Physi-KULT running

January POM and P-K at the Kingston Twosome

2010-02-17T12:02:00.003-05:00

Since I generally council against serious racing in the weeks between the end of the long Canadian racing season in early December and its beginning in late March, there's rarely much meaningful club racing action on which to report for the weeks before X-mas until the clocks "spring forward". There was, however, one performance in January which would be a worthy Performance of the Month nominee in any month-- Dylan O'Sullivan's 23 second personal best over 3k in Thunder Bay-- and it is the POM for January.

Following almost 8 months off for various health-related problems beginning in January 2009, Dylan returned to action very tentatively in the late summer of the year. In his first few harder sessions, a pace of only 3:45/km was sufficient to put his heart rate into threshold-pace range. But, in a little more than 3 months, he had become a scoring member of both his school's OFSAA silver medalist team-- finishing a flat-on-the-back 23rd place-- and the P-K junior boys medal-winning team at the National X-C championships in Guelph, where he finished 33rd. After a short break, followed by 5 weeks of hill and fartlek training alongside yours truly and his high school team mates*, Dylan decided to enter an indoor 3000m race-- his first track race in almost 2 years-- while on a recruiting trip to Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. He would proceed to win the event with the aforementioned 23 second personal best-- a negative-splitting 8:52 (4:30 and 4:22)-- completing his year long rise from the ashes.

*In related news, the "Sydenham Boys" (Jeff Archer, Dylan O., and Rob Asselstine) finished 2,3,4 (behind P-Ker Rejean Chaisson)in a 3k race at the Dome Louis Riel (an indoor 400m complex near Orleans in East Ottawa) in 8:41-43 respectively. These results represent a remarkable improvement for all three. Even since late fall, these boys have made tremendous gains in both fitness and confidence. From the unique perspective of coach and regular training partner, I can assure all of their competitors in the upcoming school and summer club seasons that they will be forces to be reckoned with. Forget their fall 09 incarnations; the Sydenham boys will be all but unrecognizable when they hit the outdoor track in 2010, and may even make a little OFSAA history-- for very rarely, if ever, have three distance runners from one small high school performed simultaneously at the the level they are fast approaching. (And big congrats go to Rejean, who ran a solo personal best of 8:33. Look for R.C. to pick-up where he left off in Niagara Falls last year, where he finished runner-up in a 3min. personal best of 1:06:33. Next stop: Sub- 1:06 and sub 30/10k!).

(For those interested in the details, the Sydenham boys' 3000m times were achieved without any focused max V02 work at all. Their training since December has been confined strictly to: one fartlek session of 16 to 26mins total, with speeds ranging from 1500 to 10k race effort separated by "recoveries" of 40-90 secs run at 3:20-40/km; and, one session of hill or track reps @1500 race effort, with recoveries of 75secs to 6mins [e.g. 6x600m in 1:33-36 with 3-4mins recovery]. Throughout, they have maintained weekly volumes of 90-100km/week. Further and perhaps even more rapid improvements are expected over the next 6-8 weeks, as the focus of their training shifts to tempo and interval sessions, and as their weekly volume increases to 110-115km/week. They will race only once more indoors this year-- at the NCIS meet in New York City on March 12th.)

In other P-K racing news, the local group competed at the Kingston Twosome event-- a Valentine's weekend tradition here in town-- with notable performances by the following athletes:

-New members Aimee Young and Colleen Coderre, who ran 40-50 second personal bests with their times of 21:10 and 21:28 respectively.

-New masters member Kevin Armstrong, who came close to a personal best with his 18:46.

-Dylan Wykes, who won the event over-all in 15:20 (following a 3min break from doing the course beforehand in 15:30!). Dylan looks to be fully rehabbed following a slight injury to his achilles in early January. Dylan will race next in Vancouver's Spring Run-off 8k on March 7.

-Emily Tallen, who won the women's division and finished 4th over-all in 16:53. If all goes according to plan, Emily will race next at the Around the Bay race at the end of March.

I'm still awaiting that guest-post from Performance of the Year winner Mike Gill, which I now expect to be a major milestone sports-literary blogging!!

P-K Spring Performance Preview

2010-02-04T10:09:00.011-05:00

As I await the final version of Performance of the Year winner Michael Gill's guest posting (expected imminently), I thought I'd satisfy a recent non-member's request for a little insight into the progress of P-K Athletes as they prepare for the upcoming competitive season. While it's impossible to make any meaningful predictions concerning who will do what over the course of the entire season, there are a few members whose consistently strong workout performances over the fall and winter have my spider senses tingling when it comes to their early season potential. But note: what follows is in no way intended to slight the work of athletes who go unmentioned. In fact, running being running, I fully expect that I will entirely miss at least one standout performer and administer the "kiss of death" to another by singling him/her out for early season greatness, only to have him/her encounter problems and fail to launch in the spring. The truth is, P-K athletes have in general been remarkably consistent in their training in what has been a challenging winter in just about all regions of the country.

P-K Juniors:

Foretelling the performances of kids in all but the shortest possible term makes trying to predict the weather look like the most exact of sciences. As I complained about in a much earlier post, kids rarely follow any predictable patterns or obey any known rules when it comes to either psychology or physiology. To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, the age-class runner is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma (also a description of Wendy's latest seasonal treat, but that's another story!). Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the following athletes will not move up a level starting this spring, such has been the extent of their recent progress in training:

-The trio collectively referred to as "The Sydenham Boys" (by me, anyway)-- Dylan O'Sullivan, Rob Asselstine and Jeff Archer. Since I have had the priviledge of working out alongside them since the end of the 09 X-C season, I've been able to feel their growing strength over the past few weeks in particular, and not just chart it on a stopwatch. And it has been considerable. All three have been consistently hitting close to 100km/week in training, and have been nailing their Tuesday (progressively longer fartlek) and Friday (hills and reps) sessions with remarkable power and precision. I am in my best winter shape since 2005, and it has been all I can do to keep up with them (and, in the fastest sessions, I have not even bothered trying!). Dylan provided a clue to the progress of all three when he recorded a race-winning, negative-splitting (4:31/4:22) 3,000m personal best last month in Thunder Bay (coming at the end of what had been perhaps his worst week of training all winter.) And the fitness of all three has continued to grow since then. They (along with and yours truly) will line up for an end-of-phase test of fitness next week over 3k in the Winternational meet at Ottawa's indoor "Dome" complex.

(Also included in this group is newly minted senior athlete Nick McGraw, who has now regained the form he had before his travel hiatus in 2008-09. Nick will hit the roads in the spring, aiming for a big 10k P.B. in Vancouver in May.)

-Grade 9 athlete Adrienne Morgan, who finished her first high school X-C season with a strong run at the provincial championships, and has been quietly making huge fitness gains of late. If she can translate her workout form into race results, Adrienne will create some pleasant surprises on the track this spring.

-Grade 10 athlete Adrian Noble. Despite a plague of minor illnesses, Adrian has continued to loom larger and larger within his training group, in spite of being its youngest member. With a healthier next few weeks, Adrian will continue the breakthrough he started last fall with his strong finishes at the high school and club X-C provincials.

Local Group Members:

Being composed of mainly masters-age athlete, the performaces of this category of athletes is as easy to predict as kids' is difficult.

-The new cluster of athlete's referred to in my notes as "Sub-Group One"-- Amy Young, Colleen Coderre; Will Baird, Bonnie L'Abbe, and Kitty Kerr. All newcomers to the group last fall, with recent 5k bests of between 22 and 25mins, and all having taken to harder, more structured training with aplomb, I expect members of this group to be among the contenders for the 2010 group performance of the year. All appear to be in shape to run between 20:30 and 23mins before the season even begins. Amy is currently preparing for Boston, and some of the others will test the waters in our local Valentines Twosome race on the 14th.

Fifty-plus ace Bob McGraw. Coming off his outstanding 4th place finish in a stacked 50-55 field at the National X-C championship last fall, Bob has continued to train at a consistently high level, and is poised to record some of his highest volume totals ever as he prepares for an assault on the 35min mark at this spring's Vancouver Sun Run. To do it, he will have to surpass the conditioning that enabled him to run 17:00 for 5k last fall, but all signs suggest that he may be already there, or very close to it.

P-K veteran Agathe Nicholson. Since she has an airway that is reactive to cold, dry air, Agathe is normally fairly quiet on the training front until the first intimations of spring. This season-- her first non-marathon focused one in a while-- however, Agathe is already looking strong. She recorded one of her best 5k times ever this fall (18:52, and on a slowish course) while in the later stages of marathon prep), and so is well positioned to challenge her P.B. this spring (18:37)-- and at the age of 49!

On-Line Athletes:

With this group-- a much larger and more varied one than either of the others-- my main concern is that I will leave someone out (for which I apologize in advance)! However, obvious candidates for strong spring performances include:

Up-and-coming senior elite road competitor Rejean Chiasson. Building on the fitness that enabled him to chop a mere 3mins(!) from his HM personal best (1:09:33 to 1:06:30), Rejean has been racking up big volume totals (routinely 140-160kms/week) while also working on the high-speed end of his racing range. Now almost finished the current training phase, Rejean will shortly embark on period of yet higher volume, following which he will attempt to revise his 10k and HM yet further, when he lines up at National HM Championships in Quebec City in April and the Vancouver Sun Run in May.

Fellow twenty-something racer Matt Pieterson. Matt is coming off a breakthrough summer, which saw him shed 30-odd seconds from his 5k P.B., and an X-C season in which he qualified to represent Canada at the World Student X-C Championships (to be held in, of all places, Kingston, Ontario in mid-April). Since the fall, Matt has also recorded some prodigious weekly volume numbers (albeit on the soft terrain of Victoria, B.C., where he is pursuing his LLB.) At present, he is preparing to represent the U of Vic in a series of indoor track races which, his recent track work suggests, will see his current P.B.s shortly consigned to the trash bin (or recycling box, since we're talking about B.C. here!). Looking to the spring and summer, Matt is as good a candidate as any to claw his way onto the lower ledge of first-tier Canadian distance running.

P-K Performance of the year owner, Mike Gill. Mike's 2009 run of improvement was so rapid that it can't possibly be finished yet. Expect him to raise eyebrows and provoke puzzlement (as in: "Who's that guy?") near the front end of races this spring and summer.

New-ish masters member Ray Moorehead of Nova Scotia. Ray has kept his racing to a minimum since joining, but has trained as consistently and well as anyone I've ever seen. Currently embarking on an ammbitious plan for success at the Boston Marathon, Ray looks set to make his mark as the spring and summer racing campaigns unfold. I fully expect his name to come up on the Performance of the Month nomination lists throughout the year.

Fellow master Troy Cox of frigid, snow-bound Huntsville, Ontario. Although not against the occasional retreat to the safety and comfort of his t-mill, Troy is support for the old theory that running in harsh conditions makes northern runners strong. Coming off a fall which saw him set an outstanding masters HM P.B. of 1:12:40 and perform strongly on P-K's provincial and national champion men's 40-49 X-C teams, Troy has managed to hold his training together nicely in the face of the elements this winter. Like Agathe, this spring will be his first non-marathon dominated racing season in a while; likewise, I expect to see very strong numbers beside his name as soon as the spring racing season gets underway.

Again, apologies those names I undoubtedly overlooked in this and the above categories. As I said, P-Kers in general have maintained an exemplary level of training this winter; thus, with winter consistency being the key to spring and summer success in this country, I expect all members to perform at very high personal levels this spring and beyond into summer and fall.

Un-Blinding Us With Science?

2010-01-27T14:21:00.017-05:00

I have been known to aver that running is a very simple sport. And I remain convinced that, notwithstanding the odd optional gadget, it is. In my post from a couple of weeks ago, I argued that running's relative simplicity had left it more or less untouched by technological change, at least when compared with other sports. But this raised a broader question concerning the role of science-based knowledge in the sport of running: What has science actually taught us about running; what, in other words do we know about running based on sound scientific research, as opposed, say, to less formalized modes of knowledge production? One early researcher in the then emerging field of exercise physiology was known to have offered that object of his investigations would be, to paraphrase: To discover the scientific basis of what the best coaches already knew based on trial and error; in other words, to verify a body of knowledge that had been accumulated and transmitted by means of actual practice rather than through the formal application of scientific method. This may have been a bit of false modesty on the part of the researcher-- surely he also believed he would discover new principles that would perhaps contradict, but at the very least improve on, what the best coaches knew, or thought they knew. The statement did, however, represent a clear acknowledgment of the centrality of experiential knowledge in the sport of running-- and on the part of a professional scientist, no less. Now more than 40 years on, we might wonder about the actual fruits of this still very fledgling but fast-growing field of research: Has exercise science only confirmed truths known by the best coaches?; Or, has it perhaps corrected misunderstandings and misconceptions embedded in everyday coaching practice, and even uncovered wholly new principles and the means for exploiting them in pursuit of better performance?

But first, a qualification: I have no formal scientific training myself (natural scientific training, that is; I have an unfortunate surplus of social scientific training!) I have, however, tried to make a point of keeping abreast of the science of racing and training as best I can. If you'd like to read about the science of running and exercise from an actual scientist-- and one with a high-level running background to boot-- check out journalist Alex Hutchinson's informative and highly readable blog Sweat Science

To begin, we might consider the state of knowledge about racing and training in the days before the advent of what would become today's "exercise science". What, exactly, was the content of the informal knowledge that the above mentioned researcher aimed to substantiate?

The first, most basic, and ultimately most consequential practical discovery in sports like running-- i.e. sports based on the testing of basic physiological limits-- was simply that of the "overcompensation" principle. Now utterly commonsensical, the idea that a basic physiological system-- e.g. a pattern of muscular contraction, short term and explosive or long term and continuous-- could be induced by means of systematic repetition, sometimes to exhaustion, to become more rather than less adequate to the original challenge (i.e. stronger rather than tired out and weaker), had first to be discovered through actual practice. This discovery would become the very basis of what we now refer to as "training" in simple strength and endurance sports (i.e. sports with a relatively small technical skill dimension). Before the discovery that exposing the organism to systematic stress could actually make it more rather than less capable, coaches and athletes operated according to the theory of energy conservation; or, the idea that the body possessed finite amount of vital energy that must be carefully preserved and marshaled in order to be powerfully released on the field of play. (For a brief and illuminating discussion of the discovery of "training", see Beamish and Ritchie Fastest, Highest, Strongest [2006]).

"Training" based on the overcompensation principle supplanted the older practice of "energy conservation" when athletes who exposed their bodies to controlled stress and recovery regimes began to seriously out-compete those who didn't (I leave it to Beamish and Ritchie to explain the social and political forces driving the new interest in winning that led to the discovery of this paradigm-shifting physiological principle.) But, in running in particular, coaches would very shortly thereafter begin a process of refinement of the basic principle of systematic "training" that would last up until the advent of exercise science in the late post-WWII period.

From the 1920s until the early post-WWII period, most runners trained by directly replicating the demands of their racing distances-- i.e. by running repeated bouts at or faster than their goal race pace, sometimes up to 5 times a week. (Today's runners might try imagining what it would feel like to run 10-20x400m at mile/1500m race pace five days in a row!) Far more effective than simply conserving energy for its cathartic release on race day, this kind of training nevertheless had it limits. As one can imagine, it was very psychologically stressful. For this reason, and because it probably over-stressed certain basic adaptive processes (but who really knew in scientific terms?), athletes often failed to improve after a couple of years on this kind of regime.

As a result, this kind of intense, daily, race-specific training would eventually give way to the practice of "periodization", in which runners trained at different speeds and over different terrains, depending on the time of year (which, as with the invention of "fartlek" and hill training, was also a concession to the vagaries of climate, geography and scarce resourses-- namely, the absence of groomed running tracks). The older method would survive in a limited way in contexts where facilities existed, and, more specifically, where rapid, short term gains were sought-- for instance, the U.S. college system and, to some extent the North American high school system which fed it. But, by the 1970s, most runners trained according to the principle of periodization. The most celebrated developer and proponent of this variegated approach would become the now legendary New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard, famed for his uncanny success rate in turning athletes found ready-to-hand, some in his own neighborhood(!), into Olympic medalists and world record holders.

The periodization approach would lead to the development of the basic distinction between so-called "aerobic" and "anaerobic" running (really, just longer, slower running versus shorter, faster running). Out of this basic distinction would arise the techniques of the meduim length, intermediate paced run (the "tempo" or "aerobic threshold" run) and the Farlek session (see my November 17th post). And Lydiard himself would also place special importance on uphill running and "bounding" (a product of the particular environment of New Zealand, no doubt). Over time, coaches from every continent would create their own variations on the "periodized" training system, but it would remain the same in its essence up until the advent of "exercise physiology"-- and, many would argue, beyond to the present. And, while there had been rudimentary scientific investigations into the physiological mainsprings of the system (many in the context of USA-USSR Cold War military/scientific rivalry) "periodized" training remained the rather pristine product of simple trial and error on the part of coaches and athletes in the field. In the 40 or 50 years since the advent of systematic training, athletes had repeatedly opened up vast new frontiers of performance strictly on the basis of intuition, casual experimentation, and the informal dissemination of best practice within a remarkably open community of enthusiasts and competitors (hostile political establishments notwithstanding). (For an interesting glimpse into this world, see Bob Phillips short biography of Czechoslovakian distance running legend Emile Zatopek entitled Za-to-pek!).

It was precisely this "best practice" that the above-mentioned early exercise physiologist set out to investigate by means of the scientific method and modern diagnostic technology. To proceed directly to the question at hand, what can we say have been fruits of his and others' investigations over the past 30-40 years? What has been confirmed, what falsified, and what, perhaps, newly discovered? The record, I would suggests, is mixed, and the precise value of exercise physiology-- or more broadly now, "exercise science"-- for the practice of run-training remains questionable.

Of the contributions that science has made to our understanding of how to improve distance running performance, I would include the following five in the category of "unquestionable":

1. The simple confirmation that distance running proficiency is rooted in "aerobic capacity". Lab analysis confirming that distance runners typically have higher maximum volume of oxygen per kilogram uptake capacities (MV02) than non-runners, and that the best runners tend to have greater capacities still, clearly established the physiological basis of the sport, and pointed the way towards future improvements. And the discovery through longitudinal studies that MV02 could be improved through run-training only confirmed what the best athletes and coaches already new. Today, there are debates about the role of so-called "running economy" (the speed of a runner relative to his/her MVO2, which is an aspect of an athletes overall "aerobic power") and how to improve it, but the broader role of MV02, or aerobic capacity, in explaining distance running success is now beyond question.

2. The discovery of the role of the spectrum of muscle fibre composition (so-called slow and fast-twitch fibers) in determining relative success in running events of different distances. "Muscle fiber" theory revealed that there were probably immutable physiological determinants of running success at the different extremes of the running distance spectrum; that, notwithstanding some cross-trainability of these different fibres, distance runners and sprinters were likely born into their respective event groups. Scientific confirmation of this basic reality, while it has been more useful at the extremes than at the margins of the spectrum, has helped to inform the event choice, and even the specific training, of thousands of athletes.

3. Clarification of the physiological effects of training at the cellular level. Basic research in exercise physiology has gone a long way in specifying what happens to our muscle and blood cells when we train for running at different intensities. The simple discovery that our muscles, including our heart, become stronger and better able to store and make use of different energy sources, and that our blood volumes increase over time in response to our muscles' training-induced demand for more oxygen to ignite energy metabolism, has been a powerful support for the idea that training improves performance, and that it can likely do so over many years. Now, athletes have a scientific basis for continuing to pursue their sport competitively for years beyond what would have been considered "peak age" 50 or 60 years ago. One result is that we have now seen runners in their mid and late 30s win Olympic medals in running events where precisely these kinds of long term training adaptations would seem to be most relevant-- the 10,000m and Marathon.

4.The theory of "lactic acid". The discovery that exercising muscles produce this substance the nearer the point of failure they reach-- even though the reasons why they produce it, and even its role in muscle physiology, have recently been shown to be unclear-- represents a breakthrough that has enabled many coaches to more carefully regulate the intensity of training on a day-to-day basis. For whatever the reason, and to whatever longer term effect, the presence of high levels of lactate in an athlete's body is a clear marker of training stress. And while the measurement of blood lactate levels is still a somewhat expensive and invasive procedure, it is now within the grasp of at least the club-level athlete, if not the recreational age-group athlete.

5. The discovery of the role of dietary carbohydrates in the physiology of distance running. While knowledge about the optimal ratios of carbohydrates to fats and protein in the diets of runners continues to be revised, all runners are now aware of the primacy of carbohydrates in fueling performance in endurance events, putting paid to the "steak and eggs breakfast" theory of yesteryear!

Beyond these five very broad contributions-- which vary in terms of the extent to which they add to, supplant, or only confirm elements of already existing practical knowledge in the field-- we find a welter of narrower discoveries and claims (many of which are ably documented and vetted in Alex Hutchinson's blog referenced above).

Among these are studies that confirm the performance enhancing properties of various drugs not intended for such use, and form the basis for their banning. In these instances, the contribution of science to the sport is unquestionable. Other recent studies have examined things like the effectiveness of long established conventional training modalities such as static stretching and post-workout massage (both found to ineffective in reducing injury, and perhaps even counter-productive), and the benefits of barefoot versus shod running (still very inconclusive). With more funding for this kind of targeted research, we can no doubt expect to see conventional coaching wisdom turned on its head. We can also no doubt expect to see more scientific validation for emerging and established training practices, such as various kinds of strength and flexibility training.

Notwithstanding the light that science has been able to shine on the accumulated practical knowledge of run-training-- and, I would predict, in spite of future scientific discoveries-- running looks set to remain the very technically simple (if practically VERY difficult!) sport it has always been. If it manages to retain what's left of its sporting integrity in the face of the inevitable spate of new doping technologies (with "gene-doping" being by far the most threatening), running is likely to remain the very simple challenge of athlete vs. himself and the elements that it has always been, even at the highest levels. Our sport is, after all, the only one besides soccer in which athletes from some of the poorest nations on earth compete on more than even terms with athletes from the richest nations. If science and technology had ever played more than a secondary role in running, this could never have happened. Moreover, runners should take great heart in the simplicity of their sport. Its homely charm is what preserves it as a respite in a world increasingly dominated by technological inter-mediation. We can likely rest assured that machines and chemicals will never fully colonize it. It is likely to persist in its more or less pure form (buffet belts notwithstanding!) as long as we're able to preserve congenial, natural spaces in which to do it; which is the greater challenge of technology faced by all the world.

Feeling Groupy and P-K Performance of the Year

2010-01-20T21:36:00.016-05:00

Approximately half of the 60-odd athletes-- ages 14 to 50ish-- under my tutelage carry out all, or very nearly all, of their training alone, while the other half trains mostly in sub-groups made up of runners of similar speed (albeit frequently of different ages). I, personally, have spend virtually my entire career training completely alone, easy runs included. Which kind of athlete, you might ask, is better off when it comes reaping the full benefits of their training efforts-- the grouper or the loner?

And the answer is...wait for it...: It depends. That's right, "it depends", which is no less true an answer for being boringly hedged. It depends on the athlete and it depends on the dynamics of the group in question. And, it depends on the kind of training being undertaken.

When it comes to athletes, you might be tempted to think that those who prefer to train in groups do better if they're able to do so. The truth, however, is that those who strongly prefer group training are often those most dependent on it to get their workouts done, and at the right pace. The athlete who has come to rely on a group to train properly, or at all, is probably best advised to spend some time learning the discipline of training alone. This is a problem that many younger and exclusively school-based athletes must confront; if they want to continue their careers into adulthood, they must often learn the discipline of working out alone. For some this comes more easily than for others. But all athletes who choose to train exclusively in groups should learn to do some training alone; first, because they may occasionally find that a group is not available to them; and second, because learning to train alone can actually help improve their racing skills. Learning to pace without the aid of a group, and developing the ability to push hard without the familiarity of regular training partners to act as cues, can make one a more well-rounded athlete, able to thrive in a wider range of racing situations. I'm also convinced that a stint of training alone can make an athlete mentally stronger. Learning to train alone when we've never done it before, and are perhaps afraid to try, can reveal heretofore unknown depths of resolve and inner strength from which to draw in difficult race situations.

Likewise, athletes who prefer to train alone exclusively can benefit from going against their personal grain once in a while. Since racing is almost always a group activity-- albeit one in which the members are not necessarily inclined to act supportively(!)-- it is necessary for all athletes, and particularly those inclined to be loners and/or control freaks when it comes to their workouts, to learn to run with others around, and to do it in spite of-- indeed partly because of-- the chaos that sometimes ensues when five or more fired-up runners all attempt to negotiate a given training pace. As a lifetime loner (albeit less by choice than by the simple necessity of very rarely having more than a couple of athletes of similar speed ready to hand), I always felt a little awkward and generally more tired at a given pace when training in a group than when going it alone-- that is, unless I was leading the repeat. I couldn't help but think that I might have been a more effective racer had I been able to do more group training.

As a general principle, and for the vast majority of athletes, group training is a very powerful tool. The vast majority of the world's top runners, and an even greater percentage of the best runners at lower levels, are the products of group training. In practice, however, the effectiveness of group training will vary according to the "culture" and performance profile of the group in question. Simply put, when the members of a training group are cooperative and mutually supportive, when they understand that a workout is a means to becoming fitter for racing and not itself a competition, and when the range of abilities within a group is very narrow, group training is at its most effective. This is why the best coaches will tend to avoid the "one big group" approach to workouts-- i.e. in which the entire group, regardless of ability, storms off into the session at the same time, sorting themselves as they go along, and usually after most of them have already undermined the purpose of the session by starting too fast. Effective use of group training starts with a clear understanding that the best way for athletes to improve is NOT by trying to go as fast as possible in every session, or by futilely chasing a faster athlete week in and out. With this principle clearly understood, the knowledgeable coach will separate his/her larger group into sub-groups based on both ability and personal compatibility, disregarding both age and gender if necessary.

Finally, the effectiveness of group training varies with the kind of work being done. I find that group training works most effectively at either end of the intensity spectrum.

For longer, easy runs, a group dynamic can be very useful, even when a group is not all that evenly matched in terms of speed. On easy days, faster runners can often run with slower runners if faster runners are willing to go at the slower end of their easy pace range, and vice-versa; or, if their pace ranges don't overlap, the faster runner is prepared to run some extra time to make up for the slower pace. Given that the most important thing about easy days is simply getting them done consistently, the ability of a group to provide company and a little welcome distraction once in a while makes it a very useful support for this kind of training.

For the fastest kinds of training we do-- i.e. intervals at 1500/mile or 800m race pace-- the group dynamic can be highly effective not for its capacity to facilitate disassociation and enable us to simply "get through the session"; but rather, for the way it encourages us to focus and relax. When trying to run at middle distance race speeds, the premium is on the ability to relax and "float", so as to forestall the inevitable moment of muscular failure. In my experience, there is something about having others around going at similar speeds that facilitates this kind of relaxation; in particular, having another body in front, and thus not having the responsibility for establishing the correct pace for the work-bout, seems to make running at close to tops speeds for prolonged periods of time just a little bit easier. Then, of course, for those who actually plan to race middle distance events, some familiarity with what to do when there are other bodies in very close proximity-- all vying for space along the shortest line around the track-- and changing speeds as they either falter or forge ahead, is essential for top performance. And, the greater ratio between stress and recovery times involved in faster training makes it easy to regroup before each repetition without compromising the session for the slightly faster members of the group.

It is when attempting to train at intermediate paces that working in a group can become sub-optimal in the longer term for individual members. At these intermediate speeds-- in particular, max V02 paces and tempo run paces, which make up the vast bulk of the faster running that most runners do, and which involve the very careful combining of volume and pace-- group dynamics can sometimes undermine the training of individual members, even when the group is fairly evenly matched. In this kind of running, where the difference between controlled running-- training-proper, if you will-- and time-trialling is a very fine, and where sessions are typically frequent and very demanding, the group-driven competitive inducement to run even a little bit faster than is optimal can slowly degrade an athlete's performance over time, even when the additional intensity stimulates some rapid short term gains. This risk is particularly acute for the slowest member of any group, who must sometimes run a little faster than might be optimal in a given session in order to remain in touch with the group. The reverse might be said for the faster members of a group-- that they must sometimes run slower than might be optimal for them in a given session in order to remain in the group. This is certainly true, but the effects of running workouts perhaps a little too slowly on a regular basis are far less destructive than the effects of trying to run even a little too fast every week.

With these qualifications duly registered, my advice to all runners is to avail themselves of the group training option where possible, and assuming all other factors are equal. The trouble, of course, is that all relevant factors-- such as the convenient availability of a good group, combined with adequate coaching expertise-- are rarely equal. The majority of the "solo" athletes with whom I work train this way by necessity-- either because their work and family demands compel them to train at irregular times, or because the available group options do not come with sufficiently expert coaching guidance. These athletes have contacted me in order to make the best of their training options, subject to the constraints of their daily routines. In situations where the group option, combined with good coaching, is available, however, athletes hoping to maximize their performance are well advised to take it. And even athletes who can't make the group option work for them are advised to find a cooperative and equally endowed training partner or two at least once in a while, in order to experience, if only in a small way, some of the benefits of the group experience. Until now, I have said nothing about the social benefits of group training. The question of performance aside, running with a regular partner or group can be the basis for deep and abiding personal bonds. (My local group has become a group of lifelong friends, who socialize together on a regular basis). And when these social benefits are combined with those of performance, the result is a powerful synergy that can propel individual athletes to levels that they would not have imagined possible. Happy athletes training alongside athletically compatible partners are a potent force for success at any level.

In the best training groups, success feeds on itself until it becomes almost routine and to be expected. Witness, for example, the exploits of Guelph's Speed River Track Club, which combines senior elite with university and junior level athletes. Individual members of this group have tended to perform far above the levels they achieved as individuals, or as members of other groups. Now that this group has achieved "critical mass" in terms of its size, cohesion, quality of coaching, and professionalism of administrative support, the process of achieving national carding, winning national championships, or qualifing for national teams, has become utterly demystified for its individual members, who only have to look at the person beside them to know what success at this level looks like and precisely how it is attained.

The P-K Performance of the Year

After much deliberation-- including going back over the record of the group for the months of Jan to September-- I have decided on the winner of the 2009 P-K Performance of the Year, who will receive that promised Mizuno prize package!

But first, the nominees and winners for the months of January to September (and apologies to anyone with a worthy performance that I may have overlooked-- I didn't get much, if any, input from the membership on this, and I don't think I missed any of the potential winning ones):

January: Emily Tallen's fine 1:16:40 HM run in Naples, FLA at the end of the month. This was a P.B. for Emily, and was good for 5th place in a strong field.

February: Then rookie and 49 year old Myra McDonald's 20:29 5k, set in the customary bone-chilling cold of Kingston Road Runner's Association's annual "twosome" race. Myra also went on to be nominated for her performance at the provincial X-C championships in November.

March: Then new member Troy Cox's very fine 2nd place finish in the master's division of the Around the Bay Road race,in difficult conditions, and while in the the early stages of preparing for the Ottawa Marathon... in mid winter...in Northern Ontario. Troy would also go on to be nominated for his outstanding 1:12HM masters win in Toronto last fall.

April: Rejean Chiasson's P.B. and prize money-winning performance in the Vancouver Sun Run-- his first big out of province road race, and one of the first big races, period, for this very fast improving athlete. Rejean would also recieve a second nomination for his breakout 2nd place P.B. performance (by 3mins!) in Niagara Falls in October.

May: In the spirit of relentless objectivity, my own winning and Canadian age group record-setting performance on the slowish Nordion 10k course in Ottawa. Battling a chronic hip injury, and coming off a near lifetime personal worst time a month earlier in Victoria, this would rank as one of the better performances of my master's career.

June: High school senior Charly Allan's 1500m in the heats at the provincial high school championships. Making the final in a near personal best, Charly completed his remarkable run from grade 9 back-of-the-packer to one of the best in the province. As a consequence of this result, and his peerless record of academic achievement and community service, Charly went on to receive the Brian Maxwell Scholarship, worth $5,000 and awarded yearly to Canadian university-bound provincial distance runner who best combines athletic achievement with high-level scholarship and conscientious citizenship.

July: Dylan Wykes very strong runner-up 48:31 performance in the Nissan 10 Miler in Toronto, while in full preparation for the Berlin Marathon in August.

August: Dylan's 33rd place finish in the marathon in the 2009 World Championships. The difficulty of competing in the marathon at this level, overseas, and in complex weather conditions, can never been underestimated, even in the case of an athlete of Dylan's calibre. Dylan did not run a personal best (almost no one in the race did); but, he wasn't far off, and he held it together brilliantly after a bold move at the halfway point in this, his first major championship marathon.

September: New high school junior member Clara Langely's dominating win in the Trinity High School Cross Country Invitational. Having been out of the country and away from training the entire summer, Clara rounded into shape with remarkable speed, and won this event going away. Clara's run was all the more notable considering she had won a cross country race only once in her high school career. She followed up her Trinity performance with a a similarly impressive run in Brockville later in the month, this time easily dispatching the senior girl's field.

For the monthly winners for October to December, see previous postings in the blog.

And without further ado, the winner of the 2009 P-K Performance of the Year is on-line member Michael Gill, for a mind-boggling run of improvement that culminated in his 2nd place performance in the master's race at the national X-C championships. Mike's performance received the nod narrowly over Dylan's Berlin performance, with deciding factor being the sheer scale and rapidity of improvement involved in putting Mike into position to achieve the performance he did in November. Mike had been a decent university level athlete, but had left the sport years ago, and had accumulated significant excess weight on his 6', 3" frame in the meantime-- which, all the more remarkably, he was still in the process of trying to shed when he began training with me in May of the year! Simply put, I have never seen such a rate of improvement in any athlete at any age. This probably means that Mike will have a hard time topping his achievement in 2010, but one never knows!

Watch this space throughout the year for the names of the monthly P-K performance winners for 2010. The early front runner for January 2010 is junior member Dylan O'Sullivan, who won an indoor 3000m race in a personal best of 8:53, a lifetime improvement of 23 seconds-- and this after having missed most of 2009 with health problems.

10 Changes that Shook the Runner's World

2010-01-12T13:21:00.010-05:00

Recent reflections on the first decade of the new millennium have been filled, as these kinds of reflections almost always are, with references to technology-- how fast it has been moving, and how, once again, it has Changed Everything. The truth is, sometimes technology creates fundamental change of one kind or another; but, more often, it doesn't change much that's fundamental about the way we all go about our business. Most technological change amounts to variations on an established theme-- quantity rather than quality, if you will. But what if we break things down a bit and consider the effects of technology at the micro-level. Surely, in some small areas of life-- those of our various leisure pursuits for example-- technological change has had transformative impacts. Or has it? What, for instance, has been the impact of technology on the sport of running in the past few decades? This week, I propose to consider this question in terms of my own experience with the running-related technological innovations that have appeared over the course of my own 30 year career. In what follows, I present my ranking of the 10 most consequential running technologies to appear since I laced up my first pair of trainers, along with a few words on the total impact of these innovations. I also offer a couple of dishonorable mentions in the technology department-- so called innovations that are nothing of the sort.

Here, in reverse order of consequentiality, are my choices:

10. Changes in footwear. Ironically, given the amount of general hoopla surrounding running shoes since the advent of the first running boom, innovations in this area seem to have had very little impact on the activity itself-- at least where the proverbial rubber hits the road. In my own experience, some models of shoes from the early 1980s were actually superior to most of the models on offer today, in terms of basic performance and injury prevention. And, there was definitely a period in the last 3 decades when shoes seemed to be getting worse-- over-engineered and too encumbered with new technologies. Recent innovations in the paring down and simplifying running shoes are welcome, but they don't really represent a net gain when the whole era of running shoe innovation is considered. In my view, we need only only concern ourselves with running shoes from the point of view of avoiding those that are bad for us. The best shoes today, as always, are those ones that simply stay our of our way; that enable us to run as long and fast as our own bodies will allow us. That said, the shoes of the past 30 years really do represent a net gain on what came before. The are, by and large, much lighter, more flexible, and more responsive than anything worn in the late 1970s. Its still worth while taking some time to examine the claims, and the performance, of different brands or running shoes. Just don't expect them to do more than their basic job.

9. Satellite-based measurement modalities. Things like Google Mapping, MapMyRun, or the portable wrist-worn GPS certainly represent innovations; but again, their high profile is probably out of proportion to their net value-added. A technological innovation is important only in relation to what it is attempting to improve on or replace. In the case of these technologies, what is being replaced is our own ability to estimate distance for the purposes of assessing our training paces, and we can learn to do this quite accurately with no more technology than a wrist watch. In my case, these modalities have done little more than confirm the accuracy of my own estimations from as long ago as 25 years. I wouldn't go as far as to agree with those curmudgeons who argue that these tools are more trouble than they're worth, however. But I do think their suddenly high profile is way out of proportion to their net benefit. They certainly have their uses, particularly for beginning runners, and those who do a lot of running in strange areas. However, if they don't already own a good set of winter running clothes, a treadmill, or an elliptical trainer (see below), most runners would be better off spending their money on these items first.

8. Heart rate monitors. Much of the above also goes for HRMs. These devices provide another good measure of training intensity, to go along with the established ones-- the wrist watch and our own brains-- but their value-added is not on the level with their pervasiveness, or, I think, with the claims made on their behalf. I completely disagree, for instance, with the premise of a whole training system built around heart rate levels. I simply don't think HR alone is a fine-grained enough measure of training effort to support this kind of burden. I have always taken flack from HR aficionados for this stance, but it's a flack I'm more than willing to take.

7. Flexibility training. This one may have ranked slightly higher, except for the fact that there is as yet no clear evidence that flexibility training really increases performance or reduces injury in runners! Then why count it as an innovation at all, you might ask. In spite of the ongoing lack of supporting research, millions of runners remain sold on an intuitive level on the benefits of stretching, and on new types of stretching, including A.I. (Active Isolated), Yoga, and various kinds of dynamic flexibility exercises that aim to increase functional range of motion. Although I hedge my bets by the not making a religion of stretching, I count myself among those millions who are convinced on the pure level of "feel" that flexibility work enables them to run further and faster, and cope with injuries better. And I think one day science will discover the secret of what many runners "know" deep in their fibers. Anything that has lasted as long as stretching has among runners must be working on some level. Runners, after all, tend to be busy people, and busy people will tend over time to give up doing things that they feel are not of direct benefit to them.

6. Clothing. While advances in running shoe technology have not amounted to all that much in 30 years, innovation in the area of basic running apparel-- from the hi-tech "wicking" t-shirt, to the spandex tight, to and the vast array of super-lightweight winter garments-- has been nothing short of breathtaking. In fact, advancements in running clothing would rank even higher in my mind if we were only considering running in Canada. In most of the rest of the world, one's choice of running apparel is not all that significant one way or another. But for those who have to face four months or more of winter running, and who are old enough to remember the cotton sweatshirts and baggy, heavy, crotch-dragging gym pants that used to pass for cold weather gear 30 years ago, the advent of wafer-thin, breathable and genuinely warm winter running fabrics has been nothing short of miraculous. I would even go so far as to say that the invention of decent winter running clothing has single-handedly increased the total number of year-round active runners in places like Canada.

5. "Active Release" therapy. As with stretching, the jury is still largely out regarding the proven benefits of this form of injury treatment. But again, millions of injured runners desperate to return to the fray will swear by the bang-for-buck value of this therapy, which combines the use of pressure points with the active bending and stretching of the affected limb. My own experience with the technique-- which I first encountered in my mid to late 30s, when my body was beginning to lose the last of its youthful resilience in the face of hard training -- was that I could reduce my injury down time by 50% or more over simply resting and cross training through timely application of ART. Such was the effectiveness of this technique that what might have been stubborn problems, costing me days or even weeks of training in bygone days, could be eliminated in as little as two treatments at the hands of a skilled practitioner. I owe a good deal of my success as a master runner to ART, combined with innovation #4 below.

4. Pilates-based "core" strength training for runners. Originally developed as a therapy for injured dancers, core training was gradually adapted for runners looking for ways to address the underlying causes of so-called "overuse" injuries, and perhaps get a little faster in the process. Elites runners have probably always had decent natural strength in the areas covered by core strength training-- the lower and deep abdominals, the low-back, and the glutes-- good natural core strength being no doubt a part of the secret of their elite-ness in the first place. The real value of core strengthening has therefore been in enabling later-starting, previously inactive, and older runners to reduce pain and injury associated with weakness and lack of stability in these nexus regions of the body. A relatively late-breaking innovation, core strength will no doubt continue to have an impact in keeping more aging runners in the game longer, as well as help late-comers get started without succumbing quickly to common overuse injuries.

3. Expertly made custom orthotics. This one is bound to provoke some sharp disagreement, but not because the custom shoe insert is not a major running innovation; rather, because orthotics tend to be over-prescribed, and are too often poorly made, at least for the purposes of serious running. For the millions-- including many of the sports top performers-- who have relied on them to make the difference between repeated, chronic injury and success, they are almost as vital as oxygen itself. The minimalist fervour notwithstanding, the fact is that not everyone's feet are suited for the mile upon mile of running on pavement and track that success in running requires, and we will never live in a world where more than a few of us can get away with running barefoot. Properly prescribed, expertly made, and carefully readjusted by the hand of a craftsman or woman who knows the biomechanics of running, the contemporary orthotic insert, made of state of the art materials, has become as important a basic running innovation as the running shoe itself.

2. Tie: The lightweight and affordable home/club treadmill and the elliptical trainer. Ubiquitous because they have now become so relatively cheap, the home/club treadmill has quietly revolutionized running by making it far more accessible to inhabitants of environments unfriendly to outdoor, winter, or after dark outings. Male runners; runners who live in temperate, runner-friendly communities; runners who can run in daylight whenever they choose; and runners who are not and have never been the parents of small children may scoff at the suggestion that the affordable treadmill represents an important innovation. But, runners for whom getting outside poses special challenges will know that easy access to the 'mill can make the difference between being a serious runner and not bothering at all. As for the elliptical trainer, it is almost everything the treadmill is, with the added benefit that it can also be used as a cross-training modality while rehabbing injuries. For most runners, in fact, the purchase of a home elliptical trainer is probably better value for money than a home treadmill. And perhaps better value than either for most runners is the purchase of a gym membership, which provides cheap access to both types of machine, plus a great place to do some core strength exercises!

1. The internet. The internet? Indeed. Before you dismiss this as an easy catch-all (what activities, after all, has the internet NOT at least indirectly transformed?), consider the following: In the past 30 years running has gone from being a sport regularly covered in the national media to an fringe sport with no more mainstream media profile than-- to take one of many possible examples-- "mixed martial arts", a sport that remains illegal in many jurisdictions! Thus, as a sport, running now been forced to take up residence almost exclusively on the internet. More than this, however, it currently thrives on-line. Running now seems to depend on the new technology more heavily than most other sports, and seems to be growing in spite of this, or perhaps because of it. Runners seem to be a uniquely computer friendly lot. They have adjusted readily, even happily, to the reality of having to watch even the biggest events on their sporting calendar exclusively via live-stream webcasts. (In fact, many of us now prefer it this way, considering how fragmentary and ill-informed mainstream coverage has become, when the conventional media do deign to cover our sport.) Add to this the rapid growth of running related websites, message boards, blogs, and on-line coaching outfits, and it is clear that the internet has significantly enabled the remaking of running as competitive sport, along with its continued expansion as a mass fitness pastime. The internet now contains a vast and easily accessible storehouse of all things running, as well as a global community of enthusiasts, fans, and experts. Outside of local training groups and races themselves, the net is now almost exclusively where we as a sport community come together to share our knowledge and experience, and as well as recognize one another's achievements-- from world records to age-class wins and personal bests. Some-- myself included-- have even credited the internet with being instrumental the recent resurgence of American elite distance running. No doubt, websites like the famous-- some would say infamous-- LetsRun.com have become important vehicles for the promotion of "best practice" in coaching and training, as well as all-important arenas for the attainment of stardom in the sport-- that is, in a world where only aficionados seem any longer to care.

But what do these various innovations really amount to when compared with the impact of technological change in other areas of life? Compared simply with other sports, I would argue: relatively little. Think, for instance, of the impact of changes in equipment on the way hockey is played. Here, changes in stick and skate technology alone have increased the tempo of the game considerably in 30 years; whereas, in running, the best runners of 30 years ago would not look out of place at all in today's elite fields, and the same could easily be said for recreational runners. Or take golf, where equipment changes, new training regimes, and the introduction of cheap digital video have actually forced the redesign of courses themselves. Running never has been, and likely never will be, transformed by technologies to this extent. To quote one of my favourite runners-- all-time top three Canadian marathoner and sage, Arthur Boileau-- "running is a simple sport". Art was referring to our ability to understand and rate our performance in running when he said this, but it remains true in a general sense. Most of what is meaningful in running occurs under the skin of athletes themselves. Technological innovation notwithstanding, our ability to do well in this sport still depends, as it always has, on our capacity to run long and fast as often as possible for as many years as possible. The above innovations no doubt help to support this basic endeavour, but they do relatively little to change its essence. It may be, in fact, that running has already undergone all the meaningful technological innovation it can absorb. Further "breakthroughs" may have even less real impact than the ones mentioned.

Finally, what about technological innovations that have taken running a step backwards, or that have been generally more trouble than they're worth? In this category of "dishonourable mention", I would include two things, which run the gamut from the sinister to the ridiculous: The "blood-boosting" agent EPO, a banned substance intended for use by cancer patients; and, the infamous "buffet belt", that now ubiquitous strap-on, personal feeding, hydration and entertainment centre.

It might seem counter-intuitive to list EPO has a step backward for running, since it has no doubt contributed to the assault on the record books that took place immediately following its introduction in the early/mid 1990s. In a strictly technical sense, couldn't we list EPO as the greatest of all running-related technological innovations? If running were akin to rocket science, or other kinds of engineering, the answer would be "yes". But running is fundamentally not like rocket science: it is a sport, and sports are games. And games are-- in contrast with activities where the best possible technical means for achieving an objective are sought-- fundamentally based on the establishment and negotiation of gratuitous obstacles. The fastest means to get from point A to point B is, after all, not running at all! What makes running a game is that is has rules which shape the behaviour of participants in ways that encourage them to display characteristics that we humanly value-- courage, determination, honour, etc. The introduction of a means of, in effect, "beating the game", such as EPO represents, threatens to destroys the game itself. The invention of EPO certainly represents a kind of achievement, and the skill that went into its development is something that we value in a general sense. But, its introduction into endurance sport undermines our ability to appreciate the human qualities that endurance sport, as a game, was invented in order to encourage and showcase. The introduction of EPO and other performance enhancing drugs threatens to turn endurance sport into a contest between pharmaceutical researchers and not athletes, strictly speaking (and, EPOs effect on sport aside, pharmaceutical researchers ought to have better things to do!). EPO and other performance enhancing drugs may represent an innovation in terms of finding ways to enable the human body to go further, faster. But the sport of running is not about finding ways to go faster by any technical means necessary, but rather, within a clearly established and mutually agreed upon set of rules. As such, the introduction of EPO into distance running represents a clear step backward for the sport.

More hilariously, the "buffet belt" is a technological step backward for the sport in that it represents an innovation in response to a fictitious and manufactured need. And, because it actually makes you slower! Runners who use these contraptions spends hours training their bodies to run faster-- including reducing the actual weight of said bodies-- only to strap on several ounces, or even pounds, of extra weight, simply in order to have water and other sustenance more ready to hand. The trouble is, most runners don't go far enough, or run in such remote areas, that the necessary water and food are not readily available by other means. (I, for instance, plan my summer runs around access to municipal water supplies, or run 20min loops, so that I can return to my stashed water bottle every 3 miles or so.) And the use of buffet belt in races is doubly counterproductive and mystifying. Why carry all that extra weight when most races supply water and other fluids for free, and at 3-5k intervals, and when a gel or two can easily be stowed in the pocket of one's shorts!? The buffet belt is certainly innovative, but in the field of retail marketing, not running science.

Next week, I review and P-K Performance of the Year nominees for January to September last year, and pick Performance of the Year for 2009, the owner of which will receive a small Mizuno prize package.

Waging the Winter Campaign: Some Retreat, No Surrender!

2010-01-06T11:53:00.006-05:00

Reading the many front-line reports from my athletes in the trenches of this still very young winter training campaign, I would conclude that, for the moment, winter has the upper hand. Conditions have varied across the country-- from the bitter cold and snows of Northern Ontario and Alberta, to the unseasonably mild conditions of Quebec City and, to my astonishment, St. John's NFLD-- but no region has been completely spared by winter's assault (except Victoria B.C., but that hardly counts). Despite the promise of a milder El Nino winter north of the 49th, it's been weather business as usual-- perhaps even a little worse than usual in some places-- for Canadian runners. And the casualties are already beginning to mount.

Attempting to train through the Canadian winter is not really a war, of course (we have REAL wars ongoing to remind us of that!); but, attempting to do the sport we love in this climate does present some real challenges in terms of strategy and tactics, and it requires establishing a very clear set of objectives. In other words, it requires and understanding of the special nature of the problem, good planning, and a degree of flexibility on the ground. After more than 30 consecutive years of battling it, the vast majority of them without access to today's arsenal of technologies-- your lightweight, wicking fabrics, your treadmills and your elliptical trainers-- I have determined that, for the most part, winter cannot be beaten; it can only be neutralized via an intelligent strategy and a series of well timed tactical retreats. If we want to exit the winter season no worse off than when we entered it-- and that is really the only realistic goal-- then we have to accept that it will challenge us, and be prepared to retreat from its worst advances when necessary.

Here are my hard-won training tips for battling even the worst winter to a standstill:

1. Always assume the worst. Forget environment Canada's long term forecasts and accept the fact that winter will attack, and that it will require you to respond in the form of adapting your training. If it turns out that we all get lucky, great; but, being psychologically prepared costs us nothing, and enables us to respond quickly when the all but inevitable comes to pass.

2. Accept that you will quite probably lose some overall fitness over the winter, and that you will likely be in no position to challenge any P.B.s in March and April. But, at the same time, don't panic. It's quite possible to regain lost shape, and then some, very quickly once the better weather returns-- provided you're not already injured when that time comes. Again, winter is usually for surviving, not conquering.

3. Don't attempt to run your highest mileage totals of the year during the winter months. In the old days, it was commonplace for runners to attempt to do their "base" training during the non-competitive winter months. This did not apply well to the Canadian context then and it still doesn't, climate change notwithstanding. Runners in more northerly climes are better advised to do their highest mileage in March and April, and again in August, September and October, leaving the worst winter months for their speed and power work. Faster running, hill running, and plyometrics are actually easier to do in winter, with the help of treadmills and indoor tracks. And, there is good reason to believe that doing this kind of work as immediate preparation for longer, harder training is the best way to proceed in any case (see, e.g. Daniels' Running Formula, Ch. 4). Fast hill repeats with longer recoveries and intervals at mile race pace improve balance, strength and overall biomechanical efficiency, thus reducing our risk of injury when it comes time to do do our longest and hardest training of the year. In any case, those who attempt to hit high mileage targets during the winter will likely become frustrated, risk-prone and, in all probability, injured before it's all over. (Been there, done that, as they say.)

4. Don't be a hero! Real runners should be interested in building their aerobic capacity and not their character through their training. There are no awards for eschewing the indoor track, elliptical, or treadmill and running outside in all conditions as a matter of principle, or for wearing shorts in sub-zero temperatures-- no awards worth winning, at least. No one will care how "tough" you were in facing down winter in these ways if you end up running slower than you should in the spring and summer, due to an injury sustained in attempting to make your dubious stand.

5.In choosing when to retreat to the treadmill, elliptical, or indoor track, consider the footing outside rather than the temperature. With some simple precautions, it is possible to train safely outside in very cold temperatures. (And no, you will not "freeze your lungs" if you run in the cold. If this were possible, x-country skiers would be in big trouble!). Generally, only the extremities (and in the coldest temperatures, exposed facial skin) are in any danger in the deep cold. Running on slippery surfaces, however, is a different matter. Without proper traction, we run the risk of de-optimizing the relationship between the benefits and risks of training, and this negative relationship intensifies as our attempted speed increases. When we train, ordinarily injury risk increases with the length and intensity of our sessions; but, so does potential benefit, creating a trade-off. On loose or slippery surfaces, the risk of injury to the hips, groin, hamstrings, achilles, and plantar fascia (not to mention trauma from falling down) increases and is not matched by the potential benefits of the training, since our speeds will be slower relative to the effort applied. Simply put, when we attempt to run on poor surfaces, we increase our risk of injury while reducing the potential benefits of our training relative to other training options.

6. Learn to use the various modalities of indoor training effectively. Making the best use of your indoor training options entails, first, understanding which of them is best match for runners. There is some debate about this, but, in my experience, the available options ranks as follows in terms of their suitability for replacing outdoor running:

-Running on a treadmill (a no-brainer, really). In spite of some minor differences in our running strides on and off the mill, treadmill running is as close to a one-to-one with outdoor running as you can get, and is useful for replacing the full range of running workouts, from long runs to hill reps. But, remember, treadmill speedometers are not always a reliable guide to actual pace. And, even when calibrated, treadmill speeds feel about 10 secs/km easier than their outdoor equivalents, due to the absence of atmospheric resistance. Always add 1% of elevation or .2 MPH to equal your outdoor running paces. Finally, be aware that treadmill running forces a faster stride rate than outdoor running; so, when assessing effort, tune in to respiration rate and muscle fatigue rather than to how fast your legs seem to be moving.

-Running on the indoor track. Circling the indoor track is perhaps better than t-mill running, but for the greater risk of injury from repeated cornering.

-Tie: elliptical training and traditional-style x-country skiing. Both are great modalities for replacing running's aerobic stimulus, but their significantly different limb actions and resistance to gravity make them secondary options (i.e. unlike running, both involve mainly milder concentric muscle contractions rather than sharp, ballistic, eccentric ones). Runners who replace running with these activities will find that their lower legs and feet are somewhat de-conditioned when it comes time to hit the road, trail and track again full-time.

-Deep water running. Here, the limb action is very similar to running, but the buoyancy factor reduces the aerobic demands below that of the other options. It's possible to recoup this loss through higher intensity sessions, but most runners without a lot of experience can't manage the kind of intensity required (think: hard interval sessions once or twice a day just to maintain basic conditioning!). The other drawback of deep water running is that the initiation period required to do it effectively (about 2 weeks of everyday sessions) reduces its usefulness as an emergency substitute for running for all but those with prior experience doing it.

-Swimming. Great for the few who really know how to do it, and who have the extra time involved, but too technically tricky and time-consuming (about 2 hours of swimming is required to replace 1 hour or running) for the average runner. And, of course, the limb action is significantly different from running.

-Stationary cycling. Good for multi-sport athletes who have worked out proper bike set up, and who have developed the leg power to reach the aerobic intensity necessary to replace running, but risky to the low back and probably next to useless for the average weak-legged runner.

Next week, look for an update on the P-K Performance of the Year nominations (I'm still reviewing January to October for suitable performances), as well as some reflections on the advance of running-related technologies and innovations over the past 30 years, when I consider my picks for the top ten such advances over the course of my career.

Finally, I'm happy to report that Dylan Wykes has retained his national team status and funding for 2010. There was initially some question that he would make the cut, when he was put on provisional status, subject to appeals from excluded athletes. After a failed appeal by an excluded athlete in late December, Dylan was officially added to the list. Being nationally "carded" carries significant benefits for an athlete in Dylan's position, including a tax-free stipend. Congrats Dylan!

So, You Think You're Tough?

2009-12-09T19:57:00.011-05:00

If you're a runner, you're very likely to answer this question with something like: "Maybe, but not enough, and not all the time"; or, "No". When our race performances fall below expectations, we runners are more likely to blame our lack of mental focus, resolve, or what we like to call our "toughness". Loathe to make excuses for a poor performance, most runners prefer to blame what they see as their own psychological weakness rather than other factors, such as their conditioning, or choice of race tactics. Why do runners so often think that they fail themselves in difficult race situations, what exactly is "mental toughness", and how important is it, anyway?

Runners often feel like they're mentally weaker than they want to be, or should be, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that, because runners tend to conceal their mental states from one another, and yet are intimately familiar their own own doubts and frailties around racing, they are inclined to assume that their friends and competitors must have it together mentally better than they themselves do. As a coach of many runners-- and thus privy to the inner lives of more runners than most-- I know that all runners, even those who appear most in control, are inclined to feel that they are being held back by their own inability to "go deep enough" in difficult race situations. In fact, I am myself a runner with a reputation for being able to get the most out of himself in training and competition; yet, I know that I'm not as "tough" as I might appear in the heat of battle (I am actually a runner who can consistently deliver according to expectation in races, but I also know that so-called "toughness' is not as important in racing well as runners often think it is, of which more below). The second reason that runners often feel they lack it "upstairs" in race situations is that we are so quick to forget how physically difficult racing actually is; in fact, our ability to recall the distress of racing is so poor that we often forget it within minutes of finishing! (How many times have you heard a runner fresh from the finish chute, and still out of breath, say something like: "If I'd only made the decision to go with so-and-so, or push harder at such-and-such point in the race, I would have been 10 seconds faster". Granted, sometimes this is true; but, far more often the runner has simply forgotten how tired he/she actually was at the "key moment" in question. In my role as coach, I've made a point of paying very close attention to the signs of physical fatigue that individual runners are apt to show when the going is becoming very difficult in a workout or race situation; and, as such, I'm often able to tell people that, regardless of what they might think they remember, they were more likely far too physically spent to react meaningfully at the alleged "key moment" than too weak mentally-- that, if there was any failure involved, it was of a purely physical nature.

What we typically think of as mental toughness is, furthermore, somewhat overrated when it comes to it contribution to successful race performance. In my view, the ability to ignore discomfort and increase effort in the final stages of a race, when compared simply with being very fit, properly tapered, and properly paced, is marginal in its importance. I think so-called mental toughness can make a difference in our ability to "go to the whip" (to use a great analogy, courtesy of one of Canada's best ever marathoners, Art Boileau) in the very late stages of a race-- and so can often make the difference between winning and losing, for those at that level. However, the other above mentioned factors are far more important in their contribution to performance, and can make the difference between a great race and a disastrous race, rather than just between a good race and a very good race, as is most often the case with so-called toughness. Ultimately, of course, we all want to be tough, fit, and properly paced all at the same time; but, on days when we're not feeling as tough as others, we can always rely on being physically prepared and smart in order to avoid a complete flame-out. In fact, for those racers unprepared in these vital respects, being tough can actually be something of a liability, in that it can induce us to attempt things we have no business attempting on race day.

But, taking a step back, what is this quality called "mental toughness" and, more to the point, how is it acquired? Here, it think it is necessary to consider the problems of mental toughness and physical preparation as a unity.

Mental toughness, I would argue, is the ability to cope effectively with the anxiety naturally associated with the feeling of hypoxia, compounded by the stress of athletic competition. As with the quality we call courage-- which does not entail the absence of fear, but the ability to cope and perform in the face of fear-- mental toughness does not mean the absence of feelings of anxiety or stress in race situations; it's best thought of as referring to the ability to get the most out of our bodies in spite of the inevitable anxiety and stress that we feel when we race. (As a matter of fact, some of the "toughest" runners I know manifest a great deal of anxiety and stress both before and during competition, and yet race very consistently, and rarely fail themselves in the later going.)

And how does one come to possess such an ability to cope thus in the cauldron of a long distance race? In a word: familiarity-- familiarity, that is, with the actual stresses, physical and psychological, associated with racing. Very few people, I would argue, are born with the ability to push their bodies to full capacity in an extreme test of physical limits, such as a distance race represents. The vast majority of us must learn it, and learn to become better and better at it, through exposure to racing itself, and through training to race. Mental toughness is, as I sometimes like to put it, more a habit than a personal attribute. We develop it through workouts that are structured to reproduce the stresses of racing without being races themselves, and through the drill of simply getting out the door every day. (Speaking of the latter, in a conversation the other day with my daughter, who was having a hard time getting out the door to train in the damp gloom of a late November afternoon, I reminded her that moments like this should be greeted as opportunities, not obstacles-- opportunities to demonstrate our resolve to ourselves and to steel our mental armour for the races ahead. I told her that many times I have thought, mid-race: "I didn't run all those miles, in all that lousy weather, just to give up when it counts most"!). Any athlete who has prepared to the best of his or her physical ability is, by definition, a "tough" person. Racing, by comparison, ought to be thought of as the easy part-- and it is, if all the routine, but vital, physical work has been done. To quote another great marathon champion-- Juma Ikanga of Tanzania-- "the will to race is nothing without the will to prepare". If a runner has already demonstrated the "will to prepare", she will have already developed most of what she needs, psychologically as well as physically, to compete well-- and all the more so if she is able to recognize this fact and resist dwelling on her own feelings of "mental weakness". In the end, therefore, our concern with our "mental toughness" ought better to be directed at our will to get ourselves out the door to train day-in and day-out, than at our ability simply to endure stress in a race situation; for, without the first kind of toughness, the latter type is meaningless.

P-K at Nats X-C and November Performance of the Month

2009-12-02T12:57:00.006-05:00

This post finds us at the end of the 2009 X-C season and, indeed, the end of the Canadian running season itself. There are, of course, a few brave little winter races out there (not including on the far Left Coast, where there the racing goes on all season); but, the season that began in the cold winds of late March and continued through the heat of summer and into the crispness of fall has now ended, as it always does, in the muddy gloom of late November-- a gloom that is brightened only by the brief flash of colour that is the Canadian cross country championship season, culminating in the national championships themselves.

This year's edition of the event was brilliantly hosted by the Speed River Track Club/University of Guelph, as it had been for the previous two years, and will be again for one last go-around next year. The U of G, under the leadership of Head Coach Dave Scott Thomas (DST), has now become the undisputed center of elite Canadian distance running; so, it is symbolically appropriate that it should have been granted an unprecedented double term as host of the national X-C championships, which is really the championships of distance running itself in this country, being the only time all of the main contenders, junior and senior respectively, are assembled in a single race. But the Guelph boys have not been content with mere symbolism. DST, with the able assistance of race director Chris Moulton and a host of young athletes and running enthusiasts, has created a set of championships that will be recalled for decades to come for their top-to-bottom quality and attention to detail-- from a superb, runner and spectator friendly course, to expert announcing and on-line media coverage, to the sport's best all-ages after-party, all within walking distance of race hotels! The Guelph boys have delivered a string of championships for the ages, and have set the standard for all future editions of this event. (The only respect in which they can be considered bad hosts is that they never allow any other club near the senior mens' team title!)

As for the P-K group, we had what could be called a good day-- good, but not great.

In the team category, leading the way were the men's 40-49 group, which defended its title in this division, albeit by a scant 37 seconds, following a correction in the results, which originally showed the Toronto Olympic Club in 5th place, some 7mins behind. The win was nice, but the margin of victory was unacceptably small, considering the quality of male over-40 athletes in the group. It is hoped that this will be remedied next year, and made amends for by victories in the men's 50-59 and women's 40-49 categories. The challenge is on!

Next came the junior boys team, which finished 2nd in a very deep field of 20 teams-- a performance intrinsically superior to that of the masters men. As it happened, none of the boys had his best day individually, with no one managing to crack the top 15. As a group, however, they were deep and strong, with none giving up under pressure. All team members are Kingston-based, marking the first time a team from the city has medaled in a national X-C championship. And, with most of the team returning next year, and several younger reinforcements in the wings, they look well positioned to repeat, or perhaps even improve upon, their performance next year.

Among individuals, Mike Gill continued his remarkable run of improvement with a win in the 30-35 division of the masters event, and a very strong 2nd place overall in the race. Running a tactically brilliant race, Mike managed to destroy all of the runners who beat him two weeks ago at the Provincial Championships. With a year's more training, he will move up to the Open Men's race, where I hope he will be a scorer for a medal-winning P-K senior men's team! Mike's run, meanwhile, earns him his a second nomination for November Performance of the Month.

Meanwhile, Dylan Wykes ran perhaps his gutsiest national X-C ever, with a 6th place in the Senior Men's race. The worst finish by Dylan in the past 3 championships, this result nevertheless represented a significant triumph over some recent adversity. Before he was able to make up the conditioning he lost during his recovery from the World Championship Marathon in Berlin, he was felled by the flu, which put him out completely for 7 days. Then, before he could recover his shape from the flu, he was off to Japan for the Chiba International Ekiden, where he ran poorly, by his standards. He raced nationals X-C less than a week after returning from Japan. This performance earns Dylan a nomination for November performance of the month. It would have been very easy for Dylan to have settled for a much worse finish position, or to have pulled out of this race entirely; instead, he ran as he always does in this event-- as though he might win it. And he will be a stronger athlete in the future for his efforts.

November P-K Performance of the Month:

With Dylan and Mike's results added to the mix, the list of impressive November performances is now a long one (see the November 17 post for the other nominees).
And the winner for November Performance of the Month is... Michael Gill's National X-C run. As I mentioned, Mike has had a run of improvement such as I've rarely seen, and this result was by far his best. And what readers will not know is that, a year ago, Mike weighed some 50 pounds more than he does right now, and, that he is still training at far from capacity as he negotiates some chronic lower leg problems. More than this, however, is the poise and concentration he has shown in executing his races. He competes as though he has been doing it for years without interruption, which is far from the reality. (For a close look at his race execution on Saturday, have a look at the Flotrack broadcast of the masters race.)

Mike's run is now added to the list of nominees for P-K Performance of the year, the owner of which will receive a small Mizuno prize package, courtesy of Physi-Kult Running and Mizuno Canada. The performance of the year will be announced as soon as I have compiled a list of monthly winners for January through September. And here, I will need the assistance of group members, so that no worthy result is overlooked. Please send your suggestions to me, with the month in which they were done, at steve@physi-kultrunning.com. And don't be shy about nominating one of your own performances if you think it deserving. (I'll be nominating my own Canadian 45-49 record run from Ottawa for the month of May, just to show that ALL P-K performances are eligible!).

Preparing Young Athletes for the Long Run

2009-11-24T12:44:00.017-05:00

On no other topic are my coachly musings as likely to provoke reaction as on that of kid's running and youth development in general. While my ideas do sometimes provoke arguments on other subjects, in most instances people are ultimately willing to defer to the accumulated knowledge and experience of my 30-plus years of intense involvement in the sport (they shouldn't always, but they often do).On the subject of kids' running, and long term athlete development, on the other hand, many more people tend to have their own sometimes strong views, and they tend to hold them regardless of how little knowledge and experience they might have-- and especially if they have a personal stake in the argument, as the parents and/or coaches of young runners do. In this week's installment, I offer some explanation for why this might be so, along with a quick summary of my views on the topic.

In the years since I started running, the sport has grown from a fringe activity pursued by mainly by students (older ones-- high school and university),"health nuts", and other (mainly male) "oddballs", to a mass-based, multi-billion dollar health and leisure phenomenon. The simultaneous mass growth of the sport among mainstream adults, male and female, and younger school children has meant that running has become an increasingly family-oriented activity. Kids frequently now grow up accompanying their parents to road races (and sometimes even X-C and track meets), and parents now flock to watch their children compete in school races. Signs of this transformation are everywhere. The finish areas of large road races are now frequently full of children waiting to greet exhausted mothers or fathers, and the parking lots of school races now over-flow with parents taking time from their work days to watch children as young as 6 compete in school X-C and track events. This is in stark contrast to only 20 years ago, when fewer adults with small children ran, and perhaps even fewer took time off work to watch their kids compete. (In fact, when I chat with veteran runners as young as their mid-30s, we frequently remark on how few times our parents had ever watched us compete when we were younger. And I don't think I knew anyone whose parents themselves ran competitively. My own father watched me race perhaps twice in my life, and my mother, who actually became a runner herself in middle age, perhaps five times, even though I was considered a "star" performer from about the age of 15. They were supportive, of course; but they just didn't think this entailed attending all of my races.)

The advent of running as a "family" pursuit, while generally to be welcomed, has had a few important implications where kid's running and long term athlete development are concerned. Increased parental participation in running has tended to mean that kids are now becoming involved in more serious competition and training at younger ages, with their parents often acting training partners and coaches (or, at the very least, as keenly interested bystanders). When combined with an explosion of on-line, magazine, and book-based information on all aspects of running, the result has been a vast multiplication of people with both an emotional stake in the sport via their children's involvement, and a certain amount of casual expertise. (When looking for some sports-based precedent for this phenomenon, we might consider hockey in Canada or baseball, football and basketball in the U.S., in which the figure of semi-expert "parent-coach" or "sports parent" is now a stock-- and somewhat humourously stereotypical-- one.) And, just as in other sports where the parent-coach/aficionado has become a central figure, the parents of successful age class runners in particular are often the most heavily involved, sometimes claiming an expertise and authority disproportionate to their actual level of knowledge or experience-- such as an American runner-dad who launched a website to promote his home-grown coaching theories, using his precocious daughter as the basis of his authority!

When I encounter resistance to my ideas about kids running, it is most often from the parents and/or coaches of younger and more successful kids-- those who tend to be intensely involved in the sport outside of a school program. I regularly receive inquiries about coaching from the parents of children under 13(I restrict participation in my club group to kids 13 and over), and most understand, or at least offer no resistance, when I explain to them the basis of my views on kids and running. I have, however, had some pointed disagreements on this subject, and I know that my views are not always shared by other youth coaches and parents in the sport. In my experience, the parents and coaches of heavily involved young runners almost always mean well, and believe they are acting in their young athlete's best interest. They tend to believe that, if they are only facilitating and not compelling their child or athlete's involvement, they are doing no harm as far as his or her long term development and relationship with the sport are concerned. What they often unaware of-- and sometimes willfully, because of the deep pride and sheer enjoyment they experience in watching their young charges succeed-- is that intense early involvement in the sport, and the competitive success that tends to go with it, very often leads to early difficulties and premature abandonment of the sport. And, while its it true that not all young athletes take up the sport with view to reaching its highest competitive levels, and that a few do indeed manage to reach these levels following a childhood of intense early involvement, it is, or should be, the responsibility of adults to give young athletes the best chance of reaching their full potential in the sport, just as they would in any other life-endeavour, whether athletic, academic, or cultural.

Giving young runners the best chance of reaching their full potential involves, first, understanding the specificities of the sport itself, and being open to learning as much about its science and lore as possible. I have arrived at my own views about kid's running, and long term athlete development in general, through my own experience, of course, but also through familiarizing myself with whatever formal research exists on the subject (of which there is, unfortunately, not nearly enough). For what they're worth, I would summarize the results of my observations and analysis as follow:

1. Young running prodigies, defined as kids who run far ahead of the next best in their age cohort, very rarely convert their age-group success into adult, or even senior high school, success. A casual perusal of the early age-class results for North American over a 20 or 30 year period record is sufficient to bear this out. And, in fact, former prodigies seem to drop out of the sport at about the same rate and at the same ages as non-prodigies-- which is somewhat surprising, given the apparently much greater incentive for early age group stars and record holders to continue in the sport. The precise reasons for this are subject to debate, but I suspect a number of factors are at play. My own view is that the almost inevitable evaporation of prodigies' early advantage over their peers, which may have been in the first place the result of natural physical precociousness or, more often, the early introduction of systematic training, and the age at which that loss of advantage occurs, combine to create pressures on young athletes to which quitting the sport may seem, at the time, like a reasonable response. Prodigies who are no longer winning races easily, and who have often been training hard for years (either in running or in some other aerobic sport, such as swimming), must often feel as though they are falling behind when their peers begin to match them, even while they remain among the very best in their cohort. Breaking records and winning races, often against much older competitors, must, after all, be a tough act to follow in a young life, and being reduced to simply one of the best can probably seem like failure.

2. The vast majority of today's top runners, while often very good as young runners, were not what anyone would call prodigies, and quite a few were far from it. When I began thinking systematically about this problem years ago, I made a habit of collecting stories of athletes who were very ordinary age class performers, or very late-starters in the sport, yet who managed to reach its highest levels as adults. In this file can be found everything from world record holders and Olympic champions (such as Sebastian Coe, John Walker, and Robert Cheruiyot) to some of Canada's current top athletes (such as Reid Coolsaet, who has now won more National Senior Championships than he ever won age-class medals!). This pattern, perhaps more than anything else, marks distance running off as different from most other sports, and certainly from those other sports with which most North American parents would be familiar-- e.g. hockey, gymnastics, and swimming--, where intense early involvement and age group success would seem to be a stronger predictor of long term success.

3. Complete maximization of personal potential in running takes a very long time, and those who lose their enthusiasm for the training process at an early age never become as good as they might have. It is not unusual for runners to perform lifetime bests and win Olympic and World Championships medals at ages 32-plus. The oldest Olympic champions in the marathon, for instance, were 37 for men and 38 for women, and the current men's world record holder set the mark at the age of 35. This late maturation is possible because success in the sport is a function of some very basic physiological adaptations-- adaptations that can proceed for decades with the right program, and under the right circumstances. Being a very good runner also requires a certain amount of wisdom, patience, and emotional resilience-- characteristics that are developed through life experience, and are therefore found more often in adults than in children or adolescents. Very few people who have not experienced the process, or witnessed it up close, can fully understand the extent of the difficulty of progressing from a very good age class runner to a national or world class athlete, and so it is easy for them to believe that the fastest 12 year olds are the most likely to become the most successful adult runners. In reality, a successful career in running is actually made up of two or three different careers, with the success of each dependent on the careful negotiation of the last. And the challenges in each phase are all, in their own ways, equally acute. Such is the difficulty of making it "all the way" that it is a small wonder than anyone ever does it!

The lesson that can be taken from all of this, and the one I try to impart when called upon to give advice on kid's running and long term athlete development, is that the optimal plan to ensure that young runners both enjoy the sport and retain the best chance of reaching its highest levels, is one that involves relatively late-starting (age 13 or older), infrequent and mainly local competition, and non-specialization till the age of at least 15 for girls and 16 for boys. There is no evidence to support a theory that those who start systematic, year-round training at early ages gain any long term advantage on their peers, and plenty of anecdotal evidence that such early involvement may actually be counterproductive for the average kid. And, perhaps more importantly, I see no evidence that kids who start sooner and more seriously have any more fun with the sport than those who don't!

My long term observations have thoroughly convinced me that the development model prevalent in other kids' sports is wholly inappropriate for a sport like running; which, because it is based primarily on the simple development of gross physiological capacities, is primarily dril or work-based, and lacking in a significant play element. To put it another way, competitive running is not, when it pursued seriously, truly a children's sport. And, unlike the other sports that kids typically play, it is entirely possible to reach the highest levels in running without ever having pursued it seriously as a child; in fact, later starting is probably optimal for long term success. Granted, there will always be outliers who will defy the odds and build successful adult careers on the basis of intense prepubescent involvement; but, addressing the problem of development entails consideration of what is optimal in light of the fact that the long term response to training of any individual athlete cannot be known in advance. Modeling development on what we know about the average or typical path to success of top runners is the responsibility of everyone who works with young runners, particularly when it this does not involve any sacrifice of enjoyment for these athletes. The pursuit of an experimental or counter-intuitive path to development represents a risky form of self-indulgence on the part of youth coaches and the parents who support them. Defiance of the developmental odds may pay off in individual cases, but the costs of losing this gamble can be great for the young athlete. Pursuit of a more grounded and proven path, at the very least, eliminates the basis for regrets and second-guessing if and when a young athlete decides to abandon the sport before his/her full potential has been realized.

Fartlek: The Workout That Dare Not Speak Its Name

2009-11-17T12:34:00.005-05:00

This week, I want to say a few words of praise and clarification about the Swedish workout with the flatulent name-- fartlek. But first, some P-K Performance of the Month Nominees.

This being November, all of the nominees made their mark in X-C events, and at the recent school and club provincial championships in particular. Here are my picks, in order of the age of the nominees, oldest to youngest:

Myra McDonald, who won the women's 50-59 age division at the provincial masters championships in her first ever race "over the country". In fact, Myra is a rookie racer in all disciplines, having only joined the group and started training seriously a year ago! Adding to her accomplishment, she ran only 50 seconds or so over her road 5k personal best over the very hilly course in Newmarket. (Times are always a tricky measure of X-C performance, but, judging by the recent performances of her competitors on certified road courses, Myra's run would certainly have been a significant P.B.)

Michael Gill (now a repeat nominee), who finished the same hilly 5k course that Myra ran in a time only 15 secs off of his already huge breakthrough road performance from last month. A very conservative estimate would put this time in the low 16min range on a standard road course, meaning that Mike has chopped at least another 30 seconds from his time in only a month, bringing his total improvement since starting in the group up to a whopping 2:30! Honestly, I have never seen anything quite like this. (And, as only I would know, he may be just getting started. There is still much more he could-- and will-- be doing in training over the next year or so.)

Nick McGraw, who dominated the junior boys race at the club provincial championships in Newmarket. For those familiar with Nick's excellent record of performance in X-C and triathlon, this won't come as as surprise. However, this was his first serious X-C race in almost 2 years! It was also the result of very little serious preparation since returning from his many travels over the past 18 months. As his long time running coach, Nick has surprised me with his performances on several other occasions; but, this may topped them all. Nick will line up again in two weeks time at the Nationals, where he will be a member of P-K's very strong-- even potential medal-winning-- junior boys team.

Jeff Archer, a local senior high school athlete who has seen remarkable improvement over the course of his season this year. Last year, Jeff placed 57th in the school provincial championships in a time some 2:30mins behind that of the winner. This month, he finished 10th in the same race, some 55 secs behind the winner-- a performance far in advance of the average rate of improvement for an athlete of his age. And, to top off his school championship performance, he finished a close 4th in the club provincial race a week later in Newmarket, and even looked like he had a chance to win it in the final km! Jeff will join Nick in two weeks as a member of the P-K junior boys team at nationals, his first trip to this fall classic.

Adrien Noble, another local high schooler. Adrien joined the group a year ago and has made very steady improvement ever since. Like Jeff, he put the exclamation point on his progress this month at the school and club X-C provincials. Not even qualifying for school provincials last season, Adrian won the qualifying race this year in convincing fashion, and finished a strong 18th at the championship itself. Then, a week later, correcting the tactical errors that probably kept him out of the top 10 in the school race, Adrien finished a close 8th in the provincial race. Too young to run for the junior boys team at nationals, Adrien will now take a well earned, albeit short, break from training.

All results from these race can be found at: www.trackdatabase.com

I will no doubt add further nominees following the Nationals weekend on the 28th, after which I will declare a November Performance of the Month, the owner of which will join October winner Lauren Taylor as a nominee for P-K Performance of the Year, to be announced some time in January. And nominations from members themselves are welcome. (If fact, I will be asking for members to help me select nominees for Performance of the Month going back to January of 09).

Fartek: The Workout That Dare Not Speak Its Name

If you're looking to feel silly and slightly uncomfortable, try saying the word "Fartlek" to a group of primary school students. Even if you're talking to a group of keen young runners, it will do no good to follow this up by explaining that the word is actually Swedish, meaning "speed-play". The point is, you will have said the word "fart" without any comic intent, and they will find it hilarious.

In its original form, fartlek running was defined by the use of spontaneous changes in speed introduced within the course of an otherwise easy, aerobic training run. Its Nordic inventors intended it as a kind of hybrid of easy, recovery-pace running and formal interval training; and, like a lot of training techniques, it was given rise to by a combination of necessity and opportunity. Fartlek training was born in the forests of Scandinavia as a means of taking advantage of the opportunity that the natural environment afforded, and of making do without easy access to a running tracks or stopwatch-bearing coaches (there was, recall, a time before convenient, affordable and easily portable hand-held timing devices). Its pioneers also intuited that it was perhaps a more accurate simulation of the precise demands of actual long distance races, and of off-track races in particular, than the then standard track interval session run at faster than race speeds and with more passive recovery periods. Early fartlek sessions would have athletes running freely and picking their own landmarks between which to do pick-ups of varying speed and length. Later, with its broader international dissemination, fartlek would become more formalized in terms of the length and intensity of the accelerations, and more tailored to the needs of athletes in specific event ranges. It remains, however, an ideal way to combine the volume of a longer, easy run with the intensity of a track interval session, as well as an occasional alternative to the grind of standard interval and tempo sessions.

It it important to understand, however, that fartlek training is not form of compromise between two more ideal forms of running-- easy recovery running and hard interval training, or simply a psychological respite; it is its own form of training, and it offers its own unique psychological and (I think) physical benefits. Fartlek training is ideal preparation for longer, off-track races in particular. What makes it ideal in this respect is the imperative to recover on the fly, to accelerate when already running at a fairly high heart and respiration rate, and to focus throughout a longer, continuous bout of running. And the top speeds in fartlek workouts are typically no faster than those reached in a race of 5kms or longer, with the average pace in a good session frequently matching exactly the athlete's proper tempo run pace. The active recoveries and the typically longer duration of the fartlek session tend to prevent athletes from ever approaching their 1500 or 3k paces, forcing them to spend more time at their actual long distance race paces rather than above or below them, which frequently happens when the training plan includes only easy runs, interval sessions and tempo runs. So, while the foundation of any correct training plan remains the MV02 interval session and the tempo run, punctuated by the easy, aerobic run, the fartlek session remains a vital adjunct. It provides both psychological respite from these other kinds of sessions; but, more importantly, it offers a useful simulation of the physical and mental demands of long distance racing, which include the ability to respond to mid and late race changes in effort and speed, and the mental discipline to maintain focus under prolonged stress.

As my most of my athletes will have learned, I have a few favourite fartlek sessions, including:

-the 60/40, in which athlete runs for 60 secs @ 5k race pace and recovers for 40 seconds at or slightly faster than typical easy run pace; and

-the 6 to 1 "hybrid" tempo and interval-pace session, in which the athlete completes a series of runs descending from 6 minutes mins down to 1 minute, taking 1 minute recoveries @ typical easy run pace between each segment, and attempting to increase his/her pace from tempo speed to down to interval speed in the final 3 segments of the session.

The fartlek form, however, allows for infinite variations, and I never tire of inventing and self-testing new combinations of speed, recovery and total volume. And the introduction of different terrain expands the possibilities that much more.

So ingenious is the idea contained in fartlek running that it was bound to be invented at some point. It's just a little unfortunate for us anglos that the Swedes, whose word for speed happens to be "fart", got there first!

X-Country: A Race Only a Mudder Could Love

2009-11-03T20:07:00.006-05:00

Before I rhapsodize on the unlikely virtues of cross country running-- that most gritty and exhausting of disciplines-- I'd like to recognize the first of my Performance of the Month honorees. The nod for October goes to Lauren Taylor, who continued her remarkable trajectory just this past week at the Eastern Ontario provincial qualifier. On a challenging 5k course in Renfrew, Ontario, Lauren ran 24:30 to finish 63 in a field of over 100 girls, most of them a year older than her. As I mentioned last week, in her first two years of high school running, Lauren had become used to running alone, at the back of the back. This year, however, utterly undeterred in both training and racing, Lauren has managed to make remarkable strides, shaving over a minute per kilometer(!) from her race times. This past season, Lauren has offered dramatic testimony to the remarkable power of simply sticking with it. I have met fewer than a handful of athletes with Lauren's pure drive and unblinking determination. She is a beacon for all who have chosen to accept running's simple challenge: to remake ourselves, cell by cell.

Lauren's name will go into the pot for consideration for P-K Performance of the Year, with the overall winner (chosen by me, with help from you)being announced in December. Since I only began the contest this month, I'm going to have to review performances for the entire year, starting last January, in search of suitable nominees. For the next few weeks, I'm going to ask P-K members to help me by plumbing their memories in search of worthy performances for each month of the year. And remember, the main criteria is not the objective level of the performance (or else Dylan Wykes would win every month!); it is the level of performance relative to the age, the preexisting abilities of the runner in question, and/or the conditions overcome in the accomplishment of the performance (although Dylan could still win it on these bases too). And, with X-C season still upon us, the contest is far from over.

And, I am happy to announce that the Performance of the Year winner will receive a small Mizuno prize package.

Cross country running: What is there to love about it? It is exhausting and frequently filthy. It is run during the some of the worst weather of the year, and there is no chance for a P.B. And yet so many of us, particularly we 'lifers', do love it, in spite of its unique rigours and general unpleasantness. In fact, we tend to love it almost more than we love running itself.

Like so many of the best things in life, X-C running is an acquired taste. And those of us who love it tend to have acquired this taste early in our running lives, usually in school. The taste for cross country is so slow to take, in fact, that most of us didn't even know we loved it until years after our first leafy, muddy foray. Cross country running was, for many of us, the first kind of real distance running we ever did, since it came first in the school sports calendar. Most of us simply did it because it was there, and because we liked running better, and were better suited to it in body and temperament, than the other fall sports on offer. At first, there was only the difficulty-- the cold, the mud, the steep hills, the struggling through the first colds and flus of the year, and the crowds of other competitors, pushing us, stepping on us, and blocking our way along narrow trails-- and perhaps a small taste of victory here and there. Later, though, cross country-- its intensity, feel, and its smells-- would become intermingled with our melancholy nostalgia for autumn and our early school days in general. (And runners, being naturally comfortable in our own company, and given to introspection, are often prone to melancholy nostalgia.) For those of us who continued to do the sport beyond our high school years, memories of cross country racing, and of traveling with our team mates to run cross country races, would become integral to some of our fondest recollections of early adult life. Many of us would begin lifelong friendships and love affairs on cross country training fields and race courses, and on the buses that delivered us to these places. By our mid-20s, many of us would have acquired an attachment to the sport that would one day see us return to stand on chalked start lines, beside wooden states festooned with coloured tape-- red for the left turns, right for the white, just like the political spectrum-- long after our muscles had lost their bounce and our hair, if we still had it, its original hue. To run cross country, we would discover, is to time-travel: In the throes of competition, chest burning in the cool, dry air, and nose full of the sweet, musty smells of grass, mud and fall decay-- the very same air and the same smells as on our first childhood trips "over the country"-- we discover that less about us has changed than we thought, and we find comfort in this amidst the extreme challenge of the activity itself.

I am, of course, a running 'lifer', and I share this love of cross country, for all of these reasons. As a coach of late-starting masters runners, however, I have been pleased to discover that its harsh appeal is not confined to its power to evoke the past. New runners certainly find X-C difficult, more difficult than the road races which which they are more familiar, and they are often a little baffled by the preparations required to tackle it-- the shoes with the long spikes, the special clothing required to repel the fall and winter elements, and the training over soggy, hilly, and lumpy terrain; but, once they have had a taste, they are often found returning for more. Much of the appeal of cross country running is simply the extremity of the challenge, which is exhilarating in itself. After that comes the temptation to mastery: having tried it once, many runners are often interested to see how much better they could do with a little more practice. New entrants to cross country running are also subject to infection by the enthusiasm of those us who have done it many times before. There is bound to be some curiosity to see and experience what the fuss is all about. Finally, these days, many adults are attracted to X-C as a result of watching their children take to the trails in school races (with many no doubt discovering that it is far harder than it looks!).

Lately, it has occurred to me that X-C has another universal appeal for serious runners, and in particular those living at more northern latitudes. Training for and racing X-C is, quite simply, the best way to get through November without resorting to alcohol, reclusion, and other acts of quiet desperation. Without X-C to occupy our minds and bodies, it would be far more difficult to face the prospect of increasingly dark days, the imminent prospect of winter, training on the pavement (or worse, the treadmill), and a horizon of meaningful races far to distant to even glimpse. It is true that the fruits of spring and summer success are sown in the darkest months of the year; but, that is a mere abstraction when confronted with a 4:30pm sunset, on a rainy, windy and cold Wednesday afternoon, following a trying day at work. Having the most important X-C races of the season in November nicely dispatches running's bleakest month. With the focus squarely on conquering the hills, mud and cold, and in the company of crowds of brightly clad fellow enthusiasts, November is put squarely in its place.

No matter where you are in North America, it is not too late to register for your local,regional, or national X-C championship! Check your federation or local club's website for details.

P-K Performance of the Month/Year Recognition

2009-10-26T13:38:00.005-04:00

Although I should have initiated this at the beginning of the racing season back in April, I want to begin recognizing top competitive performances by P-K members each month in the form of a Performance of the Month and, eventually, a Performance of the Year, nod. (Actually, I'd like to come up with an actual prize-- perhaps some Mizuno foot wear or apparel- for the Performance of the Year award. I'll be working on that). The Performance of the Month/Year will not necessarily go to the fastest performance, or to a winning performance; it will go to an exceptional performance, relative to a number of variables determined by me. These variable with have to do with things like the percentage of improvement shown, the athlete's age and level of experience, and the obstacles that he/she may have had to overcome in the process of recording the result in question. With so many athletes and so many performances to consider each month(I will consider local, on-line and junior members), the process of selecting a "best" will not be an exact science; but, I pledge to do my best to ensure that all worthy performances are considered. And nominations are certainly welcomed. My hope is to offer some peer recognition for great feats of racing, and to inform the ever growing list of P-K athletes-- most of whom will not have met on another, or perhaps even know of one another's existence-- about what their fellow members are up to on the field of play.

A short list of performances that have caught my eye in the past four weeks include, in the order in which they were run:

-50 year old Bob McGraw's 17:00 5k, which represented a more than 40 second improvement on his masters personal best, and the fruit of more than a year of consistent, high level training.

-Emily Tallen's 16:45 in the same race-- her 3rd best time at the distance-- after being pushed to the ground and buried at the start, and sustaining a nasty bruise to her knee that would require 3 days off of running.

-42 year old Troy Cox's 1:12:42 performance in the Goodlife Toronto Half Marathon-- a very fine master's time, and an outright personal best.

-50 year old Clive Morgan's outright win of the PEC Half Marathon.

-48 year old Agathe Nicholson's 18:53 5k in Rochester NY, during a marathon taper, on a slow course, in windy and cold conditions.

-31 year old Mike Gill's 16:37 for 5k. Mike joined P-K in the spring of this year and his over-all focus and attention to detail has kept him improving steadily. But his ability to rise to the occasion in a race situation is remarkable. This race represented a 2 minute improvement over his starting fitness, and an almost 1 minute improvement in a single month. I always encourage racers to aim high, and to trust their conditioning, but I would never have thought to instruct Mike to pace for this kind of time at this stage of his program!

-High school runner Lauren Taylor's entire grade 11 season thus far. Until this season, Lauren had never beaten another runner in a race, period. This season, chopping more than a minute per km(!) off of her previous best race pace, she has moved close to the middle of the pack! Through it all, Lauren's resolve has never wavered. Always a very diligent trainer, she has really come to enjoy the fruits of her labour this season.

-Rejean Chiasson's 3 minute personal best over Half Marathon (69:30 down to 66:30), and runner-up finish, this past weekend in Niagara Falls. As we all know, the faster we are to begin with, the harder it becomes to make significant improvements; so, Rejean's run is all the more impressive. No one has more drive and focus in training than R.C., so this represents a very well deserved breakthrough result.

Congratulations all, and I'll pick a winner next week.

Allowing Ourselves to Learn

2009-10-19T12:41:00.004-04:00

Many years ago, in the hour before what was to be my fastest ever 10k, I made a pledge to myself that I have honoured ever since. If I run well today, I promised, I would never again worry about how my body felt while warming up for a race. As I had a hundred times before, I jogged through my pre-race warm-up that evening feeling so tired and sluggish that I wondered how it would be possible to reach and sustain my goal race pace. If four and half minute kilometer pace was making me feel uncomfortable, how would I ever manage the two minute and fifty-two second ks that my training had told me I was capable of!? I had, of course, felt weak and sluggish many times before what would turn out to be strong races, but I had never before promised myself to remember precisely how I felt in order that I might stop worrying about it for good. Each time in the past, all of my pre-race anxieties would be forgotten in the rush of excitement of the race and the great wash of relief when it was all over. And, when I logged my race report, I would rarely mention how I felt beforehand, only how I felt during, and the race result itself. What I had decided to do differently this time was to set my emotions aside and allow myself to consciously learn something from my racing that would benefit me next time out. We're always learning from our races and workouts, of course, but the knowledge that most of us accumulates is unconscious and intuitive, such that, over time, it is difficult to catalogue precisely what we know, how we came to learn it, and what it felt like not to know it.

Much of what I do as a coach these days, both during routine weeks and on race days, consists of spotting and recording patterns in the way my athletes respond to their training stimuli and racing experiences. Through my communications with athletes, I then try to pass on what I discern so that the athlete will be better able to participate in the process of his or her own coaching, both through providing more meaningful feedback, and through developing a deeper, more intuitive understanding of their own training process. My job is made much easier, and the coaching process much smoother and more productive, however, when athletes allow themselves to accumulate their own body of experiential and intuitive knowledge, and when they begin to record it, both mentally and in their actual training logs.

Over the years, I've discovered that some athletes are far better at both learning from me and from their own experience than are others, and that this has nothing to do with basic intelligence or innate running ability. The difference, I think, can be explained in terms of the ability of some athletes to set their emotions aside long enough to allow their rational faculties to fully apprehend the training and racing process. Emotional drive is, of course, absolutely crucial for success in this and any other sport, and those with more of it tend to enjoy greater success than those with less of it, when all other things are equal. Athletes with a greater emotional investment in what they're doing also, I think, have a richer experience of sport than those who manage to do it completely dispassionately. The best athletes, however, are better able to confine their emotions to the moments when they are useful-- such as in the difficult sections of a hard race or workout, or when they are forced by injury into a tedious cross-training regime-- such that they have the mental space to learn from what is going on around and within them. With many athletes, and younger ones in particular, I find myself having the same conversations, and trying to impart the same information, over and over again at workouts and before races. With these athletes, I'm always on the alert for the ideal "teachable moment"; but, the lessons are often slow to stick. These are the athletes who constantly worry about how they feel and doubt their fitness beforehand; who, in blaze of emotion, ignore carefully plotted pre-race plans in favour of "how they feel"; and, who forget everything that happened before and during a race or workout almost immediately after. Athletes like this are frequently very talented, and their passion and free-spiritedness often produce spectacular performance breakthroughs; but, more often, their fire and spontaneity lead to failure, disappointment, and confusion. And then there is the flip-side of the emotional coin: those athletes whose fear and anxiety repeatedly prevent them from taking risks and taking full advantage of the physical adaptations they have earned through their training. In the end, athletes who habitually put passion over reason tend to have shorter and less fulfilling career than those who strive to manage their feelings long enough to learn from their experiences.

Unfortunately, there is no simple secret to setting our emotions aside long enough to begin to learn from our own training and racing experiences. As athletes mature and gain more experience, learning to learn becomes easier; the ability, however, will always comes more easily to some than to others. The best way to become a better student of our own training and racing, however, is simply to keep a good training log. The next step is to learn what information is most useful to record; and, more important than things like daily training heart rates, body weights, and calories consumed, which rarely vary much, is subjective information, such as our thoughts and feelings before, during, and after our races, and at different stages in our training year. Among the things I've learned from recording subjective information in my training logs is that I will tend to feel in a race almost exactly the same on average as I did in my final two workouts before, regardless of my basic conditioning, or how I felt immediately prior to the race, whether good or bad. This information has both greatly calmed my nerves before races that my warm-up has suggested might go badly, and prepared me to face racing situations in which, in spite of feeling normal in the warm-up, things might not go my way. I've also come to learn from my training logs that periods of training that I remember as having gone uniformly well-- simply because they preceded a very good race, or included a particularly memorable workout-- often contained many more sub-par workouts and anxieties over possible injuries and other physical problems than my gilded memories suggested. This information has many times worked to allay fears that perhaps my training was not going well enough to prepare me for an upcoming race.

Short of having a good training log (which, of course, takes years to compile), the especially nervous or emotional athlete can begin to create some space in which to learn simply by spending some time post-race revisiting his/her feelings beforehand, both immediately prior to the race and in the key workouts leading in, with an eye towards better understanding and mastering any negative tendencies they might have. Often all it takes to prevent our emotional drives, fears and anxieties from interfering with our performance (to say nothing of spoiling the whole experience of racing itself)is a little self-knowledge gleaned from the study of our own basic emotional tendencies. This way, we are better able to get out of the way, so to speak, of our own well trained bodies long enough to let them do their thing, and confine our emotional drives to moment when they are most useful. Legendary American coach Jack summed-up this problem nicely when explaining how best to approach racing the marathon: run the the first 3/4 with the head, he said, and the last 1/4 with the heart. I would add that this works all the better when we have first used our heads, meaning our rational minds, to understand not just how our personal bodies work, but how our sub-conscious mind and emotions behave during the process of training and racing.

When to Pull The Plug?

2009-10-05T21:21:00.005-04:00

No, not that plug! However, while I've no intention of getting up on my hind legs to talk about medical ethics, the question of whether and when to put a bad workout or race out of its misery does have something of a personal moral dimension for some runners. My own recent DNF at the Syracuse Festival of Races 5k-- which, at it turned out, occurred at about the same moment as one of my athletes' steadfast refusal to abandon his marathon race, despite being hobbled by a preexisting calf problem that began slowing him down as early as the 8k mark-- gave me pause to consider this, for some, sensitive issue. What, I wondered, made it easier for me to bail out of a 5k race (and it was a pretty easy decision by the time I made it) than it was for my athlete to let go of his marathon, particularly when, it seemed to me, he was putting so much more at risk than I was?

I should start by saying that I have actually dropped out of more races and workouts than many runners have finished! It's not that I do it very often; this recent DNF was only my second in a decade, although I have ditched many workouts in that time. It's just that I've started such a vast number of workouts and entered so many different races, and under such a wide variety of circumstances, that even 5 percent DNF rate equals something like 50 races and 500 workouts! I'm never been happy about abandoning a race or workout, but I will do it in an instant, subject to certain conditions; these are also the conditions under which I tell my athletes that it's O.K. to pull the plug. And, I've relaxed my rules a bit since turning 40, since getting older has rather drastically reduced the number of races I can safely attempt in a year. My "DNF rules" are informed by a basic calculus concerning the probable net effect of struggling to finish a race on my ability to maximize my racing performance in that season. Basically, if I am obviously sick or injured (and particularly if I'm bothered by a a problem I suspected beforehand might flare up), and my condition is clearly going to both negatively effect my performance and quite probably going to reduce my ability to train and race in the near future, I will abandon the effort. In the case of my DNF on Sunday, I started the race feeling under the weather with a nagging cold for the entire week prior, but hoping I would come around just in time (which I often have in similar circumstances). When it was obvious, both in the way I felt and the performance I was putting together, that this was distinctly not my day, I shut it down without hesitation. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, racing or training hard whilst unwell has, particularly since turning 40, has been the chief cause of sudden injury for me). My only other DNF of the past few years actually happened earlier this year, when I pulled out of the national track 10,000 at 6k in hot and humid conditions. In this instance, it was because I had no chance of meeting my time goal-- the only goal I had going in-- and fighting to the finish would have meant squandering a one of my precious few race efforts of the year, and costing me a week or more of recovery time. In both instances, I made a calculated decision to abandon at a very particular stage in the race and left the field without regrets.

By why, one might ask, do I have rules at all? Why not just allow myself to abandon any race or workout that I simply don't feel like finishing? Although I don't see the decision to finish or not finish a race as in any way a moral one (and I find it a little odd when people take pride in having finished every race they've ever started no matter what), I do think that runners who want to be their best should not get in the habit of abandoning races or workouts simply because they're not going according to plan. Very difficult or unsuccessful workout and races have a very important role to play in the development of a strong racing mind. Finishing when it would be both psychologically and physically easier to let it all go is very important in building the kind of mental focus required to get the most out of one's body on the days when it is ready to deliver. As my DNF rules suggest, I certainly think this can be taken to counter-productive extremes; but, I do think that under all but the above circumstances runners should attempt to complete races and workouts to the best of their ability on the day. An uncompromising attitude is a powerful tool in realizing one's full athletic potential. Besides, I've often found that interesting and surprising things happen in the midst of what seem to be failed workouts and races. Sticking it out has often given me the opportunity to salvage something of value in an otherwise dismal outing-- a stronger than expected final repeat or a few places gained unexpectedly in the late stages-- something that becomes a springboard to a much improved performance next time out.

Finally, as a coach, I think it's important to let the athlete make the final decision when it comes to finishing or not finishing a race or workout. For some athletes, the decision to finish workout or race, even when the risk of injury, illness and lost training time is great, has a deeper personal significance. Likewise, the decision to abandon a particular race may be related to factors beyond the scope of the coach athlete relationship. In either case, while I may offer my own point of view, my policy is to respect the autonomy of the athlete when it comes to the decision to "pull the plug". So, while I certainly found it ironic that, at the very moment I was deeming it unwise to run but two more hard kilometers in my 5k race, one of my own athletes was deciding to push on for another 34(!)kms on a gimpy calf, I realized that what was ultimately at issue was our respective relationships to the sport itself. My decision to stop and his decision to persevere, while polar opposites in one sense, were equally expressive of our own uniquely personal reasons for running and racing in the first place, with neither being right or wrong-- another reminder that running is always about much more than simply running.

P-K Profile #4-- Bob McGraw

2009-09-29T21:23:00.005-04:00

This week, I offer another in my series of profiles of group athletes (it's been a while since the last one!), this one of local member Dr. Bob McGraw, who's been on something of a tear over the past year, making life miserable for his competitors in the 50-55 age bracket.

It feels as though Bob's been close to the group for a number of years (in part because his kids have run in the junior group since primary school), but it's only been in the past 18 months that he's been a regular feature at local workouts. An emergency meds doc, father of three, and travel enthusiast, Bob hasn't always had the time to train as consistently as he'd like, although he's managed to keep a hand in it all his life. A multi-sport competitor in the early years of the sport in Vancouver and Kingston, Bob would eventually begin to pare his athletic life down to running as the demands of his personal and professional life grew. After a couple of injury-related false starts with the group several years ago, Bob finally found his groove in the winter of 2008, and has been doing some of his best running since turning 50 in that year.

On the road, track and trail, Bob is the picture of calm, power and economy. I never saw him compete as a younger athlete; but, with some 70s era hair and a vintage mesh singlet, I imagine he'd have looked like one of the great European athletes of that era-- short, barrel chested, and light of foot! At 50, his stride is still smooth, light, and compact. (As I do with many of my talented masters athletes, I often wonder what Bob might have done in his teens and 20s had he elected to train seriously.)

Bob's recent run of racing success began with his 1:19:30 age-class victory at the Niagara Half Marathon, his first race of this length in years, and continued a month later at the National Masters Cross Country Championships, where he was the oldest member of our winning men's 40-49 team. A complete cycle of winter training, including some frigid tempo and fartlek sessions around our regular neighborhood circuit and a stack of very solid interval sessions on the indoor track a the Royal Military College, left him poised to rewrite his masters bests this spring and summer. Work, travel, and suboptimal weather conditions kept Bob from hitting his time goals in the first half of the racing season, but he started the second half with a bang, running a huge masters personal best of 17:00 at the Army Run 5k a little more than a week ago, winning the category by 40-odd seconds. Since he was involved in a fall at the start of this race, and since he elected to maintain a moderately high training volume going into it (his seasonal goal races being the provincial and national X-C championships), we can no doubt expect him to repeat, or even improve on, the quality of this performance before the year is out (fellow Canadian 50-55 competitors, consider yourselves warned!). And, having seemingly found the sweet spot in his work and family routine, I expect Bob will continue to be a top performer among the 50-somethings for as long as he'd care to.

The Devil in the Details

2009-09-21T14:19:00.010-04:00

Why do some athletes who seem to have everything going for them-- a knowledgeable coach, a solid program, and plenty of apparent natural ability-- nevertheless seem to consistently under-perform, and generally fail to develop their long term potential? And why do others, sometimes using the same coach and program, and with the same, or even sometimes less, apparent basic ability, go on to enjoy long and successful careers? Could it simply be a matter of luck?; the unseen and genetically determined "trainability" of some athletes and not others?; or, perhaps, could be it be some athletes' genetically determined proneness to injury and illness (another type of basic luck)? The truth is, there is no way to know for certain the factors that explain success and failure in athletes who appear to be equally endowed. Such is the complexity of the training process-- which is also, we can't forget, a "living" process, given the complex imbrication of our training with our everyday, non-running routines. Nevertheless, while a fully scientific answer to this question may elude us, a look inside the daily lives of a very large numbers of athletes-- such as I've been afforded in the course of a 30-year involvement in the sport-- offers certain hints. If fact, my experience strongly suggests that some athletes, for whom all other things seem roughly equal, enjoy dramatically different degrees of long term success because of the way that they manage the seemingly minor details of the training process-- what we might refer to as the supports of the training process, as distinct from the actual business of completing runs and workouts.

That the devil of repeated failure seemed to reside more often in the details of an athlete's quotidian routine became apparent to me as I began to look more closely for an explanation of my own periodic failures and set-backs. And my conclusion was gradually confirmed through subsequent observations of the daily habits of the many other athletes with whom I would come into contact over the years, whether as a friend, competitor or coach.

Using my years of detailed training logs, I was able to discover that there was invariably a moment, usually in the form of a single poor decision, such as an ill-timed or too intense workout session, or late night out, that triggered a series of events (often involving further poor decisions) leading to the periodic collapse of my training or racing. When I was younger, some of these initial episodes of bad judgment had simply to do with lack of knowledge or experience (I was, after all, largely self-coached). Later in my career, however, these bad decisions, when they occurred-- and they occurred less frequently the older I got-- had less to do the not knowing than with my occasional impatience, complacency, corner-cutting, or ill-advised risk-taking. I had, in particular, a marked tendency to force my return to hard training following a bout of illness (particularly common when my children were small). To this day, the vast majority (something like 90%) of all the injuries I've suffered have been sustained within a week of a lay-off caused by viral illness. After something like the 3rd or 4th repetition of this pattern, I began to discern it as, in fact, a pattern; nevertheless, I still occasionally took undue risks following minor illnesses, although, of course, usually without incident. It was the fact that I didn't always get hurt following a cold that lead me to take the risks I did, and the more time that elapsed between my last illness/injury episode, the more I would be willing to take the risk of doing a hard session during or immediately after a viral infection. Of course, every time an injury did occur, and I was forced into the pool or onto the elliptical again, I would realize that I had made the same mistake yet again, and I would remind myself of how stupid it was to risk losing 10 or more future workouts-- to say nothing of the tedium of obligatory cross-training and rehab-- in order to save just one workout this week. All the higher level sophistication and general determination in the world would amount to nothing, I would eventually conclude, without proper attention to the details. Like Achilles with his heal, I surmised, we were no stronger than our weakest link-- which was more likely to reside in some apparently trivial detail than one of our basic training principles.

As it would happen, I would sustain relatively few injuries or other set-backs in my career, and would enjoy long stretches of successful racing right into my 40s. And, the older I got, the more I realized that my long term success had more to do with my ability to recognize and attend to the smaller details of my program than with, say, "good genetics", or some other form of happy chance. In spite of my occasional tendency to take risks around illnesses, I began to realize that I must have been getting most of the details in my training and general preparation right most of the time, and probably more often than many of my equally talented and similarly hard-training, but more oft-injured, competitors. Sure enough, as I got to know some of my competitors as good friends, and saw first hand the many small lapses in good judgment they frequently made-- from pushing through workouts while obviously (to me, anyway) in the early stages of injury, to refusing to re-schedule or abandon workouts when obviously over-tired, to neglecting their strength routines-- I began to realize that, in many cases, their apparent "bad luck" had a much more specific cause: poor day-to-day judgment and lack of attention to the detailed supports of their training processes. And, on the other side of the coin, I began to notice that athletes who were doing better than I was were most often the ones who had developed, and were successfully adhering to, even more sophisticated support systems. Eventually, and finally, my entry into coaching would convince me that the devil of repeated failure was most often in the details of an athlete's training process.

Becoming a coach has entailed developing a familiarity with the personalities and daily habits of people normally reserved for psychologists and immediate family members! In addition to leading to some deep and abiding friendships, it has been an indelible lesson in the importance in athletic success of managing one's day-to-day affairs and controlling one's occasionally counter-productive impulses. Everyone I have ever coached has professed a keen desire to succeed; yet, some have proven much better at attending to the small threads in the fabric of their training programs, which, if allowed to come loose, will lead to the unraveling of the entire cloth. It is these athletes who have tended to enjoy the most long term success. Proper attention to most of the details in question-- from getting good sleep on a consistent basis, to managing illness, to maintaining a minimal core strength routine, to communicating with me immediately about possible injury problems (and following my advice), to simply following the training program as written-- is well within the realm of the practical for the average athlete, no matter how time-pressed. In fact, my busiest athletes are frequently the most diligent in the management of their daily support routines. Those who don't manage these crucial details effectively, I have come to understand, simply do not, deep down, believe they are as important as they are to their over-all success. Some who have not always been good at managing such details have, over time, and as a result of bitter experience, learned to become better at the job (much as I myself did). For others, on the other hand, a tendency to want to "get on with it" and never mind the fuss, is an ingrained trait of personality. In these instances, consistent success and long term talent development remain frustrating up-hill battles. This kind of athlete is, in fact, the most likely to abandon the sport prematurely, blaming "bad luck", in some form or other, for their failure to thrive.

When it comes to negligence in the maintenance of proper training-support routines, special comment must be reserved for the teenage athlete. Proper attention to details like rest and nutrition requires ability to understand the link between present actions and future consequences; this is an ability that most teenagers lack, simply because they are teenagers. Nonetheless, some young runners take lack of attention to detail and generally bad day-to-day judgment to new heights. Teenage runners generally want to succeed as much as adult runners-- perhaps more-- and their decision to pursue this most difficult of sports marks them as a special breed within their age cohort; nevertheless, the same kid who will complete every run and workout without fail, will also, without warning, decide to stay up half the night partying the week before his most important race of the season, and while already suffering from a cold! The teenage athlete is also remarkably difficult to sell on the merits of proper nutrition, strength training, and even simple injury rehab, such as icing or stretching. They are also sometimes reluctant to obey basic workout instructions, preferring, lack of experience notwithstanding, to do things their own way. And, amazingly, some asthmatic teenagers will repeatedly forget to bring their inhalers along to workouts and races, even when the simple, side-effect-free, administering of said medication means the difference between success and failure. In short, teenage athletes are often remarkable in their ability to confront the bigger challenge of being runners-- the regular completion of workouts and runs; but, just as often, they are reluctant to register the importance of getting the details right. Unfortunately for them, this makes them an excellent negative example for all of us.

In the end, I'm convinced that most unsuccessful runners of any age or basic ability level (from potential elite to age class recreational) are undone by a failure to do what they know, or ought reasonably to know (because the have probably been told!), is correct than by unknown variables, such as their basic genetic inheritance. Failed runners often speak of injury-proneness, or the basic, genetically-determined inability to handle the required training loads, in accounting for their troubles. And there are, of course, rare examples of otherwise genetically blessed athletes whose bodies are in some other way irreparably flawed, causing them to break down under the burden of even modest training. Upon closer examination, however, many more unsuccessful runners have failed because of their own repeated lack of attention to the important details that sustain any training effort, and because of a repeated inability or unwillingness to learn from their mistakes. In my experience, most runners are actually capable of training much longer, harder, and more consistently than they ever have; yet, many cannot progress because of a repeated failure to attend to the seeming minutiae that so often make the difference between success on the one hand and injury or poor race performance on the other. I conclude, then, with my list of the most common neglected areas of detail among runners, young, old, elite and average. These are mostly simple and easy to manage variables that most reasonably experienced runners know are important but nevertheless often neglect:

1. The treatment and proper rehab of common injuries, including the timing of return from injury.

2. The management of effort levels on a daily basis (i.e. failure to reign-in the very common "harder is always better" impulse).

3. The maintenance of a simple strength program to shore-up known areas of weakness.

4. Attention to basic nutrition (a fast improving area, it must be said).

5. Attention to sleep requirements and sleep problems (sometimes more complicated, admittedly).

6. Deciding when and how much to race (many runners enter races for the wrong reasons, at the wrong times, and generally race too often).

7. The choice of pacing strategies in races (many people insist on exemplifying Einstein's definition of insanity when it comes to their choice of racing tactics-- to wit: Repeat the same failed strategy over and over again with the expectation of different results).

The Retail Running Clinic: Boon or bane?

2009-09-14T12:10:00.013-04:00

Is it possible that a phenomenon-- the shoe store running clinic-- that introduces thousands of people to running might also be bad for the sport? And, is it "elitist" for a lifetime competitive runner like me to even entertain such a notion? A recent inquiry from a potential on-line client-- and current participant in a well known store-based marathon training clinic-- gave me occasion to revisit my views on this favourite discussion topic among running veterans and other aficionados.

When we attend an event such as the Ottawa Race Weekend, or any of the half a dozen Canada Running Series events, and see throngs of runners sporting those now familiar tokens of store clinic participation (the "back-flap" jacket and "ammo belt"-style water carrier) and dutifully stopping for the 60 second walk break that is the orthodoxy within the store clinic-based running movement, it is hard to argue that this phenomenon has been anything but beneficial for the sport of road racing, even, perhaps, at the elite level. "Ammo-belts", jackets and all, these throngs of new runners represent a significant stream of revenue for road race organizers (to say nothing of the stores that sell these accessories!), part of which sometimes goes to prize money purses for race winners. The mass entry of store clinic runners onto the road race scene has also been accompanied by steep spike in road race entry fees over the past 20 years-- a rate far above inflation, for sure-- meaning that each of these new runners has been worth 2 or even 3 "old-school" runners in terms of dollars generated. In many ways, events like the Ottawa Race Weekend and the Canada Running Series owe their very existence, in their current form, to the rise of the running store clinic. In fact, some of the bigger stores have developed close, even symbiotic, relationships with bigger events, such as Ottawa, with the clinics preparing runners for specific races and the stores buying premium floor space at pre-race commercial expos. So, with road races now bigger and richer than ever, in significant part because of the union of commerce and sport embodied by the shoe store running clinic, what could long-time supporters of competitive running possibly have against this new running boom?

For one thing, many long time runners resent what they perceive as a mass-market colonization of their once pristine sub-cultural preserve. Like members of any other formerly grass-roots sub-culture, long time, serious runners tend to dislike any form of commercial exploitation of an activity they see as having deeper, perhaps even spiritual, significance for them, and they are apt to direct this dislike at the most obvious manifestations of the trend-- in this case, the store clinic runner, with all of the associated trappings. In fact, many long-time, serious runners would be perfectly happy to see their sport return to its roots as a "hard-core" and therefore relatively fringe activity, pursued exclusively for its own sake by a well-trained minority of pure-hearted enthusiasts, even this meant that races became smaller, poorer, and perhaps less well organized. I see this reaction as, at least in part, expressive of a longing for a return to the purely "sportive" dimension of running-- as opposed, that is, to its purely hygienic, "life-style" and consumer-driven aspect. As a long time and very "hard-core" runner myself, I can well understand this reaction; it is a form of "elitism", to be sure, but one with some redeemable characteristics. Ultimately, however, I don't see it as a legitimate basis on which to be critical of the store clinic phenomenon.

My own critique of the store clinic "learn to run" and "marathon training" phenomenon has always been based on my belief that running should indeed be a "hard-core", sport-based, competitive activity; but, that it can and should also be a mass-based activity. My critique centres on my belief that store clinics actually sell their clients short as athletes,, and that they do so for the most crass of motives-- separating them from their money.

My argument here is, first of all, a structural one, meaning that I think the store clinic approach operates the way that it does because not because of the bad motives of the people who operate it (many people who have run store clinics are, quite often, serious, competitive runners themselves); instead, this model operates the way that it does because of context within which it is situated. The store clinic program can only exist as an adjunct to the retail enterprise itself, whose primary business is, of course, the sale of running gear.

In order for stores to devote time and attention to their clinics, their clinics must pay for themselves in the form of fees and sales of product that would otherwise not be sold. In order for stores to attract clinic patrons, they must "sell" running much the same way as they sell their other products. To do so, they must stress the ease of access to the sport, and they must offer a simple, tangible goal (race completion, weight loss) in return for the fee paid. They must also, of course, convince would-be runners that the sport is synonymous with a higher than strictly necessary degree of consumption-- of products and equipment, that is. Store clinics must also continually re-enroll runners in their clinics, in order to keep them coming back to the store, and to avoid having to look for fresh clientele every 3 months. Even more insidiously, store clinics must set their actual training schedules around the routines of store operation. It is therefore not uncommon for stores to host Sunday long runs to coincide with the opening hours of their stores, or to set the number and types of harder sessions based on the availability of staff. (In one popular marathon training schedule, fully half of the athlete's weekly volume is to be completed in just one run, and there are 3 faster running sessions-- including repeat hills, which are of dubious value in a marathon building phase in any case, particularly for beginners-- scheduled on consecutive days.) And in order to get around the problem of staffing clinics, some stores will actually appoint graduates of their own clinics-- those with very little experience as athletes, let alone as coaches-- to run the show.

In the end, while running store clinics serve to introduce thousands of new runners to the sport, and all but gift-wrap them for race organizers, they tend to leave them permanently stranded between the status of beginner and bona fide runner. No one could ever expect every new runner to one day become a serious, life long runner; but, store clinics do not, and indeed cannot, offer this a next option to their clientele. It is simply not in their interest to do so. But worse, store clinics, in pursuit of their particular business model, often systematically misinform new athletes about racing and training. The most infamous example here is undoubtedly the "walk-jog" theory of marathon completion. The "walk-jog" theory of marathon running, according to which it is more effective to take 60 second walk breaks for every 10 minutes of running, is a pathology that grows directly out of the store clinic's need to promise all participants a quick and tangible reward, the Holy Grail of which is marathon completion. The introduction of walk breaks, quite simply, allows under-prepared runners get from start to finish in one piece; yet, it is billed by proponents as a faster, perhaps even the fastest way for the average runner to complete a marathon or shorter race distance-- and this, even though it is well known that the best, and even just the very good, marathoners do not take walk breaks. The crucial distinction here is, of course, that between "the average" runner (i.e. the store clinic participant) and "the good" runners (i.e. those whose ability effectively puts them into a completely different sport). The store clinic insistence on the "walk-jog" approach permanently consigns all participants to the status of talentless "other", whose main concern is to complete races without getting injured, or particularly stressed.

Thus, in pursuit of its particular kind of commercial interest, the typical store clinic approach, while it may indeed put bodies into races, actually erodes the sport of running as such on the most basic of levels-- by mass-promoting the notion that an a vigorous and competitive approach to running is too difficult and dangerous for the "average" person. While it may serve to promote greater public health (actually, a somewhat dubious claim, since the typical clinic member and race entrant is, on the basis of being middle to upper income alone, already in better health than the average person), store-based "learn to run" and "marathon training" clinics systematically discourage thousands of people-- many of them women, who, for sociological reasons, were often discouraged from taking up competitive sport as girls-- the opportunity to experience the joy and fulfillment of a vigorous, competitive approach to running. Meanwhile, in running clubs and informal running groups across North America, people are proving that serious, competitive running can be for everyone, and for life. Interestingly, much of my information on the running clinic phenomenon has come from refugees from the clinics themselves-- from people who have looked for, and found, an exciting alternative to the endless routine of "walk-run" and "marathon completion" for its own sake, an alternative that the clinics would not, and could not, offer.

Surviving the Aging Body's "Tectonic Shifts"

2009-09-07T13:06:00.004-04:00

Somewhat like the planet on which we live, the substructures our bodies are constantly shifting and changing, in spite of the day-to-day surface appearance of stability and fixity. And, as with the plant, these shifts can have fairly sudden and dramatic consequences. The aging/maturing process is sometimes punctuated by a coalescence of changes in our body's basic balance of strengths, tensions and angles which can temporarily overwhelm its capacity to adapt, resulting in the fairly sudden onset of pain and dysfunction. I suspect this is true of all aging/maturing bodies; but, in the trained body, these "tectonic shifts" are bound to be a little more complicated, both because they are influenced by the training process itself, which is actually designed to promote such shifts in some form, and because of the degree of disruption they can cause for their owner. When runners experience these shifts, they can feel like victims of a body snatching; a fairly predictable and reliable vessel can feel suddenly transformed into something wholly unfamiliar. In fact, runners in the throes of such transformations will often report feeling like they are "in someone else's body". Sometimes, of course, this can be a positive experience, such as when our bodies suddenly become better able to do what we want them to. More often, though, such sudden shifts are for the worse, rendering us suddenly unable to do what we have always been able to.

In my own athletic life, I have gone through several rearrangements of my bodily "geography", with the most sudden and disruptive of which occurring after the age of 35.

In the early phase of my athletic life, most of my bodily changes were of the slow and adaptive kind, although I do recall moments of sudden awareness that my body could do things it could not only months before. My first major disruptive shift, however, occurred when I was 16, and resulted in my first real injury-- a bout of the dreaded Ilio-Tibial Band Syndrome. I had just undergone a period of fairly rapid growth, which I'd managed to train through without incident. Then, after a couple of weeks of feeling tight in the quadriceps, I experienced a sudden and very sharp pain on the lateral side of my left knee. Baffled, I struggled through a couple of painful 15 minute jogs before giving up and allowing the condition to run its course. Three weeks later, and with little or no therapy besides icing, I was able to return to my normal running schedule. I did not feel so much as a twinge in this area until more than 30 years later.

My next physical "earthquake" occurred in my 27th year. A decade of higher running volume associated with my shift from the middle to the longer distances had left me with a body somewhat weaker and tighter in what were later to become popularly known as the "core" muscles-- those that stabilize the low back and pelvis. In an era before Pilates, Yoga and instability boards, most runner's strength work consisted of some basic upper-body lifts and some sit-ups or crunches, if that, and only the odd middle distance runner did any lower body work at all. As a result, those of us on high mileage programs tended to be at greater risk for low back, hamstring and other related problems, particularly as we aged. Thus I was to develop a sudden and very stubborn injury to my left hip-- a complex and undiagnosed dysfunctionality that caused diffuse pain and tightness in the entire area. After struggling with this problem for the better part of 4 months, during which I was slowing groping toward the kind of solution that I would, years later, discover to be the most effective approach to this kind of ailment, I was eventually able to resume a full schedule of racing and training. In the end, however, I felt as though I had not so much cured the problem as developed a new balance of strengths and tensions-- a new basic "geography" in my body that subtly allowed me to bear the load of my training elsewhere. I may not have looked much different to the outside observer, but I felt suddenly and permanently different inside.

My internal plates where to undergo one last major shift-- this time under the weight of my marathon preparations-- some 10 years later. Once again, a gradual tightness in the low back and hips erupted into sharp pain in the low back and upper hamstrings one early winter day while doing intervals on the gently sloping section of Toronto's famed Beltline Trail. I was still able to run, although my stride became much shorter and tighter for a few weeks after that, and, in fact, would never return to its full length and fluidity again, even though I would go on to record a few decent results, including a 1:04:42 Half Marathon and a 2:17 marathon, in the months that followed. A year after this shift, I would be deep in the throes of the back problems that would effectively end my open running career. In the 3 years between my marathon and my entry into the masters ranks, I would work hard on my core strength and stability, such that I would eventually become able to run (not to mention sleep and put my socks on!) without constant pain and discomfort; but, my body would never be the same as it had been. Once again, the lay of my bodily land had changed and I had merely learned to adapt and adjust.

In the 9-10 years since this last shift, I have live through several smaller "aftershocks", including another bout or ITBS and, just this past year, a very chronic and painful hip/hamstring/knee problem, similar to the one that afflicted me 20 years ago. I have attacked these problems with all of the new modalities I have learned about since developing my back problem-- especially eccentric loading of the affected area, which seems to mimic "active release therapy" in its effects. While I think I have now worked through this latest problem effectively, again, I do not feel as though as I have so much "cured" it as learned to move subtly differently in order to carry my running load in a more sustainable way, given the realities of my aging body. I thus now appear to be now moving into yet another period of relative "tectonic stability"-- I am now a little more like the Canadian Shield than, say, the San Andreas Fault!; but, I fully expect more, and probably more frequent, quakes as I continue running through my 40s and 50s.

What is my advice for negotiating and surviving these shifts? First of all, in certain instances, it's not possible to work through them. The onset of serious osteo-arthritis, for instance, can spell the end of our running days (although reliable research now indicates that instances of this problem are actually less common in serious runners than in the general population). Such conditions are relatively rare, however, and all too often, runners, and older runners in particular, will simply give up in the face of a seemingly intractable problem (how many times have you had a conversation with an ex-runner that began with the phrase "I used to run, but...[insert chronic injury problem]). My experience as an athlete and coach have taught me that even the most stubborn problems can be overcomes with persistence, patience, and ingenuity. As one of my favourite sports therapists (Greg Lehman, MSc, DC)once put it, "the body is not stupid, it is smart", by which he meant that, given the opportunity and sufficient time, it will solve most problems on its own, and all the better if we can figure out best how to help it along. We may end up with slightly different body at the end of the process than we had a the beginning, but our bodies can usually adapt to their own aging process as well as to the demands we make of them-- albeit within limits, of course.

At the age of 46, I'm thankful that I did not give up in the face of any of my body's big realignments. It would have been very easy to do so at the time, and many of my friends and competitors did just that, leaving the sport years before they would have preferred, and depriving themselves of much subsequent joy and fulfillment-- to say nothing of some fantastic physical, psychological and emotional side benefits. With each of these challenges, I have had the feeling that "this may be it", that I might never be able to run as well again, or without pain. Each time, however, I have fought back until, gradually, my body has regained its equilibrium and begun to move again in something approaching its old familiar way.

Finally, an omission from last week's post: Below is a link to Dylan Wykes new site, which will offer, among other things, more of the great blogging for which he is becoming known!

D. Wykes Page

Guest Posting-- Dylan W's Berlin Log

2009-08-31T11:49:00.009-04:00

This week, World Cup marathoner and P-K member Dylan Wykes offers a first hand account of his 33rd place performance at the Championships last week in Berlin. Those familiar with Dylan's previous race blogs (Rotterdam and Toronto) can look forward to another entertaining and insightful bit of blogging, and aspiring elite marathoners will be able to get a valuable glimpse into the process involved in taking on the world's best in a championship setting. Enjoy!

But before we get to Dylan, I'd like to recognize the solid racing efforts of group members at the Chris Thater Memorial 5k-- an elite regional race in Binghamton NY-- this past weekend. The group was led by the age-group winning performance of Cleo Boyd (entering grade 11 this year). Cleo won the 14-16 category with a strong early season P.B. of 19:05. Finishing 2nd and 3rd respectively in the same category among the boys were Cam Levac and Kyle McKellar, who recorded P.B.s of 17:08 and 17:17. Finishing 4th in this category was Adrian Noble (still in his first year of training, and a year younger than Cam and Kyle) in a very promising 17:30. Rookie master runner Myra McDonald (who happens to be Cam's mom) finished 2nd in the 50-55 category in a near P.B. of 20:24 performance. Look for Myra to break 20mins this fall-- and in her first year of serious running! Finishing 3rd in their age categories were yours truly in the open master's division (15:36) and "member at large" Paula Wiltsie in the same division among the women (17:45). In the boys 17-19 category, Rob Asselstine (entering grade 12 this fall) finished just out of the prizes in 4th (16:40). Also finishing just out of the money-- this time in the overall master's category-- was Jeff Brison, who nevertheless ran his best time in 3 visits to the Thater, with a very solid 17:15 performance. Complete results are available at:

Chris Thater Memorial 5k

Dylan's Berlin Log:

It’s been just over a week since the World Champs marathon, and I’ve finally taken some time to reflect on my 2:18:00, 33^rd place, for my 3^rd attempt at the marathon and my first (and hopefully not last) attempt at the world championships marathon. Here’s a little (lengthy!) report of what I was thinking and feeling during the 42.2km through the streets of Berlin.

The race was due to start at 11:45am, which is an odd time to start a marathon (we later found out that the start time was such so that the race would be on during prime time Television viewing in the marathon crazy Japan) and made the weather a potentially huge factor. As late as Thursday it hit a high of 32 C. But some rain on Friday meant that they were only expecting it to be 20-22C on Saturday (race day). Certainly not ideal marathoning temps, but not horrible.

The one good thing about the start time of the race was that we didn’t have to get up terribly early to eat. I woke around 7.30 and at 4 pieces of toast with PB and banana and some coffee and sports drink. After that I just relaxed and got into my running gear and made sure I had everything I needed for the race. We boarded a bus from the hotel headed to the start area just after 10am. It’s hard to get nervous and uptight before a marathon, because it is such a long race and so much can happen, that wasting your energy getting pumped up for the race will likely just make you go out to hard in the beginning. But, I have to admit I got a bit nervous when our bus driver drove around in all sorts of weird directions for about 20 minutes before admitting he didn’t know the route to get us to the start line because of all the road closures. Luckily where he ended up dropping us off was only a 400-500m walk from the start area. We warmed up along a 250m stretch of road behind the start line that was blocked off for the marathoners. It was interesting to see all the different countries and the different things they did to warm up. Mostly it was just a lot of slow jogging. After a slow 8-10minutes of jogging and some light stretching we stripped down to our competition gear and went through the final check-in. From there we escorted to the start area 10 minutes prior to the start. The crowds at the start/finish area were huge and I got a little rush of emotion when we first made our way out and the spectators were cheering loudly. After a few minutes of light strides and standing around we lined up. Myself and the other Canadians stayed in the back row (about 3-4 rows back from the front) of the 100 odd man field. At 11:45 the gun went off, everyone started their watches, and it was time to for the end result of months of grinding out long runs and hard workouts to unfold.

After running the first km in 3:03 (what would end up my fastest km of the day), I grouped up with my Canadian teammates: Reid Colosaet, Andrew Smith, and Giitah Macharia and we started clicking off 3:10/km. The pace felt very easy in the early stages and after about 3km we decided to slowly bridge the gap to a large pack of runners about 20m in front of us. We passed 5km in 15:45 at the back of a pack of about 25 guys that was now consistently clicking off 3:10/km.

There was a little excitement at the first water station as people tried to get in position to pick up there bottles. Each country has a table every 5km with the personal water bottles for each athlete on it. The tables are lined up along one side of the road side by side in alphabetical order. There isn’t much room between each countries table so sometimes it can be difficult to see and pick up your bottle. Reid realized after a sip of the honey and salt concoction that he had accidentally picked up Giitah’s water bottle. We were all running together at that point so he gave Giitah his bottle and Andrew and I ended up giving Reid a few sips from of your bottles. If there were ever team work in such an individual sport as marathoning that was it right there.

After that I settled into the back of the pack led by Russians, Germans, and Australians and completely checked out mentally. I didn’t bother checking my splits or thinking about much of anything until we came around to 10km, which we passed in 31:33 (15:47 for the 5km from 5-10km).

The course was 4x a 10km loop, with a 2.2km add on during the final loop. So the 10km mark was at the start/finish line. The start of the second lap was pretty uneventful as I tried to remain calm and relaxed. My calves started to tighten up a little bit around 12km. This made me a little nervous as that is way too early to start having anything tighten up. I consciously changed my stride a little, trying to do a bit more of a ‘marathon shuffle’; taking shorter strides with less time spent floating through the air and hopefully less force on impact. This seemed to help as by 20km I was feeling really good. We passed 20km in 63:30, which meant we ran the second 10km loop in just under 32 minutes. Although this was a little slower than I was hoping and planning for, I didn’t really care. I was comfortably in a big pack of about 15-20 guys and I felt comfortable doing it and figured I could compete right to the finish against that group of guys. Strangely my mindset changed drastically in the next 1km. Just before the 1/2way mark (21.1km) I decided to move to the front of the group. I did so initially just to get out of the pack and change up the stimulus a bit. I guess I was getting a bit bored (or maybe a bit impatient) sitting in the back of the pack. And I was sick of getting cut off by other guys in the group when we went around corners. I thought it would be fun to get in the front of the group for a while and see how that went. I realized after about 400m at the front of the group that no one was actually following me. At that point I decided (without a lot of thought going into it) that I was just going to keep going at the pace and not worry about if the group followed me. The pace, which apparently I had made faster than the group behind me felt really easy and I didn’t see any point in slowing down to rejoin them. Over the next few minutes I didn’t look back, but could tell by the way the crowds were cheering that I was quickly putting space between myself and the big pack of guys. Oddly I was not nervous about this at all. I felt really good and at that point in the race wanted to keep up the 3:10/km that we had been running earlier on and naively figured I could do it just as easily on my own as in a pack of 15 guys.

At about 23km my group of 1 became a group of two when Hamilton, ON native Reid Coolsaet also broke away from the group and joined me to share the pace. I was really excited about this. We switched off leading each other for the next 3-4km and we were able to maintain 3:10-3:11/km. This made me really excited as I was feeling really good at this point and we were constantly catching guys who had gone out at a faster pace and were already paying the price. I had no idea what place we were in at that point but my confidence was growing with each struggling runner we passed. I had never felt so fresh and confident at 30km in my previous marathons. So when I passed through the start finish area in 1:35:29 (just under 32 minutes for previous 10km) I was confident that I could keep up that pace and finish right around 2:15 – which I would have been happy with, given the conditions.

My next kilometer (from 30-31km) was 3:18, the slowest of the race, and I panicked a bit when I saw that on my watch. I tried to tell myself that it was just slow because that kilometer including the personal water bottle station, where I slowed down a bit to make sure I drank every ounce of my sports drink. But the reality was I was starting to slow down a bit. At that point Reid started to do a lot more of the leading (whereas on the 3d lap I had done most and even put a little gap on Reid at one point) and I was starting to tire a bit. No single part of my body was hurting more than others at that point, I was starting to feel the effects of running such a long way, and probably of the escalating heat (apparently temps reached mid 20’s during the race). I tried not to panic and just stared at Reids back and told myself I was just going through a bad patch and would feel good again in a few minutes.

My confidence really started to waiver when one of the runners from the pack I had broken away from just after half way came running by. I tried to tuck in behind him and go his speed. But I couldn’t manage it. It felt like he was sprinting. At 35km my 5km split from 30-35km was 16:35. So I was slowing down, which I was well aware of. But, that was terribly slow and I thought if I could maintain that pace I was still going to be able to run a great race. But, over the next few kilometers Reid started to inch away from me and a few other runners from the group behind started passing me at paces that seemed ridiculously fast to me.

By about 37km I had been passed by 3-4 guys and was not making gains on anyone ahead of me. My confidence, energy levels, and muscles fatigue all seemed to take a big knock at the same time. I stopped looking at my splits and thinking about time and basically went into survival mode. Those last 5km were probably the worse of any my 3 three marathons to date (my previous two being a 2:15:15 in Rotterdam in April 2008 and 2:16:20 in Toronto in Sept 2008).

Despite the amazing crowd support, including cheers from my mom and brother, I was barely moving out there the last 5km. The hardest part was at about 38km when we went off our usual 10km loop to do the 2.2km add on. This part of the course was unfamiliar to me and when I took a few turns that took me in the opposite direction that I wanted to go (towards the finish line) I just put my head down and tried to survive. I was in a constant battle with myself both mentally and physically those last few kilometers. I would get mad at myself for going so slowly and losing ground on the guys who had passed me. Every so often I would lift my head and concentrate on my form and try to pick up the pace. I would be able to a little bit and I’d be encouraged, but then after about 20 seconds of running a bit faster I couldn’t fight the pain and I’d have to slow down a bit because I feared if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to finish the race. At the last water station at 40km I stopped for a second to grab my last water bottle and make sure I got in as much of as I could as quickly as I could, because at that point I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make it to the finish line without it.

The final 2km of the race was a straight shot down the main street in Berlin. It was the longest 2km ever. I continued to try to compete but knew I was barely running at that point. My 5km from 35-40km was a disastrous 17:45! I fought through a tough wind down that last straight and managed to throw in a little bit of burst when I saw the finishing clock clicking of 2:17:45,46,47, etc hoping that I could get under 2:18. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough as my final time was 2:18:00.

When I crossed the line I was completely spent. I could barely stand up and wished I could just be magically transported to a massive and comfy bed. Straight afterwards I was pretty disappointed with how I did. But more than anything I was shocked about how ugly things ended up out there. I was dazed and confused. I found out 5 or 10 minutes after the race that I was finish 33^rd. That was the first time I had any idea what place I was in at any point in the race. I didn’t really know how to react to the placing. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t completely disappointed. I went into the race ranked about 80^th (based on personal bests for the marathon). To finish 33^rd therefore seemed ok.

Now one week and a few beers later I am still not sure how to feel about the race. The marathon is such a cruel event. There is so much time and energy and hard work poured into that unless the result is something magnificent (which it rarely if ever is) it is hard to be satisfied. I am general just dissatisfied and know I could have done better. I think if I was a bit smarter and a bit more patient and didn’t move ahead of the group so early that I could have placed quite a bit higher. Looking at the results now, and the splits of other athletes it paid to be more patient. Guys from the group I was running in finished as high as 18^th place. And they did so by running slower than I did from 20-30km, but remaining consistent from 30-40km. By charging ahead at 21km I only got 30 seconds ahead of the pack I was previously running in. But by slowing down so much in the in the end other guys from that packed ended up as much as 2.5 minutes ahead of me by the finish! Being more conservative from 20-30km wasn’t going to mean I would have finished 2.5minutes faster. But, I think I would have been able to hold things together better if I had been more patient at that stage of the race. Live and learn I guess.

I am definitely hungry for more and it was definitely the most exciting and unforgettable race experience of my life. The spectators were unlike anything I have experienced before. They were lining the entire course, 4-5 people deep in some places and they were really loud especially when I was running the pack with three German runners during the first half of the race. I read report that estimated there were 700,000 spectators out cheering (which seems somehow impossible, but then again I have no idea how to estimate the size of a big crowd). Reid and I had a little fun with the crowd during the third lap, when I was still feeling good and confident! We realized that the crowd wasn’t quite as loud as when we running in the big group with the Germans. When we went past a large group of spectators first Reid, then I, raised our arms motioning for the crowd to cheer louder, and they responded in unison like someone just scored the winning goal in the NHL playoffs. It was very, very cool-- likely something I will never experience again. So, I’ll try and spend the next few days reliving the positives of the race and putting the negatives behind me.

For some photos and video (which I am not in very much at all) check out the links below:

mzungofire

Berliner-laufbilder

Dylan in Berlin

2009-08-25T12:41:00.006-04:00

With Dylan incommunicado somewhere in Bohemia at the moment, doing some well deserved sightseeing, I thought I'd offer my own reaction to his Berlin performance in temporary lieu of his own report, which I hope to have sometime soon. If the following article in our local paper is any indication, it should offer some very interesting insights into his first (of many, we hope) full-scale international meet experience:

Whig Standard article

In my view, Dylan's 33rd place/2:18 performance was solid, and certainly consistent both with his training going in and his previous two marathon performances. He finished much closer than the rest of the field to his seed time, meaning that he finished much higher than the simple statistics would have predicted, and he ran an intelligent race in doing so, moving through the middle of the field in the final 12.2kms. In hindsight, his decision to push the pace-- along with team mate Reid Coolsaet-- after the 30k mark may have been something of a mistake; however, calculated risks of this kind are the essence of championship competition, and Dylan and Reid should be lauded for their audacity and courage. Moreover, the lessons they learned from this experiment will add to their arsenal of experience for next time. While we would both obviously have preferred a major breakthrough-- a top 20 finish, for instance-- such one-time leaps are very difficult to summon on-demand, and doubly so in a championship race setting. The next best thing to a big breakthrough-- particularly in marathoning, where the average success rate tends to be much lower than for other events-- is a consistent performance, which is what Dylan produced in Berlin. When I was preparing for the marathon myself back in the '90s, I was told by several informed observers that almost every marathoner experiences a flame-out in at least one of his first 2 attempts (e.g. even the legendary "Boston" Billy Rodgers, who knew that course like the back of his hand, dropped out in his first attempt there.) For Dylan to have produced solid results in each of his first 3 attempts at the distance is testament to the soundness of his preparation and execution. Further improvement would seem to depend simply on continued consistency in training (in addition to careful increases in his training load) and a consequent deepening of his basic conditioning for the event. He will not attempt another marathon this year, but will return to the event-- this time with the main goal of improving in his time down to 2:13-14-- in the spring of 2010.

Wykes in Berlin-- All Systems Go

2009-08-19T13:41:00.006-04:00

My summer hiatus from the blog officially ends with the following short summary of Dylan Wykes preparations for his first championship marathon, the World Championships Marathon in Berlin this Sunday (the race, BTW, will be livestreamed on CBCsports.ca, starting Saturday morning at 5:35EDT).

As most of you know, Dylan secured his spot on Canada's marathon team (the World Championship marathon includes a national team competition-- the World Cup Marathon) through his performance at last fall's Toronto Waterfront Marathon, where he was first Canadian in 2:16:19-- a time well below the minimum qualifying standard of 2:18. He is joined on the team by many-time Canadian track champion Reid Coolsaet, Brooks Marathon Project member Andrew Smith, Congolese emigre and veteran Canadian road racer Gitah Macharia. (New Canadian Jon Brown, a former British International with two consecutive Olympic Marathon 4 places to his credit, was a late injury withdrawal from the team).

Dylan's build-up for this race was perhaps his best yet, in terms of both consistency and total volume. This is only his third marathon, but we have both learned much since he took up the event a scant 18 months ago. Our approach is to make only small, incremental changes to the program from one race to the the next; but, weekly volumes of 190-200kms (through the introduction of more double-run days) and frequent exposure to the demands of very long sessions-- up to 40k in total, with large percentages at race pace or faster every 10-14 days-- have increased Dylan's ability to stay relaxed and focused while skirting the outer periphery of glycogen depletion-- allowing him, we hope, to push a little further on this vital energy supply come race day.

With help from exercise and nutrition expert Dr. Trent Stellingwerf, Dylan has also refined his pre- and mid-race refueling and hydration regime (never an obvious problem area, but a low-risk adjustment, it seemed to us, particularly considering Dr. Stellinwerf's expertise in this area).

Typical of his acute attention to detail, Dylan performed almost all of his harder sessions, and many of his recovery runs, at the Berlin race time-- 11am. He has done this in previous build-ups, but the usual starting time has made this a greater priority this time. Syncing workout and race start times enables the athlete to optimize his pre-race nutrition consumption and metabolism (including the all-important waste excretion phase!).

Speaking of the race start time, an area of concern than remains beyond our or anyone's complete control is the race day weather. Always a concern in an event as long and taxing at the marathon, the late-summer 11am start time for Berlin creates the very real possibility for mid-race heat and humidity-related complications. A starting temperature of over 20C, or a even a much lower temperature, albeit accompanied by high humidity, forces the athlete to moderate his pace-- never an exact science for even the most disciplined and skilled runner, particularly in a championship race. We feel that Dylan has the basic conditioning to run under 2:14; but, a start-time temperature of over 20 C will force an adjustment of the first half pace to something closer to 2:16-- still ambitious running under what amounts to mid-summertime conditions. This being a championship race-- both individual and team-- Dylan and his team mates will be running with an eye to place as much as to time, however. Under adverse weather conditions, the highest placings often go the most intelligent and disciplined athletes on the course, rather than to the best conditioned. Dylan will be looking closely at his watch during the race, but he will also be listening for his place number, particularly in the later going. In warm weather championship races, it is not unusual to see intelligently-paced athletes make dramatic runs up the field, moving easily past the detritus of their over-ambitious competitors.

Finally, if you plan to watch the race, look for at least three of the Canadian team-- Dylan, Andrew Smith, and Reid Coolsaet-- to work together at goal pace for a good portion of the first half of the race. Since they appear reasonably evenly matched, and to make things more familiar and thereby comfortable in the early going, these three will keep each other company until one or more of them determines one way or another-- either by forging ahead or falling behind--that it's time to bid Auf Wiedersehen

Best of luck to all of Canada's marathoner this weekend (the lone Canadian woman-- Tara Quinn-Smith-- goes on Sunday morning)! And, as supporters, we need to understand that a successful marathon actually does require a degree of luck-- in the form of cooperation from very difficult to control variables, such as the apparent capriciousness of even the most carefully prepared body in its response to the metabolic demands of this most extreme of track and field events. In any championship marathon field, the vast majority of competitors will have prepared themselves to according the best of a vast accumulation of both self- and technical knowledge; and yet, a very high percentage will fail to perform according to reasonable expectations. Because the event is so extreme, and the variable so difficult to manage, the "failure rate" among marathoners is extremely high, and the consequences of that failure physically devastating and therefore relatively long term. All marathon competitors themselves toe the line in the full awareness of this daunting reality, which is why they must be considered perhaps the most courageous of all athletes. The unique challenge of the marathon, and the thing that makes failure so painful is, however, also that which makes success so uniquely sweet and abiding. Let's hope that at least one Canadian athlete, if not all of them, is able to savour a drop from this cup by week's end.

Whatever the result, look for Dylan's first-hand account of his Berlin experience sometime next week.

P-K on the Roads and Summer Holidays Tips

2009-07-20T14:25:00.010-04:00

P-K athletes-- both local and on-line-- were active on the summer road racing scene over the weekend, led by Dylan Wykes' fine mid-marathon-build outing at the Acura 10 miler in Toronto (results, story and pics available from Runnerschoice.com). A solid interval session on Thursday (7x1k @ low 2:50s on trails, with a 200m jog recovery, preceded by a 30mins a.m. run and a 25min warm-up)and a good recovery day on Friday settled the issue about whether to approach this one as a tempo-pace effort or attack it for the win. Despite having upwards of 150kms for the week on board before starting his warm-up, Dylan would decide to race rather than train this one. Eschewing coyness, Dylan hit the front shortly after 2k and did his share to keep the race on the right side of 3min/kms up till the 14k mark, at which point eventual winner (low-28 10k man Hosea Kibet, whom Dylan described as a gazelle-like in the lightness and ease of his stride) took charge. Decisively beaten and on the verge of draining the glycogen tank dry, Dylan eased it in over the final couple of kms, satisfied at having done all he could competitively on the day. This will be his last all-out race effort before the World Marathon Championships in Berlin on August 22, leaving just over two weeks of hard slogging before the beginning of the final descent, so to speak, into race day.

Also competing in Toronto were new P-kers Reg Smart and Mike Gill, who hit their pace targets nicely in the 10 miler and 5k respectively, running 18:45 and 1:18 and change, their consistent hard work apparently beginning to pay dividends.

About 36 hours earlier, and on the other side of the lake, another group of us was lining up for an uncharacteristically rain-soaked edition of the Buffalo Subaru 4 Mile Chase*-- a nearly 30 year old summer staple that loops the funky Elmwood Village district of that resilient old city. Typically one of the warmest and most humid races of the year, this year's Chase was an almost chilly 63 degrees F, with and on-and-off drizzle that made it feel like a tepid day in May rather than the Dog Day of Summer that race veterans have come to expect. The highlight for our group was Paula Wiltsie's come-from-behind defense of her title in the master's women's race. (Paula continues to pull things together following her diagnosis of iron deficiency in early June). After Paula, new member Myra McDonald-- just recently a participant in the 50+ category-- surprised everyone with a money-winning 5th place finish in the master's division. (Myra didn't discover that she had done this well until, having failed to find her name in the standard age-class results, she took a look a little higher up the board!) Working down the women's age groups, Margarita Sviajine continued her strong string of racing with a win amongst the 35-39 year olds. Margarita is looking forward to mixing it up in the over-40 division starting next year. Meanwhile, Emily Tallen signaled the beginning of her rebound from illness and a disappointing nationals track 5k by finishing a strong 5th against perhaps the best women's field in the 29 year history of the race (beating her were 2 Kenyans and 2 Ethiopians with national team experience). The only P-K men entered in the race were masters Jeff Brison and Yours Truly. Jeff ran by far his best time in 3 visits to the race, solidifying his best summer of racing in years, but missed the master's money by one spot in what was perhaps the deepest over-40 field in the history of the race. I, meanwhile, ran a very flat-feeling 20:03, good for 2nd place in the master's field behind the formidable Al Arbi Khattabi, who was coming off of a strong 2nd place performance at the Boilermaker 15k only 6 days prior.

*This year marked the 29th running of the Buffalo 4 miler, eight of which I have attended, dating back to the late 1980s. This is by far my favourite summer road race, so I'd like to make a personal pitch on behalf of the event to those planning to be in its general vicinity next summer. Next year is the 30th edition of the event and is not to be missed by connoisseurs of the fine road racing experience. This race has an early evening start, and the post-race beer party on the beautiful boulevard of the Bidwell Parkway is the best I've seen in my 30 years racing in the streets. And after the official party and awards, an excellent dinner (and more beer at the superb micro-brew emporium, Coles, for those in the mood) is only a block or two away at any one of a dozen cafes and restaurants. Oh, and did I mention that the entry fee for first-timers is 10 US bucks?

Some Tips for the Holidaying Runner:

Sticking with the theme of summer running, I thought I'd offer a few simple tips on how to keep your training on track while on the road. Like everyone else, runners like to travel and escape their typical routine during the precious few weeks of the Canadian summer; but, for the serious runner, this does not include a break from the training routine-- quite the opposite, in most cases. Most serious runners I know actually like to use their time away from work to do more running, not less. Keeping to one's running and strength training schedule while away from home is,however, not easy, given how embedded our routines are in our domestic surroundings and daily perambulations: our familiar running times and routes; our regular training partners; and our gyms and home exercise rooms. And then there's the difficulty of explaining to our non-running friends and relatives why we can't have a beer at 11am because we'd like to go for a run later even on our vacation! ("Don't you ever take a break from running?", they feel free to wonder aloud).

Here, then, are a few simple tips for keeping things going while on summer vacation and out of one's training element:

1. Pack shoes that you can do both faster sessions and longer, easy runs. Since space is always a premium while on the road, bring a single pair of relatively new and lighter-weight trainers on your summer trips.

2. Remember to bring a lightweight mat on which to do your flexibility and strength work. One of the most annoying things I've found about vacationing at cottages and crowded friend's houses during the summer is the lack of a decent place to get on the ground to do my core and flexibility routine. With a small, roll-up mat, one can get outside and do this stuff almost anywhere (thereby avoiding tripping-up your uncle and causing him to spill his gin and tonic).

3. Use the "out and back progression run" in place of tempo sessions. Although the increasingly cheap wrist-born GPS is rapidly solving this problem, most travelers still confront the difficulty of getting a controlled, harder workout in on unfamiliar roads or trails. One of my tricks over the years is has been to go out in one direction for 30mins at my typical easy run effort and attempt to come back the same distance 5mins faster. This works on any surface and produces a very accurate estimation of proper tempo pace, I have found.

4.Run in the water. Many of our typical vacation spots here in Canada are close to deep and calm (at some point in the day, at least) bodies of water that are ideal option when excessive hills, dangerous traffic and/or flying bugs make running on the road a daily trial. You may have to pack a water belt for this one, but a partially deflated kid's water ring around the waist will also do the trick when added buoyancy is required.

5. Run in the mid-afternoon. Most of us stay up later while on vacation (one of the pleasures of vacationing in the first place), so trying to do your thing in the morning will just make you more tired. Besides, most of your friends and family will be tired or preoccupied in the mid-afternoon and probably won't miss you if you slip out for an hour or so. This will bring you back just in time to help with dinner prep and enjoy that best drink of the day-- the post-run beer (for my taste)! Running in the mid-afternoon will be hotter, but that will just make that other summer-specific post-run treat-- the plunge into the lake or ocean-- all the sweeter.

I'm sure there are more, but that's a start. In my experience, runners who take a few simple steps to maintain their routines-- and thus hang onto their hard-won spring conditioning-- are ultimately much happier campers than those who let it all go. Running need not monopolize you and your family's summer travels, but neither must you sacrifice your precious shape in order to enjoy some time at the lake or visiting relatives. In fact, running might even intensify your seasonal experience, since it can acquaint you even more intimately with the sounds, smells and feel of the Great Outdoors in summertime.

"So, you're a runnner? Ever run a marathon?"

2009-07-06T21:05:00.010-04:00

There is not a serious runner anywhere who has not, at some point, had a conversation with a non-runner starting with this question. And anyone who's been at it as long as I have will know that non-runners have always understood running and the marathon to be synonymous, or at least thought that the goal of all runners was to run a marathon-- and furthermore, that any runner who hadn't run one "yet" simply lacked the conditioning to run that far! I regularly share a laugh about this with a close friend of mine who happens to be a two time Olympian and former Canadian record holder. For years she has had to patiently explain to non-running acquaintances, upon their discovery of just who she is (and such is her genuine modesty that people can have known her for years before becoming aware of her accomplishments), that she specialized in distances shorter than the marathon. In fact, I think one of the main reasons she now wishes she had gotten around to trying the marathon before injuries cut her career short is to be spared having to explain to non-runners how a former "professional" runner never managed to run 26 miles during her career! In the past 20 years, however -- the same 20 years that have seen the decline of elite distance running in places like Canada, the U.S. and the UK, about which more in a moment-- the association of running with the marathon seems to have become even more automatic, to the point where many runners themselves (albeit usually newer runners) now think of running only in terms of the 26er.

How has this happened and what does it mean for running as a competitive sport? And, is the association of distance running and the marathon necessarily wrong (should all distance runners aim to try a marathon in their future)?

The coincidence of the mainstream mass-popularity of the marathon in North America and Europe and the decline of running as a serious sport in these places (as evidenced, e.g., by relative and absolute declines in elite and serious recreational performance levels) is, like the simultaneous increase in youth participation and the sharp decline of prime-age competitors in places like Canada over the past 15-20 years, a paradox in need of reconciliation. How can it be that the second "running boom", unlike the first one-- the "jogging" craze set off in North American, many would say, by Frank Shorter's victory in the Munich Olympic marathon-- has failed to produce a corresponding increase in the number of serious competitors and in performance levels? This is particularly puzzling in the case of women, whose new-found interest in beginner's running clinics, and willingness to pay the increasingly steep cost of entering races, have been the engine of this new boom. In the 70s boom, women were also important players, albeit more as ground-breakers at the elite level than as place-fillers. The achievement of parity with men in terms of racing distances (as recently as 1972, the longest championship event for women was 1500m), including the inauguration of a women's Olympic marathon, and the professionalization of road racing for both genders, was in large part the legacy of a storming of the distance running scene by a cadre of remarkable female athletes-- people like Joan Benoit, Grete Waitz, Ingrid Kristiassen, and Rosa Mota, to name just a few-- during the 70s and 80s. As a product of this first boom myself, and as an avid reader of the magazines and books it spawned, I recall the frequency of the "fitness jogger to superstar" story line among elite women road racers in those days. This first boom, it seemed, was an immediate driver-- rather than simply a facilitator-- of elite women's running, or at least road racing, in that relatively fewer of the sport's big female names seem to have been serious, elite competitors in the age class ranks. The first running boom both drew women into the sport and dramatically raised the level and depth of performance standards, precisely as one would expect.

The paradox of running's second boom where performance is concerned can be explained, I think, in terms of its principle drivers-- the urban road race (often a marathon) as charity and/or tourist "event", and the "learn to run" business-- which often operate in symbiosis. During the first boom, road races were principally athletic contests. The most successful of these early races-- the Peachtree 10k in Atlanta, The Boilermaker 15k in Utica, the Bloomsday 12k in Spokane, the Bay To Breakers in San Francisco and, of course, the New York City Marathon-- certainly managed to attract significant numbers. In their early days, however, these races were first and foremost footraces, rather than community fitness/charity "events". Participants, whatever their age or gender, attempted to race them rather than simply complete them, and it was considered a token of failure to be reduced to walking at any point. Today, by contrast, a significant portion of the fields in these and other races aim only to cross the finish line under their own power, and often actually plan to walk significant portions of the course. This shift is amply documented in the vastly increased average finish times for almost all major road races today.

Some of the difference between then and now can be explained simply in terms of changing demographics-- the age of the average road racer, after all, has increased along with the median age in general in all developed societies. Some of it, however, is the product of a specific kind of marketing by these and other smaller races. And here is where the "learn to run" business enters the picture. Where the exploits of high profile distance runners such as Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers and Joan Benoit tended to drive the growth of running in the first running boom, the second one has been propelled by figures like Jeff Galloway, John Bingham and, in Canada, Running Room founder John Stanton, whose stock-in-trade has been to encourage would-be runners to enter the sport with the aim simply of completing races-- i.e. without particular regard for finishing time or place. The "learn to run business", which now extends beyond the Galloways, Binghams and Stantons in the form of local store-based clinics and trainer-led operations, also tends to encourage race participation, even up to the marathon distance, for runners with only a few weeks or months experience (which is part of the reason it must discourage concern for finish time and place). The potential of these outfits to provide a steady supply of participants willing to pay increasingly high fees to participate in road races has not been lost on the promoters of road races themselves. The bigger races now routinely contract the best known advocates of the "complete not compete" movement (if they can actually afford them!) as speakers at clinics and expos as a means of both building their numbers and servicing race participants who are by now far more likely to have heard of John Stanton than world record holder Haile Gebresellasie.

From a strictly public health perspective, there is little to find fault with in this arrangement. Formerly inactive people are encouraged to become physically active, and everyone involved in the enterprise-- from race organizers and sponsors, to charities, local communities, businesses, to race participants themselves-- is receiving value for their time, effort and money. From the point of view of running as a competitive sport, however, the "second boom" model of running-- i.e. as strictly a fitness pursuit, centered around simply completing races of various distances at any speed and with as little preparation as possible-- offers very little. And it is not simply a matter of recognizing race winners-- most races do, and many still offer prize money (although, interestingly, far less than 20 years ago in relation to the dollars generated, and once inflation is factored in). The problem is that the shift of emphasis from "competing to completing" is founded on the assumption that serious training and racing are beyond the powers of ordinary people, and even perhaps dangerous and unhealthy, if one listens to some advocates of the new approach. Furthermore, over time, the idea that road racing is something to be done primarily for health maintenance-- symbolized by the "fun run"-- has made it far less attractive to younger runners, if young people are even aware that road races are serious sporting events at all, as distinct from the casual exercise their parents or even grandparents might do on a Sunday morning. And it's not a case of the "completer" ethos being opposed to running for extrinsic rewards. Completers are not discouraged from flaunting their accomplishments as such. The emphasis on simply completing the race is really a matter of setting the bar far lower than than need be, encouraging new runners to settle for much less than they could accomplish, and failing in the process to offer them the deeper rewards associated with realizing one's full, long term athletic potential. To be critical of the completer movement in defense of running as a competitive sport is not to defend elitism against populism; quite the opposite. It is to affirm the potential of the average runner, regardless of her basic ability, to train longer and harder; and, in the process, to deepen her experience of running.

The association of running with the marathon has thus become more automatic in the wake of running's second boom simply because running is now more than ever associated with completing races, and the marathon is still the longest-- and therefore the most challenging-- race the average person has ever heard of. Increasingly, new runners are encouraged to think of their running journey as more or less complete once they have managed to get themselves from start to finish in marathon. All that remains is to repeat the accomplishment, and perhaps to seek out new and more stimulating venues in which to do so. I read the trend towards ultra running, Iron Man triathlon, and "adventure racing"-- still relatively small in comparison with the marathon at this point-- as an logical extension of the "completer" ethos. If running is now all about simply completing the longest distance possible, why stop at 42 kms?

The failure of this second running boom to produce a corresponding increase in elite and serious recreational performance is equally simple to understand. The prevalence of the completer ethos is far from the only reason fewer people now see running as a competitive sport. As referred to in earlier posts, there's also the effect of the contemporary youth development model (in North American at least)that has, I believe, contributed to a marked reduction in the numbers of serious adult elite and recreation runners. Nevertheless, the de-sportification of running that has occurred as a result of transformation of road races into exercises in mass fitness and community spiritedness, aided by the "learn to run" business, has, over a number of years, contributed to the decline of serious competitive running in places where this phenomenon has been most pronounced. These drivers of running's second boom have not necessarily reduced the numbers of serious runners in absolute terms, but they explain why running as a sport has failed to thrive in proportion to the sheer volume of new participants.

Finally, what about the question of whether or not all distance runners should, as a matter of course, aim to run a marathon at some point in their careers? Is the average person, after all, completely wrong in assuming that long distance running and the marathon are synonymous? If a runner is only interested in having a quick and conversation-stopping answer to the question/challenge referred to in the title of this post, then I would say: yes, do 3 or 4 longer runs, enter a race, get yourself through it in one piece, and move on. If, on the other hand, a runner is fine with looking like a failure in the eyes of his or her non-running family and work associates, and is content to be the best possible shorter distance runner he/she can be, then I would say not to bother. For those runners intrigued by the idea of attempting a marathon, I would offer the following advice. Assess your aptitude for this longest of serious racing distances by gauging your body's response to longer, easy runs. If you find runs of 2 hour plus generally disagreeable, either because they make you excessively sore or because they significantly impair your ability to complete your other workouts at a reasonable level, then attempting a marathon build-up and race may not be for you in the long run. Not every runner's body is suited to the marathon, just as not every runner's body is suited to the 100 meters. Approached seriously, the marathon is an extreme event, and only those with high aptitude for handling its special rigors have a great likelihood of success. And when the risks of failure are not only a disastrous race day performance, but weeks of fatigue, soreness to the point of injury, and generally un-enjoyable daily running, then the decision to attempt a marathon should not be taken lightly, even by those who have enjoyed great success at intermediate distances. Finally, even for those with obvious aptitude, I would not recommend attempting a marathon until the 2nd of 3rd year of serious training for road racing, and not before the age of 22.

Without a doubt, training for and racing the marathon is a classic test of the distance runner's mental and physical wherewithal. And, when it goes according to plan, there is perhaps no greater sense of accomplishment than crossing the line in a marathon race, considering the sheer number of variables to be successfully managed. The pursuit of this special high, however, is never worth the cost of destroying one's enjoyment of training for and racing distances for which one might be better suited. While possessed of a special aura and cache, the marathon is, nevertheless, and from the point of view of the running body, simply another road race. And, in the end, it remains just as significant an accomplishment-- arguably an even greater and more satisfying accomplishment-- to perform consistently well for a number of years at the shorter distances than it is to claim one or two great marathon successes, particularly if the price paid is a body no longer able to enjoy the simple pleasure of daily running.

Daniels Primer #4 (and more): What is a "Tempo" Run?

2009-07-01T20:49:00.008-04:00

When I first encountered the work of Jack Daniels, in the form of the first edition of his now famous Daniels' Running Formula,the "ingredient" I found most interesting, and initially the most useful, was his "tempo" or "t-pace" run. For years, I had been doing harder, sustained runs of 6-8k, which I referred to as "tempo" runs; but, I had little idea of how, precisely, these were best approached, and I had an even dimmer understanding of how they were supposed to make me a better runner, beyond the psychological dimension of preparing me to concentrate, and hurt, for longer than time it took me to run 400m to 2k intervals that were the main staples of my training at the time. Without this basic understanding, I usually approached these runs as train-through time trials. Indeed, I hit some prodigious speeds in these sessions-- sometimes as fast as 2:55/km for as far as 8k. Because I attacked these runs with such ferocity, I was never been able to do them more than once every 10-14 days, and I gave them up entirely during the main racing seasons. Through Daniels, I was to learn a whole different approach to the sustained, faster-paced run; one that helped add several more good years to my open racing career, I am convinced.

With the help of Daniels, I was to put the "tempo" back in my tempo runs, which was ultimately to make all the difference.

As readers of this blog (or of Daniels himself) will know, the secret of Daniels' famous "formula" is his careful delineation of a series of training paces corresponding to various percentages of a given athlete's velocity at maximum oxygen uptake (different from a standard maximum volume of oxygen uptake, or "V02 max", which is a measure of the amount of oxygen an athlete can take in divided by his/her body weight). In his lab studies, Daniels observed that athletes could typically sustain their velocity at maximum oxygen uptake for an average of about 12mins, or approximately the time it takes to race 3 to 5kms, after which they would begin to slow dramatically, with associated increased levels of lactic acid in the muscles (I say associated because it remains unclear as to the actual role, if any, of lactic acid accumulation in causing an athlete to lose velocity when they typically do). Daniels also discovered that this velocity at V02 max was a very reliable guide to an athlete's performance at distances longer than 5k-- that it tended to be a kind of universal measure of a distance runner's basic ability.

As coaches had discovered in early part of the last century, running at or close to this speed ("racing speed") enabled a distance runner to become faster over time. As with lifting progressively heavier weights to increase muscular strength and power, running at speeds close to what Daniels was to call max V02 velocity provoked an over-compensation effect (a.k.a. a training effect) which, over time, increased an athlete's velocity at V02 max and improved his overall distance running performance. Theoretically, the more running an athlete could do at his V02 max velocity, the faster runner he would become. The catch, however, as Daniels and the other coaches of his era had begun to discover, was that the ability of an athlete to perform bouts of running at V02 max tended to be rather strictly circumscribed; in short, runners tended to become excessively tired and mentally stressed if they attempted to perform more than a given amount of work at this effort level. Innovative coaches, therefore, began to experiment with having athletes complete runs of longer (often many times longer) than the 12 mins they could run at maximum aerobic velocity, but at speeds much slower than this speed, which they sometimes referred to as "recovery" runs. And occasionally, depending on an athlete's racing specialty, coaches prescribed much shorter and faster runs with substantial recovery periods. Over time, many coaches began to observe that these sub- and super- maximum speeds seemed to have their own somewhat independent effect on an athlete's max aerobic speed. Coaches operating on the basis of training principles developed by the great Arthur Lydiard, for instance, observed that very long bouts of easy running, in the almost complete absence of V02 max paced running, could improve an athlete's speed at V02 max.

Daniels' "running formula" appears, as I have suggested, as an attempt to make systematic our use of these various super- and sub-maximal running paces by relating them to the physiologically adaptive responses they provoke, and by offering a practical method determining them for each athlete (his "VDOT" system). Daniels "threshold" or "T"-pace is located precisely at the transition from "easy" running, in which no lactic acid accumulation occurs in the muscles, and V02 max velocity, in which lactic acid accumulation begins to steadily increase. The training effect of running at this pace for periods of 20 to 60mins (although usually no more than 40mins is possible in a non-racing situation) is, according to Daniels, a tendency to increase physiological efficiency, or the body's ability to utilize oxygen, which is shown to have a knock-on effect in terms increasing velocity a V02 max. It is this physiological efficiency, according to Daniels, that helps explain how a distance runner can become faster over time without increasing his V02 max, or why runners with lower V02 max readings can quite often out-race runners with higher measures.

In the lab, Daniels observed that rested athletes could typically maintain this "threshold" pace for about 60mins, meaning that it correlated with race paces for distances of 13-20kms, depending on the speed of the athlete. In his own coaching practice, Daniels tended to prescribe sessions of "t-pace" running lasting at least 20mins and as long as 40mins once or twice a week, with further bouts inserted into specialized sessions for marathoners.

Having more or less understood how to use his other prescribed paces in my training, it was Daniels suggestion that sustained runs at as much as 15 seconds per mile slower and up to 30% further than I had be doing my own "tempo" sessions that stood out most for me upon discovering his book. This revelation also set me to thinking about my earlier transitional years-- from middle distance to long distance runner. It occurred to me that at various points in my career, such as during my summer of discontent following my dismal final year of high school, I had probably inadvertently done sizable chunks of my "easy" runs at close to what Daniels was calling "threshold" pace. In fact, whenever I had gone more than a week or two without doing structured workouts-- either during break periods or when returning from injury-- I would tend to gravitate to this pace at the end of my runs at least 3-4 times per week (without the stress of regular workouts, I tended to like to run fast much of the time). I had, I figured, probably already been benefiting from this kind of running; indeed, it probably figured fairly prominently in my becoming a long distance specialist in the first place.

All it took from here was to formalize my heretofore informal practice of occasionally running 20-40mins "steady" (the word that appears in my old training logs to describe this kind of effort) by adding it into to my cycle on a regular basis. This I began to do in my early 30s, at which point I noticed an improvement in my consistency in workouts as well as a feeling of greater mastery at racing distances 10k and longer. In addition to the physiological benefits I began to enjoy from slowing down and lengthening my regular my tempo runs, as well as doing them more frequently, I improved my ability to relax, concentrate, and control my pace in races lasting the typical duration of these sessions. As a coach, I have seen this kind of running, once mastered, work wonders in improving my athletes' performances at distances 5k and longer. So important and useful have I found this kind of running that I have even incorporated it into my program for younger runners. (In the case of younger runners, however, the immediate "bang-for-the-buck" of tempo running is not as great as for older and more experienced runners, mainly because younger runners are not doing sufficient total weekly volumes to tackle tempo sessions of much longer than about 15mins-- nor should they. It is, however, important that young athletes see this kind of running as a part of the normal training regimen of the serious distance runner, and that they learn to do it properly. Another bout of hard, V02 max running will always improve the performance of young athletes in the short term; but, if they plan to progress beyond the age-class ranks, they will sooner or later have to learn to execute proper tempo sessions-- and I prefer sooner to later.)

I think tempo running remains the most important, yet most misunderstood, form of distance training there is. The most common mistake among athletes and coaches remains that of doing them as undeclared time trials rather than as strictly controlled sessions. Because of their typical length, tempo sessions can become counterproductive if performed at too high an effort on a regular basis. In the pursuit of precise effort management, it is also important to stage tempo sessions on relatively flat terrain with stable footing. It is simply not possible to zero-in on proper "threshold" pace if steep hills or poor footing cause the athlete to work either too hard or not hard enough in a tempo session. The best way of determining one's "t" pace remains to run a race on a flat, fast course lasting about 60mins and use that pace as an average. When this isn't possible, it works to run for 20mins at one's perceived threshold pace immediately followed by an all-out section of 1-2kms. An increase in pace of greater than about 15 secs per km means that the perceived pace is almost certainly too slow, and a failure to increase the pace by more than 5 secs means it is almost certainly too fast. It's also possible to use heart rate as a gauge of t-pace; but, since most people don't have measure of their true max heart rate, and because heart race can be affected by variables unrelated to one's running effort, caution is advised if adopting this approach. In the end, I encourage my athletes to develop an accurate feel for their correct t-pace, so that they can properly maintain this effort when course and weather conditions vary. A useful rule of thumb for monitoring t-pace is a variation of the old "talk-test" for determining easy run pace (i.e. on an easy run, one should be able to carry one a conversation without undue discomfort). During a t-pace sessions, one should be able to speak, albeit only in short sentences and with lots of "recovery". When supervising t-pace sessions, I like to check athlete's effort level by asking them a simple question within seconds of finishing their workout or section. If they can answer within about 5 seconds, they've probably nailed their pace pretty closely. Finally, a t-pace session does not have to consist of one single bout of running. It is equally effective--and even preferable in warmer weather, for example-- to run sections of 4 to 15mins split by short recoveries (about 60 secs per 5mins run).

Update--Nationals Track 10k

2009-06-29T15:55:00.002-04:00

Just a quick follow-up post to last week's entry about my participation in the nationals track 10k. As it happens, I abandoned this one at 5400m, due to the heat and consequent impossibility of meeting my time goal. I managed to stay on 31:00 pace for 2 miles before falling off sharply in mile 3. I reached 5k in 15:50, after which I tried one more lap in order to get an real time pace measurement. A split of 79secs told me that anything under 32mins would be impossible under the conditions. Having no other goals besides the national age group record (31:43), and wanting to preserve my body for some big upcoming races (I get much more beaten-up from racing-- at any pace-- now than ever before) I had no problem with letting this one go.

Meanwhile, group members Dylan Wykes, Rejean Chiasson and Matt Pieterson held up somewhat better, although all sacrificed time due to the heat and humidity. Perhaps next year, when the event will be held in Toronto again, the event will be scheduled a little later in evening, so that the racers can not only compete but challenge their personal best in one of the few serious domestic opportunities to do so.

Look for a longer entry on another topic later this week.