were culturally permissible, I suspect they might want to shed some of
the confining garments they do wear so their dancing would be even
6  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

more natural. They might dance nude, the same way the ancient Greeks
competed in the ancient Olympics.
I am not advocating for runners to run nude (although several road
races encourage a state of undress), but nude does have its place. Mark
Remy, the daily blogger at Runner’s World, wrote a humorous book titled
The Runner’s Rule Book: Everything a Runner Needs to Know—And Then Some.
On page 47, he explains rule 1.44: One Day a Week, Run Naked. What
does he mean by that? “Once a week—maybe on an easy day—leave
your running watch at home, head out the door, and just . . . run. While
you’re at it, leave your GPS at home, too, and your heart-rate monitor,
cell phone, MP3 player, and whatever other modern gizmo you normally
carry with you. You’ll be amazed at how liberating it can be.”
Mark has a very good point. Why be burdened with all that stuff ?
Consider Mark’s suggestion and chuck the stuff one run a week to see
how it feels. If you like it, you can add a second day. Or you can get rid
of one accoutrement at a time until you are free. It would be simpler to
go “cold turkey,” of course, but not everyone is capable of making such a
clean break. After all, like barnacles growing on the side of a shipwreck,
you added the stuff one at a time, and the stuff might need to be scraped
off one at a time until you can feel comfortable running easy and free.
To consider what kind of an effect this would have, take a moment
to do a little research. Open Tom Derderian’s Boston Marathon and page
through the chapters dealing with the 1970s. Take a good look at some of
the photos, and then take a look at some of the times that were being run
in those days, including by Tom himself. The only accessories most runners
used were watches, and they were watches with hands that went around
the dial; digital watches hadn’t yet been invented. Running was pretty
simple and pure—and runners were generally faster than they are today.
Consider also that if you enjoy racing, the United States of America
Track and Field (and subsequently the Road Runner Club of America)
bans the use of electronic devices: MP3 players, cell phones, and such.
So it’s easier and more practical to wean yourself off the devices in your
training before getting disqualified from a race because of your use of
electronic devices.
Why hamper yourself with stuff that literally has nothing to do with
running? You’ll have plenty of opportunities when you’re old and rushed
to an emergency ward to have all types of monitoring devices hooked up
to you. And then it will mean more, because it will impress the nurses
(“My, oh my. A resting heart rate of 52. We don’t see that in here very
often. That’s one healthy heart!”).
Then, as the wise old coot you’ve become, you can look back in fond-
ness and joy to perfect runs you experienced—runs that stand out for
their sweetness and light—and lightness.
 Embrace Simplicity  o o o  7

Nobody except Marshall Ulrich* needs to remember runs as a beast

of burden or as a mobile emergency ward.

Simplify! Simplify!
Your running life brings the most to your life when it intrudes the least.
You want your running life to affect the rest of your life in a positive
way. The world gets more complicated every day, rushing forward at
such a speed and in such complex ways that it is a challenge to keep up.
Some psychologists worry that life is speeding up so much that people
simply cannot keep pace and are subsequently overstressed. The human
brain is adaptable, but it can only adapt at a certain speed. It needs time
and space to cope with change. Consider a swimmer who dives into
the river and begins swimming upstream at the same speed the water
is coming toward him. He is able to stay even with a spot on shore. But
should the river swell and the flow pick up speed, the swimmer will likely
be swept away by the current. It will simply overwhelm him.
In a similar way, the onslaught of more and more electronic devices
is marvelous and overwhelming at the same time. The technology
is impressive. Look at an iPhone and compare it to a 1983 Apple IIe
computer. (You might be able to find a picture of an Apple IIe on the
Smithsonian Web site.) At a cost of more than $3,000, the Apple IIe was
a marvel of its day, but compared to a $250 iPhone, it is a relic.
Yet for all of its marvelousness, the iPhone creates something of a
burden in the way it mesmerizes and intoxicates with its myriad of appli-
cations. (When I went to get mine, the salesgal went on for 45 minutes
about everything it does; I had to interrupt her to ask if it also works
as a phone, because she had never mentioned that function.) Watching
some people with portable electronic devices is similar to watching drug
addicts. They literally can’t tear themselves away from them and actually
begin getting depressed if they go five minutes without a chime sounding
to tell them they have a text message or a call. That much tension from,
and adoration of, a device isn’t good for the human nervous system.

*From July 1 through July 4, 1999, Colorado’s Marshall Ulrich, frequent winner of the
Badwater 135 race across Death Valley and up the shoulder of Mt. Whitney, attempted
to run, self-supported, from Badwater in the bottom of Death Valley to the peak of Mt.
Whitney, 14,494 feet (4,418 m), a distance of some 150 miles (241 km). The wheeled
contraption he constructed to cart his equipment weighed 225 pounds (102 kg). “For
the first time in my life,” Ulrich observed afterward, “harnessed to a cart weighing
more than 200 pounds, I felt the bondage of the servant animals, and the important
role they have played in increasing the quality of human lives. The bondage to that
cart taught me how we are all united in the universe in spirit, none better than the
other, none worse.”
8  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

For all the talking and texting, smartphones are also alienating. One
15-year-old boy I know texts a girl in his school but has never spoken
to her in person! People are communal animals. Face-to-face interaction
is almost as important to good mental health as is eating. Interaction
adds texture to life.
Running with others offers a sense of community and provides a
release and a resource. It seems that no subject is too alien or too out of
bounds when a small group of runners hits its stride on a long workout.
On the other hand, running alone frees a person’s body and mind. For
that period of time, the nervous system is relieved of its anticipation of
electronic stimulation. This gives it a vacation, a nap, a rest from being
bombarded by an increasingly infringing world. It also frees the mind
to solve what may seem like insurmountable problems.
There is an almost magical aspect of running alone when not bur-
dened with stuff. All of the day’s complexities fall away, and problems
that seemed overwhelming are stripped of their frills and brought down
to the simplest of terms, from where they can easily be solved.
Many a noontime runner has come back to work astonished at the
simplicity of a solution to a seemingly complex problem that had vexed
her for hours at the office. The pure run leaves behind the white noise
and the fuzziness of the problem and strips it bare. Bare is always easier.
The burden is cut loose, and the runner runs free.
Can life get any better than that?

For Your Consideration

• Running is one of the simplest and most fundamental of activities.
Keep it simple.
• The lighter a car can be made, the more efficient it is. Add weighty
accessories and it burns more fuel, which undermines its perfor-
mance.
• Allow your run to serve as a cleansing and liberating activity, not
a burdensome chore.
• The rhythm of a long run allows you to clear the cobwebs and
confusion from your head. Many a thorny question that seemed
to have no answer is readily resolved during a run . . . if you give
yourself the opportunity to ruminate.
• Learn to listen to the rhythm of your own heartbeat and breathing.
It is as close to primal purity as we get in today’s world, and one of
the things that makes running so precious.
 chapter

FPO
Eric Gevaert/fotolia.com

Tap the Athlete

with
Kathrine Switzer
T here is an oft-told parable about the restrictions we place on our-
selves—with the help of those around us—that bind us to the earth
for the rest of our lives and deny us physical heaven. The parable goes
like this:
There was a tall wall in town, the width of which was less than a
dozen inches. The wall was higher than a man’s head. It started
at one end of a city block and went, unbroken, to the other end
of the block. Kids used to climb on it by placing crates and boxes
against the wall. One kid dragged his bike up the side of the wall
and began to ride it along the top of the wall. His friends thought
it was really cool. The kid very much enjoyed riding across the
top of the wall. But one day, an adult who also happened to be
a science professor of great renown came along and explained to
the boy that he couldn’t really do that—nobody could do that. It
was impossible. The next time the kid tried to ride his bike along
the top of the wall, he fell off and broke his arm.
Natural-born athletes are different from regular folks. They are born
with an animal prowess that thrives deep in the muscles and sinew, below
consciousness. They do what they do so well as a function of who they
are—without thinking about it and analyzing it. If they think about it at
all, it is more often to wonder why, in the area of their extreme compe-
tence, the people around them are not as capable, and sometimes even
downright inept. To them it doesn’t seem natural that others fall short
of the level to which they were born, even when they try their best.
We’ve all known these natural athletes and we’ve all envied them—the
high school kid who instinctively knows where the opposing quarter-
back is going to throw the football before it leaves his hands so he can
get where he needs to be to steal it out of the outstretched hands of the
intended receiver; the basketball player who can toss a three-pointer
instinctively without thinking about it, who lofts the ball up and turns
to run back downcourt without watching it go in because she already
knows it is going to do just that (remember John Jerome, from the
introduction of this book, throwing rocks at bottles?); the runner who
explodes from the blocks and is three steps down the track before you
or I have so much as reacted to the starter’s gun. The list goes on and
on and on and could be discouraging—if we let it.
The good news is that sport is an area in which hard work can some-
times make up for talent, or in which real talent is awakened later in
life. Good genes will take us only so far; sometimes hard work can take
us farther.
Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team. Wade
Boggs went out to the ballpark early every day to work on his fielding.

10
 Tap the Athlete  o o o  11

To make up for a lack of natural talent, Emil Zatopek ran harder work-
outs than any human being could be expected to endure and as a result
became one of only a handful of long-distance runners who could truly
be called legendary.
There is an athlete in each of us. Most of us just haven’t been intro-
duced. Some people seem as afraid to meet the athlete in themselves as
they are to explore dark corners of their psyches.
Being an athlete is a combination of mental attitude, some number
of agreeable genes, and hard work. The sport and lifestyle of running
are their own special case, though. For all of its incredible simplicity,
there is no more profound or complex sport on the face of the earth.
Consider its permutations and consider that there must be at least one
permutation available to every mobile body on earth.
What other sport offers such latitude? At a track meet there are dis-
tances from 100 meters to 10,000 meters. On roads, there is everything
from the urban mile to the urban marathon to (in New York City on a
1-mile loop) an annual 3,100-mile (4,989 km) race. Out in the country,
there is everything from the 50-yard dash to the 100-mile trail race.
There are 24-hour, 48-hour, 72-hour, and 6-day races at local tracks.
There are adventure runs from Badwater in Death Valley to the peak
of Mt. Whitney, 100-mile stage races along the base of the Himalayan
Mountains, and transcontinental races from Los Angeles to New York.
This is not even getting into cross-country races and running legs in
triathlons and multisport events.
Genes will take you only so far on those running excursions. A strong
will and firm resolve then take over, which are qualities any human being
can develop by accessing the athlete within. Unfortunately, even some
folks who search out the runner within and take up the act of running
fail to search deep enough for the athlete within.
What does that mean? Simply, there are tens of thousands of runners
in the United States who do as little as possible to get by. As a result, they
never discover that there is a lot more to be tapped. Let me give you a
very concrete example. I don’t like to stress the marathon, but because
very real statistics are available, it is easy to cite accurately:
• In 1979 there were 75,000 marathoners in the United States; in
2004 there were more than 400,000.
• In the 1979 Boston Marathon, 24 Americans ran under 2:18; in the
2004 Boston Marathon, no Americans (zero, zilch) ran under 2:18.
How is that possible? How can it be that from a pool of 75,000, 24
ran sub-2:18s at the world’s most famed marathon way back in 1979
and more recently not one ran a sub-2:18 from a pool of over 400,000?
It simply does not compute.
12  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

One could expect that, based on past performances (and ignoring the
fact that we have enjoyed nearly 30 years of improved diet, running
shoes, training methods, and so on), with over 400,000 marathoners in
the country, there should have been 144 Americans under 2:18 at the
2004 Boston Marathon. What that says to me is that there are literally
hundreds of national- and world-class American marathoners slogging
around the streets who don’t realize that they are national class and
world class simply because they have never been encouraged or have
never been self-motivated to reach in and yank out the athlete within
by training harder and longer.
In an increasingly sedentary world, even runners seem frightened
to tap into the trapped athlete within. Instead, they approach running
tentatively, encouraged by many to take the path of least resistance
combined with the American imperative of instant gratification: become
an overnight marathoner with the bragging rights that go with it; then
drop out the other side and move on to something else.
We see this constantly in one of the largest segments of would-be
marathoners: charity runners. Charities require a constant supply of
new runners to commit to secure pledges and then get trained to run a
marathon. What happens to the runners on that journey or afterward
is immaterial.
Virgin runners who have never run a step are trained to run a marathon
within six months. Often, when they line up at the starting line, they’ve
never run another race on the way to attempting 26.2 miles and they are
still 30 to 40 pounds overweight. The results are preordained: they run
a marathon, they acknowledge that it was the most incredibly difficult
physical thing they’ve ever done or are likely to do, and they never run
again. The athlete within never sees the light of day, and the romance
of the marathon distance is undermined because it wasn’t raced; it was
survived. (This is not to say that all charity program coaches are inept.
But if all of them were adept, there wouldn’t be dozens—sometimes
hundreds—of charity runners out on a marathon race course long after
the course closes.) These runners are cheated out of becoming runners.
Dick Beardsley, who remains the fifth-fastest American marathoner
of all time (he ran 2:08:53 against Alberto Salazar in the famous Duel
in the Sun at Boston in 1982), took nearly five years to come back from
injuries before he again lined up to run a marathon—and he’s obviously
got the genes of a champion. Yet he was smart enough to know that
the body needs to build to longer distances, along the way sculpting
the athlete within so when it is time to line up at the starting line, the
athlete informs the runner.
In an age of obesity and sedentary lifestyles, the natural athlete in most
of us is either buried under layers of fat or forever stilled by inertia. What
 Tap the Athlete  o o o  13

a crime it is, then, that so many potential world-class runners’ careers

are short-circuited by being pushed too far and too fast.
Nothing good is built overnight. The athlete, muffled by an increas-
ingly antiphysical society, needs time to emerge and to shine. In the 1970s
athletes were given time to mature, to come into their own. No one told
them they couldn’t do it. Their bodies were prepared by regular running,
and their competitive spirit was nursed in short races and elevated as
speed and distance gradually increased. The full term of matriculation
was employed; there was no diploma mill in which they put a check in
one end and received a hollow PhD at the other end.
You owe it to yourself to enjoy the full measure of your efforts, to
meet and greet the athlete within, to run under that athlete’s power and
determination, and in the process to be genuinely fulfilled. All of this
begins with the simplest of acts: Open the door and go for a run. Or start
by going for a walk. Every time I walk out the door to go on a workout,
I recall a saying my father used to overuse. When he wanted us to get
out of the house, he’d tell us, “Go out and get the stink blown off you!”
The very act of going out the door and moving under your own
power taps into the essentials of human evolution. The largest bones
and muscles in the human body are in the legs for a very good reason:
we were designed to move. In talking to groups of novice runners, I add
to that the observation that if we were designed to sit in front of a tele-
vision for hours, from an evolutionary standpoint, such an activity (or
lack of same) would develop in us beautifully sculpted butts, but as we
can observe, that isn’t what happens.
What is the other design factor in the human being that makes us
excellent walkers and runners? That would be our sophisticated cooling
apparatus: our potential to use our skin as a cooling mechanism by sweat-
ing. No other animal on earth sports such a complex and efficient cooling
system, which contributes to us being natural-born endurance athletes.
Consider that for a moment: Every human being on earth is designed
as an endurance athlete. How good we are at being endurance athletes
depends, as stated before, to some extent on genes. But a good deal of it
also depends on hard work.
Anyone who is willing to put in the hard work can be a decent runner—
perhaps not a world-class runner, but at least a decent runner. What
other human activity can make that claim? Some of us could practice the
piano until our fingertips bled and we’d never become a decent pianist.
The same is true about doing math or repairing cars . . . or anything else.
Some people are good at it, whereas others could devote their lives to
trying to learn it and they’d never progress past pitiful. (All you need to
do to see this proved beyond argument is to watch the early shows of
American Idol each year.)
14  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Running isn’t like most other activities. Do it, then do it some more,
and you can become decent at it. Do it a lot more, and you can prob-
ably become above average.
But, you may ask, what kind of an athlete could I possibly have
trapped inside of me?
Consider the fact that there are blind runners (some of whom can run
a marathon in under 3 hours), runners who are amputees (one gal not
long ago ran a marathon in 3:05 as a below-the-knee amputee), runners
with diabetes (who greatly benefit in controlling their disease through
exercise), 85-year-old runners, and people who used to be runners who
take it up again later in life who are changed forever by the rediscovery
of how simple yet profound the act of running is.
Later in this book are discussions of how to greatly enhance your
running by getting out of a rut and making sweeping changes to your
running. This is not what we’re addressing here. This is way simpler
than that. This is about walking out the door and meeting your athlete.
Go out there and spend some quality time with your new best friend,
the athlete that was trapped inside you, the primitive eons-old runner
who wants out, the essential runner ready and eager to reveal aspects
of yourself that have long been repressed.
Millions of runners ply the world’s highways and byways. They weren’t
always runners, except in the relatively rare instance in which they ran
track and field or cross-country during their school days and continued
to do so after graduation. Go to any local 5K race and hang around after
the race is over and talk to a group of the runners. Ask them how they
got into running. If there are eight people there, seven of them will
reveal that they weren’t athletes in high school. In each case they will
be happy to confirm two things:
1. I never imagined that I was a runner until I became one.
2. I’m more comfortable with myself now that I’m a runner than
I’ve ever been in my life.
The nice thing about running is that the runner is always there,
patiently waiting to be released. There isn’t a predetermined starting
date or a firm expiration date.
One of the easiest ways to release the athletic beast inside and to keep
it loose is to set running goals, both short term and long term. It’s fine
on occasion to just run around for the sake of basic movement, but to
loosen the athlete, goals are necessary, both as a motivational factor (to
get you out the door on days you’d rather not go) and as a testing factor
(testing just how good you can be with a requisite amount of training).
Setting goals is a process that runs parallel with the personalities of
most people who get involved in running, and it is a way of laying out
 Tap the Athlete  o o o  15

yardsticks end-to-end toward reaching a long-term goal. You may start

with modest goals and grow from there. You may be surprised at how
motivating reaching goals can be. Set a short-term goal and achieve it,
and you will be doubly motivated to strive for the intermediate goal,
and from there to the long-term goal.
One of the most impressive runners I’ve ever met, and a guy who
really knows goals, is John Keston, who holds numerous age-group
world records. He didn’t begin running until he was 55 and, like many
other people, he started running to whip himself into better shape (in
his case, to play squash). He was a Shakespearean actor and professional
singer, with a runner lurking inside him, just as one lurks inside all of us.
John began entering 10K races as a lark and found that, for his age,
he was pretty good. Through dedication and hard work he became
ever better and began setting records for his age. An aspect to consider
with running, at least if you wish to race, is competition—against other
runners and against yourself. Age-group competition occurs within the
larger race; beyond that is competition against yourself, which involves
setting PRs (personal records), trying to run faster and better than you
did last week.
But getting back to John Keston and his fully emerged runner: John is
doubly impressive because on a somewhat regular basis (like, once every
five years or so), he has been forced to reinvent his runner as a result of
a nonrunning accident (such as riding a bike over railroad tracks and
breaking his hip to the point that it required a metal plate) that puts
him on the disabled list for months at a time. Each time he has eased
back into running and reemerged as good as ever and sometimes even
better. He has essentially been reborn on a regular basis.
Even those with decades of experience can be reborn. Kathrine Switzer,
one of the pioneers of women’s running, twice the head of the Avon
running program and the author of Marathon Woman, related this surpris-
ing and refreshing development in her own search for the inner athlete:

When people would say to me, “I used to run, I don’t anymore. I

should get back to it. I always liked it,” I used to be amazed. How on
earth could you like running and not do it?
Now, after running for 50 years, I think I understand a little better.
The athlete within is always there; just finding it is often challenging.
I never stopped running, and still define myself first as an athlete, but
over the last 10 years I was spending less and less time actually doing it.
Work, travel, fatigue, higher priorities—you know the story—all resulted
in my running less. Consequently, I got slower, put on weight for the first
time in my life, and was less confident of my physical capability. Well,
hell, I was 60, I told myself. Of course I had less capability!
16  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

After running 35 marathons, it became more fascinating to do the TV

commentary of the race. After thousands of miles of Sunday-morning
long runs, using that time to write another book was more challenging
to me. There was still joy and great creativity in my daily run, but it
wasn’t compelling enough to make me push myself.
And then a funny thing happened. Fascinating events began pop-
ping up that didn’t exist even a decade ago. Like running on a game
reserve in Kenya, or running three races in three days in Bermuda, or
running over a mountain range over rough tracks and through rivers in
New Zealand. I found myself wishing I could do them, and annoyed at
not being 28 anymore. Back then, I only had to pull on my shoes and
I was there. And now what? Was the old athlete somewhere inside me
even capable of trying?
And then another funny thing happened. I was meeting women who
were 65 and 70 years old who had just started running and were doing
these events. Older than me! Way older than me! That was it; if they
could do it, I could, too. For years I had the reputation for motivating
others, and now, presto! They were motivating me. It’s the truth: Find-
ing the athlete inside happens quickly when you are inspired or when
your competitive hackles are raised. The athlete was there inside raring
to go; it just needed a goal to give me the focus.
The ongoing process has been funny, wistful, time-consuming, and
extremely enlightening. Although the outcome has yet to be determined,
I can say for certain that it is humbling to have to work so hard again;
it is bewildering to still feel inside how I felt at 28 but how incapable I
am of being anything but 63, how hilarious (you have to laugh) it is to
have to spend twice as much time training now as I did then because
it takes me twice as long to cover the same distance and because I
need a nap afterward. But it is thrilling in the extreme to find that old
lioness getting stronger again; perhaps a bit wobbly and flea-bitten
but still roaring.
The athlete lurks in all of us. It is our human nature honed over tens
of thousands of years. It is up to us to open the cage and let it loose.
Even if it goes on hiatus, remember that it can still be revived and again
released into the wild.

For Your Consideration

• Don’t demand too much too soon, or you will court injury and
burnout.
• Just because there is a distance known as the marathon doesn’t
mean you have to run it this year—or ever.
 Tap the Athlete  o o o  17

• Try different sports, and in running, try different distances. We all

have sports or distances at which we are better than we are at others.
• Long-distance running is a sport and lifestyle that is ideal for those
who are adept at delayed gratification. Delayed gratification—like
the taste of the tree-ripened fruit—has more profound rewards than
does instant gratification.
• It is never too late to seek the athlete within, nor too early to give
that athlete his or her head.
 chapter

FPO
Wojciech Gajda/fotolia.com

Keep It in
Proportion
with
Amby Burfoot
R ecovering alcoholics and drug addicts make good long-distance
runners. At least for a while. That’s because they have the capac-
ity—nay, the compulsion—to become obsessed with their habit of the
moment, frequently to their ultimate detriment.
Good long-distance running requires a strong dose of dedication
administered on a regular basis at increasingly larger amounts if it is to
work. As with taking drugs, the more you increase your capacity, the
more it takes to get a reaction—or, in the case of long-distance running,
the more it takes to make even incremental improvements.
Numerous recovering alcoholics and drug abusers slide over to long-
distance running as a substitute for their negative addictions. Besides
helping them obsess about something other than drugs, long-distance
running also contributes to keeping them away from smoking cigarettes,
a seeming staple at most Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Long-distance running has long been touted as a positive addiction.
It was initially referred to as such by William Glasser in the 1960s and
made popular in his 1976 book of the same title.
Glasser cited running and meditating as positive addictions. He
promoted both for their own sake and also as alternatives to negative
addictions.
Even people who have not dealt with negative addictions who come
to running tend to become, to varying extents, addicted to the activity.
Why else continue to participate in an activity that from the outside
appears to be insanely repetitive and profoundly boring? “I just like to
do it. I have to do it. It makes me feel good and when I don’t do it, I
feel bad” sounds a bit lame, explains little (at least to those who don’t
run), and certainly makes you sound like an addict of some kind, but
that response is very common among runners.
Some psychologists cite examples of running clients who exhibit clas-
sical physical signs of withdrawal when, because of injury, their running
is temporarily taken away from them. Other psychologists point to the
brain’s release of endorphins during running, which are like a natural
drug that allows a runner to turn a seemingly dull, boring, and repeti-
tive activity into a holy rite. (Endorphins are morphine-like chemicals
released by the brain under various circumstances, including long-
distance running and sex. Some anthropologists have theorized that the
release of endorphins was crucial to ancient people’s survival because
their release mediated the drudgery and discomfort of long-distance and
long-running hunts for animals to be used as food.)
The only problem with addictions is that they are overpowering, and
as such, they tend to ultimately get out of hand. They can take over
control of the person rather than the person controlling (and using)
them in a positive way.

19
20  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

In 1989 I wrote a book called The Exercise Fix (Human Kinetics). It was
a study of the runner’s high and of exercise addiction in general but in
running specifically, because running offered the largest and most will-
ing cohort available at the time. My conclusion was that regular aerobic
exercise such as running is good for a person on many levels. It offers
a plethora of positives: It increases physical endurance, provides more
ready energy, controls weight, lowers blood pressure, releases stress, alters
moods in a positive way, increases self-esteem and body image, increases
the efficiency of the brain by infusing the brain cells with additional
oxygen and nutrients, and builds up your T-shirt collection. But the book
went beyond the positives to address what happens when running takes
control of a person’s life.
The Exercise Fix was inspired to some extent by the vitriolic response
to an editorial Bob Anderson wrote in On the Run, a tabloid fortnightly
publication of Runner’s World, in which he said that to some people,
running had become a religion. He got blasted by religious zealots as
well as by those who were defensive about the amount of time they
spent running. Bob’s observations made perfect sense to me, but then,
I was exposed to an awful lot of running crazies. This was, after all,
1978, when the first running boom was building toward a force-5
hurricane.
The fact that some of the respondents were so virulent about how their
excessive running was not bad for them was fascinating. Of course, within
the next five years, most of them were no longer runners. I wove this fact
into the conclusion of The Exercise Fix: Those who run too much either
burn out psychologically or run themselves into the ground physically
by overdoing it and failing to listen to the cries of distress their chroni-
cally injured bodies bleat out.
As an aside, more fascinating still was the vehemence with which these
former addicted advocates of running became the lifestyle’s harshest crit-
ics. Their conclusion: Running is bad for you, so don’t do it. Look what it did
to me. They didn’t say, I ran to excess, didn’t listen to my body, didn’t listen
to my doctor, didn’t listen to my friends, and was a total jerk. Now look at me.
I’m a near-cripple and I should be ashamed of myself. Don’t do what I did.
Ease into running, build gradually, listen to your body, and enjoy the process.
Let’s face it: There is only one future for a runaholic: to become an
ex-runner.
If that’s the fate you desire, run wild, run crazy, and run to excess. In
fact, run to wretched excess. Your running career will be finite.
If you want running to be a part of your life for the rest of your life,
keep it in perspective, and keep it in proportion to everything else in
your life. Can running be an important aspect of your life? Certainly.
Does it fulfill deep-seated needs for which the body was designed? It
 Keep it in Proportion  o o o  21

does. Is it the be-all and end-all of your life? It shouldn’t be. Not if you
are running at a level that is healthy and allows for other aspects of your
life to occasionally have sway.
Many converts to long-distance running allow it to take over their
lives, to the extent that they lose their families and friends in the pro-
cess because running becomes more important to them than anyone or
anything else. That’s unfortunate. When running has that large a role in
your life, it has gotten out of hand. It is ruling your life, and you have
lost control; when that happens, it’s time to cut back or take some time
off. If you don’t, your body will revolt by courting injuries that bring
your running life to a painful and bitter end.
How can you tell if your running has taken control of your life, rather
than the other way around? Ask yourself the following questions:
• Do I feel guilty if I miss a day of running?
• Does my mood deteriorate if I don’t get in my daily run?
• Am I likely to run through injuries?
There is a whole litany of questions you can ask yourself, and even after
asking yourself these questions, you can still rationalize why you need
to keep overdoing it. The following checklist can help you determine if
you might have a running addiction.

Commitment or Compulsion?
In order to develop and maintain aerobic (cardiorespiratory) fit-
ness, a person must practice the aerobic activity on a regular basis.
Kenneth Cooper, father of aerobics, considers doing a 20-minute
workout three or four times a week, or every other day, to be prac-
ticing aerobic fitness on a regular basis.
Aerobic practitioners who go beyond Cooper’s minimum rec-
ommendations tend to participate in the activity for reasons other
than good cardiovascular health. They find fulfillment in the fitness
activity itself and not merely in the end result, which becomes a
sort of by-product.
These more ambitious people tend to invest a good deal of
time and commitment in training and racing, whether the aerobic
activity is long-distance running or swimming, sustained bicycling,
cross-country skiing, aerobic dance, or triathlon. Generally, these
are laudable pursuits that provide an extreme degree of fitness to
the athlete and provide an arena for socially acceptable personal
fulfillment.
(continued)
 Commitment or Compulsion  (continued)
A number of these people, however, consistently escalate their
fitness pursuits until those pursuits become the center of their lives,
displacing family, friends, sex, hobbies, and job in importance. The
admonition that “too much of anything is not good for you” comes
forcibly into play.
The following self-test is designed to gauge your attitude toward
your involvement in aerobic pursuits. Some of the questions may
not be applicable to you at this time in your aerobic career. For
instance, you may never have consulted a sport therapist or sport
psychologist, and to you the statement “My sport therapist is my
best friend” may seem rather absurd. Consequently, you will likely
place a score of 1 next to it.
Some of the statements refer to a specific type of aerobic pursuit
(the triathlon) but are applicable to a variety of aerobic efforts,
and presumably you will answer accordingly. Other statements are
general: “If you don’t even try, you’ve already lost.” These have an
obvious application to aerobic activities, and especially to aerobic
competition.

A Self-Test
Where Exercise Addiction Stands in Your Life
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the strongest, give an objective
weight to each of the following statements as they apply to you
and your endurance fitness. Then total your numbers and see the
interpretations at the end of the test. Fill the test out with a pencil,
or make photocopies so you can retake it periodically.
_____ Aerobic fitness is important to me. I’m positive I’ll be engaged
in one or more endurance sports for the rest of my life.
_____ A day without an endurance workout is like a day without
sunshine.
_____ If it becomes downright impossible to get my workout in
today, I can always double up tomorrow.
_____ Until I get my workout in, I’m a real bear—as in unbearable.
_____ A little pain proves there’s progress being made.
_____ If 5 hours of workout a week is good, 10 hours is twice as good.
_____ Warm-up and cool-down are important, but it’s what comes
in the middle of a workout that counts.
_____ As far as endurance training goes, more is always better.

22
_____ “My workouts for the past week? Glad you asked!”
_____ Regularity at any cost is the backbone of all fitness.
_____ Quality without quantity is wasteful.
_____ “My sport therapist is my best friend.”
_____ You’re not a real runner until you’ve done a marathon.
_____ Triathlons are important because they allow you to do more
training with impunity.
_____ To go for more, always for more, is what’s important in life.
_____ Rest is for the weary, not for the strong.
_____ An unbroken string of workouts should remain so.
_____ A person who has nothing to prove has already made a point.
_____ If you don’t even try, you’ve already lost.
_____ Relaxation is all right after you’ve made the grade.
_____ TOTAL YOUR SCORE.

Where does your total fall? 161-200, exercise addiction personi-

fied; 121-160, leanings toward exercise addiction; 81-120, nearly
neutral; 41-80, fitness with a mellow bent; 10-40, approaching
terminal mellow. Retake this test every four to six months.
Analyzing Your Score
What was your total for the test?
Let’s briefly examine the various levels of involvement in aerobic
activities indicated by the test results:
20-40. Very few people involved in aerobic activities are likely to
score this low simply because, to pursue an aerobic activity, a certain
commitment to regularity is necessary. Consequently, answering the
first question truthfully is likely to put the typical aerobic exerciser
well on the way to the next level.
41-80. A person who pursues aerobic fitness according to Cooper’s
minimum weekly requirements and who maintains fitness strictly
for its health benefits is likely to fall into this category.
81-120. This range is referred to as neutral because it includes
people who occasionally increase their training to take part in an
annual competition or who typically increase their involvement in
aerobic activities when the weather improves. People in this category
tend to stay involved in aerobic fitness all year round, but to escalate
the involvement on occasion as the spirit or season moves them.
(continued)

23
24  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Commitment or Compulsion  (continued)

121-160. Most aerobic athletes fall into this category. They are
involved in fitness for more than just the health benefits, and they
regularly pursue competitive goals, whether that means trying
to break 40 minutes in the 10K road race or doing three or four
short-course triathlons per summer. This group also includes aero-
bic dancers who periodically gear up to reach higher levels and
bicyclists who regularly train for and take part in century rides and
other endurance events. Also included are cross-country skiers who
compete in several citizens’ races a year.
161-200. At this level, one’s commitment to aerobic activities and
sports tends to cross over into obsessive and compulsive behavior.
Aerobic training becomes more important than nearly anything else
in life. It is the focal point of each day. There is a tendency to will-
ingly train through injuries and to compete in races when injured.
There is also a tendency to blindly defend one’s intense involvement
on the basis of the benefits aerobic fitness bestows on the human
body. The phrase “No pain, no gain” is used at first to get through
difficult workouts, and later to justify training while injured.
It is advisable to retake the self-test periodically because, as with
other addictions, aerobic involvement may go through peaks and
valleys, binges and layoffs (often occasioned by temporarily debilita-
tion injuries associated with the fitness activity).
The typical tendency, however, is for the person addicted to aerobic
exercise to pursue that exercise in a headstrong and headlong fashion.

Running, at its best, should complement your life. It should keep you
fit, relieve stress, provide healthy competition, help stave off diseases,
give you more stamina to follow other pursuits in life, raise your self-
esteem, keep you out of the doctor’s office, and, let’s face it, make you
more virile and increase your life expectancy. Running can be a simple
activity that benefits every corner of your life while undermining noth-
ing. It can easily be integrated into your daily life, no matter how busy
you are.
Running, which can feel at the outset like an intrusion into your life
that you must shoe-horn into a daily routine, can eventually come to
be as natural and as second nature as combing your hair—if you happen
to have hair to comb. Running can be one of those daily habits that fall
by the wayside unless you integrate it into your daily life.
 Keep it in Proportion  o o o  25

Daily running and walking used to be an integral part of the average

life of just about every man, woman, and child on earth. In the ancient
world, travel by foot was a given because horses and elephants hadn’t
yet been domesticated. Many tribes were nomadic and people traveled
great distances on their own two feet. In those days, walking and run-
ning weren’t integrated into daily life; daily life was integrated around
the physical activity of getting from one place to the next.
Even when various animals were domesticated, not everyone had a
horse to ride. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the majority of the Athe-
nian army traveled on foot. The hoplites (light infantry) were trained
to run a fast mile while wearing their armor. This training made them
more maneuverable and therefore more effective, as they proved at the
Battle of Marathon against the much more numerous Persians (today’s
Iranians) in 490 BC.
In Rome, the common folk did not speed around the city on chariots,
knocking Nubian slaves out of the way; chariots were only for the very
rich and powerful. The same goes for the fancy carriages in Europe and
the Orient several hundred years ago. On our own Western frontier, the
pioneers typically walked beside their oxen- and horse-drawn wagons
and ranged far and wide on foot pursuing game along the trail. It is only
within the last 50 or 60 years that nearly every family in the United
States has owned a car—even the poor and downtrodden. Even today,
though, most people in developing countries still get to where they are
going by traveling on foot.
In the developed world, around the middle of the 20th century, run-
ning was considered a form of punishment. Going on forced marches
toughened up soldiers; they were frequently treated to the “dog trot,”
alternating walking and jogging. On high school and college football
teams, miscreants were forced to run laps as punishment. The same went
for baby boomers in physical education classes in the 1950s and 1960s:
Goof up or goof off and it was laps around the gym for you.
Only since the 1970s, and only among a certain elite, has running been
seen as a reward and sometimes as an alternative to riding in or driving
a car. Although the object of derision among many in the car culture
of the 1970s, Frank Shorter made running cool for postcollegiates who
wanted to maintain some level of fitness in a society where, for most
college graduates, physical work was being phased out.
During the initial running revolution (then thought of as a fad that
would fade), somehow a relatively high number of college graduates who
had salaried jobs (jobs that also went well beyond the standard 40-hour
workweek) were able to fit running into their busy professional and
social lives. People who were not world- or national- or even regional-
class competitors were running 50, 60, and 70 miles a week. Somehow
26  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

they managed to make their regular running an integral part of their

lives without missing a beat.
These early runners fit running into their lives by making it a prior-
ity. Running every day was no longer an option; it was a necessity. A
day without running became an incomplete day. They simply, over a
period of time, raised the status of their daily run until it just had to be
done. To some it went so far, as we discussed earlier in this chapter, as
becoming an obsession.
If you have not yet made the commitment to running, such dedica-
tion may seem almost cultish, and therefore beyond your capacity. But
consider how easily we get ourselves into other habits that we either
consciously or unconsciously integrate into our daily lives. Do you stop
at a cafe on the way to work to get a fancy cup of coffee? Do you go by a
convenient store on the way to work to pick up a donut? Do you check
e-mails first thing in the morning, and every hour thereafter? At lunch,
do you go to the same deli or fast-food joint and order pretty much the
same thing every day? Such habits are relatively easy to develop, and
once formed, can be difficult to break.
This is not to say that there aren’t sacrifices to be made on the way to
integrating a regular running program into your week. You may have
to get up an hour earlier to get in an early-morning run before work, or
you might have to give up socializing with fellow workers over lunch
so you can go out for your daily run. Fortunately, it is usually easy these
days to find someone at work who’ll want to go along with you on your
noon run. It may surprise you how little time it takes to develop a new,
healthier habit that works running into your daily life.
In the same way, you’ll want to examine how you can best integrate
your weekly long run into your weekend. So as not to disrupt the fam-
ily’s weekend schedule, many a runner gets up before the rest of the
family and gets the run out of the way. By using the term “get it out of
the way,” I don’t mean to suggest that a long run is odious or a chore.
For some runners, that Saturday or Sunday early-morning run is the only
hour or two they have alone. Free time in the current rushed world is
often a godsend—an hour or two of sanity and a reward for a week well
spent with other people doing other duties.
Running can also serve as a perfect stress reliever, whether done alone
or with others. If asked to choose between an hour run or an hour on
an analyst’s couch, many will choose running, hands down. Even some
analysts are prone to agree. In his essay “Jogotherapy: Jogging as Psy-
chotherapy,” in the book Running as Therapy, Frederick D. Harper wrote:
“The theoretical approach of ‘jogging as psychotherapy’ is predicated on
the supposition, supported by empirical evidence, that jogging can alter
psychological states and psychological traits” (Sachs and Buffone, p. 83).
 Keep it in Proportion  o o o  27

Make running a virtue that you use to complement your life, to pro-
mote your general health, and to get out and explore new worlds. And
occasionally, take a break. Also, be sure to keep it all integrated but also
in proportion. Your body (and your psyche) will thank you.
Amby Burfoot, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and editor-at-
large at Runner’s World, has been running competitively since high school
back in the 1960s. Looking back at his long career as a runner, he put
it into perspective this way:

Many years ago I thought Perfection was the only path, and in my
running I sought to achieve it over all else.
I ran 20-milers on Sunday morning. On Sunday afternoon, I added
up my mileage for the week. If it didn’t total 100 or more, I ran the
additional distance Sunday evening. I did hills on Tuesdays, and speed
work on Thursdays. Saturday was a race day: I went out fast, and then
picked up the pace. Every Monday morning, I started all over again.
For a while, my system appeared to be working. Distant stars came
into focus. I set my sights ever higher. Olympic gold didn’t seem out
of reach.
Then I crashed. Over and over again. I learned life’s lessons, and
running’s, the hard way. The stars receded, and my Olympic dreams
grew tarnished.
But something good also happened. I figured out how to run on
terms that actually worked. They didn’t require Perfection. And sure,
they didn’t deliver impossible dreams.
But they made me happy. And I can live with that. I learned that:
1. No one ever completes an unblemished training plan. Some days
you get sick. Other days you just feel like crap (even though you don’t
know why). The most you can hope for is that you’ll hit 80 percent of
the workouts you originally planned. And guess what? That’s more than
good enough. This led me to the 80 = 99 rule. If you do 80 percent of
your planned workouts, you’ve got a 99 percent chance of hitting your
goals. The other 1 percent depends on the weather, which you can’t
control at all. So let it go.
2. You can’t be in top shape all the time. Sometimes you have to be
in really crummy shape. (An excellent time for this is the Thanksgiving
Day to Super Bowl period. And you don’t lose any points if you extend
to Valentine’s Day. Or St. Patrick’s Day. Or Easter. Personally, I don’t
think you should stretch things out past Easter. It just doesn’t seem
right. Besides, you might have to put on a bathing suit as early as June.)
3. Every year, month, week, and day marks a new beginning. And
each is a really good time to, um, begin anew. No one’s keeping score
28  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

but you, so you might as well play by whatever rules will help you suc-
ceed. I’m not suggesting you set the bar low; I’m just suggesting you
set the bar at a height you can clear. When he was close to death from
prostate cancer, Dr. George Sheehan, the philosopher king of running,
told me: “There’s only one runner in your race, and you are he.”
I’ve tried to take Sheehan’s teaching to heart. I’m not striving for Per-
fection any longer. I’m just trying to run the best I can in my own race.
Amby’s conclusion is one he earned from decades of running and
learning about both himself and the sport. As long as we do the best we
can do, there’s not much more we can—or should—expect of ourselves.

For Your Consideration

• Consider scheduling regular one- or two-week vacations from run-
ning during which you don’t run at all. These are the downtimes
of your annual training cycle and will help you come back to the
sport refreshed, in mind and body.
• Always be willing to ask yourself this question: Am I in charge of
my running, or is my running ruling my life? If the latter is the
case, you need to take a break and regroup.
• Ask yourself on occasion whether your personal life has expanded
or shrunk since you took up running as a sport and a lifestyle.
• Observe yourself in social situations. Do you constantly bring up
running as a topic of conversation? Is your next run too often on
your mind? When is the last time you and your family and friends
took a vacation that didn’t involve running?
• Do you become anxious and ill natured if you don’t manage to get
in your run?
 chapter

FPO
AP Photo

Maintain
a Journal
with
Joe Henderson
W hat did you do four months ago in your training that helped you
pull off that PR (personal record) at last weekend’s 10K? What was
your sequence of training? What were the key workouts? What days
did you take off to properly recuperate? What additional racing did you
do that might have contributed to your peaking at just the right time?
And how did you know exactly where you were on the night of June
4, 2005, when the prosecuting attorney had you under oath in the
breaking and entering trial?
Well, that’s easy. You’ve been keeping a running/life journal for the
past decade, so you are able to access every workout you did for the 18
weeks leading up to that successful marathon, and you are able to pro-
vide an alibi for the night of June 4, 2005, because you were eating pizza
and drinking beer at the Red Hawk Brewpub & Pizza Parlor after your
usual weekly track workout with a dozen members of your running club.
Journals can be either valuable (think of Boswell’s journal of the life
of Samuel Johnson) or ridiculous (think of the shaggy-haired guy over
there at the end table in the corner coffee shop who writes into his com-
puter journal all day long, which means he writes about stroking the
keyboard of his computer all day long). Many journals are fascinating.
As interest in novels (other than genre novels) slowly expires, memoirs
are all the rage—and they aren’t all memoirs of famous people. Some
are of seemingly normal people who have either inflated their lives
beyond all recognition or lived secret lives nobody around them knew
anything about.
A running journal is invaluable on two wildly different counts:

1. It can help you recreate a sequence of training that resulted in

success so you can once again have a wonderful racing experience.
2. It can offer revealing clues as to how your training may have con-
tributed to an unwanted outcome, such as an injury that took you
out of the game for a goodly period of time right in the middle of
the prime racing season.

The journal reveals all, the good and the bad. The nuts-and-bolts
portion of your daily journal is merely a recitation of facts: how far you
ran, how long you ran, at what speed you ran, what kind of weather
you ran in, whether you warmed up first, whether you did an adequate
cool-down, whether you did postrun stretching exercises, and so on.
On the subjective side, you can note how you felt during the run and
how well you recovered after the run.
Your journal allows you to examine your running life and learn from
it so that you can improve your training and racing in the future, and
increase the length of your running life.

30
 Maintain a Journal  o o o  31

Some runners want only facts in their daily journals: time, distance,
pace, and so forth. For others a journal is a place to record the objec-
tive facts of their daily run, as well as a space to define their day by
including the major events in their life that day as well as to comment
on the day in general and on specific parts of it.
I began keeping a journal when I returned to running on June 13,
1977. I kept it in a three-ring binder. If I was in a hurry that day, I’d
quickly write the basics of my running in the upper left corner; then
make some observations on the day. If I had more time, I’d run the
page through my Royal standard typewriter and go on at length about
that day’s run, that day’s trials and tribulations at the office, and a few
things personal.
The three-ring binder was perfect because I could add pages to it at
will. When I had too many pages, I bought a second three-ring binder
and began inserting pages there. Many of the long-term runners I know
have a similar method of keeping their journals, but they use one three-
ring binder per year. They are more meticulous that way than I am.
My three-ring binder gained a companion binder only when the first
binder wouldn’t hold any more pages.
Eventually, though, I changed over to simple 3-by-5 cards, which I
found I was using for a lot of things in my life, such as keeping a list of
things I needed to do that day. The 3-by-5 cards were perfect because
they were very portable (I could shove a handful of them into my back
pocket when I was going on a trip) and very easy to file. At the end of
the year, I used a felt-tip marker to scrawl the year onto the top card,
and then I simply bound them with twine and put them into a box
with bricks of cards from previous years.
The 3-by-5 cards held my daily workout in the upper left corner,
and notes about the rest of the day filled out the rest of the card. If I
needed to use the back of the card, that was OK, but I tried to use only
the front of one card each day. That seemed like a good exercise in
discipline and brevity.
My journals proved extremely valuable when a few years ago I
attempted to recreate for Marathon & Beyond my most unforgettable
ultramarathon: the 1978 Cow Mountain 50-Mile Planet Earth. It was
fascinating going back through the journal. Because the race involved
a whole weekend (getting there, camping out, getting up early to run
it, partying afterward, and getting back home), there were three pages
of notes, one for each day. Some of what I found in the journal did not
jibe with what I remembered about the race weekend. You know how
our memories, left to their own devices, edit events in our past to either
mitigate them or to enlarge them. Well, the journal tells it like it was,
because it was written in the heat of the moment in black and white.
32  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

When John J. Kelley, winner of the 1957 Boston Marathon, writes

stories for our magazine about various marathons he ran, he can recreate
them with great detail because he has kept a journal of his running and
his life for decades. Clarence DeMar, seven-time winner of the Boston
Marathon, kept meticulous records of his workouts and used them as a
resource when he wrote his autobiography, Marathon.
Bruce Fordyce, from South Africa, still holds the 50-mile world
record, which he set in Chicago in 1984. While writing a story on the
25th anniversary of Bruce’s epic race, Rich Limacher exchanged e-mails
with Oonagh, Bruce’s sister, who had this to say about Bruce’s journal
keeping:
Something that no one realizes about Bruce is that he is incred-
ibly disciplined. He has kept a diary of his life, writing a page
every day since he was 7 years old! That is part of his success.
You should ask to see his running journals: they are incredible.
Everything is noted, all the smallest details. Strangely, I once
had the honour of sitting next to Sir Roger Bannister at a dinner
party and got talking to him about how he broke the 4-minute
mile. Poor man must be sick to death of that conversation,
but he was so charming and told me he did it differently from
others because he recorded all the details of his training, etc. So
maybe they have that in common (Marathon & Beyond, May/
June 2010, p. 126).
Maybe all of us would do well to have journal keeping in common
with John J. Kelley, Clarence DeMar, Bruce Fordyce, and Sir Roger Ban-
nister. Obviously, it worked well for them.
These days the process of keeping a journal has been made easy by the
availability of commercial running journals. Joe Henderson publishes
a nice one through Barnes & Noble.
Of course, as with many things these days, computer software exists
for journal keepers. Also, smartphones can record and track your runs,
which saves you the trouble of having to do the math to figure out
your pace, because the software does it for you. Some applications can
even create maps (with mile points) of your runs by tapping into GPS
satellites.
Someday, you may want to write your memoirs (everyone seems to
be doing that these days). It can often be somewhat disconcerting to
think back to something that happened to you 10 years ago, jot down
the details, and then go back and pull out your journal where the facts
are lodged. The mind can do some strange gymnastics with facts if you
give it 10 years to ruminate.
 Maintain a Journal  o o o  33

Keeping a journal has four benefits:

1. It provides the opportunity to keep a record of your daily life.
2. It offers an opportunity to chart your daily training to get the
bigger picture.
3. It forces you to write every day, which can help you clarify what
happened in your day.
4. Older journals are fun to read and often reveal insights into life
that you have long since forgotten. And heck, if you have kids, it’s
a wonderful legacy to pass on to them. All sorts of organizations
are running around attempting to extract meaningful memoirs
from people who lived through World War II before they are gone.
Your journal leaves a personal legacy that can be enjoyed while
you are still alive and hopefully after you are gone.
It is worth taking the time to start a journal. If you decide to start
a journal and it is the middle of the year, that’s OK. You can start the
journal today. Think of the upside: you can probably go to the local
bookstores and buy a running journal for this year that’s half price
because half the year is gone.
Make a record of your running—and of yourself. Running buddy Joe
Henderson has literally kept a running journal/log/diary for decades.
Joe is the author of more than 20 books on running and served as the
editor of Runner’s World for seven years during its very formative period,
1970 to 1977. I asked him for some insights into the art and science of
writing it all down:
You can be your own biographer. You don’t need to be a talented
writer to profit from a diary. You don’t need to spend more than a minute
a day writing in it. You don’t even have to write many, or indeed any,
words. Numbers alone tell stories as they help you recall old training
sessions and suggest new possibilities. That process begins with three
guidelines:
1. Keep it simple. Limit the amount of information to a few essentials
that you can list briefly, quickly, and in an accessible form for review.
The harder it is to keep a diary, the less likely you are to use it. You don’t
need a preprinted training diary. A calendar with large blocks of space
for each day will do nicely as long as it is tacked to your bedroom or
office wall, but it won’t travel or store well. A notebook works best for
this purpose. Fill it at the rate of one, two, or a few lines a day.
2. Keep it up. Analyze the accumulating data over extended periods
to judge your results. Review at the end of each week, month, and year.
34  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

The longer you maintain the diary, the clearer your patterns of response
to the exercise—and the clearer your thinking about it—become. Days
of training leave behind what appear to be random footsteps in the
diary. You can’t take much direction from them at first. But the weeks,
months, and years form a trail that points in two directions. It shows
where you have been and where you might go next.
3. Keep it. Store your records in a safe place, treating them as the
precious volumes they will become in time. Their value grows along
with their age and bulk. The ultimate value of a diary is as a personal
library of dreams and memories. You can open it to any old page and
bring a day back to life. You can call up a mental videotape and, from
a few statistics on the page, recreate all you did and felt that day. These
recordings give substance and permanence to efforts that otherwise
would be as temporary as the moment and to experiences that would
be as invisible as footprints on the pavement.

For Your Consideration

• Don’t put it off another day. Either buy a commercial running
journal or put together one of your own, and start filling it in on
a daily basis.
• Keep an accurate record of your daily runs, and be sure to record
how you felt before, during, and after a run. Sometimes the best
way to learn about the outcome of a long training period is to read
about your perceptions of your running on specific days. If you ran
a set workout but felt really beat up afterward, that’s obviously an
indication that you weren’t getting enough rest.
• Think of your journal as a ship’s log. Record the basics of what hap-
pened to you on that day. But unlike the dry jotting in a ship’s log,
your journal entries can come to life by adding your own observa-
tions and opinions.
• Find a safe, easily accessible place to maintain your journals. They
don’t take up all that much space, and you may need to consult
them on a regular basis.
• Designate someone to whom the journals are to be given after you
die. They will constitute one of your most valuable possessions and
will be valued by someone in your family.
 chapter

FPO

Take Your Measure

by Racing
with
Hal Higdon
Y ou’ve probably seen them on your training runs: runners who, you
can intuit by their pace or their clothing or their style, are running . . .
just to run! You can’t imagine that they’ve ever pinned on a number,
toed a starting line, and raced against their peers on a timed and mea-
sured course. They constitute the Henry Thoreaus of the running world:
running to their own iPod, marching to their own drummer, smelling
the flowers, and damn the torpedoes that go whizzing by. They get by
running on the periphery of running society, like ghosts or shadows.
It’s difficult to determine whether these runners are serene or oblivi-
ous. We have several of them in our neighborhood. One young fellow,
around 25 or so, runs in gray sweatpants, a blue sweatshirt, and a navy
hat—the same outfit all year long, winter or summer. Another one, in his
early 30s and sporting a dark beard, runs in baggy, dark blue shorts and
a sweatshirt and wears clunky black high-top shoes that look as though
they weigh 12 pounds each. I wave at them as they go by, but they
seldom pay attention to me—they seem lost in their own little worlds.
Of course, I’m not much better. While I’m evaluating their sartorial
conundrums, I’m as often wearing a pair of khaki pants as not. I don’t
go very fast anymore and don’t see the need to be spiffy and high-tech.
On days when I see both these guys, I think about stopping them so we
three can form the Luddite Running & Pizza-Eating Society. The sassy
running clothing industry ain’t getting rich off us.
In years past I’ve felt a tinge of sadness for runners of this ilk. They
seem content, like grazing cows, when they should be pushing them-
selves to be brazen like snorting bulls. They seem to be missing the cherry
on the sundae: racing. But I’ve reined myself in these days, just as I no
longer stop my car when I see a runner training on concrete sidewalks
when there is a perfectly good asphalt bike path in the street, where the
running surface is only about 25 percent as damaging.
My friends who race on a regular basis look at these shadow people
and shake their heads in sadness, wondering what the point is of regu-
larly putting in all those miles and then not putting them to good use
in a contest of strength, sweat, and speed. My racing friends construct
various analogies for these raceless runners:

• It’s like writing two-thirds of a novel and then putting it in a drawer

where nobody will ever see it.
• It’s like buying a sports car and locking it in the garage.
• It’s like working your way through college and then skipping final
exams and missing out on graduation.

OK, OK. I’m being snide toward my racing friends. I have been, on
many an occasion, one of them, and have taken away more from a race

36
 Take Your Measure by Racing  o o o  37

than I’ve left of myself on the roads; that is, I’ve gained more satisfac-
tion from running with a number rather than merely doing a workout
of the same length.
What racers don’t understand about “mere runners” is that, to run-
ners, running is not a step to racing, not a training ground for a racing
venue, but rather an end in itself. We all know it intellectually. Running
lessens daily workplace and family stress, maintains a healthy body
weight, confers a level of fitness, controls blood pressure—it bestows a
bandoleer of health and fitness benefits.
After all, this is the modern world. We are no longer required to run
from saber-toothed tigers or to chase down our next meal to survive. We
have the privilege of running merely to run—for the simple, elemental
joy of it. In the modern, more laid-back era, we have evolved away from
Ernest Hemingway’s definition of sport. To Hemingway, there were only
three sports: mountain climbing, bull fighting, and auto racing; every-
thing else was a game, he contended, because there was little chance of
losing your life playing basketball or soccer . . . or chess. No more saber-
toothed tigers, no more “sport” to running, according to Hemingway.
If someone is perfectly happy just running around the neighborhood
three or four days a week, let ’em alone, right? If this were the 1970s, I’d
be inclined to leave well enough alone. After all, the people who were
running back then were generally competing nearly every weekend they
could find a race, and they were getting pretty damned good at racing.
Almost everyone who ran also raced—and raced quite well. They were
wringing from their running the full measure of what it had to offer.
Racing can be an exhilarating experience. Training for a race can be
a character-building process. And feeling good about yourself after you
race can bestow confidence that extends to other aspects of your life.
Training for a race and then competing raises you physically above
95 percent of Americans. Even with the increasing number of people
who enter road races in America, in the middle of the demographic
curve and at the opposite end of it, there are enormous piles of people
building blubber and perfecting inertia.
Besides improving their running fitness levels, racing exercises runners’
psychological side. Preparing for and completing a race constitutes a
significant event in a person’s life, which is why some runners compete
as often as they can, in spite of the fact that they will never outright
win a race.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Expe-
rience has a second subhead: Steps Toward Enhancing the Quality of Life.
Csikszentmihalyi cites Roger Caillois, a French psychological anthropolo-
gist who divides games into four categories. The first category is agon:
games that have competition as their main feature. “In agonistic games,
38  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

the participant must stretch her skills to meet the challenge provided
by the skills of the opponents. The roots of the word ‘compete’ are the
Latin con petire, which means ‘to seek together.’ What each person seeks
is to actualize her potential, and this task is made easier when others
force us to do our best” (pp. 72-73). With trying our best comes a right
to grasp self-esteem.
George Sheehan, a cardiologist who for many years before his death
in 1993 was considered the running guru, put it quite simply in his
1975 book Doctor Sheehan On Running: “Even for the free man, life is a
dangerous and difficult game. Man, the player, must train long and hard
before he can move through life with the simple, certain, leisurely grace
of the expert. Still, it is the only game in town” (p. 185).
Old Doc Sheehan tested himself as often as he could by lining up at the
starting line of any race he could find, from the mile to the marathon.
He attempted to live the philosophy that Ortega y Gasset espoused:
“Life is a dangerous struggle to succeed in being in fact that which we
are in design” (p. 12). Doc Sheehan loved Ortega and quoted him often.
We are designed physically to move under our own power. We are
designed psychologically and spiritually to compete with others and with
our environment—and especially with ourselves. In the world not that
long gone, we lived, therefore we competed; we competed, therefore
we lived. These days we do it in the dating arena, we do it at work, we
even do it against ourselves—hence the concept of the personal record.
Applied to the running universe, is it too simple to say that we some-
times use racing as a tool toward better racing? Let’s take a moment
to look at this concept. Two runners of equal talent and training will
produce very similar results. Real-world testing like that tends to place
us where we belong on the performance spectrum. But a sub-par race
performance by a runner who is merely using the race as a hard workout
does not diminish him relative to his twin who goes out to his best on
that day. Their goals are entirely different.
Unless we are using a long race as a long workout toward a race further
down the road, every race day is a test day. Although all such tests pro-
vide very objective results, not all tests constitute the be-all and end-all
for all runners, although they could and perhaps should be.
Except for speed workouts at the track, most marathoners never test
themselves in a 400-meter race, or an 800-meter race, and probably
not a mile, either. At the other extreme are runners who specialize in
shorter distances and have never and will never run a marathon, much
less an ultra.
Besides the collateral benefit of increasing basic leg speed, distance
runners who train for and compete at shorter distances can use those
tests to predict their performances at upcoming longer-distance events.
 Take Your Measure by Racing  o o o  39

Also, by testing themselves at shorter distances on an annual or even

twice-a-year schedule, they can chart improvements in or the devolu-
tion of their racing skills.
It is commonly accepted that people who take up long-distance
running and get serious about it can expect to improve for roughly 10
years. After the 10 years, aging and wear-and-tear tend to produce slower
performances at all distances. So, for the novice runner or the returning
runner, scheduling an annual time trial at shorter distances is often a
mood elevator because the times continually improve.
Of course, after that decade of improvement, a runner can become
dismayed and discouraged when charting the gradual and then escalating
decline in performance. I know quite a few long-distance runners who
threw in the towel when their times began to slip. This is unfortunate
because everyone’s performances slip as they age, which is why there is
such an interest and participation in age-group running.
Because we are often our own harshest critics, we can find that com-
peting against ourselves is the most difficult competition we face in
life. For this reason, seriously consider scheduling shorter races to test
yourself as a rite of passage every year. You can then work the tests into
your broader buildup toward your next long race or marathon.
Because you want to do well in the test, don’t sign up for a mile race
if you haven’t been doing shorter, faster workouts at the track. Plan to
build toward your mile test or your 5K test with the same avidity you
bring to your longer-distance training.
Many areas of the country have what are called all-comers track meets
on a regular basis. These events are run like regular track meets, with the
whole smear of events, but the races are open to anyone who wants to
take part. There may be a nominal fee for taking part in a race, but it is
usually quite inexpensive.
If you’re going to do a mile race, for example, start building toward
it three or four weeks in advance by religiously going to a track once or
twice a week to do some step or pyramid workouts. (A pyramid workout
involves running 400 meters hard, then jogging either a half lap or a
full lap, then running 800 meters hard, jogging another lap, running
1,200 meters hard, jogging one lap, running 800 meters hard, jogging
a lap, and finishing with a hard 400 meters.)
If you are shooting for a mile race, you don’t necessarily have to do
hard mile repeats. Working up to three laps hard should be enough,
because based on your weekly mileage, you should already have an
endurance base built up. If you’ve never done a mile race before, when
you come out the other end of your fast four laps, you’ll have a whole
new appreciation for those runners who specialize in the event. Although
it is only 1/26th of a marathon, it offers its own challenges, and unlike
40  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

a marathon, doesn’t offer 25 additional miles in which you can make

corrections for going out too hard in the first mile.
The mile can be a bear of a race, especially if you go out too fast in
the first lap and the bear jumps on your back somewhere toward the
end of lap 3 and you still have another lap to go—a lap in which you’re
supposed to pick up the pace to the finish line.
Any short track race is a perfect means of teaching your legs to turn
over at a faster clip, which translates into more efficiency and speed at
longer distances. This is especially true of 5K and 10K races. By increas-
ing your leg turnover and improving your stride, you can make major
improvements in both your races and your longer runs.
You can also use events shorter than the marathon to realistically
predict what kind of time you can expect in your next marathon. It is
somewhat easier to predict your marathon time from a recent 10K or
half-marathon. For instance, if you are training for a marathon with
a decent weekly mileage and a long run at least every other weekend,
and all other factors remain equal, by running a 37-minute 10K, you
should be able to break three hours in the marathon. A 40-minute
10K translates to a 3:30 marathon; a 45-minute 10K, to a four-hour
marathon; and a 50-minute 10K, to a 4:30 marathon.
Using a half-marathon is even easier. Take your half-marathon time
and multiply it by 2.1 for a realistic marathon finish time.
You can also test or measure yourself on what have become your
well-established longer training courses. Most of the great road racers of
all time had a favorite (or, in some cases, an infamous) longer training
course that they would run as hard as they could in the weeks before
their scheduled marathon to get a feel, in real numbers, of how well
trained they were and how well they would do in the actual race. Some
of them used familiar courses so they could check their journals to
compare their present times against similar attempts in the past. Other
top marathoners went to the track and ran 15 or 20 kilometers to get
an accurate gauge of where they were in their fitness level.
Whether you go to a track or test yourself against last year’s version
of yourself at the same distance, or use the test as part of the formula
for predicting your next race time, the by-products (faster leg turn-
over, more efficient stride, better biomechanics) are a bonus that will
effectively make you a better—and much faster—runner than you were
before you began taking the measure of yourself.
Let’s take a moment to explain that by-product thing.
Although now retired, the British/French-designed Concorde air-
liner was a paragon of speed in its time. It roughly halved the time it
took to fly from New York City to London or Paris. Once airborne, the
plane looked as sleek as an arrow, but on the ground, it was awkward
 Take Your Measure by Racing  o o o  41

looking, with its nose pointed to the tarmac. To increase the lift at
takeoff, the nose tilted forward, which made it look like a heron that
had been broken over the knee of a giant. Once the Concorde gained
enough altitude, hydraulics pulled the nose into line with the rest of
the plane’s body, and it was ready to break the sound barrier—several
times over.
It is similar with running long distances. When you jog at a slow
speed, as we often do during warm-ups and cool-downs, there is a
great deal of inefficient vertical movement, a lot of bouncing. You
tend to use nearly as much energy bouncing as you do moving for-
ward. Increase the speed gradually, however, and the body—like the
Concorde—tends to smooth out: the stride lengthens, there is more
forward movement, the up-and-down diminishes. You have slipped
from jogging into running. You have become more biomechanically
efficient. The increased forward movement comes from incorporating
a longer stride; you cover more ground with each stride, so even if you
keep the same leg turnover, you are faster and you cover more ground.
If you do speed work (at the track, by racing, by doing fartlek train-
ing) often enough, the better biomechanics and longer stride length
will filter into even your more casual, slower runs. You will finish
your long runs faster than you used to because you are covering more
ground with each stride.
Speed work also makes it more comfortable to increase leg turnover,
so that even your slow long runs are not as slow as they were. You
have slowly ingrained a faster, more efficient form of running into
your training.
If you’ve been running for quite a few years, you can notice this
pleasant phenomenon by monitoring your foot strikes. When slowly
jogging, you were likely landing on your heels, which in itself is inef-
ficient because by doing that, you are essentially braking your forward
movement with each stride. As you become more Concorde-like, you’ll
notice that you are striking farther along your foot, frequently midfoot,
which is more efficient because you are releasing the brake that came
with each stride. You are overriding it.
Take the measure of yourself by racing at shorter distances on a
regular basis. After you’ve done it for a while, compare the sole wear
on your training flats to that of the old pair in the back of the closet
that you used when you were mostly jogging. The wear patterns should
have changed noticeably.
For more discussion of the benefits of running distances that you
may have considered unlikely or unusual in your running routine,
visit http://tinyurl.com/35gl7mg for a bonus online chapter devoted
to running unusual distances.
42  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Hal Higdon is a contributing editor for Runner’s World who’s been

racing for more than a half-century. One of his most recent books is a
novel, titled simply Marathon. For training information from Higdon,
go to www.halhigdon.com. (Hal is the guy who, in 1977, pushed the
Runner’s World owner/publisher to hire me to replace Joe Henderson as
editor. I’ve since forgiven him.)
I asked him for his take on the value of racing. He wrote the following
under the title “In Praise of Races”:
Racing is to running as seasoning is to food. Pasta just does not taste
as good without a layering of marinara. Tacos without salsa are, well,
tacos without salsa. If you eat Mexican sans salsa, you won’t have to
quench the fires in your mouth with ice water, but you might as well
be eating dog food.
Thus, runners intent on finishing their first marathon may be missing
some of the fun if they bypass shorter-distance races. More the problem,
they may arrive at the marathon starting line unprepared for what is
about to hit them.
The racing experience does differ from the training experience. To
race, you need to do more than just roll out the front door and start
running. You often must travel, which in today’s era of tightened secu-
rity is not always a pleasant experience. You must know what to bring,
everything from extra safety pins to gels to lubricants for your armpits.
And don’t forget your racing shoes.
Racing means learning not to line up near the front row when you
are a walker. It means learning how to cope with portable toilet lines.
Racing means learning that you pin your number on the front, not the
back. Didn’t anybody tell you? And how do I affix this timing chip to
my shoe?
I submit that you learn by making your mistakes in small races, where
the penalty for error is not severe. It’s better than doing so in a 40,000-
runner marathon for which you have trained eighteen or more weeks.
Those of us who coach novice runners sometimes are troubled by the
large numbers who appear at marathons with their bodies well trained
but not yet their minds. They arrive at their first starting line not yet
fully aware of the demands of the sport. That someone would run a
first marathon also as a first race astounds us and also, to be honest,
somewhat offends us. Yet we do not wish to insult new runners and
guilt-trip them into following our rules (Our way or the highway). Yet
the highway is 26.2 miles long, not all that easy to traverse if you skip
some of the homework.
Fortunately, in recent years more runners have begun to recognize
the value of shorter races. Many marathons now offer half-marathon
 Take Your Measure by Racing  o o o  43

options. Stand-alone halves have increased in popularity. More and more

new runners have begun to take the sensible approach of scheduling
a half-marathon as their first race and later tackling a full as seasoned
veterans.
Most of us grumpy coaches endorse that approach, but we also hope
that your first marathon is not your last running race at any distance.
This is because 5K and 10K races also can be fun. You don’t want to
leave the sauce off your pasta, do you?

For Your Consideration

• Racing satisfies the very human need for competition: It sharpens
us on many levels and makes us stronger.
• Racing can serve as a substitute for regular track workouts if you
don’t like the confined feeling of a track.
• Racing is a good test of fitness levels.
• Racing is a good way to promote the social aspect of running.
• Don’t overdo it—take one easy day for each mile raced.
• Even a race gone bad is an educational experience, and an incentive
to learn to do better at the next race.
• In your self-tests, go down to distances as short as 400 meters.
• Look for all-comers meets where you can race at shorter distances
against other runners. Competing against other runners is usually
good for a 4 to 5 percent increase in your speed.
• Although the 5K is the most popular road race distance these days,
for a more accurate test of your performance leading into your
next marathon, look for a 10K or one of the increasingly popular
half-marathons.
• Fashion a longer (15- to 18-mile, or 24- to 29-kilometer) course
that you can use on a regular basis to test your fitness as you count
down toward your next longer road race. Keep careful records of
your performance on that course so you can compare it to the time
you are shooting for.
 chapter

FPO
Galina Barskaya/fotolia.com

Eschew Racing
with
Dick Beardsley
A t one of the board meetings of the Napa Valley Marathon last year,
we were all given something of a start when Mark Bunger, a Cali-
fornia Highway Patrol officer and board member, passed out a packaged
wristband similar to the yellow Livestrong bands Lance Armstrong has
been selling on behalf of cancer research. “I’ve got enough for all the
runners’ bags,” he said.
Gard Leighton and I glanced at the 3-inch-square piece of literature
packaged with the purple wristband, then at each other. The headline
on the little square of paper shouted, “RACING KILLS!”
“Only once in a while,” Gard muttered. Gard Leighton knows racing:
As a masters runner, he earned a gold belt buckle at the Western States
100 by turning in 10 sub-24-hour performances.
It took Mark a moment to realize what Gard and I were reacting to. “Oh
jeez,” he said. “I never thought of that.” The wristbands were designed
to discourage streetcar racing, a growing menace among young people in
California. The connotation for our marathon hadn’t occurred to him.
Considering the total number of people taking part in running road
races, the number of people who die during a race is infinitesimally
small. In most cases, racing on a regular basis strengthens athletes by
substantially exercising the heart, significantly expanding the lung
· 
capacity, raising the VO2max, raising the lactate threshold, increasing
leg muscle strength, and increasing the ability to focus.
Racing a car blows out the carbon buildup, allowing the machine to
better do what it does by doing it for a short time at its max. But you
don’t want to run a car too fast too often. You can see the results of too
many jackrabbit starts by pulling up behind some young stud piloting a
supertuned little Japanese import that leaves a light blue film of smoke in
its wake. Too much pressure on the little engine is burning out the rings.
The same applies to a runner. Too much racing aggravates the slight-
est biomechanical defect until the offended body part screams for relief.
Too many microscopic tears accumulate until, like droplets of mist on
a car’s windshield, they run into each other, creating ever-larger tears
until they produce a serious injury. Too many racing miles and not
enough easy miles also builds up a deficit of energy: The fuel tank is
never allowed to refill itself.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the running clubs in the San
Francisco Bay Area used to get together to select a Runner of the Year.
One of the qualifications for being chosen Runner of the Year was a high
number of points amassed for the number of miles raced during the
previous year. To accumulate more points, some candidates would race
three or four times in a weekend, which was easy enough to do in the
Bay Area because a dozen races or more were available each weekend.
Some of the people who won that award haven’t run in more than a

45
46  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

decade. They did a marvelous job of burning themselves out physically,

mentally, and spiritually—or of becoming chronically injured. They
burned out the ole rings once too often.
The rule of thumb for training and racing is to allow one day of easy
running for each mile of hard racing. Using that yardstick, you could
safely race a 10K every weekend, or a marathon once a month.
Mark Twain used to refer to refilling his tanks after he wore himself out
either writing or going on lecture tours. Anyone who has been around
running for a long time, has raced on a regular basis, and has learned to
listen to his or her body knows this simple fact: It takes a fair amount of
time to refill the tanks on a physical level; it takes even longer to refill
the tanks on a mental and psychological level; and it takes longest of all
to refill the tanks on a spiritual level. (This concept will be periodically
raised throughout this book.)
Let’s take a look at each of the three tanks. Physically, racing hard
makes great demands on a runner on a number of levels: It requires the
expenditure of a great deal of energy, tears down muscle tissue, strains
connecting tissue and ligaments, and beats up on literally every organ
in the body, from the stomach to the bladder.
Of course, given adequate amounts of rest, the incredibly adaptive
human machine comes back stronger than ever. The key phrase here is
adequate amounts of rest. We can’t continually tear down the body systems
and expect them to continue to function well if they aren’t allowed to
recuperate. Racing too often at any distance places a barricade between
the body’s potential to heal and its ability to do so.
Fortunately, all it takes to come back stronger is a dedicated rest
period—not unlike the two periods in a year that are provided by nature:
the summer when it’s too hot and the winter when it’s too cold. Several
very accomplished racers I know annually take an entire month off every
year to allow their bodies to rest and to repair the microscopic tears and
bruises that racing and high mileage can cause (see chapter 15).
What about the mental and psychological tank? Racing well and often
requires a great deal of focus and dedication—dedication to the training
needed to race well, and focus to apply that training to the race itself.
This focus and dedication come on top of or in addition to the other
aspects of life that require focus and dedication, such as family and
friends, work requirements, volunteer efforts, and ongoing information
accumulation and education.
Although there is a ready formula that can be applied to resting after
racing (one easy day for each mile raced), there is no easy formula for
refilling the mental and psychological tank. It would be nice to think
that the seasons of the year provide an answer: that if we go easier
during summer and winter, our mental and psychological tank will be
 Eschew Racing  o o o  47

refilled, and we’ll have a more successful spring or autumn. This may be
true. Using the summer and winter as base-building seasons in which to
increase weekly mileage in a gentle, relaxed manner may provide plenty
of time to allow the mental and psychological tank to refill.
Unfortunately, not everyone takes the time to refresh and replenish.
Many hard-core racers race as often as they can—until they either become
injured or burned out, which is another way of emptying the mental/
psychological tank. The more you extend your racing season, the longer
you will need to come back from it. Certainly, we all know ultrarunners
who race an ultra every weekend. They rationalize this by insisting that
they don’t run hard and it’s usually on a soft surface. That’s all well and
good, but racing miles are racing miles. They add up. And they take a toll.
Racing too frequently or too long until you break down or burn out
makes it more difficult to come back. Like a pump that must be primed
when its tank is allowed to empty out completely, the body and mind
that are raced dry will take an inordinate amount of time to make a
legitimate comeback. If you come back too quickly after racing yourself
into the ground physically and mentally, you significantly increase your
chances of injury.
What about refilling the spiritual tank? That’s the toughest of all.
The spiritual tank is the most elemental. It is the tank from which your
dedication to running draws its nourishment. It can become drained in
the wake of incredibly difficult efforts, either too much racing or racing
too hard. You may reach a point at which you let out a belabored sigh
and sink to the ground, totally spent. From this perspective you gaze
down the road and all you see is more road and it all seems to be just
too much.
Some runners and racers never recover from spiritual exhaustion. This
can happen to novice runners who want to run a marathon as their first
race. Because their tanks are never filled to start with (because racers’
tanks are filled by a drip process, not by a fire hose), once they have
completed the marathon, they have no exhilarating and uplifting urge
to continue running and racing. Their effort has exhausted them on too
many levels to make a comeback or to want more, and the main reason
is that they never eased themselves into the fray to start with.
Although this may seem like blasphemy to many racers, I suggest that
your body, mind, and spirit will benefit from taking every fifth year of
your running career as a retreat or recovery from racing. Take the year
off from racing and just run for fun. Besides allowing time for all three
tanks to refill to bursting, such a break would allow you to come back
to racing with a fresh outlook and a tremendous reserve of energy.
Eschewing racing for a year would not be the end of your racing career.
It might be just the opposite. Consider the timeworn saying: Absence
48  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

makes the heart grow fonder. This can apply to your racing, so that
when you come back, your heart is totally refreshed.
Along the same line, don’t attempt to run or race through injuries.
Such painful efforts may seem heroic on some levels, but on other levels
all you are doing is guaranteeing that your running or racing career will
be finite.
One runner who knows injury and burnout from overracing is Dick
Beardsley, famous as half of the duo (along with then world-record-
holder Alberto Salazar) that staged the Duel in the Sun at the hot 1982
Boston Marathon. Both of them went under 2:09 on a day when such
a performance seemed impossible.
Dick’s life has been a roller-coaster. We often joke that if a thunder-
storm comes up over the horizon, don’t stand next to him, because the
first lightning strike is bound to hit him. He went through a horrendous
farming accident that nearly tore off his leg, he has been involved in
several vehicular accidents, and he has undergone more operations
than a lab rat.
I asked Dick to put into perspective the wisdom one gains after many
years of running and racing when it comes time to admit that maybe
racing right now isn’t the best thing for you. This is what he wrote:
Racing is the reward you give yourself from all the hard training you
put in, but can it lead to injury or burnout? Yes!
Back in my younger, faster days, no one loved to race as much as I
did, perhaps with the exception of Billy Rodgers. I would run 30 to 40
races a year, from 5K through the marathon, but that kind of excess
can catch up to you!
In 1981 I ran five marathons and over 30 other road races. I had
another marathon scheduled but had to pull out after being attacked
by dogs while I was out on a training run. By October of that year I
no longer had the excitement of waking up every morning and going
on my first training run of the day. I remember almost having to drag
myself out of bed to run. I then ran the International Peace Race in
Youngstown, Ohio (25K). I ran terribly and really thought I had lost
it. As I look back, there is no doubt that I was suffering from burnout!
I had trained so hard and raced so much without a break. It was no
wonder my mind and body did not look forward to running anymore.
I took the entire month of December off with no racing and running
only five miles a day at a very easy pace. By the end of the month, I
was raring to go!
After the 1982 Boston Marathon, I was really beat up physically and
mentally. I should have backed off my training, but I did not because
I had committed to Grandma’s Marathon 62 days after Boston. I was
 Eschew Racing  o o o  49

fortunate to win that race, but it was really difficult and I should have
taken time off afterward, but I didn’t. Instead I ran two 10Ks in Alaska
the following week!
By August I was training for the New York City Marathon and my left
Achilles’ tendon started getting a little tight. No big deal, I thought. I
continued to race, but my Achilles’ tendons kept getting worse. The day
before the NYC Marathon, I ran the last four miles of the course and was
limping by the end because my Achilles’ tendon was hurting so badly.
Did I withdraw from the race! No! I should have, but my thought at
the time was, “This is such a big race, the adrenaline will take care of the
pain.” It didn’t, and by the time I ran off the far side of the Verrazano-
Narrows Bridge at two miles, my left Achilles’ tendon was hurting so
badly that it was affecting my right leg.
I should have dropped right there, but I kept hoping it would feel better.
It didn’t, and I finished well behind Alberto Salazar, the winner that day.
To make a long story short, I ended up having to have two surger-
ies on my Achilles’ tendon to fix it. The moral of this story is: Racing is
fun, it’s a great way to incorporate speed work, competition makes you
a better runner, and so on, but too much of a good thing can lead to
burnout or injury. Please don’t let that happen to you.
I learned my lesson. As recently as the March 2010 Napa Valley
Marathon, I planned to run the first 13 miles as a workout. No way.
By 11 miles I knew that to go any farther was to invite more injury. I
dropped out and got a ride back to the finish area.
Throughout most of my running career, I have basically been saying,
“Do what I say and not necessarily what I do.” No more. I think that’s
called maturity. It just took me a while longer than most to grow up in
that regard.
Take it from me: When you’re injured or burned out, stop. You can
never regain tomorrow what you foolishly waste today.

For Your Consideration

• Too many people who get involved in the racing side of running
become so enamored with it that they regularly overdo it and
invariably spend part of their year licking their wounds. Consider
applying the rule of one easy day for each mile of racing.
• Not all racing has to be done at full race speed. For those who deal
daily with an inbred competitive nature, this may sound ridiculous.
“When I pin on a number, man, I’m going for it,” they would prob-
ably say. However, you can experience all the excitement of a race
by using it as a slightly harder training run.
50  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

• You can also consider using a shorter race as the middle portion of
a longer workout. If you are scheduled for an 18-miler on Sunday,
consider finding a half-marathon where you time it so that you
jog two or three miles and get to the start just as the race goes off,
racing the half at 85 percent. As soon as you’re finished, jog another
two or three miles as a cool-down.
• Many excellent racers take a whole month off each year to engage
in nonimpact, casual sport activities. Others do nothing at all,
giving their muscles the time and space to recuperate from all the
microtears they endured during the racing season.
• Taking a whole year off from racing while still casually running
will not be the end of your racing career. In fact, it might extend
it for another four or five years, which is nearly as beneficial as if
you were coming to the sport fresh and new.
 chapter

FPO
Digital Vision

Train Specifically
with
Mel Williams, PhD
Y ou don’t use a garden rake to collect mercury. You no longer go to
a barber to have a tumor excised. You don’t order liver and onions
if you’re a vegetarian.
I think Ben Franklin said all of those things. Maybe not.
What this subject of specificity boils down to is that to get signifi-
cantly better at running and racing, you need to put in a great deal of
effort practicing at the type of running and racing you are planning to
do. The essence of specificity of training is summed up beautifully in
comments from 2004 Olympic marathon bronze medalist Deena Kastor
in an interview with Hal Higdon (Marathon & Beyond magazine, May/
June 2008, p. 48):
With every race, you try to train as specifically as possible. If
you are running cross-country, you want to train on some grass
and hills, and if you’re getting ready for a marathon, you want
to make sure you are on the roads, slapping the pavement for a
good part of your weekly mileage. If running track, you want to
do some sessions on the track. It’s always the specificity of train-
ing no matter what the event.
Beautifully said.
As we’ve discussed before in this book, the human body, unlike a robot,
is infinitely adaptable. It’s more like one of those transformer things:
able to adjust shape and function—if given sufficient time to do so.
Consider, for example, that historically good cross-country runners
translate into good marathon runners. Bill Rodgers placed well in the
World Cross-Country Championships before he burst onto the scene as a
winner at Boston and New York. Same with Grete Waitz, who repeatedly
won the World Cross-Country Championships. Same with Carlos Lopes,
who twice won the World Cross-Country Championships (nine years
apart, no less) and later won the gold medal in the Olympic marathon
in 1984—at age 37, setting an Olympic record in the process.
Cross-country running and marathoning have a lot in common, but
one thing that is not common between them and that has to be spe-
cifically trained for is pavement. The typical cross-country course puts
the runner through a wide range of muscle stretches and contractions
as the runner adapts to the rolling terrain; on a larger and longer scale,
this is not atypical of a challenging marathon course (such as Boston).
Cross-country courses typically have a number of hills (which build leg
strength), as do many marathon courses (again, Boston).
What the two events don’t have in common is the running surface.
Cross-country is run on soft surfaces (grass, dirt, sometimes gravel).
Marathons (excluding trail marathons) are run on asphalt or concrete. To
adapt to the hard surfaces of marathons, runners must drag their bodies

52
 Train Specifically  o o o  53

out onto the paved roads and put their legs, ankles, and feet through a
good deal of pounding to avoid injury. Moving directly from the soft
cross-country surface to the hard road racing surface is a sure way to
produce an injury. But feed the legs a gradual, gentle mix, increasing
the hard surface gradually, and the body adapts.
A marathon runner who wants to run cross-country or trail ultras
must increase mileage on the softer surface while also training eye–foot
coordination. The runner must practice looking ahead a half-dozen
foot plants to anticipate where and at what angle to plant the foot. The
brain needs to practice analyzing upcoming foot plants and salting them
away for automatic implementation. It is very difficult for most runners
to simply step from the pavement to the trail without practicing that
next-foot-plant anticipation polka.
Then there are the matters of volume, hills, and speed. When it comes
to specificity of training loads, these things are another matter.
As Arthur Lydiard proved a half-century ago, one starts by building
an ambitious aerobic base whether you are running 800 meters on the
track or the Western States 100 Endurance Run. The aerobic base is the
foundation. The roof (speed) and the walls (hills) are added only after
the foundation (aerobic base) has been poured and allowed to set.
But once the aerobic base is set, the training that follows is heavy on
specificity.
Strength is best built by regularly running hills. In a typical marathon
training program, there are two approaches to building strength through
the use of hills:

1. Run hills pretty much year-round so they are a standard fixture

of your program. This approach is typical of runners who do a lot
of trail ultras.
2. Dial a program of regular hill running into your program for 8 to
12 weeks before your marathon to increase leg strength that will
help carry you through the final 10K of the marathon while those
around you begin to falter.
Following are four specific methods for increasing speed:

1. Use the Frank Shorter method. Frank goes to the track twice a
week year-round to maintain his leg speed.
2. Begin incorporating speed workouts at the track on a regular
basis (e.g., once or twice a week) once your aerobic foundation is
laid—say, 12 to 14 weeks out from your goal race.
3. Race at shorter distances on a regular basis. This method was used
quite successfully by American distance runners back in the 1960s,
54  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

and explains their success at longer distances in spite of the fact

that they went to the track only occasionally.
4. Combine methods 3 and 4: Do speed workouts at the track once
a week, and for the second speed workout, go to a race over the
weekend that is shorter than your goal race. This allows you to
build leg speed that will be faster than you will need at your goal
race. Remember that you can’t expect your body to run six-minute
miles in a 10K race if your body hasn’t run six-minute miles (and
faster) in practice. That’s the other side of specificity: Practice
specifically what you hope to translate to your races.
How about the matter of specificity when you incorporate cross-
training into your training? Cross-training (pool running, cross-country
skiing, bicycling, and any number of workouts on the wide variety of
gym equipment at health clubs) should only be used as a substitute for
a regular program of running when you are injured and cannot take the
pounding on the roads. This is both because the cross-training (let’s use
bicycling as an example) is not training you specifically for your sport
and because there is not a one-to-one fitness benefit between bicycling
and running.
If you want to run well, train specifically to run. If you want to bicycle
well, bicycle almost exclusively. It sounds incredibly simple: If you are
hoping to play the oboe well, don’t waste time practicing on the guitar.
This is not to say that cross-training has no benefit other than as a
substitute activity when you are injured. Cross-training in another aero-
bic sport can maintain or even increase your aerobic fitness level, but
running in a pool won’t make you a better trail runner.
You need to run more to run better. You need to decide exactly what
kind of running you want to excel in, and then train specifically for that
type of running. This is certainly not to say that you can’t train well
for several types of running and racing. It is just unlikely that you can
specialize in several types of running and racing at the same time. For
everything there is a season.
To get a better appreciation of specificity from a purely scientific stand-
point, I asked Mel Williams, PhD, founder of the department of human
movement science at Old Dominion University at Norfolk, Virginia, and
a frequent age-group winner at the Boston Marathon, if he could expand
on it for us. He calls this specificity of training for distance runners:
Runners at all levels of competition want to know how to run a faster
race. My research focus over the past 40 years has involved the study
of ergogenic aids, also known as performance-enhancing substances
and strategies, and sport performance. In my presentation to runners at
 Train Specifically  o o o  55

various race events, I note that several safe and legal ergogenic aids may
enhance running performance, such as losing excess body fat, wearing
lightweight racing flats, and consuming relatively small amounts of caf-
feine. However, I always note that proper training is the most effective
means to improve race performance.
Hans Selye, the renowned Canadian endocrinologist, developed the
concept of the general adaptation syndrome to explain health effects
related to how the body reacts and eventually adapts to various types
of stress, and his concepts have been adapted by scientists in other
disciplines.
For example, exercise physiologists have discovered that body tissues,
organs, and systems adapt in specific ways depending on the type of
exercise stress imposed on them. Based on this research, they have coined
the term specific adaptations to imposed demands, which is also known
as the SAID principle. Specificity of training for distance running is based
on the SAID principle.
There are several variations of specificity of training for sport per-
formance. For example, many runners today engage in cross-training,
and many participate in multiple-sport events, such as the triathlon.
Specificity of training is obvious for triathletes because they must train
not only for running, but also for swimming and cycling, which not only
are different sport skills but also use different muscle groups. To improve
in swimming, you must swim. To improve in cycling, you must cycle. To
improve in running, you must run.
As a distance runner, you must optimize a number of physiological
functions to enhance your performance. In general, proper training will
help induce the following adaptations to help increase your aerobic
capacity, or the ability to consume and use oxygen to produce energy,
which is the primary metabolic process involved in endurance sports.
• Increased blood volume
• Increased capacity of the heart to pump more blood per beat
• Increased diffusion of oxygen from the lungs into the blood
• Increased oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood
• Increased oxygen uptake by the active muscles
• Increased number and size of mitochondria in muscle cells, which
increases their ability to produce energy from oxygen
• Increased lactate threshold, which increases the running speed at
which the muscles begin to rely increasingly on anaerobic energy
production
• Increased running economy or running efficiency
56  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Proper training programs will help optimize these physiological adap-

tations and, concomitantly, may also enhance psychological and bio-
mechanical adaptations important to distance running performance.
At one time, long, easy running was the major focus of distance
runners. However, in the late 1940s a young Czechoslovakian runner,
Emil Zatopek, helped pioneer changes in training strategies for distance
runners. The self-coached Zatopek would often engage in very fast
interval running, such as forty 400-meter repeats. When asked by other
runners why he trained at such a fast pace, Emil’s response was, “Why
should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I must
learn how to run fast.” Zatopek went on to earn three gold medals at
the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games—in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters
as well as the marathon. He is recognized as one of the greatest run-
ners of all time and one of the pioneers in revolutionizing training for
distance runners.
Running fast is now an integral component of the distance runner’s
training regimen. In my opinion, as an exercise physiologist and dis-
tance runner, one of the best books on the science of distance running
training is Daniels’ Running Formula, now in its second edition, by
Dr. Jack Daniels. Dr. Daniels explains the purpose of training at various
running speeds. In brief, the following represent the purposes of training
at varying running speeds of increasing velocity:
• Easy pace running promotes desirable muscle cell changes and
develops the cardiovascular system: the heart, lung, and blood
vessels.
• Marathon pace running provides specific race pace conditions for
marathon runners, and is an alternative to easy pace running for
others.
• Threshold pace training is used to improve endurance by increas-
ing the lactate threshold, the point at which the runner begins to
accumulate lactic acid that may contribute to fatigue.
• Interval training is fast running designed to increase maximal
oxygen uptake.
• Repetition running is faster than interval training and is designed
to improve speed and running economy.
Dr. Daniels’ book provides an individualized training program based
on one’s current running performance, and provides recommended
workouts for each specific type of training. Optimizing all facets of
oxygen consumption, utilization, and economy is the key to maximizing
distance running performance.
 Train Specifically  o o o  57

Specificity of training also applies to specific race conditions. One

consideration may be a race course with challenging hills. In such cases,
training on hills of similar grades and lengths for several months will help
improve hill-running performance by stressing specific muscle groups.
Training should incorporate not only uphill runs, but downhill runs at
race pace as well. Running downhill during training will help develop
the ability of active muscles to minimize small muscle tears, the main
cause of muscle soreness.
Additionally, specificity of training applies to environmental condi-
tions, particularly increased heat and humidity. When the environmental
heat stress increases, reduce your training intensity or duration. Over
time, gradually increase your training distance and intensity while you
undergo the process of acclimatization. Your body systems make some
specific adaptations as you acclimatize to running in conditions of high
heat stress. For example, if you are already trained, 10 to 14 days of
training in the heat may induce the following adaptations:
• You may increase your blood volume by 5 to 10 percent or more.
• You will increase your sweat production.
• You will lose less sodium in your sweat.
All of these adaptations may help you run more efficiently under
warm race conditions by decreasing your core temperature and reduc-
ing your heart rate.
There may be other issues dealing with specificity of training. For
example, if a specific sport drink will be served during a marathon,
you might want to use that sport drink in your training. If you are to
run a race at high altitude, some altitude training may provide some
beneficial acclimatization effects.
Overall, an individualized program based on the specificity of train-
ing principle is the most effective means for an athlete to optimize his
or her genetic potential.

For Your Consideration

• Decide what type of running and racing you wish to specialize in
(cross-country, trail ultras, road marathons and halfs, indoor track),
and then train to that type of running.
• To do well in any type of running and racing, always start by build-
ing a solid aerobic base.
• Incorporate hill workouts to add leg strength and to become better
at running hills—both uphill and down.
58  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

• Don’t overdo speed workouts, but once you have built your aerobic
base, begin to add speed either by going to a track or by entering
shorter races—or by doing both.
• Cross-training can be a valuable complement to your regular run-
ning, but is never a straight-across, one-for-one substitute.
 chapter

FPO
AP Photo

Don’t Ignore
Other Body Parts
with
Joan Benoit-Samuelson
A lthough you can develop tremendous cardiovascular fitness from
doing nothing but running, other parts of your body deserve some
attention, too, if for no other reason than to bring your body closer to a
place of balance. In the process, you will be contributing to the longev-
ity of your running and fitness.
Aerobic sport and fitness activities that rely primarily on the legs get
the job done as well as they do because the legs contain the largest bones
and muscles in the body. As such, they contribute a lot in a minimum
amount of time compared to other body parts.
However, using the analogy of the automobile, the best- and longest-
running cars are those that have been cared for from bumper to bumper,
are regularly serviced, and have correct alignment.
Runners are notorious for strong legs and sticklike arms. Look at a
photo of a world-class runner. Chances are you’ll see superb muscle defi-
nition in the legs and arms that look as though they’d be hard-pressed
to heft a jelly donut.
Many years ago, when a bevy of runners from our office used to go
to the local gym over lunch hour, we’d occasionally challenge one of
the bodybuilders to a contest on the leg-thrust machine. Although the
runner usually weighed about half what the bodybuilder did, they were
pretty even as far as how much weight they could raise by thrusting
their legs forward. And the runner could usually beat the bodybuilder in
the number of repetitions. But lure the runner over to the chin-up bar,
and it was a disaster. Although light in body weight, the runner could
seldom do more than one chin-up.
It wasn’t that way, though, for the triathletes who frequented the gym.
Because of long hours using their arms in the swimming pool and many
miles and hours of wrestling the handlebars of their bikes, the triathletes
were usually very well balanced as far as their muscle development went
on both the lower and upper body. They had no trouble doing chin-ups.
The bodybuilders, for their part, were not all evenly proportioned.
Some of them failed miserably when they entered bodybuilding con-
tests because they spent way too much time on the chest and arms and
ignored most of the rest of the body.
For the runner who wants to be at it for the long run, who wants
to have a body that is reasonably balanced and therefore not prone to
injuries because of muscular imbalances, a nominal amount of time
and energy spent on developing some aspects of the upper body would
be well spent. And no, we’re not taking a cue from certain running
magazines that insist that runners need six-pack abs, although some
attention to developing decent abdominal muscles would go a long way
toward keeping a vertical torso in the latter stages of a race, particularly
the marathon, when most runners tend to droop.

60
 Don’t Ignore Other Body Parts  o o o  61

Unlike sprinters, who tend to develop more muscle mass because of

their need for explosive muscle reaction, distance runners need to make
themselves strong while keeping their bodies as light as is practical. There
is a definite cost to carrying extra muscle mass over the long miles of
training and racing.
A well-toned runner is a better—and stronger—runner.
If you are a distance runner, you can improve upper-body function
and endurance by regularly (three to five times a week) doing a mere
four exercises. You can easily do these in the comfort of your own home,
and for zero dollars.
The four simple exercises are the sit-up, push-up, basic arm curl, and
chest opener.
Everyone knows what a sit-up is, and the same is true of the push-up.
The arm curl and chest opener are equally simple, but they require some
sort of weight to make them work more easily. As someone who likes
to keep life as simple as is practical, the weight I use for the latter two
exercises is a sturdy piece of firewood. You could just as easily use hand
weights. Or, if you commit to doing enough repetitions, no weights at
all. (To appreciate using no weights at all, raise your arms above your
head 100 times. By 50 reps you’ll get the idea that gravity is a serious
force in our lives.)
A sit-up should be done using a limited range of motion so as not to
injure the lower back. Because every set of muscles in the body has a
corresponding set of opposing muscles, when we develop the abdominal
muscles by doing sit-ups, we help the opposing set of muscles in the lower
back. To do a good sit-up, find a piece of heavy furniture. Lie down on
your back in front of it. Slip your toes under the front of the furniture
to anchor yourself. Bend your knees to a 90-degree angle and cross your
arms over your chest. Using your abdominal muscles, raise your torso
off the floor but only to 45 degrees; anything beyond that threatens to
pull your back muscles and could cause injury.
Many people can do a sit-up without anchoring their feet. I find it
almost impossible to do a proper sit-up without being anchored, either
with my toes under a piece of furniture or with a spotter holding down
my ankles.
A basic push-up comes in two models: standard and modified. The
standard push-up is extremely simple. Lie down on the floor on your
abdomen, keep your legs together, and place your hands palm-down on
the floor under your shoulders. Using your toes as the hinge point and
keeping your body straight, push yourself up off the floor using your arms.
When your arms go straight, pause for a count, and then lower yourself.
The modified push-up is for those who lack strength in their arms. For
the modified push-up, use your knees as the hinge point instead of your
62  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

toes. Do the push-up as you normally would. By using the knees as the
hinge point, you are removing the lower part of your body’s weight from
the equation, thereby making it much easier to pull this off. Once you
can do 20 modified push-ups easily, change over to standard push-ups,
but at a lower volume—perhaps five to eight.
Arm curls are extremely simple. Stand straight and tall and hold the
piece of firewood or another weighted object in your hands in front of
your hips. Now, while keeping your upper arms perpendicular to the
floor, slowly curl your forearms up toward your chest. Pause for a count,
and then lower.
Chest openers are simply a more complex version of arm curls. Begin
the exercise as you would an arm curl. Bring your piece of firewood or
some other weight up to your chest while keeping your upper arms
perpendicular to the floor. Pause at your chest for one count, and then
slowly raise the weight above your head, using both your upper and
lower arms, and pause there for a count of one. Then, keeping your upper
arms perpendicular to the floor, lower the firewood or weight behind
your head to your neck, pausing there for a count. Reverse the process,
pausing at each of the junctures you paused at before.
None of these four exercises will bulk up your muscles. Taken together,
they will help build up your abdominals and your arms, while also con-
tributing to opening up your chest.
How many should you do to start? Start with 10 sit-ups, 5 push-ups,
20 arm curls, and 20 chest openers. Gradually, as the exercises become
more comfortable, add a few more to each session. Once you can do 50
sit-ups, 25 push-ups, 100 arm curls, and 100 chest openers, stay at that
level. That’s plenty.
Next, you hear a lot of discussion about cross-training among run-
ners. Cross-training is certainly a good way to add some variety to your
training, but use cross-training (bicycling, swimming, pool running,
cross-country skiing, and winter biathlon) workouts to supplement your
running, not to replace it. As discussed in chapter 7 (Train Specifically),
you learn to run better by running.
Bicycling is a good way to supplement running and to save your legs
and feet from pounding the pavement once or twice a week, although
you need to do about four miles of cycling to equal one of running.
Moreover, for cycling to be effective, you need to be pedaling constantly.
Another advantage of cycling is that it works your knees through a wider
range of motion; as a result, when you get off the bike and run, you
enjoy a higher knee lift and typically a stronger stride.
Then there’s the matter of stretching: to do it or not to do it. I’ve never
been a big proponent of stretching. I can cite a lot of good runners who
are adamantly opposed to stretching. They believe that it undoes some
 Don’t Ignore Other Body Parts  o o o  63

of what they do their running for: to make certain muscles toned and
powerful. Stretching, they believe, makes the muscles way too pliable and
in the process defeats the purpose of running to train your body to run.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum are those who are huge
proponents of the miraculous results of stretching. Their contention is
that you need to stretch an overworked muscle to loosen it, and you
need to stretch to prevent injuries. Unfortunately, some studies have
indicated that one of the most common causes of running injuries is
stretching.
I can certainly see that point, especially when I watch people at the
start of a race on a cold morning at 6:00 a.m., their poor bodies just
recently forced out of a nice, warm bed, sitting on the hard, cold road-
way stretching. I cringe when I see that, picturing the poor, cold, stiff
muscle fibers being ripped apart, crying out for mercy.
If you are going to stretch, do so after you’re done running. The run-
ning will have warmed up and loosened up the muscles so they will be
much more willing to give a little instead of being torn apart.
Famed New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard made the observation that
you don’t see impalas stretch before they attempt to outrun the lions.
What’s the most important muscle that needs regular exercising?
Right: the brain. Regular aerobic exercising nourishes the brain with
fresh imports of oxygen and nutrients that help it flourish. Use the brain,
too, to think through your exercise program and to map out one that
will fit your lifestyle and the time you have available. A lot of runners
these days seem to run without engaging their brains; they actually turn
them off by turning on loud music. Running, like sailing, is a cerebral
sport. Like the captain of a sailboat, your brain should be directing all
the various parts of your body in their duties during the process of run-
ning, as well as monitoring the strength or fatigue levels of those body
parts. It’s terrific to run with your heart (which, of course, also benefits
greatly from aerobic exercise), but running with your head will keep
you running longer and safer.
Someone who heartily believes in nourishing all aspects of the human
being is Joan Benoit-Samuelson, winner of the first-ever (1984) women’s
Olympic marathon. Living in Maine, Joanie benefits from cross-training
in the winter by being an avid cross-country skier.
She is also an advocate of pool running. In 1984 it looked as though
she would be unable to make the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials because
of knee surgery. But by doing vigorous pool running to maintain her
fitness level, she won not only the Trials in Olympia, Washington, but
also the Olympic marathon.
She agreed to share some of her beliefs about getting the whole person
fit:
64  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

I call this little essay “Cross My Heart and Hope to Train for Years
to Come.” I write this with the hope of giving you some compelling
insights and reasons for incorporating cross-training into your regular
running routine.
Having long been an advocate for balance in one’s life, and under-
standing the significance of the mind, body, and spirit triad referenced
by many physical education and activity professionals, I have tried to
balance these three subjects in my own life both on and off the roads
where I do most of my training. Having logged over 125,000 miles
(201,168 km) during my career, I have had plenty of time to think
about all sorts of topics that relate to my active lifestyle. Perhaps this
is credential enough to share lessons learned while thinking on the run.
Just the simple acts of running and thinking cover the mind and body.
The spirit part comes in the passion that keeps me going.
While constantly trying to maintain balance in my life as it relates
to family matters, training, travel, community responsibilities, and the
unexpected request or engagement, I find that my mind, body, and
spirit are constantly exercised on a daily basis even though no two days
in my life seem to be the same. Yes, it is true that I don’t have a given
job description, but I can assure you that I’m never bored. However, it
is the desire to find balance in training for road racing and running in
general that warrants attention in this book.
It seems as though running is the basis for all activity, no matter
what that activity may be. If we are attempting to achieve certain
goals in the sport of running, we need to run with some form of rhyme
and reason. If we are performing a certain task and all of a sudden
realize that we have something baking in the oven, we need to run to
the oven to prevent the item from burning. If we find ourselves behind
schedule for an important meeting, flight, or appointment, we often
run to the designated location. Essentially, we can run for a variety of
reasons throughout the day, and the variety of obligations during our
days gives us balance. We need to run for balance, and we need to
balance our running.
Runners are notorious for not dealing well with injuries. I’m willing
to bet that, more times than not, runners become injured because they
don’t balance their training very well. They believe they must put in as
many miles as possible to achieve optimal success in the sport. I used
to think this was true—until injuries finally got the best of my thinking
and I saw the benefits of cross-training.
In my first book, Running Tide, I mention the importance of the four
distinct seasons in Maine as they relate to building different physical
strengths. During my childhood we would build snow sculptures in the
winter, garden in the spring, build sand castles at the beach in the
 Don’t Ignore Other Body Parts  o o o  65

summer, and rake leaves in the fall. Little did I know it at the time, but
I was working on developing different physical strengths well before I
knew what the sport of running and injuries were all about. Today, as
an aging athlete in the sport, I know all too well about injuries.
To avoid injuries, I try to balance my interests with my training.
Fortunately, many of my interests relate to physical activity so I can
call pursuit of these burning interests cross-training. The same way the
seasons provide a palette for our year, an array of physical activities
can fulfill us in body, mind, and spirit.

For Your Consideration

• Don’t allow your running to exclude other physical activities that
can benefit the rest of your body.
• Set aside some time, perhaps just before bedtime, to do the four
basic muscle-building upper-body workouts.
• If you decide to incorporate a stretching routine as part of your
running and fitness plan, learn to stretch properly from someone
who knows how to do it to avoid injury. A long-running classic
book on the subject is simply titled Stretching by Bob Anderson.
• Use the basic aerobic fitness you’ve developed from running to
enjoy other aerobic sports, but don’t overdo it. Too much of another
aerobic sport can injure or tighten muscles that you aren’t used to
exercising at an extreme level.
• You don’t need to join a gym to develop strength and endurance
in muscles that you don’t normally use in running. And you don’t
need to buy expensive equipment. Be creative with using household
items as your gym equipment. Decades ago Jack LaLanne, the eternal
fitness guru, learned how to keep himself fit while on the road by
making use of the furniture in a hotel room. If you keep it simple
enough, you can do your auxiliary exercising just about anywhere.
 chapter

FPO
Erik Isakson/Icon SMI

Run With a Plan

R epeat the same action too often and both you and the thing you are
doing become stale and mundane. Sounds like a perfect description
of just about any manufacturing job or any dead-end office job. It can
also be a description of a monotonous running program and a perfect
formula for giving up running entirely.
My high school science teacher had been teaching the same science
lessons for so long that he had to use those reinforcement things on
the holes of the papers in his three-ring binder. We sneaked a look at
his plant biology binder one afternoon and found out that he even had
his timeworn jokes written in the margins.
Running long distances is a repetitive activity if there ever was one.
Put one leg in front of the other, alternate, repeat. What saves running
from being entirely monotonous is that it offers infinite variations. Once
warmed up, we can meld with the run until it becomes autonomic;
we typically do the training in a hard/easy manner so we aren’t doing
exactly the same workout every day; and, if we are smart, we periodize
our training and racing, coming at it in waves, or cycles.
Periodization is often compared to the seasons of the year. In other
words, for everything there is a season. Over the past several years, among
truly hard-core coaches, we have seen the concept of periodization get
whittled down, redefined, expanded, reexamined, and doused with
arcane definitions that no average runner could ever understand. It’s
even been broken into linear and nonlinear periodization. The concept
has been further confused by the hatching of new meanings for cycle
and wave, as though they were totally separate from building periods,
as though they were fields in which a specific series of workouts will
lead to a specific harvest.
There is no need for the average runner to grow a headache over
trying to understand the concept of periodization. In fact, maybe the
easiest way to come at periodization is from the back door, by asking,
What isn’t periodization?
What isn’t periodization is running in California, where for literally
the entire year you can pretty much keep your running going forward
. . . until you injure yourself from training too much and too long.
Allow me to use my own stupid self as a bad example, an example of
how not to train.
I began getting back into running in Alexandria, Virginia, in the
early summer of 1977. The entire D.C. basin becomes extremely hot
and humid over the summer and makes quality training difficult to
come by. On the last day of July, I moved to Northern California to go
to work at Runner’s World. The weather was ideal. I quickly increased my
mileage, and by the following April had run my first marathon. By the
end of the year, I’d run eight marathons and several ultras, and I had

67
68  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

no intention of stopping because I was running well and the weather,

although colder, was very cooperative. By February I had developed a
sharp pain in the connecting tissue between my right calf and my Achil-
les’ tendon. It felt like someone was inserting an ice pick. I backed off,
and the injury healed. The following year I kept training, and again the
same thing happened; but this time it was on the left leg. Next year,
same thing, but it was back on the right leg.
Eventually, the weather genes I was born with in Pennsylvania kicked
in, and I realized that nature doesn’t want us to run hard all 12 months.
By backing way down after my October marathon, my times improved,
and I never had an injury between the calf and the Achilles’ tendon again.
This is the negative way of looking at it: being forced by nature (as
a result of my own stupidity and arrogance) to take a rest. To turn it
around, you can ask, What kind of periods of building and sharpening
can I schedule for the year to most effectively achieve my running goals
for that year? What that does, in essence and in fact, is put you in charge
of your own running fate.
Let’s create our own definition of periodization:
Periodization: The process of designating various periods through-
out a year for building and then sharpening one’s fitness to run
and race at one’s best, followed by periods of diminished racing
and training to recover.
As you can see, the periods infer a beginning, a middle, and an
end—at which point you begin to radically cut back both the quality
and volume of running. But just because that wall at the far end of the
designated period is inferred doesn’t mean that we are apt to respect it.
Most runners simply ignore the wall on the right side of a period laid
out on a calendar and slide right into the next period . . . usually with
disastrous results.
Let’s break it down with an example. You want to run two quality
marathons next year. You’ve done research and discovered that all the
really good marathoners confirm that the human body can handle only
two quality marathons in a 12-month period. Notice that we’re using
the word quality. That does not mean that you can’t use additional
marathons as long workouts if you are so inclined.
So, two quality marathons. When does nature dictate those marathons
should be run? Spring and fall. Marathon calendars have disproportion-
ate lumps of marathons in spring and fall because the weather is favor-
ably inclined toward marathoning.
It typically takes 16 to 18 weeks of training to get ready for a marathon.
Let’s be generous with ourselves and use 18 weeks. Eighteen weeks times
two (two marathons this year) equals 36 weeks committed to marathon
 Run With a Plan  o o o  69

training and racing. This leaves 16 weeks for resting or easy running,
eight weeks after each of the two marathon training sessions.
Within the 18 weeks of marathon training, we have the aerobic
buildup (or base) period (say, 10 weeks), followed by six weeks of speed
and hill workouts, followed by two weeks of tapering. The six weeks
of speed would also include running hard in races shorter than the
marathon. After the marathon, you can back off for eight weeks before
beginning to rebuild your base.
If you want to do a fall cross-country program and a summer track
program, the periodization training for these races is similar. You’ll be
able to hold a peak longer, though, because the cross-country and track
races are significantly shorter than a marathon. Using the formula of
one day of easy running for each day you race, you could be racing an
8K cross-country course once a week, and in summer, you could be run-
ning mile races at the track several times a week. But again, you want
to dial in the eight weeks of easy running at the end of the season to
allow your body to heal before beginning to build again.
I use the marathon as an example because the 18-week training period
is an easily observed chunk of time marked on the annual calendar. The
same periodization concept applies to shorter distances, although not
the shorter-distance races you might plug into your 18-week marathon
training program to use as sharpening and speed-building tools.
Most adult track seasons occur over the summer months (as opposed
to high school and college track seasons). If you are a miler and have
built up a base during the spring months and, coming into early
summer, you used some shorter races to generate leg speed and build
toward a midsummer peak, you can race several quality mile races each
week for much of the summer before you peak. You’ll still have some
quality miles on the far side of your peak before (wisely) backing off on
your racing—no matter how good it is going—toward a late-summer/
early autumn trough so you can begin recovering. A similar period is
available if you are into doing shorter road races (5K and 10K), even
if, like the July 4th Peachtree 10K in Atlanta, they are in the middle of
the summer heat.
Because it is safe to race miles in proportion to easy days (i.e., one easy
day for each mile raced), you can throw together a two-month period
in which you race at various shorter distances (assuming you put in the
base miles leading into your racing binge). So as not to lock yourself
into one distance only, I refer to theses various shorter-distance races as
“flights” of races, in that they are a mix. According to the New Oxford
American Dictionary, it falls under this definition of flight: “a group of
creatures or objects flying together, in particular: a flock or large body
of birds or insects in the air, a group of aircraft operating together, esp.
70  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

an air force unit of about six aircraft.” (I glommed onto this concept of
flights by spending way too much time as a kid watching World War
II documentaries in which the skies were filled with Allied aircraft of
all shapes and sizes flying together on a shared mission, heading off to
do damage to the evil Nazis.)
In running, a flight of races refers to a bunch of different distances
that go nowhere near a marathon, all run in a two- or three-month
period: maybe a 10K one weekend, followed by a 1-mile and a 2-mile
run the next weekend at an all-comers’ meet, followed by a 5K the next
weekend, another 5K the weekend after that, a 7.6-mile (12.2 km) trail
run the next weekend, and so on, until you’ve run out of calendar for
that season. Then you should bag it for a couple of months to rest your
weary body before again ramping up for another flight of races at the
opposite end of the calendar.
Of course, to sample the whole dish of mixed nuts, the ideal would
be to come off the winter season primed for a two-and-a-half-month
spring flight of shorter races, followed by a backing off in the heat of
the summer. During the summer, you could gradually begin building
toward a fall marathon because the greatest variety and choice of mara-
thons comes in the fall. Then it’s time to back off for the annual winter
down period. That schedule saves you the discomfort of having to build
up too much mileage for too long a period in the foul winter months.
If you want it all, nothing is more widespread, all-inclusive, and
complementary than racing from the mile to the marathon (including
everything in between) all in one calendar year. You can also dial in
shorter periods and can even use the eight weeks of easy running over
the winter to dial in some alternate aerobic sport. In cold winter cli-
mates, runners often change over to cross-country skiing and biathlon
races during the down period because cross-country skiing is so much
gentler on the legs, ankles, and feet.
At the end of your fall racing season, buy a calendar for the next year
and take an afternoon to sit down and design your periods of rest and
work aimed at reaching your running and racing goals the next year.

For Your Consideration

• Save yourself a lot of forced downtime and injury by scheduling
your running and racing seasons based on specific periods.
• Map out just what kind of racing you want to do for the next cal-
endar year, and fashion in the buildup and sharpening you’ll need
to accomplish your goals.
• Never run more than two high-quality marathons in one year.
 Run With a Plan  o o o  71

• Make good use of rest or easy running periods to heal microscopic

tears in your muscles.
• Consider expanding your running by taking on several radically
different kinds of racing in one calendar year, such as cross-country
in the fall and a marathon in the spring.
 chapter

10

FPO
AP Photo

Run by Feel
I n the movie Body Heat, the Ted Danson character takes off on a run
when the urge strikes him. He doesn’t change into fancy or trendy
running gear. He just heads out wearing what he’s wearing, and he comes
back all sweaty. (Get it? Body heat. It’s everywhere in this movie.) The
first thing he does when he stops running is light up a cigarette. This
is certainly a contrivance to set his character apart from the rest of the
cast, and certainly not a training regimen most of us could get behind.
But the Danson character does exemplify the concept of running by feel.
Any coach worth his or her salt would caution against simply running
by feel. After all, there are proven ways to train to get certain results, ways
that have been proven correct over and over for decades and through the
massed results of hundreds of thousands of runners. Yet, if you are not
obsessed with running a maximum of races or running races extremely
well based on your talent, running by feel has a certain appeal. (As long
as you don’t interpret running by feel as “Hey, it’s raining out there. I
guess I don’t feel like running today.”)
Running or training by feel involves carefully reading your body to
determine what kind of running it feels up to on a specific day. It sort of
turns you into an organic heart-rate monitor: My body feels like a slow
five-miler today. Or, my body seems up to a steady 20 this weekend.
Ah! you say. That goes against a lot of what this book supposedly
teaches. You’re both right and wrong. As you’ve probably noted, many
of the chapters in this book are presented in opposing pairs: Do more
mileage; no, no, do less. Go forth and do a bunch of races; no, no, stop
racing. That kind of thing. This reflects a philosophy of dichotomy,
sort of like the theory of working opposing muscles to make your body
more balanced.
If you are a runner of duration, at times you will do best by doing
one thing, and then other times you will serve yourself—and your run-
ning—best by doing just the opposite. To do the same thing over and
over forever is to invite disaster, in the form of either boredom and
burnout or persistent overuse injuries. Consider a variety of running
stretched out over several years of your running career: this year train-
ing for the mile, next year training for the marathon, and the year after
that doing no racing at all.
But getting back to running by feel: In many cultures of the world
for a thousand or two thousand years BT (Before Telecommunications),
communications were accomplished by men running great distances
to deliver messages, often between a king and his lieutenants. In South
America, runners chewed coca leaves to supplement endorphins so
they could carry messages over high mountains between cities. In the
Himalayan region, monk runners used chants to ameliorate discomfort
as they carried messages hundreds of miles. In Hawaii the long-distance

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74  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Western Union runners were known as “the king’s messengers.” In the

Greek city-states, the “all-day runners” were hemerodromi; they carried
messages between city-states but were also military couriers (not too
unlike the Aussie runners in the film Gallipoli).
Although we know that the hoplites of ancient Greece trained together
to run wearing armor, we know little of the training of the hemerodromi,
who were capable of running 150 miles in one direction to deliver a
message. (We must keep in mind that the Greeks glorified sprinters in
their culture; the hemerodromi were on the level in our society of bike
messengers.)
We do know that the hemerodromi were awesome runners, in part
from the writings of Greece’s first historian, Herodotus. In his book
Histories, he recorded this account of a messenger sent to drum up
military support: “First, before they left the city, the generals sent off to
Sparta a herald, one Pheidippides, who was by birth an Athenian, and
by profession and practice a trained runner. . . . He reached Sparta on
the very next day after quitting the city of Athens.” We know that the
distance between Athens and Sparta was 150 miles. Once he had his
answer, Pheidippides turned around and ran back 150 miles to deliver
the bad news of Sparta’s inability to help. (Sparta, where the warrior
breed was dominant, would have loved to come and join in the fun,
but they were in the middle of a religious celebration and did not want
to offend the gods.)
Unfortunately, Herodotus did not provide a sidebar in Histories
explaining how Pheidippides and his comrades trained. We can assume
that some of their training was in small groups (there were not a whole
lot of them), although much of it would likely have involved long
training runs alone, given that this was how they practiced their trade.
They didn’t run in pairs. They would have practiced running long, and
they would have practiced how it best worked for them—that is, by feel.
In ancient Greece there were no human performance labs, no heart-
rate monitors, no graduate students in physiology extracting muscle
tissue from Pheidippides’ calf to compare fast-twitch muscle fiber with
slow-twitch. Running by feel was at the same time an art and a science.
Pheidippides and his buddies learned by trial and error what worked.
They knew when they ran to the edge of fatigue and when their running
was fresh and filled with energy.
Unless you are incredibly prescient about your body, it takes some
years of running before you intimately know the reaction to expect
from your body in the wake of a specific workout. You might note
that the last dozen times you ran hard at the track, you needed two
rather than one day of easy running to recover. In bed first thing in the
morning you might notice that your heart is still beating too hard and
 Run by Feel  o o o  75

too fast in its recovery mode to want to push it with a hard workout
again today.
We can trace the intuitive training process down through the ages.
Certainly the pedestrians of the 1870s had a real feel for what worked
for them and what didn’t. The professional pedestrians often took part
in six-day races in venues such as Madison Square Garden, where they
would compete before 25,000 spectators— most of them smokers and
gamblers—for thousands of dollars in prize money. They were great
experimenters. They walked and ran tremendous distances in training,
so they had the miles on their feet, legs, and heart and they could liter-
ally feel the results of their intuitive training. Some of them walked for
five hours straight wearing weighted boots; then took off the boots and
ran for four or five additional miles, feeling the fleet-footedness after
the drudgery of the previous lead-footed miles.
Because of the advanced feel they had for their training, 19th-century
pedestrians were also expert about when to stop and when to skip a day.
Edward Payson Weston was famous for knowing instinctively when to
take a break so he could come back stronger. He did so several times
during his famous 1861 walk from Boston to Washington, D.C., in the
middle of winter.
In the early part of the 20th century, road race fields were small and
consistently made up of a mix of blue-collar types who belonged to
athletic clubs (often ethnic, such as the Irish athletic clubs in Boston)
and college guys who liked to occasionally get away from the track. The
clubs had coaches, but their influence over the club members was often
tenuous at best and often limited to the club members who competed
in what they considered the pure sports of track and field. There were
small handbooks (often sold in conjunction with athletic equipment)
that attempted to teach runners how to improve, but they were basic
and very often dead wrong.
Adrian Lopez, one of my bosses in the mid-1970s, told me stories of
his track days when he was at college at Notre Dame. He was a miler,
but milers were trained to never run as far as a mile in training because
it would exhaust them before the race. For this reason, they trained up
to three-quarters of a mile and no more. Fortunately, we now know that
is dead wrong. Adrian also said that road racers were looked down on
by coaches as below contempt, as impure mutations of track runners.
Many of the road racers in the 1930s and 1940s shoe-horned workouts
in around their day jobs and essentially trained by feel. If they felt their
speed was lacking, they either entered another, shorter road race or ran
a track race, of which there were many in those days.
Several Native Americans, specifically Tom Longboat (a Canadian)
and “Tarzan” Brown, were reputed to train very much by feel—with
76  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

the expected result that sometimes their performances were outstand-

ing and other times they were sorely disappointing. We now know,
however, that for his Boston wins, Brown trained strenuously under
the direction of a coach.
The great majority of road racers in the 1940s and 1950s lived in New
England and on the West Coast, where there were plenty of road racing
opportunities to satisfy them. Road racers were considered an odd lot,
the bottom of the totem pole of runners. Or as Jock Semple, a road racer
himself and later director of the Boston Marathon, called them, “ham
and eggers.”
A perfect example of the dichotomy between traditional training
methods and training by feel was John J. Kelley, who won the Boston
Marathon in 1957 running for the Boston Athletic Association, which
by then was a mere shadow of its former glory. Kelley was also the AAU
marathon champion eight years in a row. When he was a college student
at Boston University, he wanted to run road races, but his college coach
refused to allow him to do so. Therefore, he ran by feel on free days to
build up mileage and became one of the best road racers in America, all
behind his college coach’s back.
In the 1970s, recent college graduates such as Frank Shorter and Bill
Rodgers often stayed in touch with their college coaches to get train-
ing advice. More often, however, they exchanged training information
within their running groups, because their college coaches knew little
about road racing. Shorter and his friends lived and ran in the Gaines-
ville, Florida, area, and Rodgers ran with the Greater Boston Track Club,
which, ironically, specialized in the roads. Rodgers had the benefit of
eventually falling under the guidance of eccentric and brilliant coach
Billy Squires, but for years Rodgers was self-coached.
Within the past 20 years, runners have had the luxury of having
coaches available (whether online, in clubs, or through the Team in
Training program), but the large percentage of them don’t train under
coaches. They often wing it or jury-rig a training program from various
sources to fit their own lifestyles.
Unless you are exceptionally sensitive to your body, training by feel
does not deliver consistently good results in races, although it may
provide longevity to a running program by avoiding anything that is
too hard or painful. Of course, like many things in running, you can
adapt almost anything to your benefit if you rely on the wisdom you
have accumulated over the years to meld the two concepts: structural
training and running as you feel.
If you are an experienced runner, you might hit a point in a training
regimen in which you feel as though you are trashing your legs with too
many hard workouts spaced too close together. Instead of proceeding
 Run by Feel  o o o  77

as planned, it might behoove you to go with your feel and back off the
strict regimen for a few days and do easy runs that feel invigorating
instead of injurious to your legs.
Consider the example of coach Bill Bowerman and one-time American
marathon record-holder and author Kenny Moore. Bowerman intuited
by watching Moore train that he would benefit by being taken out of
the loop the rest of the team was in and given some extra-easy days
each week. Moore benefited greatly from going easy on his legs after
hard workouts. In that instance, Kenny Moore wasn’t the one who had
a good feel for what would work best for him; rather, his coach felt that
Kenny would compete better by beating himself up less.
It is better to feel your way through some recovery days and then get
back onto your program than to continue thrashing yourself because
the program requires it and then be forced to back off for two weeks
to recover properly. There is no law that says you can’t be regimented
and a feeling runner at the same time. It can work either way—or both
ways at the same time.
If you are running for the simple joy of running (I tend to refer to
it as Thoreau running), there is no better way to achieve satisfaction
than to run by feel. It removes all stress and anticipation brought about
by rigidly scheduled workouts. It is certainly a purer form of running.
What kind of practical tips could I give if you are such a runner—go
thee forth and run? I can’t say that because suppose you don’t feel like
running today? If you want to run by feel, you would do well to make
heavy use of two devices: the heart-rate monitor and the journal. The
journal can help you keep track of serendipitous successful training
sequences arrived at by chance that actually produced good results, and
the heart-rate monitor can help prevent overtraining, such as running
too hard on an easy day because you’re feeling good.
If you want to run by feel, more power to you. You have put your-
self in the ranks of Pheidippides and Edward Payson Weston. Keep in
mind, however, that you should never run to exhaustion. Always stop
short of doing too much, simply because it takes about two weeks of
easy running to come back to where you were the day before you went
overboard.
Run by feel should certainly be the mantra for even the most meticu-
lous runners when the downtime of the annual schedule comes along.
After the racing season is over, allowing your body to dictate just what
it wants to do and when (and even whether it wants to do anything)
is a perfect way of allowing it to heal from an ambitious schedule. A
good month of running how you feel around the holidays makes per-
fect sense, too. It returns you to a form of running that is as guilt-free
and as natural as possible.
78  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Of course, if you want to run by feel for the rest of your life, you’re
likely to run long and well.

For Your Consideration

• If you aren’t shooting for a series of specific race results, there is no
reason to not run by feel.
• During the off-season, running by feel is an excellent way to recover
from the racing season.
• Even the most disciplined runner can benefit from a scheduled
period of unscheduled running by feel.
• If you are a casual runner who runs by feel, there’s no reason not to
keep doing exactly what you’re doing. You don’t need to smoke a
cigarette at the end of each run just to make yourself a more color-
ful character. (I will refrain from telling you about Gary Cantrell,
a director of ultra races, who smokes cigarettes.) The fact that you
have reverted to running as many of our ancient ancestors did is
colorful enough .
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FPO Photodisc/Getty Images

Move Up in Mileage
A theory in long-distance running that was popular in the 1970s has
reemerged as a mantra of successful world-class runners today: To
become a better runner, run as much mileage as your body can stand
for as long as practical, and then rest from your labors before restarting
the cycle. This sounds so eminently logical and practical that it hardly
seems worth saying. Yet, just as we have cycles in the seasons and cycles
in a running career (think Lasse Viren peaking every four years in time
for the 1972 and 1976 Olympics, where both times he won the 5,000
and 10,000 meters), we periodically need to state and then restate the
obvious lest it be lost in the cacophony of scientific certainty and general
interest know-it-all-ism.
What I mean is that logic doesn’t always rest with the experts. In fact,
on a fairly regular basis, the experts (in whatever field) bulldoze logic
under a landfill of statistics and Swiss cheese research.
Let’s look at a short history of running long to run best. In the first half
of the 20th century, there was a fellow in New England named Clarence
DeMar. He won the famed Boston Marathon seven times and arguably
would have won it at least two or three more times if at the height of his
prowess his doctors hadn’t warned him to take time off from running to
protect his enlarged heart (enlarged, as it turned out, by lots of aerobic
exercise). Clarence, a reticent and often truculent man, used twice-a-day
workouts to his advantage.
He wasn’t a scientist who, after long and thorough study, came to the
conclusion that twice-a-day workouts were the way to become a better
marathoner. He was a printer who ran to and from work each day, a clean
shirt tucked under his arm. He found that twice-a-day workouts fit well
into his workday world; on weekends he ran longer distances. The mix
allowed him to charge up a tremendous battery of strength and endur-
ance, which served him well when he raced. It also allowed him to com-
mute to and from work without having to pay for carfare. Clarence grew
up poor, worked at a boys’ home, and learned never to waste his money.
Other runners against whom Clarence competed began to take note
of his racing success and began to adopt some of his training methods.
Among those were John A. Kelley and John J. Kelley. John A. won Boston
in 1935 and 1945 and earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic marathon
team three times; John J. Kelley (no relation) won Boston in 1957, was
an Olympic marathoner, and won the AAU Marathon Championships
at Yonkers an incredible eight years in a row.
Between the two Kelleys, the legendary Czech distance runner Emil
Zatopek set new standards for the volume of distance he trained per week
to compete on the world stage. Zatopek remains the only runner in his-
tory to win the Olympic 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, and the marathon
in the same Olympic Games: 1952 at Helsinki.

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 Move Up in Mileage  o o o  81

In the 1960s New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard codified the theory of
long, slow distance as a base preparatory to specific strength and speed
training not in a laboratory but in the Olympic record books by placing
his neighborhood runners on the medals platform at the 1960 Olympic
Games: Snell, gold in the 800 meters; Halberg, gold in the 5,000; and
Magee, bronze in the marathon.
Also in the 1960s, Derek Clayton of Australia trained at mind-boggling
volume and became the first marathoner to go under 2:11, 2:10, and
2:09. At one point there were rumors that Clayton was running 200
miles a week. I asked him about that in 1980. “I experimented with big
mileage,” he said, “but I never came near 200. But why should I have let
on that I didn’t? If runners I was racing against believed that and tried
to do the same and ruined themselves, then that was all right with me.”
By the time the 1970s arrived, American postcollegiate distance run-
ners had concluded that a combination of heavy mileage, occasional
speed training at the track, and a regular regimen of racing was a sor-
cerer’s ambrosia for marathon success. At the 1972 Olympic Games in
Munich, the U.S. marathon team placed first (Frank Shorter), fourth
(Kenny Moore), and ninth (Jack Bachelor). No other national team
before or since has ever placed so well in the Olympic marathon, not
even the East Africans (Kenya and Ethiopia) in the modern era. It was
a golden age for U.S. long-distance racing.
In the previous Olympics, the U.S. team (Moore, George Young,
and Ron Daws) would have taken the team title if one existed. In the
next Olympics after the 1972 extravaganza, Americans placed second
(Shorter) and fourth (Don Kardong) and would have been first and
third had winner Waldemar Cierpinski been disqualified for his use of
performance-enhancing drugs. (When the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi files
were thrown open and Cierpinski’s performance-enhancing drug regi-
men was exposed. Frank Shorter launched a campaign to strip Cierpinski
of his gold and transfer it to himself, but the International Olympic
Committee claimed it was all too far in the past to bother with.)
It was an intoxicating era for U.S. distance running. This period
extended into the early 1980s when Americans Alberto Salazar and Dick
Beardsley staged their historic Duel in the Sun at Boston in 1982. The
top three places in Boston 1983 were taken by Americans (Greg Meyer,
Ron Tabb, and Benji Durden), and in 1984 Joan Benoit-Samuelson won
the first women’s Olympic marathon in Los Angeles.
At that point, American distance running fell apart, in large part
because the scientific community stepped in to assert that marathoners
needed no more than 75 miles of training a week to perform at a world-
class level. The extravagance of previous decades, in which marathoners
were training regularly at 120 miles a week with experimental forays into
82  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

150 miles and even 200 miles a week, was belittled and denigrated by the
scientists who studied running. Marathon running (and winning) was
no longer to be an art form perpetrated by creative artists and coaches
such as Arthur Lydiard, Ernst Van Aaken, Bob Sevene, Bill Squires, and
others. It was to be dictated by slide rules and heart-rate monitors.
Within the past decade, distance coaches such as Bob Larsen, Joe
Vigil, Al Salazar, Terrance Mahon, and others involved in regional U.S.
distance-training enclaves have reinstituted longer long-distance training
as a route to long-distance glory. The results were obvious at the 2004
Olympic Games in which Americans again medaled in both the men’s
and women’s Olympic marathons, and the trend seems to be continuing
with the development of outstanding distance runners such as Ryan Hall.
In an interview in California Track & Running News (January/February
2008, p. 36) in the wake of his astounding Trials win, Ryan Hall had
this to say about distance: “I’ve been doing high mileage ever since day
one. Mileage is nothing new to me. My legs respond better to it. For
example, I’ve found that I can do really well for a 10K by putting in 120
miles a week. That’s the kind of stuff I’ve been doing for my marathon
training and that’s when I feel my best. I’ve kind of found my niche.”
But, you say, what do world-class distance runners doing megamile-
age have to do with me? Excellent question. The answer is that it has
everything to do with you improving both the efficiency of your training
and the results of your racing.
“A high training volume improves many aspects of aerobic metabo-
lism, including the number of red blood cells, hemoglobin concentra-
tion, muscle capillary and mitochondrial volumes, and aerobic enzymes,
together resulting in greater oxygen-carrying capability and greater
ability to use the available oxygen,” concluded Jason Karp, PhD, in an
article titled “Chasing Pheidippides” (Marathon & Beyond, May/June
2008, pp. 41-45).
Except for those on the verge of fatigue from too much mileage, every
runner can benefit from adding a bit more mileage to the program. And
in that tried-and-true but frustrating phenomenon, the runner who is
already doing less will benefit much more from adding a little, whereas
the runner who is doing most will need to do much more to gain minor
advantages.
By gradually and carefully adding mileage, the average runner will
gain on several fronts. The added mileage will increase the endurance
reservoir and thereby increase performance, especially in the later stages
of the marathon where mere mortals falter. The added mileage will also
make the runner more efficient. To do anything well, we need to do it
frequently and at some volume. But once we do, we naturally become
more efficient at doing it. Everything from long-distance running to
 Move Up in Mileage  o o o  83

playing chess to playing the piano or another musical instrument ben-

efits from increasing the amount of practice we put in.
There is another benefit to becoming more efficient at running: The
practice of running additional miles doesn’t take as much additional
time as you might think because you are typically getting better at it
and therefore doing it at a faster pace. Certain parts of your regular
runs, such as getting ready to run and cleaning up after a run, take a
fixed amount of time. Those two factors don’t change whether you
run 2 miles or 20. When you become more efficient at running and are
therefore doing average runs at a faster pace, the additional time the
practice takes is minimized.
Naturally, if you race regularly, increasing your endurance increases
your performance at all distances, but especially at the longer distances
where endurance is disproportionately rewarded. The extra mileage
simply allows your body to go longer better. Also, once you get better
at something, you derive more enjoyment from it, which is a motivator
to do it better still.
Fortunately, the demographics of the typical runner are spiked with
motivation, ambition, and dedication to purpose. Some runners, espe-
cially newer arrivals, quite simply don’t know how to get better, or
they don’t realize that they can by making only minor changes to their
training regimen.
Here is a good way to add mileage to your training. Set aside a six-
month season and experiment with adding a bit of extra mileage each
week. Don’t add very much. Try adding one extra mile for the first
week, two the second week, three the third week, and then drop back
the fourth week to your original weekly mileage to give your body a
chance to rest. In the second four-week series, add two miles the first
week, three the second, four the third, and for the fourth drop back to
your original level.
If you started at 30 miles a week, by the sixth month you’ll have
topped out at 38 miles per week, which doesn’t sound like a massive
increase, but percentage-wise it is significant. Aside from the 38-mile-
per-week peak, it is the extra miles added between 30 and 38 that make
you a better, more efficient, and likely faster runner.
Two factors that affect running efficiency are vertical movement and
what I call slogging.
Any vertical movement while running requires energy. The higher
you move at each step, the more energy you expend. Watch a world-
class road racer: you could literally sit a glass of water on his head and
it wouldn’t spill. This perfection in smooth, efficient forward motion is
very apparent when you watch coverage of the New York City Marathon
at the 54th Street Bridge. The bridge railing obscures runners’ bodies so
84  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

that just their heads are visible. Their heads move along the railing as
smoothly as bowling balls roll down an alley.
If your head rises 1 inch per stride, and if there are 2,500 strides per
mile (measuring each stride at a little more than 2 feet), in a marathon
there would be 65,500 strides, and you would have “climbed” 5,458 feet
into the air in addition to running 26.2 miles horizontally. How much
energy does it take to climb 5,458 feet? It’s like climbing a mile-high
ladder. If you run more miles to teach your body to run more efficiently,
you’ll have 5,458 feet of climbing energy to apply to your marathon.
Slogging involves short steps, whereas running involves a longer stride.
Consider the increase in performance if you could add 1 inch to each
stride. The 65,500 strides in a marathon translates to 65,500 inches, or
5,458 feet (a bit more than a mile), which means that your running self
would be finished the marathon while your slogging self would still be
more than a mile from the finish line.
In a sport such as long-distance running, inches translate to miles.
Fortunately, you do not need to consciously grab at that extra inch
per stride. Doing so consciously can cause overstriding problems. The
longer stride will come on its own, in part through increased efficiency
and in part through being propelled more forcefully through the stride
by a more powerful launch, or push-off. In effect, the strength you
build up from the additional miles naturally moves you farther along
the horizontal plane while minimizing wasted energy on vertical effort
caused by bouncing.
Run more miles, allow your body to increase its efficiency and speed,
and the rewards can be enormous.

For Your Consideration

• Increased mileage, if applied carefully, increases both performance
and form.
• For the average long-distance runner, a little additional mileage has
very measurable benefits.
• As long as you add mileage slowly and work easy weeks into your
schedule, the additional miles should have no negative effects. In
fact, just the opposite should occur.
• Running more miles directly increases your endurance base and
therefore your performance in the latter stages of a longer race.
• Racing on a regular basis increases leg speed, and increased leg
speed increases the speed and efficiency of your regular weekly
training runs.
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12

FPO
Comstock

Move Down
in Mileage
E veryone knows the phrase “Less is more” and knows essentially what
it means. The idea is that you will get more out of something by
doing it less, assuming that you are doing way too much to start with.
Most long-distance runners today are not doing too much running.
This is unlike what was happening during the original running boom of
the late-1970s, when even average marathon runners were training 50
to 100 miles a week. Today it is the rare runner who approaches those
weekly distances.
Nevertheless, a case can be made that a runner who does less mileage
of a higher quality can perform better. Let’s take a look at that case by
considering the concept of “junk miles” and that of stressing quality
over quantity.
The concept of junk miles originated from the army of runners who
were putting in megamileage but decided, because of time restraints, to
jettison miles that they could not track as contributing significantly to
their fitness levels. The concept was very popular with triathletes, espe-
cially Ironman-level triathletes, who reigned as the kings (and queens)
of time management, always challenged to get in sufficient training
at three demanding sports. These upper-tier aerobic athletes were real
dynamos in their professional, personal, and sport lives. They didn’t
have much use for wasted time—in anything. So they sought to trim
their sport lives of any effort that was not directly contributing to the
desired outcome.
Athletes identified junk miles in a number of ways. If the program
called for a hill workout to build strength, and a mile within the work-
out was not sufficiently steep, it was considered a junk mile and excised
from the program. If the lead-in to a track workout usually involved
a two-mile warm-up, but the athlete could get away with a one-mile
warm-up, one junk mile (and hence roughly eight minutes) was sliced
from the athlete’s workout.
Some of us have examined the concept of junk miles and have gone
somewhat retro, falling back to the 1970s when any mile was a good mile
because it added to the total mileage that week. The more total mileage
you could get for the week, the more endurance you’d built up.
The other concept that played a major role in the case for reduc-
ing mileage was rearranging a training program to stress quality over
quantity. Built into this concept was the reality that less had to be more
because stressing quality made “more” (i.e., quantity) unattainable
because of the risk of overuse injuries. In other words, you could take
your current program, which had you on the edge of becoming injured
(although it kept you very, very fit; it’s a very challenging balancing act),
and turn some of the miles into quality miles. In the process, though,
you would have to eliminate some miles to give your body a chance

86
 Move Down in Mileage  o o o  87

to rest and recuperate. Athletes who could maintain quantity while

increasing quality—by keeping mileage but adding more quality to those
miles—would certainly improve as athletes, but would likely have to cut
back very seriously on the length of time they maintained maximum
running performance. In the end, both concepts—eliminating junk
miles and stressing quality over quantity—involved fewer weekly miles.
Sometimes lessons like this come about almost by accident. Twice in
the 1960s world-record marathon runner Derek Clayton of Australia
was sidelined with injuries requiring surgery. Both times he was forced
to cut back on his total mileage to a mere maintenance level until he
recovered from injuries caused, simply enough, by running too many
miles too hard. What was the result? In both cases he came back and
broke his own world records. He had, in effect, run himself into injury
from too many miles, but by cutting back and relying to some extent
on the tremendous base he had built up over the years, he came back
better than ever.
Both concepts can be profitably incorporated into the training regi-
men of even the more casual or time-starved runner today . . . to a point.
Eliminating junk miles from your current program or simply not incor-
porating them into your program to start with seems a simple enough
concept, except for the fact that some junk miles are inevitable (such as
warm-up or cool-down miles sandwiching more intense workouts) and
perhaps even desirable. However, if they are necessary to the success of
the training regimen, is it fair to refer to them as junk miles? Probably not.
As an example, if you are scheduled for a Thursday afternoon track
workout of four mile repeats with a lap between each, you certainly don’t
want to go to the track and immediately start with a mile repeat. To do
so is to invite (even encourage) injury to cold and stiff muscle tissue. The
warm-up miles, then, although not quality miles, are essential miles and
certainly not junk. Likewise, you don’t want to cut out the one-lap jog
between repeat miles, because if you do, you get rid of one junk mile,
but you are no longer doing repeat miles; you’re doing a four-mile track
speed workout.
But any distance run beyond what you actually need would qualify as
junk miles. For example, using that same Thursday track workout, if the
temperature is warm, you might be able to get away with one warm-up
mile instead of two because your muscles will already be loosened to
some extent by the ambient temperature. Hence, you can get away with
losing one junk mile during your warm-up and one during your cool-
down after the workout is over.
In the matter of quality versus quantity, excess miles (quantity) could
certainly be considered junk miles, but not in all instances. Depending
on the distance at which you plan to race, you need a certain base from
88  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

which to launch a program, and that base is based on volume, a volume

not always steeped in quality miles.
A 50-year-old male who has five years of distance running experience
and wants to run a decent marathon four or five months down the road
should gradually build to 35 to 45 miles (56 to 72 km) a week for a base.
During the base phase, little of that mileage needs to be quality. Quality
is typically dialed in later, when hill workouts for strength and speed
workouts for increased leg speed and running efficiency are required.
At that point, the total volume of mileage can be decreased.
Remember that no matter what distances you want to race at, you
need to train like a marathoner, building a wide base. Arthur Lydiard
proved that in the 1960s with his New Zealand runners. He believed
that a good base of miles was essential to success. He had Peter Snell,
an 800-meter specialist, train with the marathoners to build a base. At
first Snell hated it, and at one point in the early phase of weekend long
runs, he broke down during the middle of the grind and wept. But little
by little, he adapted and learned the wisdom of Lydiard’s ways when,
in the back stretch of the second lap of his Olympic gold medal 800
performance, his legs still felt fresh and full of running.
There is also the matter of learning hard/easy routines, which today
are often ignored in favor of either running pretty much the same pro-
gram each week (with a gradual increase in volume) or running whatever
mileage will fit in around everything else going on in life. The value of
lower mileage (and less quality) during the easy days or weeks cannot
be stressed enough. Once again, you must appreciate the concept that
the training effect does not take place while the body is exercising, but
rather after the exercise happens, as the body repairs itself and recuper-
ates from the workout, becoming stronger and more efficient for the
next set of exercises.
The hard/easy training principle is extremely simple and extremely
effective, yet when mentioned around many of today’s runners, it draws
a blank look. It would be valuable to take a few minutes to discuss this
very elemental concept and how it (1) increases fitness level and per-
formance and (2) prevents injuries and staleness.
Think of hard/easy as walking up a flight of stairs and taking the
elevator down.
We can apply the hard/easy principle to a week’s worth of running, a
month’s worth of running, a year’s worth of running, or more. The clas-
sic example of more than a year is Finland’s Lasse Viren, who peaked for
the Olympic Games every fourth year. He took it easy after the Games,
then gradually built over the next three years toward the next Olympics.
On a weekly basis, the hard/easy principle incorporates easy days after
hard days; hard days would be the weekend long run or the weekly
 Move Down in Mileage  o o o  89

track speed workout. On a four-week basis, hard/easy would apply this

way: Week 1 would be medium hard. Week 2 would be a bit harder
than week 1. Week 3 would be harder than week 2. And week 4 would
involve cutting back on the severity of the training to give the body
some rest and some time for recuperation before going hard again. The
key week here is week 4, the easy week.
The best workout in the world doesn’t contribute anything positive
unless it is allowed to ferment within the cask of rest, which is where
the training effect really takes place. Sometimes cutting back total
weekly mileage can contribute to better and safer running. You should
consider this especially when planning downtimes during the yearly
seasonal calendar. (See chapter 16 on rest.)

For Your Consideration

• When in doubt, do less.
• The training effect takes place during the recuperation from a hard
workout.
• Learn the hard/easy concept, and apply it to your training year-
round.
• Unless you are an elite athlete, never do back-to-back quality
workouts.
• Consider the possibility that junk miles do not exist.
 chapter

13

FPO
Imago/Icon SMI

Create
Adventure Runs
with
Dean Karnazes
P eople who are critical of long-distance running often cite the fact
that they see very few people smile as they run. It looks to outsiders
as though running is painful and boring. The response of the runner,
of course, is that once you get past the first two months, it is no longer
boring. It is, in fact, invigorating and refreshing—whether it looks that
way from the outside or not.
In actuality, for some runners, running can get boring. It all depends
on the runner’s personality. I know a woman who year after year ran
the same 10-mile course five or six days a week. To her, repeatedly run-
ning the same course wasn’t boring. To some of us, however, it might
very well go in that direction.
To keep running from becoming boring, some people schedule at
least one annual special run, often on a birthday. Some runners run the
number of years old they are on that special day. Of course, once you
get past a certain age, you’re well into eating up most of your birthday
by ultrarunning. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Some runners
invite their friends to come out to run some of the birthday miles with
them and turn the event into a mobile party, capped off with a tradi-
tional birthday party afterward.
One tried-and-true way to add excitement to your running is to
schedule an adventure run at least once a year. What’s an adventure
run? It’s a specially tailored run in which you go somewhere significant
or symbolic. You essentially depart on a road trip—but without the car.
Think of Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise from his novel
On the Road doing it all with shoe leather rather than tire rubber.
Some runners cross their home states in adventure runs. In July of
1989 my friend Tom Crawford and I put together an adventure run
from Badwater in Death Valley to the peak of Mt. Whitney and back.
We referred to it as an adventure run because if we thought of it in
terms of a huge physical challenge, we probably would have found
we were not up to it. By referring to it as an adventure run, we could
minimize the danger and challenge and think of it more in terms of
going somewhere on foot.
Runners have fashioned adventure runs into transcontinental jaunts
from Los Angeles to New York or from the West Coast of Sonoma
County in Northern California to Hilton Head, South Carolina, as the
elderly Paul Reese did. Dave McGillivray, the race director of the Boston
Marathon, once ran from Medford, Oregon, to Medford, Massachusetts.
There have even been runners who have attempted to run around the
world—and at least one we know of who succeeded.
You don’t need to go to that extreme, certainly, but scheduling
an annual adventure run has a certain charm and provides a pivotal
point to your year’s worth of running. For those who are also fond of

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92  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

planning and organizing trips, vacations, and their lives in general, an

adventure run is a huge bonus. And the more of your friends you can
get involved in the process, the better. Turn it into a big annual party.
I’m personally not fond of birthday bashes in which runners go to
a track for the day and run the number of miles that correspond to
their age, because running around a track doesn’t fit my concept of an
adventure run. Although it is symbolic on many levels and is easy to
organize, it doesn’t go anywhere. Where’s the adventure if all you see all
day is the same thing?
I’m much more fond of the extremely creative adventure runs put
together by folks such as Utah’s Davy Crockett. (Yes, his name is actu-
ally Davy Crockett!) Ole Davy’s deal is that, section by section, he is
running the Pony Express Trail through the state of Utah. Because the
trail has not been kept up well through most of the state, and because
some folks have built housing developments over some of it, to run the
trail accurately, Davy has to do a lot of research in advance of his runs.
The research is half the fun because, as he reads up on various sections
of the trail, Davy becomes an authority on the history of various way
stations, specific Pony Express riders, and towns that were either built
up along the trail or turned into ghost towns as soon as the trail was
closed.
Kenneth Williams from Corinth, Mississippi, put together a run across
the state of Mississippi that he fashioned as a fund-raiser for Boys’ and
Girls’ Clubs of Mississippi. Along the way he stopped off at schools and
gave talks about the importance of fitness for people of all ages. In all,
he spoke to more than 10,000 kids.
Your adventure run doesn’t have to be quite so grandiose—at least
not the first year you fashion one. Start small, and see how it goes.
Then, if you enjoy it, you can build on it in future years. You have the
option of going off quietly and doing an adventure run on your own
or going to the other extreme and turning it into a big show to which
you invite all your friends to do some or all of it with you.
There are numerous rails-to-trails paths throughout the country—
running, walking, and biking paths built on the abandoned rail beds
of defunct railroads. You could research the defunct railroad that once
owned the line and put together a run that follows the trail from one
end to the other. Runners living in the Washington, D.C., area can run
the old C&O Canal path.
Several runners have taken a couple of months and run the Appa-
lachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Others have run the John Muir
Trail along the backbone of the Sierra Nevada in California. Still others
have run the length of historic Route 66 from Santa Monica in Southern
California to Chicago.
 Create Adventure Runs  o o o  93

An adventure run can take anywhere from an afternoon to several

months. The crux of it is to pick something that is challenging but that
you know you can do if you build toward it and plan it out well. In the
process, go somewhere, travel by foot from point A to point B. Then
celebrate, and immediately start planning next year’s adventure run.
This is an excellent way of energizing your running as well as sharing
it with family and friends.
Although the concept of the adventure run has come into its own
in recent years, it is not entirely new. In fact, it is more of a revival
than a fresh trend. The height of popularity of the adventure trek by
foot was the period from the mid-1800s to the end of that century
when the pedestrian movement flourished, as mentioned in chapter
10. Hardy adventurers such as Edward Payson Weston put together
tremendous treks that pitted them against themselves, against others,
and against the clock. Weston began his career with a challenge he
accepted to travel on foot to Lincoln’s inauguration in the winter of
1861. He left the State House in Boston on February 22 and reached
Washington, D.C., on March 4 (453 miles, or 729 kilometers, in 208
hours), missing his goal by half a day because of horrendous weather
and road conditions. The pedestrian, go-as-you-please contests became
professional affairs and were enormously popular, but they eventually
wore themselves out because of overexposure and were replaced by
multi-day bicycle races.
Transcontinental treks were revived in the 1960s (from the ashes of
the Bunion Derbies in 1928 and 1929) and were usually solo affairs with
limited or no support. (See Jim Shapiro’s Meditations From the Breakdown
Lane in the online appendix B, 25 Running Books You Should Read,
http://tinyurl.com/35g17mg.)
Similarly, adventure runs put together in the 1960s traversed chal-
lenging terrain. A course was created from Shoshone in southern Death
Valley to Scotty’s Castle in the north. The course was later altered to
run from Badwater to Mt. Whitney.
Adventure runs have been escalating in popularity again over the
past two decades both to provide bragging rights and to serve as a new
and unique approach to keeping runners always reaching beyond the
next horizon. Certainly, whatever adventure run the mind can con-
ceive, the runner—with proper preparation—can do. And let’s face it,
there is no more intimate way to see the sights along the way than to
travel on foot.
My favorite adventure runner is Dean Karnazes, the author of Ultra-
marathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner and an outstanding
endurance runner. He once ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. He
ran the string of all 22 missions in California that sit between Sonoma
94  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

and San Diego. He also ran more than 300 miles without sleeping. He
often runs the 100 miles from his home in the Bay Area to the start of
the Napa Valley Marathon, runs the race, and then runs home. His whole
life is an adventure run. He told me about his idea of a manageable
adventure run any decent runner can construct. He calls it a runabout:
The legendary running coach Jeff Galloway has probably trained
more marathoners than anyone on earth. Jeff teaches a unique training
system that includes regular, brief walking periods. He’s also among
the few running coaches who encourage those athletes preparing
for a marathon to do training runs exceeding 26.2 miles (including
the walking segments). Those who follow this advice report that the
inclusion of walking segments makes these “overdistance” workouts
perfectly manageable. Going beyond the distance of the actual race
is also a great confidence builder, especially for first-timers.
I recommend a slight modification to Jeff’s approach that I simply
call Runabout. Inspired by the Australian Aboriginal practice of Walk-
about, it works like this: After you’ve put in some good training and
built a fairly decent level of fitness, pick a weekend morning to set out
from the front door of your house with a running pack, the contents
of which should include some cash, a credit card, a cell phone, some
fluid, and some snacks—maybe also a map or a GPS if you want to get
really sophisticated. Choose a direction (e.g., north) and start running.
Keep running until you feel like taking a break, but don’t. Just slow
down and jog or walk, but don’t stop moving. The important thing is
to keep upright and maintain forward progress. If you get really tired,
run by Starbucks and grab a latte. Stick a straw in it and drink it as
you shuffle along.
Try to make a complete day of the outing. Better, end up at one of
your favorite nearby resorts or spas, and make an evening of it as well.
Don’t worry about how many miles you actually run. Focus instead on
keeping on your feet and on moving forward, one way or another (be
it running, jogging, hiking, or walking), for at least six to eight hours.
Mostly, have fun and enjoy the experience.
Not only will you get a great workout, but also it’s an interesting
and spontaneous way to spend a day (or series of days). Funny things
happen out there. You have chance encounters, you see things you
wouldn’t normally see during your typical daily runs, and it can be
quite captivating. Rarely in our modern society do we spend an entire
day outside, and there’s just something enchanting and magical about
watching a day go by from the exterior of a building rather than being
stuck inside one. There’s a lot to be learned from those Aboriginals,
despite not having a single Starbucks in the Outback.
 Create Adventure Runs  o o o  95

For Your Consideration

• Consider making an annual adventure run the culmination of your
running year.
• Plan an adventure run that ties in another interest, whether it be
a fascination with national parks, defunct railroads, or famous
roadways.
• Get your family and friends involved, both in the planning and
in the execution of the adventure run itself. It’s always more fun
to share these sorts of crazy adventures than it is to do them solo.
• Be as creative as you can with organizing your adventure run, even
going so far as to have special celebratory T-shirts made up for the
occasion.
• Commission one of your friends who is good with a video camera to
film the whole affair, and then edit the adventure down to an hour
documentary that you can share with friends and that constitutes
a permanent record of your accomplishment.
 chapter

14

Susan Rae Tannenbaum/fotolia.com

FPO

Run Under Control

F or many a runner—especially a long-distance runner—learning to
run “under control” (that is, with self-control and discipline) is more
difficult than training to race in the first place. How many runners have
you heard use the phrase “I run without a plan”?
How often does running like you feel get you where you want to be as
far as a time goal in the marathon goes? The marathon is a race designed
for the patient, disciplined, under control personality.
Various lures and obstacles embedded in the marathon can guarantee
that if you run without a plan, you will court disaster every time you
line up at a starting line.
Let’s consider just a few:
• The tapering period (the two to three weeks leading to the marathon
itself) brings together the strength and endurance of 16 to 18 weeks of
hard training, so that you arrive at the starting line filled with enormous
reserves of energy: both physical and nervous. Unless you are heavily
disciplined, you will allow the built-up energy to dictate the early pace,
which leads to disaster because you cover the first half of the race way
too fast and have little left for the bitter final miles.
• You have practiced discipline in the early miles because you have
(finally) had enough disasters on the road from going out too fast at the
starting gun to have gotten the point. But then you hit the extremely
sweet midportion of the race, between 7 and 16 miles, when the deepest
parts of your big leg muscles are warmed and supple and your stride is
smooth and rhythmic. You are in such a heaven of wonderful running
that you conclude that in some magical way the training has gone better
than expected and you are in much better shape than anticipated, so
hey, let’s go for it! You allow your legs to run as fluidly and as smoothly
and as fast as ever they want, and what happens? Not only do they use
up the energy reserved for that portion of the race, but they also leech
some of the energy that’s being saved for the final miles. By the time
you, the incredibly powerful runner, reach 22 miles, you are no longer
so powerful or smooth or filled with running, and the final miles become
a nightmare.
• An important embedded obstacle to consider is failure to monitor.
You need to constantly monitor what your body is doing throughout
the race: your breathing, your heart rate, the striking of your feet on
the asphalt pavement, your arm swing, the position of your hips, and
your perspiration rate. Like an airline pilot, and the conscientious and
patient marathoner that you are, you monitor all systems. You do not
“run wild” or “run as you feel like it” simply because during the early
portions of the race, if you’ve done the training, you’re going to feel
mighty wonderful. But that seeming invincibility never lasts.

97
98  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

What are the best ways to make sure you don’t fall victim to these
three potential problems?
1. Going into the taper phase, carefully write down what workouts
you should be doing each day—and at what effort level. Review
the list each day of the taper, and stick to it. When you line up on
race day, have your race carefully calculated. Race pace wristbands
are readily available. Don’t ever assume that the fact that you are
in a race will magically bring your per-mile pace down. Line up
in the field approximately where you think you’ll end up at the
finish. If you are doing a nine-minute mile, don’t line up in the
front row: you’ll be in the way of faster runners, and you’ll be
tempted to go out too fast when everyone around you goes out
in a rush. Because of the excellent condition you are in, the first
miles will seem painfully easy. Restrain yourself. Putting money or
time in the bank in the early miles by running faster than planned
doesn’t pay off in the final miles.
2. In those wonderfully invigorating middle miles of a marathon,
discipline is of prime importance. Consult your race pace wristband
and stick to your pre-race calculations. Enjoy the experience of
strong, efficient running. The more disciplined you can be in those
miles, the longer the euphoric feeling will last, possibly taking you
blissfully into the 20-mile mark, and perhaps beyond.
3. Think of yourself as a race car. Run through a checklist of body
systems to monitor at each mile. Because thinking straight in the
last miles of a marathon becomes more and more difficult, write
a list on your wrist or upside down on the underside of your race
number: breathing, arm carriage, leg rhythm, head carriage, perspira-
tion, and so on.
Keep in mind that much of what applies to a marathon applies also
to shorter races. When I lived in the Napa Valley, I used to do a lot of
10K road races. I became friends with one fellow who consistently, every
race, went out too fast, and I consistently passed him around mile 4 of
every 10K we ran. After the races, I’d ask him why he didn’t pace himself
better. “That’s just how I race,” he explained, which kind of explained
nothing. Whether the race is a 5K or a marathon, know your projected
pace per mile going into the race, settle into that pace, and stick to it.
Try to run an even-paced race. It’s easier on your body and it is sure sat-
isfying to the mind to know that when you cross the finish line, you’ll
have metered out your best throughout the race.
The matter of running under control extends to two other areas of
concern: basic training and the frequency of racing, both of which relate
 Run Under Control  o o o  99

directly to satisfaction—or lack thereof—in the runner’s realm of racing.

Many runners these days cheat themselves out of a full and fulfilling
running or racing experience by not preparing properly for race day and
by not carefully laying out the training period leading up to the race.
Their training sessions are either haphazard or halfhearted, not well
thought out or executed in a less-than-maximum method.
Some runners don’t even bother to lay out a training program. Instead,
they run when they find the time or feel the inclination. Then they are
personally disappointed in the results of their racing. Running races are
one of the only arenas in life in which great expectations are anticipated
based on weak investments. (The others are the stock market and the
state lottery.)
A term paper at school, an end-of-quarter report at work, building a
house, even washing a car are all accomplished in a logical, methodical
manner. If certain steps are not followed, or if a few steps are skipped,
the project falls apart and is a disaster. The same is true of a training
program toward running a race. To do well in the race takes planning
and dedication in the preparation. You get out of a race what you put
into the training leading up to it.
What makes the long-distance racing scene so fascinating is that it
isn’t a game of checkers; it’s a game of chess. Key workouts must be
sandwiched between “filler” workouts in which you run easy to recover;
the hard/easy method must be closely adhered to, to avoid injury and
burnout. On race day you must go into the race fully cognizant of your
current ability; and in the race itself, you must use extreme discipline
to have enough energy and speed left in the final mile to squeeze out
that extra second or two.
To do well in racing, you’ve got to dedicate a certain amount of time
and energy to the process leading up to it. The race itself is the cherry
on top of the sundae. To regard the rest of it as a chore is to lose yourself
outside the process. In disciplined running, the process is all.
As I’ve said many times, the sport of long-distance running and racing
has accumulated a great storehouse of knowledge over many centuries
and many billions of miles run. Numerous knowledgeable and practical
books and Web sites are available with well-proven training programs
for virtually every distance imaginable. If it comes to a choice between a
Web site and a book, always choose the book. Why? Because numerous
trained professionals have had an opportunity to review, closely, every
line in the book, whereas any yahoo can throw up a Web site.
If you insist on using a Web site, make sure it is being managed by
someone whose name you recognize for his or her long history of teach-
ing runners to run well: Joe Henderson, Lorraine Moller, Hal Higdon,
Jeff Galloway, Mike Schreiber, or Gordon Bakoulis. And stick faithfully
100  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

to the program. Sure, you can still do well in a race after skipping a few
of the marginal workouts; but skip one of the critical workouts (such
as the weekend long run), and you’re asking for yet another disastrous
race experience.
Running under control involves sticking to a plan, whether in a daily
workout or in a race. Sticking to a plan is important in daily workouts
because it is one piece in a greater puzzle. If you deviate from the estab-
lished plan, you chance mangling the day’s puzzle piece.
Easy days are dialed in for a very good reason: they are there to mas-
sage the muscles of the legs after a hard workout from the previous day,
and to keep the legs in the habit of running. It is not uncommon for a
runner to run too fast or hard on an easy day. To see how important it
is to go slow, watch some of the masterful Kenyans when they go out
for a workout. They speed up once they are deep into the workout, but
when they start, they shuffle along as though they were just learning
to jog. They know the importance of very gradually warming up the
leg muscles.
Additionally, learning to run under control during workouts is excel-
lent practice for race day. Racing under control means entering races
fresh, not attempting to race every weekend either because you’re trying
to create a reputation for yourself as a megaracer or because you are
obsessed with running and racing. Obsessions lead only to burnout and
frustration, and are an admission that something other than you is in
control of your actions. If you are obsessed, you have deeded control of
yourself to what amounts to a compulsion. Moreover, logic and reason
have been stomped into the mud and are no longer available as tools
to improve or control your training and racing.
Let’s look at the race experience. A race, by definition, is a contest
that pits you over the distance against the clock, against yourself, and
against others. Someone who is truly racing can perform well only a
limited number of times per year. The shorter the race, the more times
the distance can be contested. World-class marathoners will tell you that
they can pull off only two top-performance marathons per year, usually
one in the spring and one in the fall.
But even races at shorter distances demand payment from your body
and your head. And they demand down time for recovery. The typical
formula is one day of easy running for every mile raced.
Runners who jog through races can literally jog a race every week-
end, but they are accomplishing nothing more than logging miles. Ten
years down the road, with hundreds of pedestrian 10Ks and dozens of
mediocre marathons on their resumes, if they were honest (and, later
in their careers, some of them are), most of the jogging racers would
gladly trade 100 lame 10Ks for one sub-40:00.
 Run Under Control  o o o  101

Run under control, follow a sensible and proven program, and the
40-minute 10Ks, the sub-three-hour marathons, and the under-10-hour
50-milers become a possibility.
There are, of course, exceptions, the outliers, the physiological freaks.
We know one fellow from Maine who is closing in on his 50th sub-
three-hour marathon. Nice accomplishment, but it pales in comparison
to Michigan runner Doug Kurtis, who in his career ran 76 sub-2:20
marathons! But guess what? The fellow from Maine and Doug both
monitored the reactions of their bodies to training and racing, and
they applied that hard-won knowledge to learn how to train and race
very much under control.
Observers of the scene continue to weave fantasies about runners
who run as they feel like it or who run wild. For decades people pointed
at Rhode Island Narragansett Indian runner Ellison “Tarzan” Brown,
who reputedly trained little and ran how he felt like. We now know,
thanks to Michael Ward’s extensive biography, that before the 1936
Boston Marathon (which he won convincingly), he and his coach went
off to a quiet cabin in the woods and trained scientifically and exten-
sively. During the actual race, Tarzan did not go out at a sprint to lead
and dominate the entire race. He laid back, conserved his resources,
and when the time was right, made his move.
You don’t even need to race to gain a great deal by running under
control. Runners who never race benefit greatly—both in running
longevity and in injury avoidance—by mentally running through their
upcoming workout in advance, by visualizing the workout before it
happens. If you are a long-term runner (but not a racer), you know
pretty well what a 10-mile workout at a nine-minute-per-mile pace
feels like. And you know what will happen if that is your plan and you
go out either too fast or too slow. Too fast, and the final miles will be
hell. Too slow, and you’ll never get into that comfortable rhythm that
makes a well-run long workout so satisfying.
There are certainly some classic examples in world-class racing of
finding that comfortable rhythm. Three examples in the Olympic
marathon come to mind: Frank Shorter at Munich in 1972, Joan Benoit-
Samuelson at Los Angeles in 1984, and Constantina Tomescu-Dita at
Beijing in 2008. In all three instances, the runners had trained long
and well and were at their peak on race day. Unfortunately for the
rest of the field, the early leaders decided to set a pedestrian pace in
the hope of forcing a strategic race. But at such a slow pace, Shorter,
Benoit-Samuelson, and Tomescu-Dita couldn’t find their rhythms,
couldn’t get comfortable, because it wasn’t the pace they’d trained for.
So, in essence, they said, “Screw this!” and picked up the pace until
they hit the stride they’d been training for. In all three cases, the rest
102  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

of the pack decided to let them go, assuming that they’d falter and
drift back, to be reabsorbed by the pack.
If you ever have a chance to watch a video of the 1984 women’s
Olympic marathon, there is one quick scene on the deserted freeway
in which Benoit-Samuelson looks behind her to see where her pursu-
ers are—and they aren’t there. You have to watch carefully to catch it,
but Joan turns back around with such a look of scorn and disdain on
her face that it is almost startling.
Naturally, all three went on to win. They never did falter and drift
back to be reabsorbed by the pack. And there was no way, on that day,
that the pack could pull it together to catch them.
To do well in long-distance (and in life) requires patience, a will-
ingness to delay gratification, self-control, and certainly a sense of
pacing—your pacing. Run wild at your own peril. But learn to run
under control, and the lessons can be transferred to any number of
aspects of your life.

For Your Consideration

• Control and discipline do not a prison make. Some parents want
to let their kids go unrestrained through life so as not to curb their
creativity, not realizing that before you can draw outside the lines,
you need to learn to draw inside the lines. Check out Picasso’s early
figure drawings.
• A carefully drawn training program is a thing of beauty—and a
road map to success.
• Run under control during a race, and the race is yours; run how
you feel like, and the race owns you.
• If you have a choice of consulting the Web or a book for training
advice, go for the paper solution.
• If you run as you feel like during a race, you are guaranteed of some
grim final miles.
 chapter

15

FPO
Photodisc/Getty Images

Run Wild
with
Lorraine Moller
Y oung children, those little sacks of raw energy, left to their own
devices, resemble wild animals in their enthusiasm for life and
movement. Watch a litter of puppies or kittens, and their every waking
moment consists of roughhousing—everything from gnawing on mom’s
ear, to wrestling with a sibling, to running around in circles for no dis-
cernable purpose. Toss a half-dozen little kids into a room and walk away
and their antics are similar. They run around randomly, cavort, jump
up and down in the same spot, wrestle with each other, and squeal with
the joy of just plain living, existing, moving.
Certainly we need to control, to some extent, acts of randomness.
Society needs rules and limits or it faces ruin from anarchy and insanity.
In every sort of formal sporting arena, the most that can be accom-
plished comes in the wake of serious and methodical practice. The young
gymnast practices the dismount from the parallel bars over and over and
over, until it becomes second nature. The swimming competitor logs
endless hours in the pool developing endurance and form that would
make a dolphin jealous. The runner builds endurance and strength
and speed in the hope of bringing them all together on the day of an
important race. For an event such as the marathon, that process may
encompass 16 or 18 weeks of carefully laid-out combinations of long
runs, tempo runs, speed work at the track, easy runs for muscle recov-
ery, carefully scheduled rest days, and often training in other sports in
the hope of continuing to build endurance while preventing injuries.
If you want to succeed, careful training to a plan is not an option. It
is everything. And for the obsessive runner, it is anything but a chore.
The process of filling in the blanks in a training journal as the workouts
progress brings incredible satisfaction. Certainly, training too hard for
too long can become mind numbing and burdensome, and often ruin-
ous to one’s physical health. But such training does not go on at the
same level year-round. If it did, the running body would soon become
the broken body.
There are usually two off-seasons: the heart of summer (when it is
too hot to run too much) and the depths of winter (when it is too foul
outside to do more than maintenance running). These periods provide
a welcome relief from the regimen of regular training. And the annual
inception of those off-seasons provides an opportunity to be a child
again, to live like an animal, to burn off excess fitness, to run wild, and
to make the transition from one training period to the next.
Think of your off-season as burning the rice paddies. By that I mean
getting rid of the period of training you just left just as rice farmers,
once the crop is harvested and the remaining stubble has died and
dried out, burn the chaff so that, after a period of rest, the planting
and growing process can begin again. This burning of the rice paddies

104
 Run Wild  o o o  105

can be a glorious period twice a year when the excess training you have
accumulated so carefully can be burned off in runs that are too fast,
too long, or too meandering to be part of any sane running program.
The end of your season is a time to finally run wild. There are no dire
consequences to your racing program if you do because your racing
program, for this portion of the year, is behind you.
The end of the fall marathon season was always a wonderful time
for me to get into the woods and do a long, fartlek-style cross-country
run, being careful, at least when I lived back in Pennsylvania or was
visiting home, to wear red while romping through the woods because
the period corresponded with hunting season. It is a glorious time on
the razor’s edge, between the end of autumn and the coming of winter,
when the air is chilly, the leaves have fallen, the sky is leaden, and you
run into a cloud of your own expelled breath. I would do these runs
when my legs were a bit tired from the just-passed racing season, but
they still had a little spring left that I wanted to leave on the trail before
the snows came.
Some runners burn off whatever training effect they have left from
the autumn and then go into a whole month of absolutely no run-
ning, giving their legs a chance to heal before resuming easy, longer
training in preparation for the spring season. The same process can
be incorporated into the late spring when the season is ending and
you are headed toward maintenance running through the hot, humid
summer months. One last hard, long, sweaty, wild run to cap off the
racing season is a terrific way to close down shop, burning off the fumes
of the just-passed season, and changing gears toward going easy before
beginning to rebuild. As long as you don’t run yourself into injury on
that season-ending hard run, you can consider it a freeing of the animal
side of your running, while putting an exclamation mark at the end
of the season.
An open period is a perfect opportunity to run wild to build strength,
endurance, and flexibility, especially if you have been doing your
training exclusively on roads. Take a day to run wild on the trails. This
serves several purposes: It breaks up your regular training and thereby
freshens it; it provides an opportunity to build strength by running up
and down hills; it increases flexibility in the legs and ankles by running
over changing terrain (something you don’t get running on pavement);
it requires some eye–leg coordination to anticipate leaping over roots
and rocks; and as far as effort goes, it is like doing a fartlek or track
workout when you chug up the hills and coast down the other side.
Wild woodland runs like this can be done to near-exhaustion to great
effect if you are willing to really dial back the workouts for the several
days following, so that you can properly recuperate. Because of the trail
106  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

surface, your legs probably will not take the beating they usually do on
asphalt, and your legs and ankles will go through a tremendous range
of motion, which they usually don’t get to do on pavement.
When we lived in Palo Alto, California, we often ran in Foothills Park.
The longest trail in the park essentially did a loop around the perimeter;
it was six miles long, with plenty of ups and downs. One year, while
training for a fall marathon, instead of doing my scheduled 18-miler
on the roads, I decided to run wild and attempt to do the Los Trancos
Trail three times. I would have at least two aid stations as I came by the
parking lot after the first and second loops, I’d get plenty of strength
built up in my legs, I would certainly increase my endurance, and I’d
get some leg speed on the well-groomed long downhill trails on the
front side of the trail. (The backside was more crude and unkempt, and
mostly uphill.)
The other enticing thing about running this trail was that, as far we
knew, nobody had ever done it three times. So it would be a wild ride,
indeed. And it turned out to be just that. In the middle of the third
lap, a storm complete with a low-rolling, chilling fog came in, and the
temperature dropped a good 20 °F (11 °C). Although tired, I had to keep
moving at a decent clip just to keep my muscles warm. It remains one
of the most memorable runs I’ve ever done over the last 40 years.
Almost as memorable, but for a vastly different reason, was a run a bit
farther south, in the hills above Los Altos. Amby Burfoot, then the East
Coast editor of Runner’s World, was in town for some editorial meetings.
He wanted to do a trail run. Sounded good to me. Unfortunately, some
of the meetings we were attending went late (as usual). We ran from
publisher Bob Anderson’s house in Los Altos Hills, heading up one of
the trailheads at twilight. Then we proceeded to get lost. Then it began
to get dark. We could see the lights of houses far below us, but every
time we took a different trail, it ended in a wall of greenery we couldn’t
penetrate or a barbed-wire fence.
Eventually, we came out in someone’s backyard, managed to avoid
a confrontation with the owner’s dog, and jumped out onto the paved
road, where we jogged back to Bob’s house. Once there, we (dumbly,
as it turned out) jumped into the hot tub. What that served to do was
heat up and further distribute the oil of the poison oak bushes we’d
run through, so that later that night Amby and I looked like zombies
as we lathered ourselves with calamine lotion. We still talk about run-
ning wild in those hills above Los Altos, and as far as I know, neither of
us has broken our pact to never again run in strange woods after dark.
I remember a runner who lived and ran (a lot) in the Great Southwest.
His name is John Annerino, and he made a reputation for himself as the
guy who ran wild in the southwestern deserts. He even wrote a book
 Run Wild  o o o  107

about it: Running Wild: An Extraordinary Adventure of the Human Spirit

(1992, 1998, Thunder’s Mouth Press). In one of his crazy runs, he ran
750 miles from Mexico to Utah. The LA Times reviewed the book this
way: “He nearly drowned. He battled heat, cold, thirst and exhaustion.
When he was nearly done, a snake rattled inches away from his ankles.”
Now that’s memorable running.
In running wild, there is also a great cleansing involved that crosses
all cultures and that plumbs the depths of the human spirit. Cleansing
by excess perspiration is seen in many cultures as a sacred ritual.
Of course, too much running wild can have a damning effect. “The
most horrific runner in literature of the nineteenth or any century,”
Roger Robinson wrote in his 2003 book Running in Literature, “must be
the Polynesian cannibal priest, dressed only in the hair of the dead,
who in a little-known Robert Louis Stevenson ballad runs in a frenzied
nonstop three-day ritual before naming the victims for the next feast” (p.
127). The final line of the poem reads: “The wreck of the red-eyed priest
came gasping home in the dusk.” Obviously, too much of a good thing.
Call it what you will—running wild, burning the rice paddies, run-
ning as you feel—it can be one of the most memorable and meaningful
runs of your entire year—the very antithesis of running under control.
I asked Lorraine Moller how she would characterize that letting-it-
loose run at the end of the season. Lorraine was born and raised in
New Zealand where, as a youngster, she and her friends typically ran
without shoes and frequently ran wild through the woods, something
she still remembers fondly. Lorraine was one of the dominant female
road runners in the 1980s, especially in the marathon. She won three
of the Avon International Women’s Marathons; nobody else won more
than one. She won the Boston Marathon in 1984 and the Osaka Ladies’
Marathon three times. She competed in the first four women’s Olympic
marathons, winning the bronze in 1992.
In a typical Lorraine way, her response to my question came back in
the form of a poem:
Second Wind
I run.
I run away from
Gravity of wrongs lived and relived
The sword that silences my song
The trance that eats my life.
Survival of the swift
It is written in salt.
I run.
I run towards
108  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

The distant mother of the familiar unknown

Great Big Simplicity.
AHA!
I see new realms in your footprints
Wild One.
In-between away and towards
There is the place of the Second Wind
The still place between breaths.
Anyone unhurried can find it
Even the timid.
Shh, not a word
Run with me
And I will meet you there.
Obviously, Lorraine has on occasion run wild, as anyone who knows
her will readily confirm. For the obsessive/compulsive long-distance
runner, an occasional wild run could provide all sorts of benefits, espe-
cially liberation from the usual and mundane.

For Your Consideration

• Follow the dictates of nature: schedule rest periods at the beginning
of summer and the beginning of winter. And celebrate these with
a wild run or two.
• Define a logical racing season—and then stick with it, even if your
racing is going unusually well. To overdo it is to invite injury. After
your scheduled season, celebrate with an unstructured romp. (If you
are worried about doing something so out of the ordinary for you,
put your cell phone in your fanny pack, just in case.)
• Once the racing season ends, you are no longer restrained by the
niceties of structure and regimen, so take an unscheduled run or
two based on simple abandon.
• Run over hill and dale until you run yourself out; then cut your
training back radically and allow your minute muscle tears and
injuries to heal before restarting your training for another season
of racing.
 chapter

16

FPO
LadyInBlack/fotolia.com

Rest
with
Marshall Ulrich
E very time you turn around, there are reports of how overworked
and overtired Americans are. A recent study concluded that Ameri-
cans have no more leisure time today than they had in 1900 (Harper’s
Magazine, June 2007, p. 13). I think back to the 1950s when, inspired by
the space race, scientists and sociologists were spending an inordinate
amount of time gazing raptly into the ideal future overflowing with
outrageous laborsaving devices.
As it turned out, nothing much came of all the daydreaming of futures
filled with fun and leisure. If you want leisure time, you’ve gotta live in
Europe, where they get five weeks off at a time (usually the same five
weeks in the middle of summer) and all go to the same beaches to relax
like fleas on a poodle.
For most Americans, on the other hand, a 40-hour workweek just
doesn’t get it done. And if you’re a salaried employee or self-employed,
you get to work just as many hours as you can stand. It’s no wonder
there are dozens of sleep-aid ads in magazines and on television. It’s no
wonder people are turning their cars into mobile offices.
The experts contend that, when you finally do drag yourself to bed,
if it takes less than three minutes to fall asleep, you are overtired. (Of
course, you don’t want the opposite problem, either: insomnia that
causes you to never get to sleep, sometimes caused by walking around
all day in a semislumber.)
Marching through life in an overtired state isn’t good for a person’s
health, and it certainly isn’t good for a person’s equanimity. This may
be why so many people try to construct an even keel by enrolling in
everything from aromatherapy to yoga to book discussion clubs to
quilting bees. (No joke. The latter is making a comeback as a way of
relaxing, helping the local community, and socializing with a group of
like-minded folks.)
The surrender to a continuous feeling of tiredness splashes over into
long-distance running. People who are very serious about their run-
ning are frequently not serious enough about the resting phase of their
training. And it’s the resting phase of a training program where the
training effect actually takes place. Dave Costill, the godfather of human
performance studies, put it very simply in his book Running: The Athlete
Within: “Balance work and rest. The purpose of training is to stimulate
the runner’s anatomy and physiology to grow stronger during periods
of rest and repair. Without adequate rest, the benefits of training cannot
be fully realized (p. 103).”
You can train yourself into the ground, but if you don’t back off and
give your body (and mind and spirit) time to recover from the workouts,
the training effect never has a chance to kick in, and the workouts are
nothing more than self-flagellation.

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 Rest  o o o  111

Consider the fact that any training you do is a process of breaking

down your muscles. Run a hard 10-mile workout and your muscles are
stressed and strained and, to an extent, damaged. You can’t do too many
hard workouts too frequently without inviting injury or breakdown. A
running journal can be educational when you suffer an overuse injury,
because you can then put on your deer slayer cap and clench that pipe
firmly in the side of your mouth and get out that magnifying glass; then,
in the guise of Sherlock Holmes, you can peruse the last two or three
weeks of your training journal and determine just where you started to
hurt yourself.
As we’ve already discussed, overuse injuries don’t happen overnight.
It’s traumatic injuries that occur suddenly, like when you trip on the
curb of the sidewalk and fall down. Overuse injuries, as we’ve discussed
before, are like the mist on the windshield of a car. When enough mist
falls, the droplets begin to run one into another, in the process forming
ever-larger drops that slide down the windshield, encounter other drops,
clot together and make still bigger drops. That’s how an overuse injury
happens: little tears joining other little tears to finally come together to
make big tears—and big tears are overuse injuries.
If you stop the misting process, eventually the droplets evaporate and
you’re no worse for the wear you’ve laid on your muscles. The way to
stop the misting process is to rest.
Rest doesn’t have to be total inactivity that makes you feel as though
you’ve encased yourself in a complete body cast. Gentle physical activity
(taking a stroll, puttering in the garden, or walking the dog) can be a form
of active rest. The object is to stay away from more running for a period
of time so that your body can undergo the training effect. The result is
that when your next scheduled workout comes along, your muscles are
at an increased level of fitness and ready for an additional workload.
This need for rest is why most professional runners don’t have regular
jobs. Part of their job is taking a quality nap in the afternoon between
the morning and the late-afternoon workout. They also get regular mas-
sages to expedite the recovery process from their training, which is both
high quality and high quantity. They also need to psychologically rest
so they can recuperate from recent races and more demanding strength
training workouts, such as hill work.
For most of us who are stitching our training in around the quiltwork
of real life, getting in the necessary rest periods can be difficult. But if we
are to perform well in races and if we are to continue training without
incurring injury, we definitely need to accommodate the body’s need
for restorative rest.
Of course, there is also a flip side these days. Some runners expect to
run well on more rest than training. Runners who train little but expect
112  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

decent results have spent too much time in the modern school system
where everyone who shows up gets a gold star. Or, if you show up late
but not quite as late as last week, you are also praised and rewarded. Or,
if you merely exist, you expect praise.
Long-distance running rewards hard work. There are no shortcuts, no
matter how many claims you hear that this or that food will knock five
minutes off your next 10K. The rewards of long-distance running are
earned the hard way: one step at a time. The successful long-distance
runner is a master of pacing, hard work, and appropriate rest.
You don’t need to run 120 miles a week to get a decent marathon
time—especially if you are already working full-time or beyond.
You can run a marathon you can be proud of on 55 to 75 miles (89 to
121 km) a week. The 120-mile-per-week (193 km) load is for the national-
and international-class runners. But you won’t run a decent marathon
on 25 to 35 (40 to 56 km) miles a week—unless you’ve been at it a long
time and your legs have a lot of muscle memory miles on them. Memory
miles come from those long, hard weeks of training over a decade or
more that hard-wires your legs to know what is required of them when
you pin on a number. But that seemingly magical phenomenon can be
tapped only so many times.
For the good runner, hard work is a must. As is hard rest, which could
include a well-placed nap. Naps are silver bullets against exhaustion.
Although it is impractical to take a nap during a fiercely fought 10K or
even in a marathon, it is not unusual for ultrarunners to take naps during
hundred-milers, especially during the dark hours. I know a woman who
ran the Western States 100 and, midway through the night portion, just
could not go on. She was exhausted. Her pacer advised her to lie down
beside the trail and take a half-hour nap. Ten minutes later the pacer
woke her up and she was filled with energy and raring to go. “I feel great,”
she responded. “That was the best half-hour I ever spent sleeping.” Of
course, the pacer never told her she’d been down for a mere 10 minutes.
As members of a society built on guilt, and as people on whom guilt
is often heaped (sometimes even by ourselves), it is sometimes difficult
to feel comfortable taking that well-earned, strategic rest period with-
out feeling guilty—and nothing interrupts a perfectly good nap more
effectively than a rash of guilt for taking the nap (or from questioning
whether you are napping correctly).
If you train hard, race often, but pace yourself wisely, give yourself a
break. The following guidelines can help you determine whether you are
failing to get enough rest:
• You fall asleep in the evening within three minutes of your head
hitting the pillow.
 Rest  o o o  113

• You can’t seem to fall asleep.

• You fall asleep quickly but wake in the middle of the night and
can’t get back to sleep.
• The skin of the cuticles around the base of your fingernails becomes
raw and red.
This matter of rest is something runners don’t tend to discuss. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s when I was running in Death Valley on a fairly
regular basis, it was reassuring to discuss the importance of taking time
off (especially for the heat-stressed body) with Marshall Ulrich, who was
repeatedly a champion on the Death Valley/Mt. Whitney course. He was
the first runner to do a quad run on the course: a double out-and-back,
roughly 600 miles (966 km). Marsh is also quite the mountaineer. He’s
reached the summit of the highest peak on each of the seven continents.
I asked him to summarize his take on maximizing rest, especially
during the off-season. Here is what he wrote:
Most runners know enough to take at least one rest day—a day
with no training—each week. But, a lot of runners don’t rest for a part
of the year; that is, they don’t allow themselves an off-season. I think
this is a mistake. I’ve been running for over 30 years and have learned
the importance of having an off-season. I believe that rest during the
off-season is as beneficial as training is during the running season.
When I started running in the late 1970s, I would begin to taper my
training at the end of August, after completing the Pikes Peak Mara-
thon, which was a tradition for me for almost a decade. I backed off on
my weekly miles significantly, ran more for fun than for training, and
wouldn’t do any racing at all until February. Typically for two months—
either November and December or December and January—I wouldn’t
run at all. Not a step. This true off-season, off from racing and off from
running, was imperative for several reasons:
1. It gave me—my body, mind, and spirit—a break.
2. It allowed me to spend more time with my family (I was married
and raising three kids).
3. It provided me more time to focus on work (I was running my
own business).
Now, I didn’t just lie around and stuff myself with turkey and Christ-
mas cookies, although I did indulge a little bit. My business, processing
dead cattle for pet food (I called myself a used cow dealer) and pro-
cessing hides for leather, requires some seriously hard physical labor,
and I relished the opportunity to help my employees during the busy
winter months. Throwing 50- and 100-pound (23 and 45 kg) hides
114  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

onto a pile, scooping up and spreading a shovel-full of salt, topped by

another hide, followed by more salt, for at least an hour a day, is good
cross-training (although the term hadn’t yet been invented), especially
for the upper body. It’s a good cardiovascular workout, too. So, while
continuing to stay fit, I gave myself a break from running.
I did my first ultra in 1983 and really started to run competitively at
ultra distances in 1987. To do this, I had to increase my training miles
accordingly. For about 15 years I trained over 2,000 miles (3,218 km)
and raced another 1,000 miles (1,609 km) a year, including dozens of
ultras and usually at least one expedition-length (at least 350 miles,
or 563 kilometers) adventure race each year. During this phase of my
career, rest during the off-season was even more imperative. I found I
looked forward to the time off, a welcome break in the action. Physi-
cally, my legs would become fresh again. Mentally, I found that after
a couple of months off, I was hungry to start running again and my
competitive spirit was restored.
There have been a few years during my career when I didn’t take
my own best advice, and I continued to train throughout the year:
once for two years in a row and, most recently, for a full year leading
up to my transcontinental run in 2008. I found it mentally draining
and physically damaging. My legs became fatigued, and my heart
was just not into running anymore. I would have to force myself out
the door. Running became a labor, and not a labor of love. That’s not
how it is supposed to be.
During my running career I’ve seen many of my friends and fellow
runners continue to train year-round, and suffer for it. Some have
burned out, losing their hunger for running and competition. Some
have been plagued with injuries, a few even crippling themselves to
the extent that they were forced out of running. Of course, rest during
the off-season is likely only one part of the equation to longevity in
running. Genetics also plays a significant role: how will your cartilage
hold up, or how much arthritis are you likely to suffer from? I’ve been
blessed with good genetics, which I supplement by resting during the
off-season.
I’m not alone in thinking that rest is beneficial. A few years ago I
was privileged to have lunch with Yiannis Kouros, who holds over 150
world records for distances from 100 to 1,300 miles (160 to 2,092
km). He has no equal in the sport of ultrarunning. As our conversation
turned to rest, he affirmed that he, too, would take a month or two off
during the year in which he would concentrate on his music, poetry,
and painting. He said that it was a welcome relief and something that
he looked forward to, because it restored his competitive spirit and
brought him full circle during the year.
 Rest  o o o  115

Everyone is unique. For some, a little rest goes a long way; for others,
more rest is better. Give your body and mind a chance to heal, refresh,
and grow. Be confident that cross-training will keep you fit during the
off-season. When the time to start training for running arrives, you’ll
be ready mentally and physically. Find that perfect balance of training
and time off. Listen and tune in to your body, your mind, and your spirit,
and you will find the perfect balance of training and rest.
That approach has certainly worked well for Marsh over the years.
Trust your body to know when and if it has managed to get enough
sleep—or too much. Take note the next time you literally leap out of
bed, ready to take control of the day. When that happens, you’ve gotten
adequate sleep.

For Your Consideration

• Taking a rest day is not going to ruin your running career. Even
your car usually gets the weekend off from the usual commute.
• Don’t get a case of the guilts because you occasionally take a day
to do nothing of an aerobic nature. Even God rested after six days
of work. Hey, I’m an agnostic, but even I think that makes a lot of
sense: God had an excellent sense of pacing. After inventing the
human race, I’d need a day of rest, too.
• Schedule rest days into your ambitious schedule or your body will
schedule them for you by translating injured days into nonsched-
uled rest days.
• Active rest, if it is gentle, works to some extent, although an occa-
sional day off when you do absolutely nothing is a real tank-filler.
• Occasionally taking several days off during a single week will not
greatly weaken you as long as you keep the hard/easy cycle going
with your regular workouts. Without easy days and rest days, you
won’t be having too many hard, satisfying days in your future.
 chapter

17

FPO
Run Alone Wojciech Gajda/fotolia.com
T he loneliness of the long-distance runner. For a generation of runners,
the title of Alan Sillitoe’s novel of juvenile rebellion described and
defined the person, usually male, who ran long distances over hill and
dale or ghosted along lonely roads at any time of the day and sometimes
at night, but always at least once every day and sometimes more often
than that.
He (and he was almost always a “he”) was a solitary figure, a loner, a
sort of malcontent crossed with a misanthrope, running very much to
his own drummer, very much outside the mainstream, perhaps verging
on madness. He was not good at the ball sports, had little eye–hand
coordination (but could leap over roots and rocks like a panther), was
dark and moody, kept a low profile in school, got good grades, read so
much he found it necessary to wear glasses (usually of the Clark Kent
style), and had only one or two friends . . . who were usually considered
losers just like he was.
This stereotype was cemented and repeated as though it were undis-
puted fact: that long-distance runners were introverts, antisocial, prone
to long periods of silence. And all of them came from the same antisocial,
boring, nerdy mold.
Of course, it wasn’t really true . . . except in those cases when it was
true—when a long-distance runner was actually introverted, antisocial,
and prone to long periods of time where he kept his mouth closed (except
to breathe) and his opinions to himself and eschewed the company of
others with great enthusiasm.
In reality, most of the long-distance runners of the 1970s and 1980s
were sociable enough. Some 80,000 of them used to get together one
day a year in May to run the Bay-to-Breakers race in San Francisco.
Marathons grew large enough to boast tens of thousands of participants.
Running clubs cropped up in every big city and many small towns, and
they were populated with people sociable enough that they managed
to attract other like-minded (and like-bodied) people to their ranks. In
fact, today there are more than 1,000 running clubs in the Road Run-
ners Club of America.
Runners, it seems, were sociable; they went to great pains to seek out
other runners. And once women became involved in larger numbers,
running became more sociable still as women brought their often social
personalities and skills to the sport and lifestyle. In many instances,
women would not run at all if they could not run with their women
friends. From a social standpoint, running provides a wonderful common
ground for groups of women, and the fitness aspect is a terrific bonus.
The Greater Boston Track Club in the late 1970s and early 1980s
sported a dozen or so national-class runners who worked out together.
Women’s running groups formed up for Saturday morning runs.

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118  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Corporate competition brought together disparate employees all inter-

mixing and proudly sporting the logo of their company, warehouse-
woman striding out with the marketing VP.
More recently, the tendency of people to train and race together has
further escalated. There are charity running groups and computer-gener-
ated virtual training groups, often tied in with major races. Everybody’s
running with somebody.
The solitary runner backlit against the rising sun on the far horizon
has become a rarity.
The days of a runner like 1960s marathon world record–holder Derek
Clayton running hard workouts day after day while avoiding other run-
ners is nearly gone. Of course, Clayton usually ran alone not for spiritual
renewal, but because he didn’t want to let his competitors know what
kind of workouts he was doing.
Clayton did enjoy running with other runners in races. His personality
seemed to be defined by an admission he shared: “I love to have some-
body next to me at 15 miles, so I can grind them into the ground.” (No
wonder he spent so much time running alone. He’d have had trouble
finding someone to run with if that person were going to get ground
into the ground.)
We could all use some alone space and time—some quality Thoreau
moments that Derek Clayton would not appreciate because of his com-
petitive nature, especially these days when we are bombarded with com-
munications of all sorts all the time. We are literally being smothered
by communications, drowned in talk and text. Yet in spite of all the
yakking, it’s the rare conversation that is truly riveting and memorable.
In fact, conversation is becoming a lost art, killed off by blogging and
mortally wounded by text messaging. Gone the way of the reel-to-reel
tape recorder.
To attempt to escape the constant babble is to court sanity.
A solitary run can provide that escape and that sanity and in the
process is a thing of beauty on two important fronts:
1. Become reacquainted with yourself.
2. It offers an opportunity for play.
First of all, it gets you away from the distractions of daily life and
encourages you to meet yourself and to become reacquainted with the
you that is lost and lonely in the fog of white noise. Many people these
days seem adrift from themselves, unable or unwilling to examine
themselves and work toward a fuller realization of the athletic potential
trapped within. They would do better to schedule some quality time
with themselves instead of surrounding themselves with the furry and
too-comfortable coat of oblivion.
 Run Alone  o o o  119

We all need some time away, some time alone. Some people are able
to create this personal time even in the middle of a bustling city sur-
rounded by thousands of people and hundreds of distractions. Others
can’t, but they have learned that they can achieve the quiet time by
running away for an hour or two.
When you voluntarily strip yourself of all distractions and distortions,
you are, for the duration of the run, free from the life perpetrated on
you by a world panting for your attention. No phone calls. No instant
messaging. No lists of what’s “in” or “out.” No brand names vying for
your attention and your dollar. No badgering or begging or cajoling or
nudging. No headphones cutting you off from the real world around
you—the world where birds chirp and where your breathing is an umbili-
cal cord that connects you to the heart of the world.
Running on your own offers the advantage of developing hard disci-
pline of body and mind. It takes a great deal of motivation to head out
on a long run alone. It involves a commitment of focus and hard work
. . . and usually the acceptance of the various ups and downs you have
come to associate with running long. It is, in essence, the training ver-
sion of Alberto Salazar’s famous statement that at the starting line, we
are all cowards. The very fact that we go out the door alone to face the
potential obstacles of the long run makes us better runners. For most
of us, the most ferocious enemy we face in our lifetime is ourselves,
because we know all of our moves and countermoves, all of our excuses
and rationalizations.
Running alone builds physical and mental strength and perseverance.
It also offers an opportunity to play with a run. When you run with a
group, you are stuck either following the dictates of the group leader or
held down by the speed—or lack of speed—of the slowest runner in the
group. When you are alone, there are no such dictates. You can speed
up or slow down or throw in a few extra hills if you think they will help
improve your fitness . . . or perhaps just because there is a particularly
attractive hill along the route. There is no better way to do fartlek than
by running alone.
Running with a group is desirable when doing especially long runs
because the group creates a distraction so that the long run seems to go
by easier and faster. But when you run a race, even if it is among a throng
of thousands, your race is your own. You are running within yourself,
and if you don’t occasionally go out alone, you will not have learned
how to confront your weaknesses at stressful times during the race.
Approaching a considerable hill on a workout, I tend to blanch a bit
as I approach it, anticipating the work ahead. Running hills alone, over
a period of weeks, I can increase the rhythm of my breathing going into
the hills, getting a jump on the increased respiration I’m going to need.
120  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

In a group run, I can feel pulled along; alone, I’m stripped bare and faced
with exactly how I handle the hill versus how I know I want to handle it.
Running alone for a long run can have its disadvantages, however. If
you are in decent shape and you’re running a 16-mile workout, you may
have a tendency, once you’re warmed up, to daydream, to disassociate,
and to just drift along while your mind wanders. In a group run, your
mind doesn’t tend to wander because there is always something going
on (often the most talkative people weaving long stories or rattling off
jokes).
If you can do a long run alone and keep your focus and concentra-
tion piqued, monitoring your body functions as you go, you can greatly
improve your ability to race well. Without the distraction of the group,
you can more easily learn to monitor your breathing, your energy
output, your running form, the slap of your shoes on the asphalt, and
your overall performance. If you hit a rough spot while you’re alone,
you can run through it and come out the other side a much stronger
runner, much more self-reliant and confident.
Running alone, you spend quality time with yourself, rocked gently
by the in and out of your breath and the beat of your heart and the sigh
of the world around you. You are in sync with the basic rhythm and
beat of your own body and of the cosmos of which you are a molecule.
All things extraneous are stripped away. All complexities become
simple—and accessible.
When you are pounded and confused 24/7 by a myriad of questions
demanding answers and decisions needing making, all of them hyper-
charged and demanding an instant answer (no matter how pressingly
important or merely trivial, there is no distinction), your body and mind
stumble and become misaligned. Stripped on the solitary run of that
constant assault of the senses, rolling along a quiet country road or a
pathway in a park, your breath coming regularly and strongly, your mind
can click into a primal dragon gear. Quickly and confidently it can sort
through the dozens of questions and problems that have stymied you.
Like a computer alphabetizing a database, your mind can line up the
questions in a remarkably logical way, bringing only one topic forward
at a time, stripping it of its nettles and disguises until it stands before
you, stark and vulnerable and easily dealt with. The question that has
dogged you for three days is solved in three miles. You shake your head
at how absolutely simple it was—once the extraneous camouflage was
shunted off to the nowhere where it belongs.
When we are out on that endless road or that path to nowhere, we are
also open to experience the connection to a greater whole. This is not
an experience that needs to be too closely examined or pigeonholed as
a religious experience. On a long run alone, the experience is available
 Run Alone  o o o  121

to the faithful as well as to the faithless. That serenity seeps not from
our running legs into the earth, but the other way around: It comes up
from the earth as it makes us one with the environment through which
we move, as it refreshes and fuels that spiritual tank in all of us that we
so badly want to fill. It is only filled, though, when we are quiet and
with ourselves, and when we are comfortable with the quiet around us
and within us.
OK, so that sounds just about as New Age hokey as you can get. Trust
me, New Age I ain’t. Think back to long runs you did alone that are
memorable even years later. I can think of one that is more than 20
years old: an 18-miler (29 km) on a Saturday morning after an overnight
storm that knocked out the power, broke tree limbs off century-old trees,
and made a shambles of the neighborhood. The run wasn’t easy, and it
wasn’t through a redwood forest. It was through a suburban area, along
what was usually a well-traveled road, and it involved vaulting twisted
and broken tree limbs. It was cold and it was wet and it was windy. For a
couple of hours I had the whole world to myself, except for the occasional
confused dog wandering around wondering what had happened to its
orderly world, and utility repair crews that were trying to reinstitute the
order on which those dogs depended for their sanity.
Gas stations post signs warning motorists not to top off their tanks for
fear of overflowing. Well, that 18-mile run overfilled my spiritual and
psychological tanks to the point of near-ecstatic excess. That run was so
good that it’s difficult, these long years later, to even classify it as a run. It
was an entirely unique experience. And it was an experience that would
have been denied had I done the run with anyone else (not that anyone
else would have volunteered to venture out into the ravaged streets).
When you run alone, the pace you run at any one time is always the
pace you choose. Do you want to pick it up to the next lamppost? Do
you want to cruise over the next mile? Do you have an urge to turn off
the road you usually run to explore a neighborhood you’ve never expe-
rienced before?
You need ask no one for permission.
You need only give in to your own whim.
You are, for that precious time, captain of your own ship. And for
that time, your ship—inside and out—is improved by its customization
of momentarily self-centered physicality. You become the animal you
were meant to be, and by that act, you are one with what is real, not
with what is virtual.
You are once more renewed by a sacrament of sweat, a process you
can only accomplish solo, in a sport in which even in the middle of a
10,000-entrant race, you are ultimately alone.
But far from lonely.
122  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

For Your Consideration

• Perform an experiment. Chuck the iPod and the GPS, the hydration
pack and the heart-rate monitor and go on a solo run. Listen to
your own breathing and absorb the world through which you glide.
When did you last meet up with yourself out on the open road?
• No matter how often you run and train with others, set at least one
run a week aside just for yourself.
• On a solo run, explore a new course. Make sure it is a safe course
by checking it out on a map or with people who are familiar with
the area. Make it your own.
• On a trip to a new area, ask the person at the front desk of your
hotel if there is a running route that will give you a tour of the most
interesting sights in your new environment.
• Next time you visit the town or city where you grew up, run some
of the routes of your childhood. What’s changed? What hasn’t? Do
your childhood haunts seem incredibly small compared to your
expanded world of adulthood?
• When you do a long run alone, give in to your urges to wander off
the beaten path. Throw in an extra hill or a detour down a street
you haven’t explored before.
• On your next solo long run, practice keeping your focus on monitor-
ing the performance of your systems for the entire run. Don’t allow
your mind to wander. This will make the workout doubly effective.
 chapter

18

FPO
AP Photo

Run Together
with
Bill Rodgers
W henever and wherever we run and race, we do so alone, whether
we’re on a run with friends or surrounded by 30,000 strangers at
a big-city marathon event.
Our run is done both within and without ourselves simultaneously.
It is generated by us and us alone, and we are wholly responsible for it
and one with it.
Because running long distance is a sport and a lifestyle we ultimately
do alone, naked to the world, it holds a special place among human
activities while also demanding a special kind of commitment.
In most sports and human activities, we are not so alone, so “out
there.” Our shortcomings in performing various activities—from exer-
cising and competing to completing work on the job—can be at least
partially covered by friends and teammates who can run interference
when we are having a bad day.
On a football team, a pair of linemen can open a delicious hole in
the line for a fullback who is not the most agile or fastest man in the
backfield. In the military, a particularly good shot can cover the back
of a quick and agile infantryman who is the company’s worst shot but
best stealth point man. At a sales meeting, the best presenter may not
be the most organized person on the team, but backed by those who
are better organized, can give one outrageously winning presentation.
It’s called teamwork, and it has worked for tens of thousands of years.
It accounts in large part for the fact that the human race is still around
and dominant in the world. It is also what makes the team, from a
strictly numbers standpoint, consistently stronger than the average
person within the team.
Is teamwork applicable to running?
Certainly. It’s what makes what is ultimately an “alone” (but not
lonely) sport so attractive to many people who hate to be alone.
Teamwork is involved in marathon relay teams, in Hood-to-Coast
relay teams, in corporate road race teams, in club or corporate track and
field teams, and in clubs participating in running events.
Although each runner ultimately runs alone and is responsible for
his or her success or failure, running with others has a special allure in
the world of sports.
Running with others creates an environment in which the status
and caste system of the everyday world is chucked, the civilized world’s
uniforms are left in the locker room, and everyone shows up for the
Thursday evening track workout in shorts and a T-shirt. Stripped for
action, you can gravitate to people in the group who share your 400-
meter repeat potential rather than your rung on the corporate ladder.
Running with others creates an environment in which lifelong friend-
ships are created based on a common love of movement and the strip-

124
 Run Together  o o o  125

ping away of pretense. People who have little in common otherwise run
together step for step, mile after mile, year after year.
Running with others is for some the most important motivating force
to get out the door. For some people, that first step is the most difficult,
but when they know they’re obliged to meet others to go for that daily
or weekly run, there is a motivation at work that goes beyond mere guilt
at letting the group down. For some, the lack of a group would keep
them from running.
Running in groups is especially attractive to female runners. Although
male runners seem OK running alone (as do many female runners),
women tend to like to get together in groups to train and race. Some
women admit that if it weren’t for their running group they doubt they
could stay motivated to run. Female running groups have certainly
paid off. In some road races (the Portland, Oregon, marathon, for one),
women outnumber men, a reality that would have been unthinkable
as recently as the 1980s. The phenomenon of women outnumbering
men in road races began emerging early in Canada, beginning in the
mid-1990s.
Colleges and running shops sometimes host classes or training work-
shops for local runners. Participants in these groups tend to stick together
as training partners after the classes or workshops are over.
Running with others, especially on particularly hard or long runs and
in races, creates a special bond that has few comparisons. This bond is
based on the following:
1. Misery loves company. On particularly long or difficult workouts
or challenging races, it is always good to have along a friendly ear
to listen to your whining, moaning, and complaining. Afterward,
you can share the high and low points of the run or race. Let’s
face it: There is a particularly perverted side of human nature that
better remembers the outrageously horrible than the sublime, and
wallows in the retelling of it.
2. Life as shared meaning. On runs or races that are going as expected,
the distance always seems shorter and the experience more mean-
ingful in the company of a friend or two . . . or three. At the heart
of every shared running experience are several miles that seem
forged in heaven, where the asphalt is softer, the wind always a
tailwind, and the breathing always under control. To imagine
having the same experience running that particular run alone is
to court a fantasy.
3. Energy exchange. The metaphysical and the mystical can come
together during a particularly long run or an especially challeng-
ing race when three or four runners who train together regularly
126  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

pass energy back and forth to each other as the need arises. This
may sound way too New Age to most people, but when one person
begins to falter or hits an ugly patch, the rest of the group can pass
energy to that person. This exchange can be so palpable that the
needy runner is often compelled to comment on the phenomenon.
I can recall even today the San Francisco Marathon of 1978 when
Larry Tunis and I paced our friend Bill Howard through his first
marathon. Out along the Great Highway, more than 20 miles into
the race, Bill began to falter. Larry and I rolled up beside him, and
within a few more strides, Bill commented on how he was pick-
ing up needed energy from the two of us. It’s as close to sharing
a responsibility for someone else’s run as it’s possible to get in an
activity in which we all ultimately participate alone.
Running with others better than ourselves, even if briefly, can have
tremendously positive consequences. If you always run with people
equal to or weaker than you are, you’ll never improve (which is an
argument against national-class runners picking only races they know
they have a chance of winning). If you run with people better than
you are, your striving to stay with them, even if for only a few miles,
will improve your running.
Years ago, several of us at Runner’s World who wanted to improve
would go out for a few miles to get warmed up and then meet up with
some of the stud runners who worked at Starting Line Sports (a retail
outlet owned by Runner’s World) and who were former aggies from
UC-Davis—guys like Angel Martinez and Peanut Harms. We knew we
couldn’t keep up with them for their entire workout, but they weren’t
yet warmed up and we were, so we could manage to hold on for the
first few miles and learn to run, at least briefly, with the big dogs.
Bill Rodgers, four-time winner of the Boston and New York Marathons,
used to offer the same opportunity to visiting runners when he had his
Cleveland Circle store along the Boston Marathon course. If you were
a 46-minute 10K runner and you were in town and you wanted to run
the first several miles of Bill’s afternoon workout, he’d be happy to take
you along for a few miles while he warmed up. Of course, once he was
warmed up and shifted to ever-higher gears, you were pretty much
on your own.
What made the Greater Boston Track Club (GBTC) such a force in the
late 1970s and early 1980s was that they had a dozen members who were
similar in talent. Whoever was feeling his oats that day would pull the
others along with him. Runners such as Bob Hodge, Randy Thomas, Vin
Fleming, Greg Meyer, and Dick Mahoney were so potent singly and as a
team because they pushed each other and in the process became better.
 Run Together  o o o  127

It is the rare long-distance runner who is capable of improving while

running in a vacuum. Emil Zatopek (Czechoslovakia), Derek Clayton
(Australia), and Jerome Drayton (Canada) come to mind as exceptions.
The benefits of running in a group were overlooked for a time. In the
1970s geographically specific running groups were common. Besides the
aforementioned GBTC, the most famous long-distance running group
was centered in the Gainesville, Florida, area and boasted runners such
as Frank Shorter, Jack Bacheler, Jeff Galloway, John Parker (author of
Once a Runner), and others.
From the mid-1980s onward, the concept of the running group fell
by the wayside, but over the past few years it has reemerged, and to
good effect.
Groups such as the Hanson brothers’ group in Michigan, Alberto
Salazar’s group in Beaverton, Oregon, and perhaps most famously, the
Mammoth Lakes group (Deena Kastor, Meb Keflezighi, Ryan Hall, and
others) have all contributed to forming a much deeper pool of talent
in the United States, and it’s promoted a real team sense among the
various groups.
Although we run every run alone when it comes right down to it,
running is one of the rare occasions in life in which we can be alone
together.
In August of 1980 I spent a week with Bill Rodgers in Boston while
working on a major feature on him for Runner’s World. At the time, Bill
was considered the King of the Roads. He easily dominated the road-
racing scene, at one point winning more than 20 road races in a row,
everything from the 5K to the marathon. He would ultimately win four
Boston Marathons and four New York City Marathons. During that visit,
he was not in a terribly good mood. At the height of his prowess as a
runner, President Jimmy Carter had announced that the United States
would boycott the Moscow Olympic Games. Bill’s best chance to medal
in the marathon had been snatched away.
On one of the days during the visit, we went to the track where a
half-dozen other members of the Greater Boston Track Club joined Bill
for their weekly repeat workouts. It was hot and muggy, but they ran
repeat after repeat, seemingly enjoying the process.
As I worked on this chapter, that day came back to me vividly. I
contacted Bill to ask him to comment on the special relationship that
develops when a group of runners trains together. He sent along this
mini-memoir of those special relationships:
When I think of some of the reasons I love running, it is clear that
maybe key for me has been that the social/friendship aspect has been
paramount. This became very clear to me as a 15-year-old Newington,
128  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Connecticut, high school sophomore when I joined our cross-country

team with my brother Charlie and good childhood friend Jason. In
fact, that first year we were almost the whole team! I still remember
us recruiting some friends, including a smoker and a basketball player
who I think lasted one race.
But most profoundly, I remember our new coach, Frank O’Rourke,
who’d been a track athlete at Boston University and who quickly reen-
ergized our team spirit with consistent support and sensible workouts.
Soon we were a force.
When we won our conference title, we ran through the season with
that banner of success. I don’t think too many people paid us much
attention, but we were stoked. My senior year in cross-country, our team
was stunned by the appearance of NHS cheerleaders at our meets—at
a cross-country meet! We had gained some clout.
In college with Amby Burfoot and Jeff Galloway at Wesleyan Uni-
versity, a Division III school, we had another wizard of a coach, Elmer
Swanson, a man who knew instinctively to keep us focused and let us
explore our strengths gradually. We bonded as a team and are still close
today, more than 40 years later.
I still recall that feeling of intensity cheering on your teammates during
races in track and cross-country, something lacking in road running.
On the other hand, I made so many friends through this sport, and it
seems like this will never change.
In my middle 20s I joined the GBTC [Greater Boston Track Club], as
did a bunch of guys I knew and sometimes trained with. Again, a char-
ismatic high-energy coach led the way, Coach Billy Squires. As a former
near-four-minute-miler in the 1950s at Notre Dame, he had credibility.
But what counted was that he lifted us up—all of us on the team—and
we lifted each other up in big training groups that occasionally degen-
erated into outright races as we raced for home. I can still hear Greg
Meyer making wisecracks, Coach Squires speaking in a strange Boston
accent and becoming near-hysterical with his determination on behalf
of our athletes at races, and all of us knowing we were pretty darned
good. That high was something else, especially because we all knew
we had helped each other get there.
I can still remember one of my last 20-mile workouts leading up to
Boston that I did with three or four friends. My Brit friend Dave Oliver
called it the Novocain Run. It was 8 °F (–13 °C), but we did it, laughed
about how cold it was, and believe me, we would not have done it
alone! We cheered each other on, trying to beat each other, broke
bread together, had a beer or two, listened to music, and ran absolutely
everywhere on this planet together. Nothing could stop us except God
himself, and I like to think that as we went by he saluted us, because
 Run Together  o o o  129

he made us the running animals that we are—and the friends that

we’ll always be.
The benefits of running with others can’t be overstressed. The play-
ful competition among friends can profoundly improve your running
skills, and the friendships tend to span the years in a way that casual
friendships never do.

For Your Consideration

• Once a week, seek out a running group that is a tier above your
talents, and after warming up for a few miles, set out with them
at their pace during their warm-up phase. When you are dropped
as they pick up the pace, head off to complete your own workout.
• Find a running partner who is roughly at your level and run with
him or her once a week on a tempo or fartlek session. Take turns
throwing in the surges and picking up the pace, but don’t attempt
to blow the other runner’s doors off. Cooperate with each other so
both of you improve.
• Find one or two runners who are a tier below you and spend one
workout a week running with them at their pace. It will slow you
down some and force you to take an easy day, and in the process
you can share with them some of the lessons you’ve learned over
the years.
• Run with a half-dozen other runners of roughly the same talent
and form a line. As you run along comfortably, have the person
at the back of the line come forward and set the pace at the front
for five minutes. Then have the person at the end of the line come
forward and do the same.
• Schedule one evening a week for group track workouts. Break into
groups of equal or near-equal talent, and pump out your speed
workout for the week. The time on speed workouts and on long
runs always goes by faster if you are doing it with other runners.
Then head out to the local pizza parlor to refill your carbo tanks.
 chapter

19

FPO

Join a Club
L et’s make this simple and put it right up front for runners who love
to run on the roads: www.rrca.org. That’s the home page of the Road
Runners Club of America, the largest and most active amalgamation of
running clubs in the world, and the backbone and protector of road
races and road racers in the United States. The RRCA turned 50 years
old in 2008. It has a membership of 200,000 runners who are active in
more than 1,000 running clubs.
Now, just for fun, let’s also throw out there the Hash House Harri-
ers, the naughty but nice running club that has chapters throughout
the world, and in some of the most out-of-the-way places in the world,
including two chapters in the Antarctic. The HHH’s central Web site is
www.gthhh.com. The Harriers claim to have 18,626 members in more
than 1700 “kennels” spread across 178 countries, and who’s to argue
with a club whose male members sometimes dress up in red dresses and
then go outside to race?
We’ll discuss these two unique clubs a little later, but first let’s talk
about running clubs in general.
Real runners, the anaerobic athletic artists, ran on tracks under the
supervision of, at first, the Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU (an umbrella
organization covering all amateur sports), and eventually, once track
and field was separated from the other amateur sports, the USATF (USA
Track & Field).
There was the odd blue-collar sportsman or confused collegiate guy
who ran along the roads, but they weren’t part of the official world
of runners. They were oddballs, sometimes referred to as “ham and
eggers,” who once a year at Boston got together and ran a marathon.
The numbers at Boston for its first 75 years were no threat to the AAU.
In 1910, for instance, there were 169 entrants; in 1946 there were 112.
There were a number of road races of varying distances, especially in
New England and on the West Coast, but the fields were universally
small and frequently consisted of the same two or three dozen runners.
(In his research for a story on the founding of the RRCA, Hal Higdon
discovered that in 1958 there were eight marathons in the United States;
today there are more than 400.)
Elite sporting clubs catered to the upper crust of society. The Boston
Athletic Association had its own elaborate clubhouse and facilities to
support everything from swimming to bowling; it even sported a wine
cellar. Clubs like the BAA supplied the athletes for the revival of the
Olympic Games in 1896.
There were also the vanguard clubs such as the New York Pioneer
Club, which was formed as an all-inclusive, integrated track club. It was
formed a decade before Jackie Robinson was signed by the Dodgers, and
welcomed Jews and African Americans, the most famous of the latter

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132  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

being Ted Corbitt, the grandfather of U.S. ultramarathoning and one

of the founders of the RRCA.
Average road runners, however, had little in the way of organizations
they could join or that catered to them. They would pile into a car, go to
a road race, run the road race, hang around a bit to socialize and down
a beer or three with their fellow competitors, and then they’d pile back
into the car and drive home.
It was a different situation in England, where sporting clubs were
common and some of them had large contingents of both track and
road runners.
During the 1950s the ranks of road runners in the United States began
to grow, but they gained no respect among the track and field types,
who still saw themselves as the pure runners and elite athletes. (Let’s
face it: They had history on their side. The first ancient Greek Olympics
featured only one event: a 200-meter sprint race inside a stadium.)
The AAU began to hound the growing number of road runners for
membership dues and went so far as to require an AAU card for partici-
pation in some road events the organization had in the past ignored.
None of the membership dues went toward providing any services for
road runners, and many road runners simply refused to pay for the
privilege of receiving nothing in return.
It was into that growing vacuum that the Road Runners Club of
American stepped.
To quote the history of the RRCA from its website: “In the 1950s there
were very few opportunities for runners to train and compete after col-
lege. In the August 1957 issue of The Long Distance Log an editorial by
Olympian H. Browning Ross proposed to develop an organization for
American distance runners. The concept was modeled after the Road
Runners Club of the United Kingdom founded in 1952. . . . At a Febru-
ary 22, 1958, meeting at the Paramount Hotel in New York City, Ross
and nine others discussed the general direction for the organization and
developed the basic operating structure.”
The founders of the RRCA wanted a countrywide organization to
oversee their activities and to provide a roof under which they could
pursue their ambitions.
The Hash House Harriers, on the other hand, date back to before the
RRCA and are a bit less organized . . . and proud of it. They formed in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1938 when some British colonial officials and
expatriots got together after work on Monday evenings to go for a run.
One runner (the “hare”) would go out and leave a paper trail that the
other runners (the hounds) would then follow. Afterward, the runners
would hang around, drink beer, and swap stories. The HHH (or H3) has
been known for decades as “a drinking club with a running problem.”
 Join a Club  o o o  133

They frequently put on outrageous races, including the tradition of

staging an annual Red Dress Run (http://reddress.gotothehash.net/),
where frequently members of both genders run the event wearing a red
dress. (Seeing a mustached, hairy-legged guy running down the street
in a red dress can be very disconcerting.)
Most running clubs, of course, are more traditional, and in fact,
without them and their members and their organizational skill, most
of the decent road races in this country would vanish.
Clubs vary in size from a dozen members to some of giant propor-
tions, among them the New York Road Runners (with 40,000 members)
and the Atlanta Track Club (9,000 members). The NYRR’s premiere road
racing event is, of course, the New York City Marathon, and the ATC’s
is the July 4th Peachtree 10K.
What are the advantages of joining a running club? Whereas a half-
century ago, most road runners practiced their sport alone, today’s long-
distance runner is typically more of a social being, and often actually
depends on the motivation of fellow runners to get in the miles needed
to race at various long distances. The essential long run, the backbone
of any long-distance running program, is less painful when done with a
group. Running clubs usually offer training groups at various levels, so
they can benefit novice runners as well as help veteran runners improve
their performances.
Clubs also provide an opportunity to give back to the sport. As already
mentioned, without the dedication of running clubs, there would be very
few road races available. Becoming a club member allows you to volun-
teer to help keep the road racing circuit alive and well—and growing.
Many clubs offer ambitious programs to encourage youngsters to take
up running, and in that way help ameliorate the vacuum left in youth
fitness with the demise of so many physical education programs in the
schools. Some clubs (including the RRCA) have even begun to offer
dating services for runners with common interests beyond running.
A growing number of professionally run road races are looking to hire
experienced race organizers. One of the best ways to get that necessary
experience is by joining a club and working on its race committees. Some
clubs, in fact, are large enough that they have salaried race officials.
Many running clubs are eager to subsidize local charities; if you’re
involved with a local charity and want to build a bridge to contribu-
tors, joining the local running club would provide a means to do that.
Many clubs publish their own magazines or newsletters and maintain
Web sites where you can learn about publications or Web communities,
or offer your talents if you are proficient in writing, editing, or design.
(The RRCA has an annual awards banquet at their convention honor-
ing the best publications and Web sites in various club size categories.)
134  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

In periods of economic uncertainty, running clubs offer all sorts of

networking opportunities for jobs and for promoting your business,
both through the club membership and through businesses affiliated
with the club. Such applications, of course, need to be done tastefully
and sensitively.
Clubs also provide ready access to better runners and experienced
coaches who can give valuable and solid training advice. This is especially
beneficial for the novice runner who may otherwise go by the wayside
because of confusion, frustration, or lack of improvement.
Clubs also frequently put together trips to out-of-town races; because
they enter as a group, they can offer considerable savings for individual
members. They also charter planes and buses and organize carpools to
go to races.
Of course the most valuable commodity a club provides is that ele-
ment you can’t put a price on, camaraderie. Any activity is more fun
when you’re doing it with a group of like-minded people.

For Your Consideration

• Join a running club for both social and practical reasons.
• Running clubs provide ready access to coaches and training pro-
grams.
• Running clubs frequently organize social events that provide ready
entry into the running world for those folks who are socially shy
and retiring.
• By joining a running club and volunteering to help out, you can
give something back to the sport and thereby keep it healthy. A
lot of the folks who volunteer all the time can use a little time off
so they don’t burn out.
• Self-conscious newcomers to running can find comfort running
within a group structure. This has been especially true over the
past decade with women entering running without previous ath-
letic experience. The club systems are extremely supportive of new
runners.
 chapter

20

Volunteer
with
Allan Steinfeld
L ong-distance runners make outstanding volunteers, primarily because
being a good long-distance runner requires that you be obsessive
about training while also dependable and responsible in numerous
aspects of life.
Let me give you two examples: Marathon & Beyond magazine carries a
feature each issue titled “My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What
I Learned from It).” A marathoner relates his or her most memorable
marathon and explains the lessons learned from it. The feature has been
carried each issue since the magazine’s inception in January of 1997.
In the November/December 2009 issue, Lisa Garrone of New York
City didn’t write one of the regular “Most Unforgettable” installments,
but she did a feature that she titled “A Different Kind of Unforgettable
Marathon.” A member of the New York Road Runners club and a veteran
of its annual marathon, Lisa volunteered to help at the race in early
November. Let’s let her explain:

I would like to say that I decided to volunteer to give back. Cer-

tainly, that was a big part of it. After all, I had run 30 marathons
in 20 states and four countries. I surely owed something some-
where, and then some. Volunteering is also a new requirement
for runners hoping to qualify for the NYC Marathon based on
the number of local races they run. But I had already deferred my
guaranteed entry from this year and therefore had a guaranteed
entry next year.
The truth is, much like my first NYC Marathon eight years earlier,
I was attracted by the idea of how glorious it would be to partici-
pate and to do well. I thought about how many times I had been
handed a sports drink that was mixed incorrectly or had found
a station that had run out of water at the worst time. Not on my
watch, I thought. Literally, I was an experienced runner. I would
make the ideal volunteer because I knew what it was like to be
on the receiving end of a water cup. I was going to do it right.
And do it right, she did. She strove to be the perfect volunteer, and for
all intents and purposes, she was. Except for the fact that she had not
anticipated the repetitive nature of handing cup after cup after cup of
water for hour after hour using the same arm motion, which literally
wore her down. She was one of the last volunteers to leave her station.
She wrote:

. . . as I jogged toward the nearest subway station, aching from

the standing and cheering and the holding, I could already feel
my resolve strengthening. Next time, I would do arm exercises to

136
 Volunteer  o o o  137

strengthen my water arm. I could practice my pouring technique

in my kitchen. Stretching lower tendons before cup crushing
would help. Maybe [and here comes her marathoner’s competitive
streak] next year, our water station could be ready even further
ahead of the other teams. Visions of future volunteering PRs
danced in my head. Much like after running my first marathon, I
was humbled by the experience of volunteering. But, just like after
my first marathon, I loved it and was determined to do it again.”
In the March/April 2010 issue of the Marathon & Beyond, Ellen Lyons
wrote an installment of “My Most Unforgettable Marathon” about the
2009 Boston Marathon. A veteran of nine Boston Marathons and a local,
Ellen didn’t run in 2009—she volunteered because she was injured. After
nearly a decade of running Boston, this time she was going to do it dif-
ferently.
Ellen spent the day with several other volunteers organizing sweat bags
for a group of police officers who were running the marathon. Her two
fellow volunteers are members of the LAPD, and as you might imagine,
the three of them are organizational mavens. They set up the bags in rows
based on the race numbers of their owners. They got done fast enough
that they had time to duck outside and catch the women’s finish. Ellen
wrote: “The women’s finish is inspiring, even with Kara Goucher taking
third place. I rarely have a chance to appreciate long-distance running as
a sport, and the top women’s performances make me proud—I’m lucky
to be a runner, an athlete.”
Ellen put in a long day but a satisfying one. She ended her article this
way: “Much later, it is getting dark—the sky now reversed, carbon-paper
clouds and pink streaks waning. I am parking the car, walking across my
lawn to my door, limping a little, sore and proud—feeling very much as
though I had participated in the Boston Marathon, despite my lack of
tinfoil blanket and medal. My neighbor Al yells to me: ‘Hey, Ellen! How
did you do?’ I call back to him, explaining that I didn’t run. He doesn’t
hear me. ‘Congratulations!’ he yells. ‘You’ll sleep well tonight!’ I decide
not to explain any further. Al is right: I will sleep well tonight.”
It is no exaggeration to state that very little would get done in the
world if all the world’s volunteers were abducted by an alien spacecraft.
Certainly in running, entry fees don’t come close to covering the cost of
putting on a race even with volunteers; without volunteers, race entry
fees would soar and running races as we know them would vanish from
the face of the earth, as would charity events of all kinds.
Volunteers are essential to the survival of most events. As we’ve seen
with so many natural calamities, without volunteer help, fatalities would
be multiplied several times.
138  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Fortunately, volunteering is its own unique reward.

Fortunately, volunteers who have never run a step, step forward to
help put on running races.
At the Napa Valley Marathon (32 years old in 2010), volunteers from
Calistoga (the little resort town where the race starts) are responsible for
the first seven miles of the course. Some intersections have been staffed
and monitored by the same families since the race began. Families
pass their intersections down from generation to generation. These are
family affairs, and woe to anyone within the marathon’s organizational
structure who makes the mistake of trying to take their intersections
away from them.
One Napa Valley volunteer worked the same intersection for more
than 25 years. When he learned he had terminal cancer, his wish was to
stay alive long enough to do his volunteer duties one last time—which
he did.
My wife and I have been working aid stations at the grueling Western
States Endurance Run for more than two decades, most of that time at
the Red Star aid station at 16.5 miles.
Roughly 1,500 volunteers are needed to put on the Western States
race. Many of the volunteers are on duty for two and sometimes three
days straight. Lee and Diana Scott organize and run the Red Star aid
station; they are not runners themselves. They come in Friday morning
to set the station up, and the crew camps out at the site Friday night,
before getting up at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday to get everything ready for
the runners. After the station is broken down at 10:00 a.m., Lee and
Diana head for the finish line at Auburn High School to staff the finish
line aid station and later to set up the breakfast cafeteria, which Diana
runs until the race is complete and everyone has left the course, which
is on the far side of 11:00 a.m.
Some volunteers, of course, manage to both help out and run the
race. That’s easy enough to do if your volunteering involves pre-race-
day activities: marketing the race, sending out entry forms, filing per-
mits with government entities that need to clear the way for the race
to happen, ordering supplies, and even handing out bib numbers and
T-shirts the day before the race.
Some race directors manage to run their own races. One of the most
energetic and ambitious of them all is Thomas Hill III, who is the pri-
mary driving force behind the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon. On
race day he runs in his own race, and one of his endearing traditions is
that, well into the race, where the course passes a donut shop, he vol-
unteers to buy a donut for any runner who can stomach one. Talk about
race-day carbo-loading. Of course once he finishes, he continues to be
a Tasmanian devil, rushing here and there and everywhere to hand out
 Volunteer  o o o  139

prizes, check that the huge post-race party is running smoothly, and
serve as the general for the whole shebang.
One of the most memorable double-duty experiences I ever had
occurred in the summer of 1980 when I was working at Runner’s World
and we were putting on the annual Corporate Cup championships at
Spartan Stadium at San Jose State College in California. Bob Anderson,
the publisher of Runner’s World, wanted everything to be as prim and
proper as possible. So a group of us on the magazine staff served as judges
of the track events. What that entailed was that we stood on a small set
of bleachers on the inside of the track near the start/finish line to make
sure that the contestants followed the rules and were scored properly.
We wore three-piece dark-colored suits, which under the afternoon sun
absorbed an enormous amount of heat.
The bleachers were specially constructed with a curtain in the back
so that the inside of the bleachers could serve as a dressing room. Most
of us standing in the sun scoring the races all day long were also on
the Runner’s World track team. As our events approached, we’d make an
inconspicuous exit from the bleachers and slip into the “dressing room,”
where we’d shed the three-piece suits and—like Superman in the phone
booth—change into our action uniforms. We had little time to warm
up before we had to line up at the start line.
Changed into my running togs and sort of warmed up (from the blis-
tering sun), I walked over to the start line for the mile run and realized
I was standing next to Rick Wohlhuter, who’d won the bronze medal
in the 800 meters at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Needless to say, my
pedestrian 5:24 didn’t impress him much. My sweat-drenched three-
piece suit didn’t impress my fellow judges much, either. The fact that
the day stands out so well 30 years later speaks well of the volunteering
process.
Someone who knows volunteering in all of its myriad forms is Allan
Steinfeld. For many years, Allan was president of the New York Road
Runners and the race director of the New York City Marathon. He had
this to say about volunteering:

I first volunteered at Road Runners in 1975, three years before Fred

[Fred Lebow, then president of the club] hired me. My reason for vol-
unteering was that I wanted to be part of something that was healthy
and good for people—which made me feel good.
Volunteers are the lifeblood of road racing events, and without
them, most races couldn’t exist. The New York City Marathon has
approximately 12,000 volunteers in pre-race, race, and post-race
positions. They come from all walks of life, and some even get to use
their professional skills, such as medical personnel and interpreters
140  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

(which are specific to New York). It is the volunteers that the runners
interact with and not the staff. We have always asked the volunteers
to treat the runners as guests in their home (and not like in-laws)
because they are guests in our home of New York City. When runners
talk about memories of our race, they always mention the special
treatment from the volunteers. It is probably the same throughout the
world. The volunteers mirror the excitement and energy of the runners
who come to run.
In our case, the volunteers want to be part of an exciting annual
celebration of life that the city and its people embrace and is known
worldwide. They want to feel good about themselves knowing that they
are helping people from around the world realize their dreams. They
also receive T-shirts from the event that they wear proudly to show
their friends and neighbors that they were part of the marathon. When
they see the smiling faces cross the finish line, they feel that their time
was well-spent. It is almost as good as sex.
Just what is a volunteer, anyway? It is sometimes confusing these
days, as we’ll discuss. According to the New Oxford American Diction-
ary, a volunteer is “a person who freely offers to take part in an enter-
prise or undertake a task.” In a curious oxymoron these days, there
are some strange hybrid volunteers: “forced volunteers” and “paid
volunteers.”
I often see references to the enormous number of “volunteer” hours
young people put in these days. Unfortunately, the volunteer hours
they put in are not freely given. Because they are required to volunteer
to graduate from high school or college, when you think of it, their
service is similar to the community service required by the courts of
various miscreants. Once these requirements are lifted, very few younger
people willingly offer their services, unless they are paid by the orga-
nizing committee.
This is unfortunate, because volunteering freely is its own reward.
Let’s return to the Napa Valley Marathon. The race has a limit of
2,300 runners. Roughly 70 medical personnel attend to the runners’
medical needs, but there are precious few instances in which they are
needed in their medical capacity. So they pitch in passing out cups of
water and sport drinks, rounding up stray cups, or handing out fruit.
Jim Cotter, a physician at the Napa offices of Kaiser Permanente
and a member of the marathon board, likes to relate his initial experi-
ences staffing the aid station at 22 miles. “All week long,” he observed,
“we’re dealing with patients who are not well, who are seeing us
because something is wrong with them, and they are cranky and out
of sorts. It sometimes seems as though you can’t do enough to make
 Volunteer  o o o  141

them happy. Then you come out here and you hand a cup of water to
a really healthy runner at 22 miles, and they react as though you’ve
just told them they won the lottery. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ they
go on, just for giving them a cup of water. Our medical volunteers love
it. They feel really needed and appreciated.”
Many runners have such reactions to the volunteers. In 2001 the
weather was cold and wet and windy, and we received numerous e-mails
after the race complimenting a Boy Scout troop that staffed one of the
aid stations. “It was cold and windy and wet and here were these Boy
Scouts, standing out in the rain, handing us Gatorade while they were
shivering, and they were telling us to have a good race. They were
wonderful,” one of the e-mails gushed.
There is a very real feeling of fulfillment that comes from serving as
a volunteer. There is also a wonderful feeling of camaraderie among
volunteers who are working as a team, and the feeling of community—
ironically—is strengthened even more when the volunteers survive a
particularly trying day, whether working in bad weather or handling
unanticipated numbers of runners.
A great deal of satisfaction can result from helping people achieve
their goals, from being a part of their accomplishment—even if it
involves merely handing them cups of water.
And the sense of camaraderie with other volunteers can’t be beat. The
volunteers at the Western States 100 Red Star aid station come from all
over the state of California, and for most of them, it is the one time a
year they see each other. Over the 20-plus years we’ve staffed it, we’ve
seen volunteers’ kids grow into adulthood, get married, have their own
kids, and bring their kids along to be part of the Red Star family. Vol-
unteers leave Red Star with smiles on their faces from a job well done
and a “See ya next year!” on their lips.

For Your Consideration

• Why not sit down with your yearlong racing schedule and come
up with a formula that would allow you to volunteer for perhaps
every 5th race you do, or every 6th; even every 10th would be a
big help toward keeping the sport alive.
• Pick one race a year that might grow on you as a volunteer oppor-
tunity, and turn it into an annual rite of whatever season it is; then
lure several of your friends to come along and help out.
• Also, pick one race a year in your area and double up by volunteer-
ing to help out in advance of race weekend and also racing it. In
a way, you would be tripling up, because as a racer on the course,
142  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

you could take note of places where the race could be improved
from the racer’s perspective.
• If you have the opportunity to coach or train newbie runners, incor-
porate the concept of volunteering into your coaching or training.
• If you are considering moving up to ultras, consider volunteering
to work as a pacer for other racers so that you can gradually get
your feet wet in the sport. In the process, you will be helping other
runners achieve their goals.
 chapter

21

Spectate
L ong-distance racing is not one of the more interesting sports to
spectate, unless you briefly study a race—especially a megarace—as
pure human spectacle. But even then, you see the runners file past
and disappear, and then you turn around and go home. It’s not like a
10,000-meter race at a track where the runners circle 24 times and you
can literally see the whole thing from the stands. Track races reveal
textbook strategies such as runners who do not have particularly good
kick picking up the pace midway through the race and wearing down
the runners who rely on a kick at the end to win.
Road races, unless they run on a loop course, are difficult to watch;
your little microcosm is way too limited and over way too fast. Of course,
the occasional course lends itself to leap-frogging to various points along
the way. The 2007 U.S. Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials in Central Park
and the women’s Trials the day before the Boston Marathon in April of
2008 were such examples. If you were willing to hoof it across Central
Park or between Boylston Street and Commonwealth Avenue, you could
see the best marathoners go by within 10 feet (3 m) of you 8 to 10 times.
It was a spectator’s heaven.
In one of my editorials in Marathon & Beyond, I proposed that directors
of road races consider holding them at automobile road racing courses,
such as the 1.99-mile (3.2 km) course at Sears Point, Sonoma County,
California. The hilly, winding course would be challenging but dramatic,
and all the necessary infrastructure is right there, everything from toilets
to concession stands, grandstands, and adequate parking to the pits,
where runners could grab their sport drinks. A marathon (the Marathon
de Sears) would involve just a bit more than 13 circuits of the course.
Because of the hills, there would be no world records, but it would be
plenty fun. Families and friends could spread out picnic lunches on the
grassy areas where currently, in late June each year, NASCAR fans spread
out tablecloths covered with fried chicken and beer. Spectating at such
a facility would be luxurious.
Of course, most of my ideas fall flat. It’s been roughly 10 years since
I proposed that one, and nobody anywhere in the world has followed
up on it. So in the meantime, literally hundreds of perfectly good auto-
mobile road courses throughout the world muddle through occasional
fallow weekends where the only action is the janitor watching the grass
grow.
Spectating a road race is not necessarily easy and often is not overly
rewarding. However, when you are the one running a race, there’s no
feeling like the one you have when you come upon a knot of spectators
who’ve taken up a place along the course to cheer you on.
Some races are replete with spectators. The Boston Marathon course
is lined with spectators; the nicer the weather, the more spectators there

144
 Spectate  o o o  145

are, some years as many as a million. The runners love Boston not so
much for the course as for the support they receive along the entire
26.2 miles from a sporting public that is famous for loving its sports and
knowing who’s who, even if there happen to be 25,000 whos running
in the same race.
New York City, of course, is similar. I recall the first time I ran the
New York City Marathon, back in 1978. As I ran through Harlem, a
wizened old African American man with few teeth left stood along the
curb handing out orange slices from his own homemade aid station. As
I went by, I waved off his orange slice. “If I was you, young white boy,
I’d run a little faster,” he said. Of course, he was only joking. Well, at
least he was smiling when he said it. He was one of the only spectators
out on the streets of Harlem that day, and 30 years later I still remember
him and appreciate his taking the time to cheer us on . . . and to urge
us to run a little faster.
On the opposite end of the mass-spectator road race are my memo-
ries of the old Humboldt Redwoods Marathon course near Weott in far
Northern California. Back in the 1980s, the course wasn’t a double out-
and-back as it is today. It was a single out-and-back that ran from the
Dyersville Bridge down the one-and-a-half-lane asphalt road through the
redwood forests to Miranda and back. One of the last years I ran it, they
had added a half-marathon that started at the same time. Unfortunately
for us marathoners, just before Myers Flat, the half-marathoners turned
back while we kept going. It was one of the eeriest feelings I’ve ever had
in a marathon: One minute I was running along with hundreds of people,
and a minute later I was all alone with my breathing, my foot plants,
and the towering redwoods, and not another human being in sight. In
some ways it was disconcerting because it happened so quickly, but in
other ways it was refreshing, because I was alone with the redwoods as
my audience, silently inspiring me to go on.
Of course, you can have every intention of being a good and enthusi-
astic spectator, only to find that you’ve been drafted into a different role.
When I started college in September of 1964 in central Pennsylvania,
I saw on the announcement board at the lounge that there was going
to be a cross-country meet at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Most students went
home over the weekend, and the campus was usually pretty quiet and
empty, a perfect time to work on book reports and term papers.
On Saturday morning, I wandered on up to the edge of the campus
after consulting the map of the course and stood huddled down inside
my winter coat as the winds howled in from Canada. It was too cold to
take my hands out of my pockets to consult my watch to see how close
I was to the start of the race. Suddenly, an old battered ’62 Rambler
Classic came chattering clattering up to me, a purple cloud of burning
146  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

motor oil trailing it. A blonde crew cut fellow with buck teeth jumped
out and asked if I was there for the cross-country meet. When I said I
was, he hustled me into the passenger seat of his car and we roared up
the road. He stopped at an intersection, handed me a red flag, and told
me to stand there. When the runners came toward me from campus, he
explained, I was to wave the red flag in the direction of I-80; but when
they came back, I should wave the flag toward the steep downhill road
that intersected the main road. He was off with a clanging protest from
his engine, and I was standing beside a lonely road as snow began to fall.
Sure enough, eventually a pack of runners came toward me expel-
ling frosted breath like a herd of desert mustangs. I pointed out toward
I-80, and in a rush of that steaming breath, they were past. I turned
and waited, and sure enough, eventually a strung-out gaggle of runners
came toward me from the direction of I-80 and I directed them down
the steep hill. Then they were gone. I stood there waiting, the red flag
squeezed between my upper arm and the side of my chest, my frozen
hands stuffed down inside my pockets. And I waited. The snow fell and
the wind tried to quick-freeze my shivering body. I had just decided to
walk back to campus when the battered Rambler appeared and Coach
Brady gave me a ride back to my dorm. (I think he came back to get his
red flag; I just happened to be attached to it.)
The next week I joined the team, figuring it was easier to run and
stay warm than to stand around freezing as the only spectator the cross-
country team had that day. The old adage that we also serve who only
stand and wait didn’t hold much meaning for me that day.
But I still remember vividly my first and last day as a cross-country
spectator.
Slightly better conditions (but not by much) greeted us spectators
in Central Park on November 3, 2007; we had come to watch the U.S.
Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials. The course involved five laps within
the park, so if we stayed stationary, we could see the field go past five
times. If we didn’t mind jogging across the park, we could catch the
field an amazing 10 times. It was one of the most inspiring races I’d
ever watched. We could get so close to the runners that if it had been
a warmer day, we’d have been sprinkled with marathoner sweat. As it
was, we collected a half-dozen special drink bottles that competitors
tossed to the fans. Again, it is a race that, as a spectator, I’ll remember
for as many years as my brain keeps working.
A spectator at the right place at the right time can make the race for
a runner who needs a little pick-me-up at that point. A cheer from the
sidelines, no matter how feeble, does not go unheeded by passing run-
ners. To be noticed and acknowledged for trying to do your best makes
the accomplishment all the sweeter.
 Spectate  o o o  147

When a local race comes up and you aren’t going to run in it, take
the time to cheer on those who are competing; it will help make their
day special. And, passing good things forward, maybe at your next race
there will be at least one additional spectator out there cheering you on.
But if you see a ratty old Rambler lumbering toward you before the
race starts, run the other way.

For Your Consideration

• On race days, when you aren’t competing, consider attending as
a cheering spectator; you might be surprised to find that you feel
almost as good as the runners you cheered on.
• Pick a race each year to use as a spectator party; get your friends
together and pick a prime spot along the course and turn it into
an annual event.
• Check the schedule for your local high school cross-country home
meets, get some friends together, and go out and cheer the team on.
Most high school cross-country teams don’t have a very large fol-
lowing, and they greatly appreciate any sort of support on race day.
• If you haven’t been a spectator at one of the famous megaraces (the
New York City Marathon, Spokane’s Lilac Bloomsday Run, Atlanta’s
Peachtree Road Race), you might be surprised at how much fun it
is to line the course with tens of thousands of other fans and cheer
on the leaders, the middle-of-the-packers, and the rear-enders.
• If a friend of yours is going to do her first road race, make a point
of going out to the course with a sign to cheer her on. Don’t tell
her in advance, though; you’ll be delighted at how thrilled she will
be to see you there.
 chapter

22

Study Runners
and Running
with
Roger Robinson
I n running, as in most areas of human endeavor, we latecomers plod
forward in the footprints of the giants who preceded us. Every disci-
pline, every area of interest has its own unique history, its antecedents.
And so it is with running, arguably the oldest sport and lifestyle on earth.
It is always fascinating in the world of popular music to see the
next hugely hyped band come careening down the pike. The band’s
praises are sung to the stratosphere, millions of kids go ga-ga for their
records (sorry . . . CDs), and in a year’s time they are barely a footnote
in a thousand-page encyclopedia of pop rock. But while they are here,
they are invariably compared to the Beatles, the implication being that
because they are newer than the Beatles, they are better. Of course, they
never are (better, that is), and sometimes even their “newer” doesn’t
play well against a 437th listening of “Norwegian Wood.” Fortunately
for the evolution of good taste, in every generation that comes along,
several million kids discover the Beatles for themselves and make them
popular all over again­—to the outrageous extent that, as chapter is writ-
ten, the Beatles’ collection of number one hits (titled, simply, 1), made
it on the list of best-selling albums (sorry . . . CD) of all time.
The kids defy the market and the marketers by gravitating toward
better music—in this case the originals, not the pretenders. (Oh, yes,
The Pretenders; but that’s a whole other group.) In the process, they
more fully enjoy the music because they more thoroughly understand
from whence it came. After all, the Beatles had their influences, too,
mostly rhythm and blues and rockabilly music.
The same phenomenon does not seem to be occurring with long-
distance running. There are millions of runners these days, but most of
them affect a glazed-over look when you mention Frank Shorter, much
less Emil Zatopek, Ernst van Aaken, Clarence DeMar, Roberta Gibbs,
Frank Zuna, Tom Osler, Edward Payson Weston, and Pheidippides. (Yes,
long before pop music stars such as Cher, Madonna, Prince, and Bono
made single monikers chic, there was ultrarunner Pheidippides—and
that was 2,500 years ago.)
Many runners these days have no more idea in whose footprints
they run than they have of the major export of Chile or the capital of
South Dakota. (By the way, it’s copper and Pierre, respectively.) Just as
significantly, they have little knowledge of what the depletion phase of
carbohydrate loading is, what fartlek training is, or in some cases, how
long a marathon is.
As an aside, I’m involved with the Napa Valley Marathon, and not
too long ago we received a desperate/irate e-mail from a woman who
demanded to know how long our marathon is. She had gone to a half-
dozen marathon Web sites, and none of them revealed just how long
their marathons are. That’s our second-favorite query; our first came four

149
150  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

times one year when, after the race, we received four e-mails wanting to
know what the hell we were doing starting the race on time.
Back in the 1970s, such questions would have been unthinkable.
New runners were mentored by grizzled veterans, they read voraciously
about the stars of running and tirelessly researched training programs,
and they often socialized after a race, exchanging pertinent informa-
tion, comparing notes, and egging each other on to greater efforts the
following weekend.
Today much of what long-distance runners grasp as knowledge and
information comes off the Internet, and much of that is either useless
or just plain wrong. Roughly a year ago we were asked by a book pub-
lisher to review a manuscript about running that they were considering
publishing. We didn’t have to go very far to form an opinion. On the
first manuscript page, there were four grievous errors of fact.
This is not to imply that there are people bumping around the run-
ning world who know everything. However, a good number of people
who have been around a few decades and are still available do know
quite a bit about the subject of running in all its wonderfully varied
manifestations.
I don’t want to imply that everyone who runs needs to become a run-
ning encyclopedia. After all, a driver who couldn’t even begin to explain
how an internal combustion engine works can still manage to drive a
car. And knowing how an internal combustion engine works doesn’t
guarantee that the person is an excellent driver, although it might help.
NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Indy car owner Roger Penske have
at least an inkling of what a carburetor and a crankshaft do.
In anything we do in life, we derive more profound and thorough
enjoyment from it if we know something about it. Attend a performance
of Richard Wagner’s opera Ring of the Nibelung without knowing who
Wagner was and what a nibelung is, and you’ll get awfully confused by
all the shouting and gesticulating and finger pointing and spear bran-
dishing. But read up on Wagner and on Norse legends and read some
of the libretto in English, and your experience will be greatly enhanced.
So too with running.
Runners remain some of the most voracious readers on the planet.
Demographically, they are surfing on the crest of modern technology,
but they also love the written word and frequently love to discuss every
aspect of a book until it is thoroughly understood and absorbed. Ask a
group of five experienced runners what the best running novel of all
time is, and you’ll get five different opinions and a good hour of lively
discussion. If you ask them what the best training program is, once again
you’ll have initiated a heated discussion on the merits of Higdon versus
Henderson versus Daniels versus Lydiard.
 Study Runners and Running  o o o  151

The upside of the Internet is that it makes it incredibly easy to access

book-search sites. What used to be a chore (going to a bookstore and
filling out forms and waiting for two weeks for a book) can now be done
almost instantaneously online. And for the more popular of the classic
running books, the prices are lower than the cost of shipping them.
There is a philosophy that you should take time to know your enemies
if you are to avoid or defeat them. In a reverse philosophy, you should
take time to know your friends (in this case, the writers, coaches, and
teachers who have gone before or are still available) so that you can have
the maximum help they can provide to improve your overall experience
of the running life.
I am reluctant to list here Web sites that occasionally or often include
running history items or stories because often Web sites vanish into the
ozone with sprintlike rapidity. (I list some sites in online appendix C.
Especially good is www.joehenderson.com, where Joe makes available
much of the writing about running he has produced over the past five
decades, including some complete books.)
Being old-fashioned and the Luddite that I am (I’m writing the first
draft of this on a Royal standard typewriter), I tend to get a lot of infor-
mation—especially historical information—from books and magazines,
which is why this chapter is so print-friendly.
Most of the Web sites of the regional and national running magazines
contain some history, as do Web sites for most of the longer-running
races. The Web site of the Boston Athletic Association, www.baa.org,
contains accounts of every Boston Marathon from the first one, way
back in 1897.
Additionally, check with your local running club and running stores;
they often bring in guest speakers who cover some interesting aspect
of the history of running and are an excellent resource. Often, with the
slightest urging, members will spin tales of the days of yore.
Also, make an effort to catch Dick Beardsley when he speaks at a race;
some of his stories of naivete when he started running in the 1970s are
hilarious. And Wikipedia, for its several shortcomings, is fairly reliable
if you feed in the names of famous runners or renowned races.
One of my favorite running writers is Roger Robinson, who frequently
writes articles on the history of running for Running Times and Mara-
thon & Beyond. I asked him how his passion for reading about running
developed. This is his reply; he titles it “History and Heroes: Why Study
Running?”:

The first running prize I ever won, in a high school cross-country

meet, was a faded copy of the Jubilee History of the International Cross-
Country Union, published in 1953. It was old-fashioned hard-back, full
152  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

of dry year-by-year race narratives and results, and it gave the names
of all the officials in big type. (They produced the book.) Blurry black-
and-white photos showed teams standing formally in a line in baggy
tracksuits and little mustached Frenchmen and Belgians racing for their
lives in muddy shorts.
That book changed my life. It opened up for me a heroic history, a
story that had enriched the century and laid the foundation of a global
sport. (The old “International” was the forerunner of today’s World
Cross-Country Championship.) It showed me that running was not
just games at school; it had a great international tradition. Although I
was not a specially gifted teenage runner, I felt that I might be a small
part of that tradition.
That sense of belonging in the history of running and adding to its
significance enriched every race and every training run for me for more
than 50 years. When, incredibly, I was actually selected some years for
the World Cross-Country, it was as if that old book were coming to life—I
almost wished our tracksuits were baggier. When I ran my first mara-
thon, I sensed the footsteps of the heroes I had read about—Spiridon
Louis, Dorando Pietri, Emil Zatopek. Finishing Boston for the first time,
my head was full of Clarence DeMar, the John Kelleys, Dave McKenzie,
Kathrine Switzer.
The more I read and learned, the more enjoyable and worthwhile
running became. It doesn’t add up to much if you do it only for yourself,
but it’s richly rewarding when you understand how every run contributes
to something bigger.
Many good runners are experts. A boy runner living near me in
Wellington, New Zealand, used to spend hours watching videos of
Jack Lovelock, Peter Snell, and John Walker, and reading about New
Zealand’s running tradition. Now Nick Willis has added to it, winning
the Olympic 1,500-meter silver medal. Any young Kenyan will recite
that country’s running roll of honor for you.
That’s why now I write about running, especially its history. If I can
give other runners the inspiration of knowing the full meaning of what
they do, I will have repaid the faded book that opened the window on
history for me in the late 1950s.

For Your Consideration

• Check out the list of 25 Running Books You Should Read in online
appendix B, and then visit the Internet book-search sites and
begin pulling together a little running library. Most of the books in
paperback cost only a few cents, especially if they were best-sellers
in their time.
 Study Runners and Running  o o o  153

• Set aside some time each week for an hour or so of reading up on

the history of the sport, profiles and biographies of the great run-
ners, and how-to books on improving your running.
• If you belong to a running club, why not suggest forming a book
club of a half-dozen or a dozen fellow runners; bouncing ideas
around about what the book is saying often opens up new insights
and a more profound understanding of the sport and lifestyle.
• Don’t overlook the ready availability of videos of various running
movies, from Running on the Sun (an ambitiously produced look at
the grueling Badwater 135 ultramarathon and the crazy people who
attempt it each year) to On the Edge (the takeoff, starring real-life
runner Bruce Dern, of the famed Dipsea Race in Northern Califor-
nia). The Web site www.zombierunner.com has a terrific selection
at good prices.
• Keep current with the new crop of running books. We are in the
middle of another resurgence of books about running: everything
from biographies of famous runners to personal accounts of run-
ning feats to how-to and training volumes. Read to run better. In
my case, it keeps me from having to steal hubcaps to stay solvent.
 chapter

23

Teach Others
to Run
R unning is one of the simplest of all physical activities—an activity
that largely accounts for our existence today (thanks to our fleet-of-
foot ancestors). As one of running’s pundits once said: “Running is so
simple just about anyone can do it; all you do is put one foot in front
of the other and then alternate.” Done regularly, long-distance running
bestows its own arsenal of physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits.
Only relatively recently have we come to ignore our physical side. And
we can all see the disastrous results of ridding our society of physical
activity: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, several forms of cancer
associated with obesity (colon, endometrial, and postmenopausal breast
cancer; Newsweek, March 7, 2008, p. 12), depression, back injuries, and
so on.
It is startling to look at 50-year-old newsreels. There are virtually
no obese people. Children are all playing physically active games . . .
outside. And this isn’t Depression Era years we’re talking about; this is
the post–World War II era. People worked physically challenging jobs.
Children played actively, had physical education classes at school, and
went outside to run around during recess.
Today many children are what used to be referred to as bumps on a
log. They do virtually nothing physical, and their diets are atrocious. In
many cases they learn their deathstyle from their parents. We are seeing
the first generation of people in the United States who will likely die
younger than their parents did.
All it takes to turn things around is a bit of regular exercise—and
I’m not talking about exercising the fingers on a computer keyboard or
texting messages on a smartphone (the logical outcome of that will be
carpal tunnel syndrome).
Do we have a health crisis in the United States? We sure do, and it
isn’t confined to a lot of people sitting around without health insur-
ance. Probably 85 percent of the health problems Americans have are
self-induced, what I like to call diseases of choice. Most of them can
be traced back to a sedentary deathstyle complicated by a deadly diet.
Some years ago I had the pleasure of coauthoring five books with Elaine
LaLanne, the charming wife of perennial fitness guru Jack LaLanne. I
asked Jack if it was more important to good health to engage regularly
in physical fitness activities or to have a healthy diet. Without missing
a beat, he pointed to the former. “A regular fitness regimen covers a
whole host of sins,” he said. As he heads toward the 100-year-old mark,
his real-life learned wisdom has been borne out repeatedly. Let’s look at
a few 21st-century headlines about exercise:
“Clearing Confusion About Exercise: Member of Committee That
Wrote New Guidelines Says Less Than an Hour May be OK,”
Washington Post, February 15, 2005.

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156  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

“Feds: Eat Smarter and Exercise More,” Marilyn C. Preston

column, Tribune Media Services, January 27, 2005.
“New Federal Diet Tip: A Lot More Exercise,” New York Times,
January 13, 2005.
“Harder Workouts May Pay Off,” New York Times, June 12, 2007.

In case you believe that none of the preceding applies to you, your
anatomy and genes say otherwise: “Human Race Has Marathon Ances-
tors: Scientists Conclude Modern Anatomy Shaped by Need to Run Long
Distances,” by Robert Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2004.
I’m not going to bore you with a whole chapter on what’s wrong with
the typical American lifestyle. It’s pretty obvious. And people know
what the solution to the problem is. At the conclusion of literally every
study on the subject, the recommendations are more exercise and better
dietary habits. What I am going to do is propose something that will not
turn the problem around overnight, but rather, something that could
double what is right with a segment of America.
According to Running USA (www.runningusa.org), the nonprofit
organization that brings together under one umbrella various aspects of
the running movement (shoe manufacturers, race directors, promotional
companies, some of the media), there are currently 11,583,000 runners
in the United States, if you define a runner as someone who ties up the
ole shoelaces and goes out the door for a run at least 100 times in a year.
(More casual runners, defined as those who run at least six times a year,
number 29,246,000.)
This number includes people who run on a semiserious basis at the
low end of the spectrum to people at the other end of the spectrum who
run hundred-mile races, as well as those elite athletes who regularly train
more than 120 miles (193 km) a week.
Our local marathon, the Napa Valley Marathon (a member of Run-
ning USA) is sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, the largest health care
maintenance company in the United States. One of the factors that sets
Kaiser apart from other health care organizations is that it spends a lot
of time working to prevent sickness and disease rather than merely treat-
ing it once it raises its ugly head. Its Thrive program pushes members
to take an active role in their own health by promoting physical fitness
and positive lifestyle choices.
Dr. Jim Cotter, himself a marathoner and a member of the board of
directors of the Napa Valley Marathon, made some welcoming remarks
before the 2008 race to the assembled runners. “If Kaiser had a member-
ship that was as active and healthy as you are, all we’d need to do is sit
around reading magazines all day.”
 Teach Others to Run  o o o  157

Dr. Cotter’s point is a good one. Wishing and hoping for good health
just doesn’t cut it. Complaining about poor health just doesn’t cut it,
especially when for most of us there are obvious ways to turn it around
on our own.
An enormous amount of good could be accomplished by instigating a
modest running program. Running is simple. It is relatively inexpensive:
an old T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and a decent pair of shoes and you’re off.
Did you know that studies reveal that in most families of regular run-
ners, most of the other family members don’t run? Pretty startling. But
that statistic also sets up a very wonderful place to start turning some of
the negative lifestyles of Americans around. Think of the health impact
if every American runner got one other American to run! The numbers
are staggering. The changes in the country’s sickness and disease rates
in one year would be monumental.
Consider that it takes roughly two months to get into good enough
shape to run comfortably on a regular basis. Consider that the most
impressive fitness gains come to those who are new to the sport. Con-
sider that most of the illnesses Americans suffer from are self-inflicted
and can be “cured” with regular exercise. Each person lured into run-
ning would attain better health than a medicine chest full of drugs
could offer.
Running lowers body weight. It firms muscles and skin. It lowers
blood pressure. It delays and often heads off osteoporosis. Running has
frequently been used by people who have wanted to rid themselves of
addictions. (It has, in fact, been called a positive addiction.) And, run-
ning has been studied as a means of combating depression. “A number
of preliminary studies have shown that aerobic running produces
significant improvement in the condition of moderately depressed cli-
ents,” wrote Gary W. Buffone in Running as Therapy (Sachs & Buffone,
1997, p. 6). A regular running program provides a virtual cornucopia
of health benefits, both physical and psychological.
But, you might say, I’m not a coach. I wouldn’t know what to do to
help someone run.
As a coach, all you need to do is pass along what you know about
the subject. Running isn’t all that complicated. We already made the
point that it is one of the most basic of human activities. If you have
been running any decent length of time, you’ve obviously picked up
the basics, and probably some of the finer points, as well.
Why not share your lifestyle with someone in your life who is impor-
tant to you? It is an excellent opportunity to have a positive effect on
that person’s life. It is also an opportunity to make special memories
by running and racing together. (Of course, do be aware that you may
be creating a monster. Your friend or family member may end up being
158  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

a faster, better runner than you are. If so, so much the better. You can
take all the credit for creating a champion.)
There is great satisfaction in teaching through coaching, especially
if it is a subject about which you are passionate. Joe Henderson, one of
running’s most noted writers on the sport and lifestyle of running (and
editor of Runner’s World from 1970 to 1977), took up the coaching of
runners several years ago in Eugene, Oregon. I’ve known Joe for decades
and have always been impressed with his dedication to writing about
running; but his passion for coaching people to become runners (or
marathoners) far outshines his love of writing . . . something I never
thought I would see.
The same can be said of my brother Drew, who has been coaching
high school cross-country for years. Some of his most satisfying days
over the past two decades came from seeing the positive changes in
some of the kids he coached. But that’s not all. Over those two decades
he has amassed a small army of graduated members of his team who
have become his friends. Drew is frequently invited to the weddings
of his former runners. Sometimes they invite him to get-togethers in
out-of-the-way places (one gathering of a dozen of his former runners
was in Colorado; he lives in eastern Pennsylvania). They stay in touch,
sharing their postschool lives with Drew and with each other.
Following the lives of his former runners has been invigorating for
Drew. He has been especially pleased to see how the discipline they
learned to run long distances well translated to other aspects of their
lives. Coaching has added an uplifting aspect to his life.
Both Joe Henderson and my brother Drew would be the first to admit
that they probably get much more out of the process of coaching than
their runners do.
You don’t need to be a genius about running to be a good coach. You
need only study the sport, be open to picking up trends, see and record
the results of your efforts, and be empathetic. All of this is within the
realm of those who have been in the sport for even a limited amount
of time.
Every once in a while a coach can have a profound impact on a
person’s life. His passion for running can be transferred to one of the
people he is coaching, sometimes in the process turning that person’s
life around. It’s happened for Joe and for Drew.
Giving back to the sport by taking on coaching duties can be very
fulfilling. You can improve a friend or loved one’s life while improving
the overall health of these United States.
The phrase “Put me in, Coach” will take on a whole new meaning.
 Teach Others to Run  o o o  159

For Your Consideration

• The United States is in a health crisis.
• Running is a very proactive solution.
• You are a person who runs and who knows about running.
• Pick out a person in your life whom you cherish but who is not
yet a runner. Become a running mentor and coach to that person.
 chapter

2 4

Start Over
bilderbox/fotolia.com
P eople typically stop running for one of two reasons: they become
injured, or they burn out (which is a form of mental and sometimes
spiritual injury).
Most physical injuries can be turned around with a combination of
medical treatment (formal or home-grown) and rest. Rest can also play a
major role in bringing a runner back from the darkness of burnout. Several
notable world records in running have been set in the wake of a world-
class athlete being forced by injury to endure a rest period he or she would
not have taken voluntarily. (Derek Clayton did this twice in the 1960s,
coming off a forced layoff to set world records. Joan Benoit-Samuelson
did it in 1984, winning the Olympic gold medal. Meb Keflezighi did it
in 2009: coming off a recovery from leg injuries that observers believed
would end his career, he won the New York City Marathon.)
But perhaps as important as rest is taking a break from the whole
world of running, which amounts to giving the spring an opportunity
to refill and refresh its cooling waters.
In considering this concept of a well or spring that needs refilling,
the age-hewn take on it from veterans of the running wars is this: The
physical well (that is, the well that needs refilling due to some physical
ailment) is the easiest of the three to refill. Next, and more difficult to
replenish, is the psychological well. The most difficult of all to refill is
the spiritual well—a well that runs deep and takes a whole lotta cooling
liquid to refill. (I discuss this in chapter 6, Eschew Racing.)
Most “serious” (i.e., obsessive) runners do not have the patience to
wait for a physical injury to turn around. Some long-distance runners
who have earned stress fractures by overdoing it have been put in casts
by their podiatrists only to saw off the cast when they couldn’t manage
to wait the six weeks until the bone healed. Of course, being that kind
of a patient from hell usually has a single outcome: repeated injury and
a lot more time off from running than would have been the case if he
or she had followed doctors’ orders.
Some see such action as heroic and to be emulated. They rationalize
that those obsessive types love their running so much that they can’t
do without it. This can’t-do-without-it is often the attitude of someone
who came to running to use it as a positive addiction to get control of
a negative addiction, such as substance abuse. What it is, of course, is a
weakness, an inability (or unwillingness) to control themselves. In the
long run, it does them no good—no good for their beleaguered bodies,
and no good for the sport and lifestyle of running in general.
If you spend perfectly good money and time to go to a qualified sports
medicine specialist and then insist on ignoring everything the specialist
tells you to do to get better, well, what can I say? Good luck. Consider
suing yourself when the healing fails to take hold.

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162  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

Psychological burnout is a different matter, although in some instances

it can be related to physical injury. If, as an example, you repeatedly
reinjure yourself because you come back too soon, eventually you are
going to become psychologically bummed, which of course will nega-
tively affect even the remaining good aspects of your running, such as
the good friends you’ve made through the sport.
Psychological burnout doesn’t need to be linked intimately with physi-
cal injury. It can just as easily be caused by overracing, piling on too
much mileage too soon, or overextending a running season so the body
gets no time to catch its breath. This latter condition is often common
in areas of the world where the weather is conducive to training and
racing all year long.
Simply put, too much running or racing with too little programmed
easy time can burn you out to the point where you can no longer stand
the thought of training and racing again. Your body needs an easy season
at least once a year to allow all the minute muscle tears to heal and for
the head to avoid mental vapor lock.
Some very accomplished runners (ultrarunner Marshall Ulrich and
gold medal marathoner Joan Benoit-Samuelson, for example) look for-
ward to the first snowfall to shift from beating up their legs to schussing
along the cross-country ski trails.
When you burn yourself out psychologically, you will find that you
need to force yourself out the door to get in a scheduled run. When
you burn yourself out spiritually, you can’t even find the lock to open
the door. You can’t even force yourself to think of running. There is no
longer a spiritual connection between you and the lifestyle of running.
The spiritual aspect of running goes far beyond the physical act of run-
ning. It infuses all aspects of your life. When it goes, there is a huge
black hole in the center of your life. A terrible darkness descends that
cannot be dispelled by the most beautiful of days.
It sounds like treason to say this, but when the joy of running has left
you hollow and empty, the best thing you can do is go with the feeling.
Give it up, at least for the time being. Make a deal with yourself that you
will abandon the lifestyle of running, which, you must admit, seems
to have abandoned you! Set a decent period of time during which you
do not run, do not think about running, do not obsess about it, just
plain ignore it. Be generous with yourself. Remember the depth and the
breadth of that spiritual well. Give yourself a year.
It sounds like a long time, a very long time, but if you want to return
to running refreshed on all levels, you need to allow the well to refill.
You need to respect your own needs— on all levels.
I’m infamous for using automobile analogies when discussing run-
ning. I’m going to shock all my Luddite buddies by using a computer
 Start Over  o o o  163

analogy this time. Almost once a month I give my computer a command

to print something and it won’t do it. It won’t even warn me that it
isn’t going to cooperate. It’s as though the link between the computer
and the printer has vanished. I assume it has something to do with the
printer software in the computer getting screwed up or getting short-
circuited. What do I do to restore harmony between the computer and
the printer? Maybe you’re not supposed to do this, but I instruct the
computer to restart itself. It turns off, turns back on, and Voila!, the
connection between the computer and the printer is restored. The same
can be applied to a running program. Stop it. Restart it. It’s refreshed,
and so are you.
What do you do after the year without running ends? Start from
scratch. Be a rank beginner, because that’s what your body is going to
want you to be. Your body is going to want to be gentled back into the
sport, then gradually into the lifestyle. To be precipitous is to chance a
renewal of the injury merry-go-round or to restart you on the road to
excess once again.
Your patience of waiting a year has allowed literally every little muscle
tear and connecting tissue bruise to heal. There is no such thing as a
born-again virgin; it’s physically impossible. But it is possible to be a
born-again running virgin, one with some hard-won wisdom from a
previous life in running.
Take your time, enjoy the process, don’t expect too much too soon.
This time around, correct all the mistakes and blind alleys you encoun-
tered on your original foray into running. And reset your goals to the
realistic levels your years of experience in running have taught you are
possible.
Reject impatience. Set goals to compete at different distances than you
specialized in the last time around. Run more miles simply for the joy
of moving rather than for putting mileage in your log. If you weren’t a
member of a running club before, join one. Volunteer at races. Lure a
friend into the lifestyle, someone you think would benefit from it on
several levels.
Give yourself a break, and don’t demand too much too soon. Your
body will let you know when it’s ready for the climb to the next level,
as will your mind and your spirit.
Baby yourself at first. Wallow in the new running you. Certainly it is
very cliche, but pause and smell the flowers. Judiciously used, running
can extend your life on every level. Listen to the gentle bellows of your
breath, feel the coursing of the blood through your veins, explore the
opening of your mind to simpler things, and be an animal worthy of
the body you inhabit.
164  o o o  Timeless Running Wisdom

For Your Consideration

• If you suffer an injury, give it more rather than less time to heal.
• If you’re going to pay a medical professional good money to diag-
nose your injury and offer advice toward recovery, take the advice
you paid for.
• If you are psychologically burned out, give yourself permission to
back off or stop completely.
• If your burnout reaches such depths that your spiritual side is
involved, make a major commitment to give the spiritual well
plenty of time to refill.
• Consider giving yourself a year off so that you can start over fresh,
doing everything right this time.
 Glossary

Every specialized area has its own nomenclature, or lexicon. Consider

the electronics industry. In the last half-century it has coined words and
phrases from blog to e-mail blast (in fact, e-mail itself), gigabyte to pixel.
Most of the terms used in the long-distance running world have an
origin in the greater language; they’ve just been a bit expanded, bent, or
reimagined. Here are 25 terms every runner should know to communicate
with other runners. Actually, there are more than 25, because there are
so many instances of two terms for one thing (e.g., bonk and hitting the
wall). Besides, I’ve never been good at math.
acclimatization—The customization of the human body for a variety
of jobs. One’s body can over time be trained to run either in unusual
heat by gradually exposing it to additional loads of heat or at a higher-
than-normal altitude by gradually building up its volume of work at
altitude.
aerobic—A physiological term referring to a condition “with oxygen”;
that is, the exercising body is performing at a level at which it is receiv-
ing enough oxygen to continue at its current pace. Once the exercising
body picks up speed or workload, it can quickly pass the anaerobic
threshold. See anaerobic.
anaerobic—A condition (“without oxygen”) during which the exercis-
ing body has advanced past its capacity to receive enough oxygen to
continue at its current pace. Once the anaerobic threshold (also called
the lactate threshold) is passed, the exercising body’s time to continue
moving at that pace is severely limited by physiology.
bib—The number pinned to a runner’s chest to identify him or her to
the scoring personnel at a race. (Old-fashioned runners still refer to it
simply as a “number.”)
biomechanics—In running, the mechanics of how one moves over the
ground. It is how the various systems of the human body work with
each other to facilitate movement.
blood doping—A controversial method of increasing the oxygen-
carrying capacity of the blood by removing blood from a runner’s
body, storing it, and having it reintroduced into the body before a

165
166  o o o  Glossary

competition where it theoretically increases red blood cell count and

hence the oxygen-carrying capacity of the body.
bonk—A term originally used in bicycling to indicate the point at which
the body has used up its available energy to supply the working muscles.
Runners still frequently refer to this phenomenon as hitting the wall.
See also hitting the wall.
carbohydrate loading—This should actually be called carbohydrate
overloading. In preparation for a marathon or a long run, the runner
cuts back on the intake of proteins and fats and concentrates on loading
up on carbohydrates, which serve the exercising body as fuel. (The old
and dreadful practice of entering a depletion phase and depleting carbs
to wring the sponge dry before overloading the body with carbs late
in the process has pretty much been done away with because merely
increasing carbs has been shown to work just as well.)
chafing—The discomfort produced when body parts rub together or
clothes rub body parts without the benefit of lubrication during the
process of running.
chondromalacia—The wearing away of cartilage under the kneecap,
which produces pain while running; also known as runner’s knee.
chute—The corridor (often consisting of brightly colored ribbons) lead-
ing away from the finish line in a race.
cross-training—The use of other aerobic sports (cross-country skiing,
pool running, bicycling) to supplement but not replace running as a
means of increasing long-distance running fitness. Cross-training, of
course, is used constantly by triathletes.
DNF—An acronym for ”did not finish.”
ekiden [Pronounced ECK-uh-din.]—A Japanese word for a marathon
relay usually in the following format: three 5Ks, two 10Ks, and a 7.2K.
The event traces its roots to a Japanese version of the American Pony
Express: Runners passed along a written message until it reached its
destination.
fartlek—A Swedish word meaning “speed-play.” In running, fartlek is
a method of increasing leg speed by periodically (during a longer run)
picking up the pace. Typically, a runner does the increase in speed
between preestablished points along the course or arbitrary points
established along the way (e.g., “Let’s pick it up at the next telephone
pole and hold it for four poles”).
gels—Gel pockets inserted into the soles of running shoes; introduced
in the 1980s by Asics in response to Nike’s air pockets.
glycogen—The fuel of choice for endurance athletes. Because the body
contains only so much glycogen, after several hours of activity, one
must consume carbohydrates to replace used glycogen stores. See also
carbohydrate loading and bonk.
 Glossary  o o o  167

hard/easy training—Alternating hard sessions (doing speed workouts

at a track, racing shorter distances, or doing long, sustained runs) with
easy sessions so that the body can recuperate and thereby come back
stronger for the next hard session.
hitting the wall—Reaching the point during a marathon or ultra at
which one’s body has depleted its stores of electrolytes (about two hours
of which are stored in the muscles and liver). This phenomenon can be
avoided by taking in electrolytes (e.g., from sport drinks) during the run.
interval—The rest period between repeats of a set distance, usually
one-half lap or a full lap, but among more serious runners as little as
200 meters or one-quarter lap. This term is often mistakenly used to
indicate a set of repeats of a set distance at a track workout in which
one does repeat laps at a faster-than-usual leg speed. What the runner
is actually doing is repeats (see repeats).
jog—A synonym for slow running and a word despised by “real” runners.
As times in races slow, however, the term is coming back into favor.
kilometer—A measurement in the metric system equal to roughly two-
thirds of a mile.
LSD—An acronym for “long, slow distance”; refers to long runs done
at a steady pace slower than race pace. The term is often credited to
Joe Henderson, who wrote a book on the subject in 1969. The term
actually originated from coaches Arthur Newton, Arthur Lydiard, and
Ernst van Aaken, and has been misinterpreted over the years to mean
running long distances at very slow speeds.
marathon—A footrace of 26 miles, 385 yards. Also, a town in Greece;
previously a plain on which a small Greek army repelled a much larger
force of invading Persians in the year 490 BC. Legend has it that a Greek
hemerodromi (“all-day runner”) named Pheidippides (see also Pheidip-
pides) carried a message of the Greek victory to the capital of Athens (a
distance of roughly 24 miles) where he announced “Nike!” (“Victory!”)
and dropped dead. The now-standard marathon distance was first run
at the 1908 Olympic Games in England; the longer marathon distance
was used to give the royal family a better view of the race both at the
start and at the finish inside the stadium. The now-standard distance
only gradually came into its own. The Boston Marathon, as an example,
used the 26 mile, 385 yard distance from 1924 to 1952; then reverted to a
25-mile, 938-yard distance from 1953 to 1956 before reverting to the stan-
dard distance in 1957. Marathon also refers to any event that lasts a long
time (e.g., a marathon dance contest, a marathon negotiating session).
negative split—A race in which the runner runs the second half faster
than the first half. (Everyone talks about doing this, but few do.)
orthotics—Custom-made shoe inserts, usually prescribed by podiatrists.
Orthotics are intended to compensate for the oversights of nature and
the abuse heaped on feet, legs, and even the lower back by runners.
168  o o o  Glossary

overuse injuries—Injuries caused by running too much, too early,

and too often. Running too often in the same way stresses body parts
repeatedly until they fail.
pacing—A method of rationing out one’s energies over the full distance
of a race course to reap maximum results.
peaking—The art and science of bringing one’s training to a peak at the
right moment to achieve the best possible performance at a specific
event.
personal record (PR) or personal best (PB)—One’s own best perfor-
mance at a given distance (i.e., competing against oneself). The term PR
is used primarily in the United States; PB is used in most other places
around the world.
Pheidippides—Often—and wrongly—referred to as the Greek mes-
senger who ran from the Plains of Marathon to the gates of Athens to
announce the Greek victory over the invading Persians, only to then
drop dead. Actually, the legend of Pheidippides dropping dead after
delivering his message was stitched together centuries after the battle.
The proto-historian Herodotus cited Pheidippides as the all-day runner
the Greeks sent to Sparta to ask for military help. Sparta was 150 miles
away. Because of religious beliefs, the Spartans could not send help
at that time, and Pheidippides ran back 150 miles to report that the
Spartans would not be coming in time to help. A Greek all-day runner
who would fall and die after a mere 24 miles would have been an
embarrassment to his profession. See also marathon.
relay—A long-distance event in which a team of runners takes turns
running segments of the course; can also refer to team races on the
track in which multiple runners take turns running legs of an event,
such as a mile relay in which four runners each run one lap of a track.
repeat—A term primarily used when referring to a track workout in which
the runner repeats at a brisk pace a preset distance, usually involving
one, two, three, or four laps of the track. The runner walks or jogs a
set interval between the repeats of the set distance, usually a half-lap
or a full lap. See interval.
ultramarathon—Typically, anything longer than a marathon, but gen-
erally considered to begin at 50K (31 miles). There is no upper limit.
warm-up—A preparatory activity to warm up the muscles before run-
ning; typically involves jogging (to loosen running muscles), stretch-
ing (to loosen various muscle groups), and strides (short bursts of fast
running) to wake up muscles for the work to come. The shorter the
event, the more the runner needs to warm up.
 appendix

25 Pertinent Quotes

I wish chiefly to impress on all athletes who may read this book that
if they wish to excel at any branch of sport they must train. Train
steadily, consistently, and constantly, and always bear in mind that
however well they may be doing it is possible for them to do better.
Alf Shrubb, one of the greatest of English
long-distance runners of the first half of the 20th century

The long run is what puts the tiger in the cat.

Billy Squires, famed coach of runners such as
Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar, and Dick Beardsley

A lot of people don’t realize that about 98% of the running I put in is
anything but glamorous: 2% joyful participation, 98% dedication! It’s
a tough formula. Getting out in the forest in the biting cold and the
flattening heat, and putting in kilometer after kilometer.
Rob de Castella, famed Australian long-distance runner

The marathon begins at 20 miles.

Frank Shorter, 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist

Second place is not a defeat. It is a stimulation to get better. It makes

you even more determined.
Carlos Lopes of Portugal who, at 37 years of age,
won the Olympic marathon in Los Angeles in 1984

We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win

something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something,
run a marathon.
Emil Zatopek, the greatest distance runner of his era

169
170  o o o  25 Pertinent Quotes

The marathon can humble you.

Bill Rodgers, four-time winner of the
Boston and New York Marathons

I have never been a killer. I’m not an aggressive personality and if I

can remember any emotion I felt during a race it was fear. The great-
est stimulator of my running was fear.
Herb Elliott, perhaps the greatest miler of all time;
he never lost a mile race in his life

The long distance runner plods on mile after mile, day after day,
week after month after year. People turn to stare, and children who
have a legitimate reason for being in the park without a golf club in
hand want to know why I’m running.
Hal Higdon, in his classic book,
On the Run From Dogs and People

The secret of my abundant health is that whenever the impulse to

exercise comes over me I lie down until it passes away.
J.N. McEvoy, 1938

A colleague reported that a patient of his, a competitive runner,

often ran against the flow of runners during workouts because when
running behind men he felt an uncomfortable impulse to stare at
their buttocks. Running against the flow, he experienced pleasure at
feeling that people would admire his strong and graceful stride and
might even notice the bulge of his genitals in his skimpy briefs.
Michael Sachs, PhD, “A Psychoanalytic
Perspective on Running,” Running as Therapy

Running is like going to a spring: each of us drinks our fill, and new
runners come, pushing aside those in front.
Michael Sandrock, Running With the Legends

I learned years ago when I was training about 24 kilometers a day

that if I shifted the daily balance to 32 kilometers one day and 16
the next, I got better reactions without increasing the total distance I
was running.
Arthur Lydiard, famed running coach

Where do you dwell when you are running?

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, Japanese Zen teacher
 25 Pertinent Quotes  o o o  171

You cut your journey as much from your own personality as you do
from the external world around you, so no one can say much that
will help you understand what it means to meet your small and large
self during the commitment to forward motion that will continue day
after day through your waking hours. From the moment you begin
until the moment you finish you are committed to an indivisible prob-
lem whose only solution is constant and unrelenting effort.
Jim Shapiro, Meditations From the Breakdown Lane:
Running Across America, as he began his
journey at the Pacific Ocean in California

[Running] gives a sense of free movement and personal physical

power. If we race, it gives the excitement, risk, reward and drama
of competition. It can give the rich companionship of running with
friends, or the equally rich solitude of running alone. It gives the joy
of learning the textures of the earth with your feet, and the fulfill-
ment of taking your body beyond its known limits. In origin it is asso-
ciated with escaping danger and succeeding in the hunt, both essen-
tial to life. It is so simple, so pure, so enjoyable, so rewarding, and
yet so arduous. Nothing matches a hard run in what the poet Yeats
called “the fascination of what’s difficult.”
Roger Robinson, Running in Literature

Epilepsy, paraplegia, blindness, deafness—what do these unfortunate

afflictions have to do with running, which is surely a pursuit of the
immensely fit? Simply that some men and women bearing these bur-
dens are active, enthusiastic, and sometimes quite formidable runners.
This is all part of a remarkable situation: people with a large spectrum
of handicaps—from temporary neurosis to lifetime disability—have
found running not only possible, but also an acceptable way to return
to the unafflicted world; to be like, or even better than, the “ordinary
person,” to experience those heady sensations, traditionally denied to
the handicapped—victory, or even hard-conceded defeat.
Dr. Peter Wood, Run to Health

Without a race every so often, I lose the sense of awe at what I can do
when I press myself, and at the same time I know my humility. I forget
that racing can make the impossible possible and the possible impos-
sible. Only here can I end up running faster than I ever thought I
could or unable to cover a distance I’ve gone a thousand times before.
Every race is a question, and I never know until the last yards what
the answer will be. That’s the lure of racing.
Joe Henderson, The Long Run Solution
172  o o o  25 Pertinent Quotes

There is more to failing than picking yourself up out of the dust,

brushing off the grime and trudging onward. For every defeat, there
is a victory inside waiting to be let out if the runner can get past feel-
ing sorry for himself.
Ron Daws, The Self-Made Olympian

In autumn, the sound of my belch is heard through the land. Fall is

the Camelot of runners. There are races everywhere—races run in air
turned crisp and invigorating, the perfect temperature for distance
running.
But the races also bring tension. In those minutes before the start, I
feel threatened. I know I may be beaten. I know I will surely feel pain.
And not only my mind knows this, my entire body knows it and acts
accordingly. Hence, the belch. That is the way I react when I am in
a situation where I am embarrassed, frustrated or apprehensive. The
belch is something rarely uttered in anger. It is not the roar of a lion,
but the bleat of a sheep.
Dr. George A. Sheehan, Dr. Sheehan on Running

A male runner in distress is a heroic figure; a woman runner in distress

is further proof that we are fragile creatures who are physiologically
unsuited to marathon running.
Kathrine Switzer, Marathon Woman

The goal I can neither reach nor let go of is out there somewhere. I
dread meeting it. So until it shows its face I will continue to do what I
have always done. I will keep on doing my best.
Joan Benoit-Samuelson, Running Tide

Running myself to the point where I stagger or am totally drained is

not heroic, but a poor show of misused energy. I will retire from the
race long before I reach such a state.
Tom Osler, Ultra-Marathoning

I do believe that the [Boston] marathon is bigger than its sponsors

and bigger than its creator, the Boston Athletic Association—so much
so that if no one put up the money and the BAA could not manage
the race, runners would still gather at the Hopkinton town green to
run to Boston on Patriots’ Day. If the towns refused to issue permits
to allow the race to pass, I believe runners would risk arrest to run.
Tom Derderian, Boston Marathon
 25 Pertinent Quotes  o o o  173

Running is a way of life for me, just like brushing my teeth. If I don’t
run for a few days, I feel as if something’s been stolen from me. I look
forward to my runs. I run alone. I don’t like to wait for people. It’s a
great way to get acquainted with yourself. I love it. I just go along
and think the good thoughts, think about my life. The air is fresh and
sweet.
Johnny A. Kelley, two-time Boston Marathon winner
and three-time Olympic marathoner;
completed 58 Bostons in his lifetime
 Bibliography
Annerino, John, Running Wild: An Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow: The
Extraordinary Adventure of the Human Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Spirit, Thunder Mouth Press, 1992, Harper & Row, 1990, 305 pp.
1998, 317 pp. Daniels, Jack, Daniels’ Running For-
Benoit, Joan with Sally Baker, Running mula, Human Kinetics, 2005, 287
Tide, Knopf, 1987, 213 pp. pp.
Benyo, Rich, The Exercise Fix, Human Daws, Ron, The Self-Made Olympian,
Kinetics, 1989, 145 pp. World Publications, 1977, 158 pp.
Benyo, Richard, Making the Marathon DeMar, Clarence, Marathon, New Eng-
Your Event, Random House, 1992, land Press, 1981, 156 pp.
365 pp. Derderian, Tom, Boston Marathon,
Benyo, Richard, Return to Running, Human Kinetics, 1994, 1996, 635
World Publications, 1978, 235 pp. pp.
Benyo, Richard, Running Past 50, Galloway, Jeff, Marathon!, Phidippides
Human Kinetics, 1998, 242 pp. Publication, 1996, 199 pp.
Bowerman, Bill J. and W. E. Harris, Glasser, William, Positive Addiction,
M.D., Jogging: A Medically Approved Harper Collins, 1976, 176 pp.
Fitness Program for All Ages, Grosset Harper’s Magazine, June 2007, 13 pp.
& Dunlap, 1967, 127 pp.
Henderson, Joe, Long Slow Distance:
Brant, John, Duel in the Sun, Rodale, The Humane Way to Train, TAFNews,
2006, 210 pp. 1969, 62 pp.
Burfoot, Amby, editor, Runner’s World Henderson, Joe, Run Right Now: What a
Complete Book of Running, Rodale, Half-Century on the Run Has Taught,
1977, 306 pp. Barnes & Noble, 2004, 336 pp.
California Track & Running News, Janu- Herodotus, Histories, Oxford Univer-
ary/Febuary 2008, 36 pp. sity Press, 2008, 240 pp.
Campbell, Joseph and Bill Myers, The Higdon, Hal, Marathon, Rodale, 1993,
Power of Myth, Anchor, 1991, 293 207 pp.
pp. Jerome, John, The Sweet Spot in Time,
Chodes, John, Corbitt, TAFNews, 1978, Summit, 1980, 349 pp.
154 pp. Karnazes, Dean, Ultra-Marathon Man:
Clayton, Derek, Running to the Top, Confessions of an All-Night Runner,
Anderson World, 1980, 137 pp. Tarcher, 2005, 280 pp.
Cooper, Dr. Kenneth H., Running Karp, Jason, “Chasing Pheidippides,”
Without Fear, Bantam Books, 1985, Marathon & Beyond, May/June 41
257 pp. pp.
Costill, David and Scott Trappe, Run- Lydiard, Arthur, Arthur Lydiard’s Run-
ning: The Athlete Within, Cooper ning Training Schedules, Track & Field
Publishing, 2002, 191 pp. News, 1970, 20 pp.

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 Bibliography  o o o  175

More, Daisy and John Bowman, Sandrock, Michael, Running With the
Empires: Their Rise and Fall: Aegean Legends: Training and Racing Insights
Rivals: The Persians, Imperial Greece, from 21 Great Runners, Human
Boston Publishing Company, 1986, Kinetics, 1996, 592 pp.
174 pp. Sheehan, George, Dr. Sheehan on Run-
New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd ed. ning, World Publications, 1975,
Newsweek, March 2008, 12 pp. 205 pp.
Parker, John L., Jr., The Frank Shorter Shorter, Frank with Neil Amdur, Diet
Story, Runner’s World Books, 1972, Pepsi Guide to Running, PepsiCo.,
47 pp. 1978, 90 pp.
Reese, Paul with Joe Henderson, Go Sillitoe, Alan, The Loneliness of the
East Old Man, Keokee, 1997, 273 pp. Long-Distance Runner, Signet, 1959,
144 pp.
Remy, Mark, The Runner’s Rule Book:
Everything a Runner Needs to Know— Squires, Bill with Raymone Krise,
and Then Some, Rodale, 2009, 166 Improving Your Running, Stephen
pp. Greene Press, 1982, 206 pp.
Robinson, Roger, Running in Literature: Switzer, Kathrine, Marathon Woman,
A Guide for Scholars, Readers, Run- DaCapo, 2007, 418 pp.
ners, Joggers, and Dreamers, Break- Ward, Michael, Ellison “Tarzan” Brown,
away Books, 2003, 304 pp. McFarland & Company, 2006, 443
Sachs, Michael L. & Buffone, Gary pp.
W., editors, Running as Therapy: An Wood, Peter D., D.Sc., Ph.D., Run to
Integrated Approach, Jason Aronson, Health, Charter Books, 1980, 351 pp.
Inc., (1984) 1997, 341 pp.
 About the Author

Richard Benyo is a longtime runner who

over the past 30-some years has competed in
distance races from 400 meters to ultrama-
rathons and has completed 37 marathons.
Named Journalist of the Year by the Road
Runners Club of America, he is the former
executive editor of Runner’s World Magazine
and Anderson World Books, Inc., and is
currently the editor of Marathon & Beyond
magazine. He has written 22 books on run-
ning, health, and fitness, including Running
Past 50 and Running Encyclopedia.
Benyo was inducted into Running USA’s
Hall of Champions in 2005, and he cur-
rently resides in Forestville, California, where he enjoys sailing when
he is not running or writing.

176
 About the Contributors

Dick Beardsley has a terrific story to tell,

and he tells it extremely well. A talented
runner in college and beyond, Dick rose to
fame primarily as a marathoner. He holds
a record for improving his best marathon
time 13 consecutive times, starting with
his first-ever marathon. He is perhaps best
known, however, as one-half of the famed
“duel in the sun” duo with Alberto Salazar,
where, on a hot day in Boston 1982, the
two waged a furious battle for the entire
26.2 miles, Beardsley finishing a mere
two seconds (2:08:51 vs. 2:08:53) behind
Salazar. But the high point had not yet
arrived in Dick’s life, and that high point came as his lowest point. His
leg nearly amputated in a farming accident, Dick underwent numer-
ous operations, only to suffer additional accidents until surgeries and
hospital stays became routine. In the process, he became hooked on
prescription drugs, and began a downward spiral that ended with his
being caught forging prescriptions. After a horrendous recovery, Dick
gradually returned to running—and began speaking of his experiences.
He quickly gained a reputation as one of the best motivational speakers
on the circuit. Today he continues to speak and inspire and heads the
Dick Beardsley Foundation.

177
178  o o o  About the Contributors

Joan Benoit-Samuelson will long be

remembered as the gutsy runner who
ran away with the gold at the first-ever
women’s Olympic Marathon in Los Ange-
les in 1984. Coming off knee surgery a
mere 17 days before she won the U.S.
Olympic Marathon Trials, she completely
dominated the Olympic event. When the
pace seemed too slow for her, she made
the audacious move to run away from
the pack and looked over her shoulder
to find that none of her competitors was
coming with her. Joan had burst onto
the marathon scene five years previous
when she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon wearing a Bowdoin Col-
lege shirt and a Boston Red Sox cap backward and ran a 2:35:15, slicing
a massive eight minutes off the course record; she came back to Boston
in 1983 and ran an astonishing 2:22:43, a then-world record. Not to be
pigeonholed as merely a fierce runner, she is also a race director, head-
ing up the very popular Beach to Beacon 10K in her native Maine. In
addition, she is a master gardener.

Amby Burfoot won the 1968 Boston

Marathon, following in the footsteps of his
mentor, John J. Kelley, who won a decade
before; following in Amby’s footsteps was Bill
Rodgers, his college roommate at Wesleyan,
who won Boston four times. Amby has been
associated with Runner’s World since 1978,
when he was hired as East Coast editor;
since then he has served as executive editor
and more recently as editor at large. One of
Amby’s New Year’s Day traditions is taking
a dip in the nearest ocean. On Thanksgiving
Day he runs the Manchester (CT) 5-Mile Road Race, which he has been
doing for more than four decades. Amby is also the author of several
books on running; his best is The Runner’s World Guide to the Meaning
of Life.
 About the Contributors  o o o  179

Joe Henderson has written 27 books on

running and countless magazine articles.
He authors the “Joe’s Journal” column for
Marathon & Beyond and was for more than
30 years a columnist and editor at Runner’s
World. A veteran of more than 700 races, Joe
teaches running classes at the University of
Oregon in Eugene and coaches a local mara-
thon team. His most classic running book
is The Long Run Solution; he jokes that he
has written only one book, but he’s rewrit-
ten it 27 times. He lives in Eugene, Oregon,
famous for its running legends.

Hal Higdon is the author of 35 books,

including a novel about the 72 hours lead-
ing up to a major marathon. It is titled
simply Marathon. Hal’s best-selling non-
fiction book is the similarly titled Marathon:
The Ultimate Training Guide. Between his
books and training programs (available on
halhigdon.com), Hal probably has trained
more than a half-million runners to do 26
miles 385 yards.

Dean Karnazes was named one of the top

100 most influential people in the world
by Time Magazine several years ago; Men’s
Fitness hailed him as one of the fittest men
on the planet. He is also one of the most cre-
ative ultrarunners in the world, constantly
cooking up unique first-time challenges.
In 2008 he ran 50 marathons in all 50 U.S.
states on 50 consecutive days. For 10 years,
he’s run the 200-mile Relay from Calistoga
to Santa Cruz, California, not as part of one
of the 12-person teams, but solo. He’s run
across Death Valley in 120-degree temps and he’s run a marathon at the
South Pole in minus 40 degrees. He is the author of the bestseller Ultra-
marathon Man and has appeared on dozens of television shows, most
notably a classic appearance on The David Letterman Show in the wake
of his attempt to run 300 miles without sleeping.
180  o o o  About the Contributors

Deena Kastor was the first American

woman to break the 2:20 barrier in the
marathon and continues to be the Ameri-
can record holder in that event. She won
the bronze medal in the marathon at the
Athens Olympic Games in 2004. She is
a three-time Olympic athlete: Sydney,
Athens, and Beijing. She was the winner of
the 2005 Chicago Marathon and the 2006
London Marathon. She holds the American
record in the 5K, 8K, 12K, 15K, 20K, half-
marathon, 25K, 30K, and 35K. Over her
career she won 24 national championship
titles. Her other great passions are cooking,
entertaining, and eating. “What a great balance of energy consumed and
energy used,” she says. She is also a voracious reader, “so I can’t wait to
have Timeless Running Wisdom as my couch companion.”

Lorraine Moller competed competitively

on the track and on the roads for more
than 20 years. Representing her native New
Zealand, she competed in the Olympic
Women’s Marathon the first four times it
was contested, winning the bronze medal
in 1992 in Barcelona. She also competed at
various distances in the Commonwealth
Games, winning the bronze in both the
1500 m and 3000 m in 1982 (Brisbane)
and silver in the marathon in 1986 (Edin-
burgh). She ran her first marathon in 1979
at Grandma’s Marathon (Duluth, Minnesota) in 2:37:37, sixth-fastest
time by a woman at that time. She commenced to win her next seven
marathons. She won the Avon Women’s Marathon three times (1979,
1982, 1984) and won Boston in 1984. She is currently a coach, author,
and motivational speaker; she lives in Boulder, Colorado.
 About the Contributors  o o o  181

Roger Robinson for many years led a

double life as a senior academic (now emeri-
tus professor) at Victoria University, New
Zealand, and as an elite international runner
representing England and New Zealand and
setting masters records at the Boston and
New York City marathons. He brought his
scholarly and sporting interests together
in books like Running in Literature and 26.2
Marathon Stories (coauthored with Kathrine
Switzer, his wife) and in many of his articles
on the past and present of running. He won
the George Sheehan Award in 2006 and the
RRCA Journalism Excellence Award in 2009.
Selected writings are available on www.roger-robinson.com.

Bill Rodgers, born and raised in Con-

necticut, is known to serious road racers as
“Boston Billy” Rodgers for his domination
of the famed Boston Marathon (which he
won four times, the first time—in 1975—in
an American record time). He moved to
Boston and has been an institution there
for decades, where he trains while running
the Bill Rodgers Running Center in the
North Market Building of the famed Faneuil
Hall Marketplace. During one period at the
height of his career, he won 22 road races
in a row, everything from the 10K to the
marathon, earning him the nickname of
King of the Roads. Although there has always been a serious competition
between Boston and New York City, Boston Billy dominated marathons
in both cities, winning the New York City Marathon four times. He is
the author of Marathoning (1980) with legendary Boston newpaperman
Joe Concannon. Billy continues to run and race and work as an ambas-
sador of the sport of long-distance running.
182  o o o  About the Contributors

Allan Steinfeld worked closely with Fred

Lebow to make the New York City Marathon
the most famous big-city marathon in the
1970s by bringing it out of Central Park
and onto the streets of the five boroughs of
New York City; he came onboard in 1986
as technical director. When LeBow died of
brain cancer, Allan rose to president of the
New York Road Runners Club; in 1994 he
became the chief executive officer of the
NYRRC and race director of the NYC Mara-
thon. He early on established a reputation
as one of the nation’s leading authorities
on the technical aspects of road racing. He
was also instrumental in establishing and fostering several associations
overseeing the sport of running, including the Association of Interna-
tional Marathons (where he served as vice-president) and Running USA
(where he served for years as president). He served as chief referee of
both the men’s and women’s Olympic marathons in LA in 1984. He is
a member of the Distance Running Hall of Fame.

Kathrine Switzer was the first woman

to wear bib numbers and officially run
the Boston Marathon, incurring the rage
of the race codirector who attacked her
midstride and tried to throw her out of the
race. The event changed women’s running
history and inspired Kathrine to go on to
run 36 marathons, win the 1974 New York
City Marathon, and become the founder
and director of the Avon International
Running Circuit where she organized
400 races in 27 countries for over a mil-
lion women. Switzer used these events to
help secure the women’s marathon event
into the Olympic Games. She is now an
Emmy award–winning TV commentator
of marathons as well as the author of Marathon Woman (her memoir)
and Running and Walking for Women Over 40 and coauthor with husband
Roger Robinson of 26.2 Marathon Stories. She still runs regularly and
although she doesn’t take competition seriously, she lets no woman
with gray hair pass her in the finishing straight.
 About the Contributors  o o o  183

Marshall Ulrich is one of those

all-around (or renaissance) kind
of guys, especially when it comes
to ultra-feats. He has achieved the
triple crown of extreme sports:
world-class ultrarunner, Seven
Summits mountaineer, and record-
setting adventure racer. Among
his feats: He reached the summit
of the highest peak on all seven
continents (and did it on the first
attempt in all seven instances); completed all nine Eco-Challenge adven-
ture races; crossed Death Valley a record 21 times, including a solo and
a 586-mile quad crossing; completed a 3063-mile run across America
in 52.5 days breaking the masters and grand masters record; won the
Badwater 146 four times; completed the Leadville Trail 100 and the Pikes
Peak Marathon on the same weekend; and completed all 100-mile trail
races in 1989 finishing in the top 10 in five of them. “Marsh” holds a BA
in fine arts from University of Northern Colorado and for 25 years ran
a successful business. Over the years he has raised more than $800,000
for charities.

Mel Williams, PhD, FACSM, is an eminent

scholar emeritus at Old Dominion Univer-
sity in Norfolk, where he taught exercise
physiology and sport nutrition over the
course of 40 years. His major research focus
has been performance-enhancing aids in
sport and he has published numerous books
on the subject, which have been translated
into 10 languages. He is committed to
maintaining a high level of personal fitness
for both health and sport competition and
has completed more than 100 marathons
and ultramarathons, including all Marine
Corps Marathons and the Kona Ironman
Triathlon.
You’ll find other outstanding running resources at
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