The Logic of Long Distance

An acquaintance told me a week ago that there is a deep connection between training for a marathon and good schooling and encouraged me to draw this connection. The connections at first seem obvious. Perhaps school is like training. You put the work in and then get results out. Effort over the long haul leads to incremental changes in the body, mind, and spirit that allow the runner/student to do something which perhaps seemed impossible. I suppose this is the association my friend had in mind, and it works at a certain level. Runners recognize, however, that equating training with effort and work takes an external view of the whole thing. From the inside training never feels primarily like a goal-oriented activity. In order for it to work and work well, it must mostly be immediately satisfying. Sure, there were moments when there was a lack of satisfaction and I could invoke an external goal (running under 2:30 in the marathon was mine) to get myself out the door. But my trainin...

Runners are generally creatures of habit. We have our standard loop, our daily schedule, and we stick to it more or less. Though they always sounds nice in theory, runners know that exploratory runs in new directions or in different cities are fundamentally disruptive to the training schedule. We prefer to know every inch of our path; it makes getting around it easier mentally. Our hardest workouts are done on the most uniform surface possible -- a 400m oval, which in its simplicity and uniform nature is a striking metaphor for the habitual nature of the runner's activity. The deeper the runner gets into heavy training, the more essential habit becomes. When the body begins to resist the miles, when the legs feel heavy, or the brain fogs from fatigue, the easiest thing to do is what one did yesterday -- hit the standard loop. We have run it so many times that it almost literally runs itself. We are responsible for a minute or two of effort, but once out the door and on the loop, ...

I ran a workout last Saturday with Lanni Marchant . She was tuning up for the upcoming track and field World Championships in Moscow, where she will be competing in the marathon, looking to improve on her 2:31 personal best, and hoping to make a run at the Canadian national record (which is 2:28.) The workout was more about pace-feel than about building endurance or suffering -- the total volume of work was only 4.5 miles at marathon pace -- but like all good marathon workouts, what it primarily required was concentration. By the end of the workout, with warmup and cooldown, we ran almost 10 miles on the track, and much of it was at specified pace. It ended up being harder than I expected, and the reason was that marathon pace is slow enough to require only minimal concentration, but it's fast enough to require some concentration. Put another way, the pace is not hard enough to draw the mind to it by itself. I found myself having to remind myself to pay attention, and this in t...

Here is the last paragraph of Thoreau's "Life Without Principle." It's a little long -- Thoreau takes his sauntering seriously -- but worth the attention: Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra -human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus a confi...

"... the universal impulse to believe , that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe." -- R.W. Emerson, "Experience" Not belief, but the impulse to believe. Not our precious and polished knick knacks of thought, cluttering the house of the mind. Not the desire to be happier, faster, fitter. Instead -- the gut that yanks us out, over and against the plans of our better selves. Not the goals that we have, not the PRs we've run, but the thrill in the neck, the ache in the hamstrings, the sideways glance to hold him off, or to die. Not the workout on paper, not the feeling of completion. Not the endless entries in the training log. The sand in your shoulders at the end of a race. Not the setting of the alarm clock, not the morning coffee. The weak winter sunrise, the breath in the air, the wet and frozen dew. Not the training philosophies, not the books and coaches and blogs and message board bull. Not the mil...

What is an easy run? Well, most basically, it's a run that's easy to accomplish. It's the backbone of training. It's the run that makes every other run possible. For some runners, this is all that needs to be said. But for a lot of other runners, especially new runners or runners who are entering a new stage of fitness, the concept of "easy" can be somewhat elusive. Heck, if you are really out of shape, there's no such thing as an easy run because nothing feels easy. That said, I think there are a few things I can say about easy running that will help new runners and experienced runners alike, mostly because I think that most people -- believe it or not -- can do their easy running better. The place to start when looking to understand what an easy run is and how it works in training is to think about what it's not. An easy run is not a workout, which means that it's not a couple more things: it's not structured or planned or focused...

On the message boards at RunningAhead, there have been a ton of recent threads about the new Hanson's Marathon Method , most of them comparing it with Pfitz' "old reliable" Advanced Marathoning.  One of the smartest posters on the board (the guy solves Rubik's Cubes while marathoning) bhearn put together a comparison of the different marathon approaches that is truly excellent. If you are looking to get more intelligent about your marathon training, bhearn's summary of the similarities and differences in these two fundamentally sound approaches wouldn't be the worst place to start. The most interesting aspect of bhearn's analysis is his comparison of the total mileage done at various intensities in the two plans over the course of a training cycle. He breaks it down in terms of the classic physiological moments of VO2max, Lactic Threshold, and MP (sometimes called Aerobic Threshold.) I am stealing his chart and pasting it below: Hansons Pfitzinge...

If you want to frustrate a new runner and come off as an elitist prick on message boards, there is a quick and easy path. Tell them to listen to their body. Long time runners are always offering this little nugget of wisdom, and new runners are always saying: what the heck does that mean! I think that neuroscience can help explain. Neuroscientists have confirmed what we have long known -- that there is an important difference between hearing and listening. In this nice little piece by Seth Horowitz , a Brown University neuroscientist, we learn that the auditory sense is quantitatively almost 10 times faster than the visual sense. In other words, our reactions to what we hear are less processed and more instinctive than our reactions to what we see. Horowitz describes the auditory sense as the human "alarm system" that operates constantly, even while asleep. To balance that constant guardedness, we have something like "volume control" -- a way of turning up i...

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in the soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away." -- William James, "Circumscription of the [Religious] Topic" Last Wednesday, around 6:15pm at Rose Park track, as the long shadows of the afternoon had just faded into the half-light of evening, I had a religious experience. Or at least I think I did. The Rose Park track is a brand new state of the ...

"The greatest thing, in all education, is to make the nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. ... For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague." --William James, Principles of Psychology , "Habit" Runners are creatures of habit. What looks like tremendous willpower to the non-runner is (we secretly know) simply routine for us. We get ourselves caught up in the rhythm of training, and all of the habits we have set up carry us almost inexorably towards our goals. The difficulty of training is always only beginning and maintaining -- once we are out the door, we are guided by habit. In this sense, habit is the runner's best friend, especially as we embark on a project toward goals. To become a runner means establishing habits. On the other hand, habit is the runner's wor...

Two quick things to draw your attention to, then some remarks on the role of vision in training. 1) A quote from Thoreau: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. "Now put the foundations under them."   --Tho...

Will the Mo-bot win the 10,000? 1. Looking for someone to follow on Twitter? That person is Tim Layden @SITimLayden. He is churning out great, nuanced stuff on track and field as it happens. His interview with the head timer of the  Felix/Tarmoh heat became part of the story, as after Tarmoh read it, her attitude towards the run off changed. 2. After watching a few days of Olympic swimming, I am always impressed with both the similarities and differences between swimming and running. First, in swimming, time is always important. Final fields are determined strictly on time, and it's possible to win a preliminary heat but not advance to the final. This means that swimmers must swim close to a full effort in every heat. If runners were required to do this, they would be destroyed by the heats, as it would be impossible to recover from a series of close to 100% efforts. Relatedly, another difference between swimming and track is the literally unbelievable (at least from a r...

" Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify." -- "Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived for" You are probably familiar with the above quote by Thoreau. If I were not saving my philosophical energies for other projects, I would ruminate on running as a practice of returning to the simple. Instead, I want to su...

From the sublime to the nitty-gritty, running gives us a chance to talk about it all. This is a nitty-gritty summary of my training over the last 6 months or so. Since way back in December, I've been working on my 5k time with the help of my coach Van Townsend (more on him, soon.) Over the course of these six months, I've done a ton of workouts. Here's a quick summary of the workouts I've done, in order of importance. 1) Lots of easy runs, from 35 min to an hour. I don't usually log the pace of these runs or even keep track of it. That's because I am a nut and if I keep track, then I start trying to push the pace a bit. If I had to estimate, I'd say the average pace of these runs is 7:15 or so. They usually start with an 8 minute mile and then settle into 7 flat pace or so. I've been aiming for 55-75 miles on 8 or 9 runs per week. This is a moderately high volume that I know I can handle without accumulating fatigue. 2) Race pace intervals w/short ...

"Running is a simple sport. You don't need all the zoopy-zoop." --Bill Squires On the first day of my philosophy classes, I tell my students that the object of philosophy is fundamentally different from the object of their other classes. In the other disciplines, the point of study is to acquire specific and concrete knowledge and skills. The proper expectation is to leave with more than you came with. There will be tests and quizzes and things of this sort that measure more or less what you have learned. Most of academic life simply takes the value of the quest for certainty and knowledge for granted and sets about getting it done. The aim of my class is almost entirely opposite. A philosophy class is successful when after a semester's work, the student feels less knowledgeable, less sure of himself and of his capabilities. Uncertain of himself and even his most precious values. Sure, philosophy has a set of knowledge and skills--certainly we have terminology a...

Runners are an impatient lot. The determination to get faster can quickly turn into dissatisfaction with what we have already achieved. One of the virtues we all have to develop in order to reach our potential as runners is an ability to control this determination and keep it from turning us towards self-sabotage. I have seen in runners (myself being a prime example) a certain 10-step cycle of sabotage that is often repeated: 1) The runner who has been going through the motions decides to train harder and smarter and better. 2) Fitness and results follow fairly quickly, and the runner gets excited to be "in shape" and running well. 3) Out of this excitement, the runner sets an ambitious goal, usually hoping that his development will continue at the same rate that it has started with. 4) Motivated by both the excitement of being fit and the thrill of the ambitious goal, the runner begins to train even harder. 5) Now, training harder than he has ever trained, more ambit...