2004 Issues
Volume 8 | Number 1 | January/February 2004
Departments
Editorial
Beyond the Barriers
Toshihiko Seko, Japan’s most famous marathoner, stated on more than one occasion that the bulk of success in the marathon is generated on the mental side of the athlete, not the physical side. So, too, have most of the road blocks.
Consider the gruff Aussie Derek Clayton, who in 1969 in Antwerp broke his own world’s- best marathon performance to take the world’s best below 2:09 for the first time with a 2:08:34. Observers of the sport claimed the course was short and that the performance was impossible. That was in spite of the fact that Clayton was the first to bring the marathon under 2:11 and the first to bring it under 2:10 and that the performances of the other world-class marathoners in the field were completely consistent with their recent performances.
Continued in our Jan/Feb issue. Rich examines the history of the men’s and women’s
marathon records.
On the Road with Barry Lewis
Back to the Basics: for Love of the Sport
Here’s the deal: I love running, plain and simple, and I guess I always have. Something comes with lacing up the sneaks and heading out the door that just makes me feel free and alive. The sensation is particularly strong when my run involves trails: it’s then that I’m often reminded of my long-ago youth and endless hours spent with my brother exploring the woods at the end of our street.While solitary running offers an often-needed opportunity to zone and escape, one of the real joys of training with others or
Continued in our Jan/Feb issue…
My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It)
by Jake Emmett
LOGAN, UTAH, September 23, 2000—Marathons are large, well-organized experiments conducted on willing but somewhat unsuspecting subjects and designed to document the physiological hells of prolonged exercise. At least that’s what I used to think when I used marathon running to teach about the limits of aerobic exercise to physical-education students at Eastern Illinois University.
I was ignorantly grateful that marathons were longer than 20 miles, which provided me with stories on the horrors of glycogen depletion and the glory of carbohydrate loading. However, as a recreational jogger, I had easily avoided The Wall, and gluttony was the only reason I ever carbohydrate loaded. After 10 years of teaching, I realized that I was contributing to the old saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Not wanting to remain a cliché, I told myself that some day I would run a marathon to experience, or do, what I taught. However, it took a phone conversation with my brother Bill to provide the motivation that I needed to train for and run 26.2 miles.
Continued in our Jan/Feb issue…
I want this issue delivered right to my house.
Subscribe
City of Los Angeles Marathon
A Marathon With Something for Everyone, but Not Enough for Anyone.
Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.
On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:
BATTLING STALENESS. I’VE BEEN running long distances only for the past two years. I’m 35 years old. Like the
typical newbie, I kind of got carried away on the racing side of long-distance running; I race at least three times a month.
I’ve been building for my first marathon, which is now 10 weeks away, and my performances have begun to become very
“pedestrian.” Do you think I might be overracing, leading to staleness? Is there a way at this point to retrench and still run
my planned marathon 10 weeks down the road? I don’t intend to burn down any barns, but I would like to run decently,
that is, sub-4:00. My 10K times have been in the 42- to 43-minute range.
Our experts answer this question in our January/February 2004 issue.
About the Authors
Among this issue’s stellar cast of authors are Brent Weigner, Don Kern, Paul Reese,
Annette Pierce, Jim Ferstle, Marshall Ulrich, and Dennis Fisher.
Features
If I Had My Running Life to Live Over
If We Could Go Back in Time, Would We Live Life Any Differently?
by Paul Reese
If I had my life to live over again, I’d try to make more mistakes next time.
I’d try not to be so damned perfect.
I’d have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I was one of those people who lived prophylactically and sanely and sensibly hour after hour and day
after day.
Oh, that doesn’t mean I didn’t have my moments.
But if I had to do it all over, I’d try to have more of those moments.
In fact, I’d try to have nothing but wonderful moments.
I’ve been one of those people who never went anywhere without a thermometer, hot-water bottle, a gargle, a
raincoat, and a parachute.
If I had it to do all over again, I’d travel lighter next time.
If I had my life to live over again, I’d start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.
I’d play hooky more.
I’d ride more merry-go-rounds.
I’d smell more flowers.
I’d hug more children.
I’d tell more people that I love them.
If I had my life to live over again…
But, you see, I don’t . . .
Those words, which I first read 20 or so years ago and which appeared anonymously in the Journal of Applied Psychology over 40 years ago, have given me much cause for reflection.
Some of this reflection has to do with running, mainly the thought that if I had my running life to live over, what things would I change and what things that I am now doing would I keep on doing? I’m talking here about such things as racing, training, diet, racing gear, running philosophy, and for want of a better term, what I call conflicting forces.
Continued…
Comeback
In Which the Pampered Runner Versus Marathon Mom Raises Its Head.
by Annette Pierce
Part 7 of Annette Pierce’s Olympic Marathon Trails comeback.
Editor’s note: A decade ago, Annette Pierce ran sub-2:50 marathons. Then she took time off to start a family. At age 41,
she has decided to make a comeback: first a sub-3:00-hour marathon, later a qualification race for the 2004 U.S. Women’s Olympic
Marathon Trials. Annette has been sharing her comeback story with M&B readers throughout all 2003.
Parts 1 through 6 appeared in our last six issues.
Did I say I was trying to qualify for the Olympic Trials? I meant Boston. I was trying to qualify for Boston!
OK, that’s a lie. The sad truth is that I did not run under three hours at Grandma’s Marathon, my self-imposed first step to an Olympic Trials qualifier. I ran 3:07:50, an admirable time but well short of the target. However, you can’t always judge a race by the finish time. In many ways it was a strong effort, and I learned valuable lessons for next time.
For instance, you really can’t expect to feel comfortable at a certain race pace if you haven’t done it in workouts. I found it next to impossible to determine a reasonable pace to practice. While I was trying to get from zero to sub-3:00 in a year, the improvement came so quickly that a pace appropriate for intervals one month slid into my tempo pace, then eventually my easy-run pace. Marathon pace proved to be elusive.
Continued in our January/February issue…
Paula Radcliffe
With Focus and Dedication Seemingly Unmatched, She Reset the Marathon Bar.
by Jim Ferstle
Don’t miss this 21-page article about the Queen of marathoning.
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
Khalid Khannouchi
With Three of the World’s Seven Sub-2:06s to Khannouchi’s Credit, Some People Actually Question His Credentials.
by Dennis Fisher
On a frigid, crystal-clear October morning four years ago, Khalid Khannouchi stood at the starting line of the LaSalle Banks Chicago Marathon and on the verge of history. Scarcely more than two hours later, he stood atop the marathoning world, having set a new world record and served notice to the Kenyans that their stranglehold on the podium at the best marathons was in serious jeopardy.
That day, Khannouchi started out somewhat slowly, falling in behind the rabbits and the lead pack. With the temperature in the mid-30s and a windchill that made it feel about 10 degrees cooler still, this didn’t seem to be the day for a serious assault on the world record. As the leaders went through the halfway mark in a bit less than 1:03, Khannouchi hung back a few yards, with Moses Tanui about half a minute further behind. Khannouchi and Tanui caught the lead pack soon after the rabbits peeled off, but Tanui quickly surged ahead, leaving Khannouchi to fall in with the others.
Continued in our January/February 2004 issue…
Hyponatremia in Athletes
“Water Intoxication” and Subsequent Death Has Become a Big Topic. How Dangerous Is It?
by Bob Murray, Ph.D.; John Stofan, M.S.; and E. Randy Eichner, M.D.
Introduction
On Sunday, December 2, 2001, in the comic section of the Chicago Tribune, the Peanuts comic strip dealt with hyponatremia. Team doctor Snoopy trotted out onto the field and deduced that Woodstock was suffering from hyponatremia. Snoopy correctly determined that this electrolyte imbalance could be corrected by the right combination of water and salt. Woodstock was allowed to drink the water, but Snoopy sprinkled the salt on his feathers. In this case, comic license overruled good medical practice, although Woodstock evidently survived Snoopy’s inappropriate treatment. That such a rare disorder was featured in a popular comic strip attests to a growing interest in the topic among the general public as well as among sports health professionals.
That hyponatremia can prove fatal to otherwise healthy athletes is reason enough for sports health professionals to be aware of what the risk factors are and how the disorder can be prevented. Although the incidence of fatal hyponatremia is rare, case reports and descriptive data suggest that non-fatal hyponatremia may be common. Estimates of the frequency of hyponatremia associated with prolonged exercise (e.g., marathons and Ironman-distance triathlons) span a wide range, in some cases exceeding 30% of the athletes tested (O’Toole et al., 1995). However, data from the US military indicate an incidence of hyponatremia of only about 0.10 per 1,000 soldier-years (Craig, 1999), far below the rates reported in athletes (Davis et al. 1999; O’Toole et al., 1995; Speedy et al., 1999). The wide disparity in incidence rates may partly reflect differences in case finding and severity. For example, studies on athletes often use a subset of race entrants, those seen in the medical tent. Some of these athletes have only mild hyponatremia and no clear-cut symptoms from it. Incidence statistics from the military and some studies on athletes key on hospitalized cases, so mild cases of hyponatremia could be missed. We need to study larger cohorts of athletes to better characterize the risk of hyponatremia. Still, the current data warrant that medical personnel consider hyponatremia as a possible cause of collapse during or following prolonged exercise.
Continued in our January/February 2004 issue. This is the definitive article on the
subject of hyponatremia. A MUST read.
The Day I Raced (And Beat) Frank Shorter
When Your Fantasies Take Over, Be Prepared to Run a Positive Split.
by Philip DeYoung
On April 28, 2002, I ran in the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon. This was my eighth marathon, but it turned into more of a fantasy camp than a marathon. The day before the race at the expo, I had the honor of meeting Frank Shorter. Frank Shorter is best known, of course, for his Olympic accomplishments. As a member of the U.S. Olympic marathon team, he won the gold medal at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and returned to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal to win the silver medal in the marathon. He is a five-time national 10,000-meter champion and a four-time national cross-country champ. He signed my marathon poster: “Go Philip. Run Well. Frank Shorter.” Very cool. The poster is now proudly displayed on the wall in my home office.
Read more about Philip’s “run” with Frank Shorter in our Jan/Feb 2004 issue…
Top O’ the World
As the World Shrinks, We May Be Running Out of Adventures, but in the Meantime There’s the
Pole.
by Brent Weigner
CONFIDENTIAL
February 8, 2002 We are a small two- to three-man expedition wanting to run a marathon to or at the Geographic North Pole as soon as possible (March 30 through April 3). Our desire is to become the first people in the world to successfully run marathons at both geographic poles in the same calendar year. We just recently ran a marathon to the Geographic South Pole. You can read about our accomplishments at www.ultramarathonworld.com/news_2002/n22ja02a.htm
We are in a race with others who have the same goal. Therefore, please keep this communication confidential. Secrecy and time are of the essence. We know most other expeditions are beginning around the 7th of April. We need to run before that time, as our competition will be on the ice trying to edge us out.
Can you help us make this challenge a reality? There will be major world media attention surrounding this event. Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Please keep this letter confidential. Thank you.
Brent Weigner, Team Leader, 402 West 31st Street, Cheyenne, WY. 82001, USA, 307-635-3316, RunWyo@msn.com I sent the above letter to a dozen different expedition companies that were operating in the Arctic during the 2002 season. I believe the letter represents the official birth of the 2003 North Pole Marathon. Others claim it was their idea; however, Richard Donovan and I made it happen. We first conceived the idea during January of that same year while we were on the ice in Antarctica running a marathon to the South Pole. In Antarctica, Richard was beginning his quest to run an ultramarathon on all seven continents in a calendar year. He completed that challenge in 327 days, leaving my 1999 world record of 267 days intact. In April 2002, Richard also ran a solo marathon at the North Pole, becoming the first person in the world to run marathons on all seven continents and both poles. During the remainder of the year, we worked together with the expedition outfitter to organize the 2003 North Pole Marathon Expedition.
There’s much more to come in this article, our first of two on the historic runs North Pole Journal by Don Kern
The huge Russian came at my nose with a fist almost as big as my head. Resistance was futile. Besides, it was for my own good. There was a lot of love in those big hands.
The North Pole Marathon: the first marathon ever to be run in the middle of a frozen ocean. My South Pole buds, Brent Weigner and Richard Donovan, were the race directors and had hooked up with Global Expeditions to make the event happen. In 2002, Richard traveled with the Russians to the Pole to run a solo marathon as part of his seven-continents ultramarathon year. After spending all of January 2002 in the Antarctic with these guys, how could I turn down this adventure? Nelsen Petersen of Kibo Productions would also be joining us and filming the adventures. Several of us would arrive in Oslo within a few days and would try to meet there for some premarathon fun and fellowship.
This is the second article about the North Pole Marathon. I like this magazine! How can I When Out-and-Back Just Doesn’t Get It Done As I sit in a tent at 11,000 feet on the mountain called Denali (Mount McKinley), I am thinking about the Badwater Quad I did 11 months earlier. I am trying to climb to the highest point in North America in June 2002 and have been snowbound for two days in temperatures below zero. “What a difference a day makes.” It seems like yesterday when I was in temperatures over 125 degrees in Death Valley. Things change rapidly when opportunities present themselves in our lives, and with those changes come new challenges. Because of a power failure with my Palm Pilot, I lose much of what was written on Denali and start writing again in October 2002, only to lose focus, and the story goes untold for another day. Procrastination? Not wanting to accept responsibility? Or perhaps diversions happen in our lives for a reason. Months pass before a trip up Aconcagua, the highest point in South America, in February 2003 motivates me and buys me the time it takes to resume—and finish—the story. Continued in our January/February 2004 issue… The Long Run Solution: Fourth Installment Here is Rich Benyo’s introduction to our new Book Bonus:
The two major North American gold rushes are cases in point:
James Marshall, who discovered gold in the mill race at Coloma, California, in 1848, as well as the owner of the property on which it was discovered, Johann Sutter, never profited from “their” gold, and in fact they died destitute.
Two polar opposites, tall, lean, and hawkish Robert Henderson and laid-back well-rounded George Washington Carmack, in a ballet bordering on Greek tragedy, discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896, but neither would reap the huge rewards their discovery precipitated. Several of the pioneers had long been standing knee deep in the frigid waters panning for gold in the stream of long-distance running. Hal Higdon, who did not toil exclusively in running but who worked several streams (auto racing, true crime), wrote a landmark book in 1971 (Henry Regnery Company, Chicago) titled On the Run From Dogs and People. It is still in print today and deserves to stay in print forever, but it is revered by only a few.
Joe Henderson, who became the editor of Runner’s World in 1970 after a stint at Track & Field News and who lured Dr. George Sheehan into the pages of Runner’s World after their meeting on the 1972 Olympic Games tour, had written numerous running books: Long Slow Distance—The Humane Way to Train (1969), Road Racers and Their Training (1970), Thoughts on the Run (1970), Run Gently, Run Long (1974), First Steps to Fitness (1974), Running with Style (1975), Step Up to Racing (1975), and The Long Run Solution (1976). As an editor, he had shepherded a mass of George Sheehan’s RW columns into Dr. Sheehan on Running (1975). But the whole landscape was to change, and all within the space of a year.
Bantam Books bought Dr. Sheehan on Running and in 1976 published it as a mass-market paperback—and it took off. In 1977, reformed fatty smoker Jim Fixx, who had been saved by running and who had spent a year mining the ore pockets of long-distance running including weeks upon weeks at the Runner’s World offices, published The Complete Book of Running, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there for nearly a year. A handful of rickety-in-the-joints codgers at once lament the book’s having been overshadowed by brighter lights while jealously hoarding the memories of the book’s flashes of gold and maybe even verging on wanting it to keep its place as “our” favorite book of the running revolution.
Joe Henderson’s The Long Run Solution was published in trade paperback for $3.95 by World Publications, the Goals are ends. Destinations. Stopping places. Two things happen with them: either you reach them, Joe’s little book wasn’t filled with training advice. It didn’t meet the no-pain-no-gain philosophies. It quoted practical scientists looking at running rather than philosophers who weren’t really talking about running when they uttered their profundities.
Joe’s book was the simple manifesto of citizen long-distance running at that very critical time. It said, simply, that even if you have graduated from college you can still run—and you don’t have to run hard in organized competition until you puke. You can enrich your life (both physically and psychologically) by running gently for an hour a day, occasionally testing yourself against yourself by racing, but hey, if you don’t feel like it, that’s OK too. Just run for an hour to fulfill your design as a human being, where your largest bones and muscles are in your legs, and for good reason.
Lower your pulse rate. Knock your cholesterol down a few notches. Keep your weight down. Feel better. Get addicted to euphoria that is self-generated by becoming the joyful animal you can be.
Joe’s message was simple: just do it. His approach was simple: simple sentences, simple running habits.
Certainly, some of the book’s references are getting a bit long in the tooth after nearly three decades. And a few references (like Tom Bassler’s claim that if you run a marathon you are automatically vaccinated against heart disease; consider Jim Fixx) have proven to be less than scientifically sound.
But the book’s strengths are its incredible readability and its stone-wall solid approach to making running a part of your life.
There isn’t a five-year period in which I don’t pick up The Long Run Solution and read it again, both to bring back the energizing effect of validating long-distance running as an adult pursuit and as an antidote to a too-pressured, too-stressed life.
Over the years I’ve done what little I could to persuade some publisher somewhere to commission Joe to do an updated edition of Long Run Solution. But then I come to my senses and relent. Would I want someone to paint tattoos and nose rings on American Gothic? Or perhaps more appropriate, would I want to see all the characters in a Norman Rockwell painting exhibiting shaved heads?
As with many timeless treasures, The Long Run Solution has the power to circle around through decades of time to take another pass over the stadium, and in many ways the time is right yet again. Today’s long-distance runner enjoying this simple little sport and lifestyle can learn much from this simple little book. Enjoy your running. Allow it to simplify your life while highlighting it with a golden hue.—Rich Benyo
I think I’ll give M&B a try. How can I Subscribe? Editorial
at the North Pole. All in our Jan/Feb 2004 issue.
A Huge Reserve of Patience Helps Make Adventure Runs a Success.
Subscribe?
The Desert Asserts an Allure That Can Make Runners Go to Extremes.
by Marshall Ulrich
Special Book Bonus
by Joe Henderson
It’s similar, in some ways, when contemplating the bestseller book gold rush at the start of the running revolution in the mid-1970s.
George Sheehan would follow up with Running & Being, which became a bestseller and a classic, but in all the excitement, The Long Run Solution, one of the best running books of its generation, was overshadowed, overwhelmed, and overlooked.
book arm of Runner’s World. It is not a complicated book and it has no long James Joyce-like run-on sentences, even
though it is about running on . . . and on and on. Joe Henderson doesn’t write complicated sentences.
He writes spare, insightful sentences, and he strings them together like a stonemason working with emeralds and
rubies and sapphires to build not a massive edifice but a wall over which he entices us to jump in an effort to get to the other side, where he has been running and playing and extending the joys of childhood well into middle age—and beyond.
or you don’t. And either way you stop, from satisfaction or from frustration.” Pretty simple and pretty profound at the same time.
Volume 8 | Number 2 | March/April 2004
Departments
The Pursuit of Ignorance
Do you ever find yourself in a social situation where the fact that you run long distances and have done so for a long time comes up and the first question you are hit with involves the state of disrepair of your knees? It’s as though running is inherently bad for your knees, and the fact that you are still walking around on your own original knees after running on them for two decades must indicate that something is wrong with you. The implication is that you certainly can’t know much about running, as even the average sitting-around sedentary éclair chomper knows that running destroys the knees.
Er, sorry. No. My knees are just fine. What are your additional suggestions for creating a stereotype?
Continued in our March/April issue. Are runners the only sane people?
On the Road with Barry Lewis
Are You an Environmentalist Just ’Cause You Run?
Part of the sweetness of running is its simplicity: You can do it pretty much anytime, anywhere, with any level of intensity you want. A pair of sneaks, a quick change of clothes, and you’re off. No heavy equipment, no court or course required, no teammates, no membership fees.
At the same time, running is tremendously complex when you consider that putting one foot in front of the other for any length of time usually leads to some sort of goal. At first, the objective may be completing a race—say a 5K or 10K.
Continued in our March/April issue…
My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It): 2003 Boston Marathon
by Gail Kislevitz
BOSTON, Massachusetts, April 21, 2003—Let me say upfront that I have never been a big fan of the Boston Marathon. There. The truth is out, so if you love the Boston Marathon, you can choose to read on or turn the page and be spared. I am a firm believer in the right to choose.
For a little background history, I was a recreational runner for the first part of my life in the stone ages of the ’60s and never even heard of the word “marathon.” I was too busy being a hippie and flower child to be a serious runner. Even when I attended Boston College, I never understood why we had that Monday off, but I happily drove down Interstate 95 to Providence to visit my boyfriend at Brown University instead of hanging around campus.
I ran my first marathon in 1993 and it was an immediate love affair. I wanted to know all things marathon related. Tore into it like a favorite history course. Started to write articles about it. Started to write books about it. It was during an interview with Nina Kuscsik that I discovered that the Boston Marathon did not officially allow women to run until 1972. And that Jock Semple had tried to forcibly throw Kathrine Switzer off the course in 1967 for entering as “K. Switzer,” realizing too late that “K” didn’t stand for Karl. Shocked and angry, right then and there I did what any ’60s activist would do; I vowed never to run the Boston Marathon for its discrimination against my sisters. I would boycott Boston and it would be sorry for it.
Continued in our March/April issue…
I want this issue delivered right to my house.
Subscribe
Park City Marathon
Low-Key and Beautiful, the Course Is Perfect for Those Tired of Big Events.
Here’s a great race that shows what the “Lure of the Little” is all about.
Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.
On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:
IN JUNE 2004, I’ll celebrate my 60th birthday (Ouch!) and have decided to celebrate by running my first ultra around that time. Have done 10 marathons between 4:00 and 4:30. Most recent, Vancouver in May; currently training for the Miami Tropical in February. I’ve looked on the Web, but no particular race has jumped out at me. Here are the criteria:
Our experts answer this question in our March/April 2004 issue.
About the Authors
Among this issue’s stellar cast of authors are Annette Pierce, Lorraine Moller, Paul Clerici,
Tito Martinez, Rachel Toor, and Joshua Seidman.
Features
My Dad, the Running Man
Running Chipped Away at His Sharp Edges, Gradually Transforming a Tormented War Veteran
into the Father I Had Always Yearned For.
by Lorraine Moller
I had seen dead bodies before but never anyone I knew. So when I entered my father’s room to see him, I asked my sister to come in with me. She had been with him for a few days and was used to seeing him without life in his body. My three brothers and she had gone to the morgue with his best clothes, dressed him, and brought him back home for a last family reunion. Now when I arrived he was lying in his casket, on his bed for his final sleep. A sheer cloth covered his body so that he looked mysteriously distant.
Oh no, no, Dad. This can’t be. Not you. You are supposed to be indestructible. I asked my sister to take the cloth off. I wanted to see for sure that it was he, to look him face on, but I couldn’t do it myself. The veil between life and death was lifted. It was Dad’s face, pale, waxy and cold, his hands gently cupped by his sides. I looked closer. On his forehead was a floret of skin and blood where he had hit the ground. I waited, looking hard for a twitch in his fingers, a glimmer of a smile on his lips, a flare of breath in his nostrils. I half expected him to suddenly jump up and laugh, “Just kidding!” Nothing. Dad was dead.
Continued. You won’t want to miss this touching memoir by 4-time Olympic Marathon runner
Lorraine Moller.
Deena Does Distance
A Run to the Beach Changed American Marathon History.
by Tito Morales
For Deena Kastor, the epiphany struck while she was in the midst of a low-key, off-season trail run.
The Southern California native was visiting her parents’ home in Agoura Hills, and one morning she decided to challenge herself by touching the sand. Kastor, then known as Drossin, set off along some trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, taking care to pace herself so that she could comfortably make the nine-mile trip to the beach.
Before that outing, her longest run had been 15 miles.
After reaching her destination and briefly rewarding herself with an up-close-and-personal encounter with the Pacific Ocean, Kastor cautiously and apprehensively set off back toward the San Fernando Valley. A 5K and 10K specialist at the University of Arkansas and professionally, she had long resisted the notion of ever trying a marathon.
“I had always said that I would never run that distance,” she recalls. “I felt that anything that takes a month to recover can’t be good for you.”
But something magical happened that Sunday morning. As Kastor wended her way home past oak groves, eucalyptus trees, and chaparral?coated hills, she discovered that she was actually gaining strength instead of losing it. Bend after bend, hill after hill, she was gradually becoming a convert.
“That was the first day I felt my body was strong enough,” Kastor says, enthusiastically describing the run as if it occurred last week. “I felt so good when I got back that I called my coach and told him that I wanted to run a marathon someday.”
Five months later, she captured the U.S. National Marathon Championship in New York while recording the fastest debut ever by an American woman: 2:26:58.
And on April 13, 2003, after just 17 more months, she broke Joan Benoit Samuelson’s long-standing American record with a time of 2:21:16.
Continued in our March/April issue…
Comeback
When the Post-Marathon Injuries Intrude, Some Solid Research May Banish Them.
by Annette Pierce
The eight–and last–installment of Annette Pierce’s Olympic Marathon Trails comeback.
Editor’s note: A decade ago, Annette Pierce ran sub-2:50 marathons. Then she took time off to start a family. At age 41,
she has decided to make a comeback: first a sub-3:00-hour marathon, later a qualification race for the 2004 U.S. Women’s Olympic
Marathon Trials. Annette has been sharing her comeback story with M&B readers throughout all 2003.
Parts 1 through 7 appeared in our last six issues.
It finally happened. I got injured. Rats!
I finished Grandma’s Marathon feeling about as good as a person feels after running 26.2 miles: no major aches or pains, just the standard stiffness in the quads and calves. I took the following week completely off while the Pierce family drove around Lake Superior. Man, it’s big! We hung out in a cabin by the lake, fished, ate pike and walleye, read the fifth Harry Potter book aloud in the car, and enjoyed the beauty of the hills, pine forests, and shoreline—a perfect way to spend the week after a marathon.
Once home, I planned my recovery phase: a week of easy three-milers every other day, slowly increasing mileage and frequency during July, then in August I would start planning my attack on a 2:47:59 at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona Marathon in January.
The first couple of runs went well and I experienced little soreness. But during the fourth run, a five-miler, the quads of my right leg started tightening. I stopped to stretch, then continued on. But this run was ill fated. I remember distinctly the moment the marathon gods decided to yank my chain. I was a couple of miles from home, running through one of my favorite places—a flat stretch of country road under a canopy of trees.
Continued in our March/April issue…
Streaking at Boston
Lessons Learned From 36 Straight Patriots’ Day Finishes.
by Joshua Seidman
As a senior at a Massachusetts boarding school, Ben Beach turned on the radio and heard a broadcast of the 1967 Boston Marathon. It was a raw day, sleet coming down, and 741 people had decided to run all the way from Hopkinton to Boston. “Running 26 miles in the sleet?” Beach thought to himself. “That’s a crazy thing—and I’d really like to do it.”
He tucked the thought away in the back of his mind but decided it was something he would try to do the following year as a freshman at Harvard. Of course, there was no online registration, and you couldn’t just walk into a running store and pick up an application. In those days, there was only one way to get a Boston Marathon race application—you had to call up the race director.
Beach proceeded to call the number where Jock Semple had his massage operation and asked him to send an application. In a gruff voice, Semple responded, “What makes you think you can run 26 miles and 385 yards?”
Beach managed to register and decided to start his training in March for the April 19 race. “I had no idea what I was doing,” Beach recently recalled. “I figured that I should just try to build up the number of miles I ran each day and eventually get close to 26.2. I had no concept of days off or hard-easy training.” Nor, as it turns out, had Beach ever heard of tapering.
He had been running a 1.7-mile loop by the Charles River for most of the school year, mostly as part of his coxswain training for the Harvard crew team. In March, he decided that he would try to gradually increase the number of “circuits” he ran by the Charles. He never trained anywhere else for the next six weeks.
On the single 3-by-5 index card that constituted his running log for the spring of 1968, he noted “2.7, blisters” on his first
intended two-circuit run. The awful choices for running footwear in those days prevented Beach from completing his
3.4-mile run that day and forced a couple of days off.
Don’t miss this article about the guy with the second-longest Bostom Marathon streak.
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
Double Vision
What Seemed Like a Good Idea at One Time Can Become a Little Blurred Later On.
by Paul Clerici
There are two things I can most depend on in a marathon: I will make mistakes, and I will finish. As a personal challenge of endurance this spring, I decided to run the Boston Marathon (April 21) and the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon (May 4) within a span of 13 days.
Needless to say, I made plenty of mistakes, the first of which, no doubt obvious, was the commitment to run two marathons less than two weeks apart. That being said, since I would most likely do it again—What’s life without challenges?— the myriad of experiences from those two races opened my eyes to levels of despair and accomplishment I had never thought possible. And I am truly richer for them.
Read more about Paul’s double marathon in our March/April 2004 issue…
Lust in the Dust
Go West, Not-So-Young Woman.
by Rachel Toor
The author gets more than she bargained for while housesitting, writing, and running
in the California Sierras.
This is a must-read in our March/April 2004 issue…
Running Sick and Tired
Identifying Specific Vitamin and Mineral Needs for Hard-Running Endurance Athletes.
by Todd Whitthore
Endurance athletes are healthier than the average person, but they can also be more prone to disease, illness, and exhaustion if they lack the correct vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants in their nutrition regimen.
Last year, the Journal of the American Medical Association recommended that all adults take a daily multivitamin: “Our North American diet is sufficient to prevent overt vitamin deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi. However, insufficient vitamin intake is apparently a cause of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis.”
Continued in our March/April issue…
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
Turning the Knob
A Runner in Search of an Epiphany Finds New Frontiers–In the Eerily Familier.
by Kevin Beck
The week after the Fourth of July, 2003, wasn’t the first time I quit being a runner while still allowing myself the luxury to put on a pair of light shoes, leave the house, and perambulate around town in a manner suspiciously reminiscent of someone bent on either casually fleeing or exercising.
The impetus for this resolution varies, but the thought process is always the same: I claim this “runner” identity first and foremost to compete, but I’ve sworn off racing forever; therefore I’m not a runner anymore. Q.E.D. But there’s a little problem with this logical schema: I have to get out there, you know, to blow off steam, and keep my waist size respectable, and get some fresh air. Now and then; not daily. And if I wear a watch it certainly means nothing. . . .
In April I had fumbled away my most recent perambulatory raison d’etre, an Olympic Trials qualifying time, when I had dropped out of the Boston Marathon just past seven miles. It was a hot, blustery day and any brooding was bunted aside by the philosophical notion that at least part of my failure was circumstantial, beyond my management. But over the next few months, training alone in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia and continuing with the hundred-mile weeks I had been doing, on average, for a year and a half now, something took sick, died, and began to rot in a hard-to-reach corner of my training psyche. Maybe it was the unremitting solitude; maybe the existential question of “why?”; or perhaps it was just one of life’s inscrutable mishmash of factors whose sum in the end spells apathy—a death sentence for any serious marathoner’s goals.
You’ll enjoy Beck’s physical and metaphysical journey. All in our March/April 2004 issue.
Return to Racing
After a Long Layoff, the Reality of Aging Must Be Dealt With.
by Scott Young
One day I got off my couch and, at the age of 50, decided to make a running comeback. Now, I am not exactly Michael Jordan, so there was no need for a press conference and daily analysis of my progress. There was absolutely no fanfare. I simply declared that I would rather be lean, fit, and happy than fat and happy, as I had become. After four years away from training to compete, I was ready to do it again.
Read about Scott’s attempt to regain old marathoning form in our March/April issue.
Madrid Marathon Study
The 2003 Race Provided a Perfect Venue for Measuring the Effects of Sun and Heat.
by Pedro Pujol, MD
Dr. Pujol is a member of our science advisory board.
The Art and Science of the Stage Race
Got Plenty of Racing If You Want It and Can Stand It—and If You Can Pace Yourself.
by Mike Wille
The final page of my Marathon des Sables logbook read something like this:
“We ran 42 km today, an official marathon distance, which felt more like a hundred miler with thumbtacks stuffed in my shoes. The terrain was nothing but a mosaic of rocks, all different shapes and sizes—jolting my feet and causing my ankles to twist and bend in tormenting directions. By the time I reached the bivouac, it felt as if my worst enemy tied me to a chair and rubbed a cheese grater along the bottoms of my feet for the last four and a half hours, while his buddy took repetitive swings at my knees with a whiffle-ball bat.
“Other than this minor discomfort, everything else has been swell (or should I say swelling). I believe the surrounding Moroccan landscape is as beautiful as they say, I only wish I could wash the sand out of my eyes long enough to catch a glimpse of it. The raging sandstorms keep everyone blinded for most of the day. I’ve been trying to eat to keep my energy up but this bout that I’m having with dysentery has taken its toll on my bowels. Everything that goes in is coming out a few hours later, with lots of extra sand. I think I may have enough of the Sahara in my digestive tract to build a sand castle, and may not have to eat any fiber for the next couple of months. I have no doubt that everything will return to normal if I ever make it out of this desert alive and get back to civilization in one piece.”
Read the rest of Mike’s article about stage racing in our
March/April issue.
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
The Arizona to Arkansas Shuffle
A Tale of Two Diverse Long-Distance Races.
by Mary Croft
Even though the second running boom is supposedly close to peaking, a startling array of marathons and ultras is offered to this new generation of runners. For those of us who were around for the earlier running revolution, the choices can be mind-boggling. In a one-month period, I participated in two races that I think exemplify the contrast between the two periods. Those races were the inaugural Lost Dutchman Marathon in Apache Junction (near Phoenix) on January 20, 2002, and the Sylamore Trail 50K, which was run about a month later, on February 23 in the beautiful foothills of the Ozark Mountains about three hours north of Little Rock.
Lost Dutchman offered everything of what I call the high-tech method of conducting a marathon. There was an incredible Web site with beautiful pictures of the area and all the information you could possibly want, including online registration. As the race drew near, updates informed people who were unfamiliar with the area or who were unable to get to the expo or packet pickup. Packet pickup and a small expo were held about halfway between most of the motels and the start of the marathon, so it was quite convenient to get your number and your timing chip and then drive the course.
Read the rest of Mary’s article in our March/April issue.
Special Book Bonus
The Long Run Solution: Fifth Installment
by Joe Henderson
Here is Rich Benyo’s introduction to our new Book Bonus:
The two major North American gold rushes are cases in point:
James Marshall, who discovered gold in the mill race at Coloma, California, in 1848, as well as the owner of the property on which it was discovered, Johann Sutter, never profited from “their” gold, and in fact they died destitute.
Two polar opposites, tall, lean, and hawkish Robert Henderson and laid-back well-rounded George Washington Carmack, in a ballet bordering on Greek tragedy, discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896, but neither would reap the huge rewards their discovery precipitated.
It’s similar, in some ways, when contemplating the bestseller book gold rush at the start of the running revolution in the mid-1970s.
Several of the pioneers had long been standing knee deep in the frigid waters panning for gold in the stream of long-distance running. Hal Higdon, who did not toil exclusively in running but who worked several streams (auto racing, true crime), wrote a landmark book in 1971 (Henry Regnery Company, Chicago) titled On the Run From Dogs and People. It is still in print today and deserves to stay in print forever, but it is revered by only a few.
Joe Henderson, who became the editor of Runner’s World in 1970 after a stint at Track & Field News and who lured Dr. George Sheehan into the pages of Runner’s World after their meeting on the 1972 Olympic Games tour, had written numerous running books: Long Slow Distance—The Humane Way to Train (1969), Road Racers and Their Training (1970), Thoughts on the Run (1970), Run Gently, Run Long (1974), First Steps to Fitness (1974), Running with Style (1975), Step Up to Racing (1975), and The Long Run Solution (1976). As an editor, he had shepherded a mass of George Sheehan’s RW columns into Dr. Sheehan on Running (1975).
But the whole landscape was to change, and all within the space of a year.
Bantam Books bought Dr. Sheehan on Running and in 1976 published it as a mass-market paperback—and it took off. In 1977, reformed fatty smoker Jim Fixx, who had been saved by running and who had spent a year mining the ore pockets of long-distance running including weeks upon weeks at the Runner’s World offices, published The Complete Book of Running, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there for nearly a year.
George Sheehan would follow up with Running & Being, which became a bestseller and a classic, but in all the excitement, The Long Run Solution, one of the best running books of its generation, was overshadowed, overwhelmed, and overlooked.
A handful of rickety-in-the-joints codgers at once lament the book’s having been overshadowed by brighter lights while jealously hoarding the memories of the book’s flashes of gold and maybe even verging on wanting it to keep its place as “our” favorite book of the running revolution.
Joe Henderson’s The Long Run Solution was published in trade paperback for $3.95 by World Publications, the
book arm of Runner’s World. It is not a complicated book and it has no long James Joyce-like run-on sentences, even
though it is about running on . . . and on and on. Joe Henderson doesn’t write complicated sentences.
He writes spare, insightful sentences, and he strings them together like a stonemason working with emeralds and
rubies and sapphires to build not a massive edifice but a wall over which he entices us to jump in an effort to get to the other side, where he has been running and playing and extending the joys of childhood well into middle age—and beyond.
Goals are ends. Destinations. Stopping places. Two things happen with them: either you reach them,
or you don’t. And either way you stop, from satisfaction or from frustration.” Pretty simple and pretty profound at the same time.
Joe’s little book wasn’t filled with training advice. It didn’t meet the no-pain-no-gain philosophies. It quoted practical scientists looking at running rather than philosophers who weren’t really talking about running when they uttered their profundities.
Joe’s book was the simple manifesto of citizen long-distance running at that very critical time. It said, simply, that even if you have graduated from college you can still run—and you don’t have to run hard in organized competition until you puke. You can enrich your life (both physically and psychologically) by running gently for an hour a day, occasionally testing yourself against yourself by racing, but hey, if you don’t feel like it, that’s OK too. Just run for an hour to fulfill your design as a human being, where your largest bones and muscles are in your legs, and for good reason.
Lower your pulse rate. Knock your cholesterol down a few notches. Keep your weight down. Feel better. Get addicted to euphoria that is self-generated by becoming the joyful animal you can be.
Joe’s message was simple: just do it. His approach was simple: simple sentences, simple running habits.
Certainly, some of the book’s references are getting a bit long in the tooth after nearly three decades. And a few references (like Tom Bassler’s claim that if you run a marathon you are automatically vaccinated against heart disease; consider Jim Fixx) have proven to be less than scientifically sound.
But the book’s strengths are its incredible readability and its stone-wall solid approach to making running a part of your life.
There isn’t a five-year period in which I don’t pick up The Long Run Solution and read it again, both to bring back the energizing effect of validating long-distance running as an adult pursuit and as an antidote to a too-pressured, too-stressed life.
Over the years I’ve done what little I could to persuade some publisher somewhere to commission Joe to do an updated edition of Long Run Solution. But then I come to my senses and relent. Would I want someone to paint tattoos and nose rings on American Gothic? Or perhaps more appropriate, would I want to see all the characters in a Norman Rockwell painting exhibiting shaved heads?
As with many timeless treasures, The Long Run Solution has the power to circle around through decades of time to take another pass over the stadium, and in many ways the time is right yet again. Today’s long-distance runner enjoying this simple little sport and lifestyle can learn much from this simple little book. Enjoy your running. Allow it to simplify your life while highlighting it with a golden hue.—Rich Benyo
I think I’ll give M&B a try. How can I
Subscribe?
Volume 8 | Number 3 | May/June 2004
Departments
Editorial
When Running Becomes a Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings trilogy has become so ubiquitous in the wake of Peter Jackson’s filmed versions of the J.R.R. Tolkien classics that we have come to believe that they have always been with us.
We high school nerds formed little cults to chip in to order copies of the books from England and then drew lots to see who would get to read them first when they arrived. Fortunately, there were three novels, so three of us little ne’er-do-wells could be occupied at one time reading the adventures of the diverse little fellowship as it strove to destroy the ring of evil—even if we read them out of sequence.
Overlooked in all the excitement then and now was that the ring trilogy did not spring from the ground. The Lord of the Rings had been preceded by a single novel written for young people. It was called, simply, The Hobbit, and it told of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, uncle of Frodo Baggins.
Many of the elements that are so popular in the trio of books and movies—Gandalf, dwarves, dragons, Rivendell and the
elves, Gollum, Hobbiton, and the ring—were first encountered in The Hobbit.
Continued in our May/June issue. Rich welcomes running legend Joe Henderson to the
M&B staff and reveals that Joe is really a hobbit.
On the Road with Barry Lewis
Seeking the Flow
There seems to be at least one point in every long race when I wonder why I’m out there torturing myself. The “bad patch” can be short lived or it can stay with me for miles, but if I put my head down and drive on through it, I know it will eventually end. There is no simple answer to the question of why, but as M&B editor Rich Benyo pointed out in an editorial last year, perhaps it is because running can “make us more human” by lightening our spirit; perhaps running offers “a special sort of meaning in a world that often feels too rushed and meaningless.” It makes us feel good, in spite of (or because of?) the pain.
Continued in our May/June issue…
My Most Unforgettable Ultramarathon (And What I Learned From It)
by Emmett Rahl
COOL, CALIFORNIA, March 9, 2002—The first time you race a distance longer than you have run before, you have a
bit of nervous anticipation that you might not be able to make it all the way to the finish line. Before I began running in April
1996, I had “raced” in about six 5K races in my life. Three of these were in middle school, and I think my best had been
about 35 minutes. The other three were Picnic Day fun runs at the University of California at Davis, and I came in tied for
last, third to last, and last, having walked all three. Running was definitely not for me because of my height (6 feet, 6 inches)
and weight (210 pounds). I had watched my younger sister, Riva (5 feet, 11 inches), run—and win—several races. Since
she did extraordinarily well, I could not use my large size as an excuse.
Continued in our May/June issue…
I want this issue delivered right to my house.
Subscribe
Twin CitiesMarathon
The Century-Old Two-City Rivalry Is Set Aside for Marathon Weekend.
When Jack Moran launch-ed the Twin Cities Marathon in 1982, he had the marketing savvy to give the race
a nifty theme. “The most beautiful urban marathon in America™,” he called it. Because of the lush park-lands, fall foliage, and classic architecture that adorn most of the 26.2-mile route, Moran was offering not hyperbole but reality, and the name and impressions of
the spectators and participants have stuck throughout the race’s history.
Award-winning posters for the marathon regularly feature themes with leaves. The finish line is in the shadows of the elegant white-marble capitol building in
St. Paul and the regal St. Paul Cathedral, virtual twin towers of the Twin Cities. Both are on a hilltop and provide photographers with impressive backdrops for runners’ finish photos in either direction. The cathedral, looming over the last downhill nearly a quarter mile from the finish line, gives a postcard image. The capitol, overlooking the finish chutes, is part of the canvas for the standard shot of runners celebrating as they cross the finish line with their time illuminated above and the chip mat recording their time below.
You can read the rest of the Twin Cities Marathon profile in the May/June issue…
Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.
On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:
I TALK to experienced marathoners (both fast and slow) and read articles and stories about pacing yourself—don’t use your energy up too early; when it’s gone, it’s gone; you can’t do negative splits; you should plan on negative splits; ad infinitum.
My friends who are seven-minute-per-mile types for 15Ks and half-marathons all tell me they crater between 20 and 23 miles because they invariably go out too fast, even though they know better. After training, you know you can go slowly and finish; it’s the fast-as-you-can that leaves the rest of us searching in the dark.
It would be great for average runners attempting their first, second, or third marathon if they knew how to determine what a realistic pace would be. (We know you should maintain a certain pace; we just don’t know how.) We can use pace calculators to learn about theoretical pace, but I discovered during my first 20-mile long run that adding 15 seconds per minute to my half-marathon pace (as figured by the calculator) about killed me. My second 20-miler was better because I ran one minute slower per mile, and I’m hoping my third and final one before my race makes me a little stronger yet. Here’s the question: We hear and read about not going too hard in the first six, 10, 13, and 20 miles and making the last six the race, but not to go too slowly because you’ll never make it up. Can your experts guide new distance runners through the maze of finding the proper pace for their race that will get them through the 26.2 knowing they set a worthy goal and made it? I define “proper” as one where you know you didn’t hold anything back but still crossed the finish line with dignity (no crawling, barfing, or screams for the medic). Or is learning all this about yourself part of the mystique?
Our experts answer this question in our May/June 2004 issue.
About the Authors
Among this issue’s stellar cast of authors are Nobby Hashizume, Rich Engelhart, Joe LeMay,
Cathy Tibbetts, Tom Hayes, and Tito Morales.
Features
In Their Own Words: Arthur Lydiard
The New Zealand Shoemaker Revolutionized Distance Running in the ’60s. What’s His Take on What Has
Happened Since Then?
by Nobby Hashizume
M&B: What is the Lydiard training method in a nutshell?
Lydiard: Simply put, it is the perfect balance between aerobic training and anaerobic training in order to maximize your potential and to peak on the required day. The important thing to remember is that your anaerobic capacity is a limited factor at somewhere around 18 and 20 liters. But you can develop your aerobic capacity with marathon-type conditioning year by year. So if your aerobic capacity is, say, 40 milliliters/kg/min. and you develop anaerobic capacity on the top, then this is your performance level this year. You can do as much anaerobic training as you like, but it’s physiologically impossible to make it any higher. So how do you bring your performance level up? You bring up your aerobic base. So the next year you might improve your aerobic capacity to 50 milliliters/kg/min. and you can develop the same anaerobic capacity on the top, and then the next year improve up to maybe 60 milliliters/kg/min. and so on. You will keep improving the overall performance level by improving your aerobic capacity. So if you start training this year and keep developing your aerobic capacity year by year, in 10 years’ time you will probably produce your best performance. It’s a gradual progressive improvement.
M&B:Fundamental to your training methods is to develop stamina by doing marathon-type conditioning.
Lydiard: Stamina is general cardiac efficiency. And building stamina means putting your body into a near-tireless state so that oxygen debts are not created quickly and the ability to recover rapidly is at a high level. This way, you’ll be able to accept a heavier workout in practice, you’ll recover from races quicker and be able to resume normal training sooner—also enabling you to hold on to your “peak” racing fitness for a longer period of time. Also one of the biggest advantages is that, at the end of the race, you’re not even the least bit tired so that you can capitalize fully on your basic speed. [Peter] Snell was the slowest runner in terms of basic speed over 200 meters in the final of the 800 meters at Rome [1960] and Tokyo [1964] Olympic Games. But because he was marathon trained, he could capitalize that speed and sprint full out while his opponents, whose basic speeds were faster than Snell’s, were too tired to use it. Best way to improve your cardiac efficiency is by running long distances.
Now, I found out years ago, when I was running 100 miles a week in training, if I alternated the distances, say, instead of 15 miles every day, run 10 miles one day and 20 miles the next, I got better results. It was Dr. Gerhard Uhlenbruck of West Germany who confirmed for me that, during the long runs, particularly two hours or more, you very quickly develop underdeveloped capillaries and build new capillary beds. General cardiac efficiency is developed through improvement of assimilation, transportation, and utilization of oxygen; and development of capillary beds increases utilization of oxygen at the working muscles. So consequently the longer runs enhance these physiological reactions. So we made sure we incorporated long runs in our training schedule during the conditioning period, usually three long runs of at least one and one-half hours to two hours or even longer as a nucleus. This is why Peter Snell, competing twice around the track as an 800-meter runner, ran 100 miles a week with a 22-mile run on Sunday.
This 21-page interview with Lydiard concludes in our May/June issue.
In Their Own Words: Peter Snell
Arthur Lydiard Reached Into the Neighborhood
to Recruit Some Young Men to Train for the Olympics:
Peter Snell Took Gold in Record Time.
by Rich Engelhart
Editor’s note: Peter Snell of New Zealand won gold in the 800 meters at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, then
came back four years later in Tokyo to again win gold in the 800 meters as well as win gold in the 1,500 meters.
Today he is a Ph.D. physiologist living and working in Dallas.
M&B: Coming from as temperate a place as New Zealand, how do you deal with the summers in Texas?
Snell: It’s pretty awful! [laughs]
M&B: My sister visited Texas once from Pennsylvania in the summer. She said
you could feel heat coming up from the toilet because the water in it was hot.
Snell: You basically stay inside. It’s hard to run in that sort of heat. So you become a cyclist. But it’s not too bad. And if possible, I try to schedule a trip to New Zealand. [laughs]
M&B: I think if I had an academic life and I could be away in the summer, I could handle it. Do you see people running here in the summer?
Snell: Some. Not so much. Diehards always run. You basically need to do it in the early morning. It just doesn’t cool off at night. It becomes an exercise in temperature regulating. You certainly can’t run very fast in that sort of heat. It’s actually a good adaptation to do a bit of a workout in the heat, but you just don’t look forward to it. And as I say, I quite enjoy cycling. I become more of a cyclist in the humid summers. On the upside, it’s pretty nice about nine months of the year, including a day like this in February.
M&B: I went out this morning in shorts and T-shirt. You can’t do that in Massachusetts at this time of year. Not usually. Though there were a few really warm days in January. Speaking of running, what’s the longest run you do these days?
Snell: It’s not long enough. I work out with my wife, and her fitness level has dropped to the point where three miles walking and jogging is about it. We should do more. It used to be, until fairly recently, I’d do a four-miler at about eight-minute-per-mile pace. But I don’t do that anymore, and walking and jogging is fine. I’m sort of hooked on the walk phase. I keep thinking I’ll lift myself out of that. Basically we jog about 400 meters and walk about 200. Don’t get injured.
M&B: Do you cycle more?
Snell: It’s probably about 50/50. I feel that cycling is not as useful as running. The reason I do the running primarily is not so much health but so that I can orienteer more competitively. And cycling doesn’t help me become a better runner that much. It helps to maintain some cardiovascular fitness. I think my problem today is that I’ve allowed myself to become detrained so that my muscle fitness is pretty low.
This 19-page interview with Lydiard concludes in our May/June issue.
The Vermont 100
A Brief History of a Long Race.
by Joe LeMay
“Aren’t you a little fast for this?” was the question posed by someone who recognized me when I showed up at Smoke Rise Farm for my first Vermont 100-mile race in 1997. I was there as part of the crew for Ellen McCurtin, my wife now and my girlfriend at the time. I was a semi-well-known national-class 10K and 15K runner, and the prospect of running 100 miles all at once as opposed to running the distance stretched out over the course of a week (as I’m accustomed to) was an interesting idea. If I can crush these guys at 10, 15, or 20K, I thought to myself, imagine what I could do over 100 miles—world record, easy.
Every now and then I toy with the thought. Then, when I piece together what would happen to me if I were to actually try to run a 100-mile race, the thought becomes much less attractive.
I would consider running Vermont as my initiation 100-miler because it’s the only one I know. I would pull through the first couple of aid stations in the lead because I don’t generally run much slower than seven-minute pace. Then I would arrive at the Pomfret aid station at mile 18. The race starts at 4:00 a.m., so at the speed I would be traveling, I would get there shortly after the sun rises. Then I would float through the Stage Road aid station at mile 27 and the colorfully named Route 12 aid station at mile 30.
Then it would start to get hard. The plodding would get to me. My quadriceps would start to tighten up beyond the point where any type of therapy would help. I would pull into the first Camp 10 Bear aid station (named for the 10 teddy bears placed beneath a tree there every year for the race) at mile 44 and quit—my $150 entry fee up in flames.
I remember the words of Homer Simpson: “If it’s hard, then it’s not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your shortwave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we’ll go inside and watch TV.”
Continued …
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
The Ultra Honeymoon
Some People Go to Vegas for Their Honeymoon, Some Go on a Cruise—but the Vermont 100?
by Nancy M. Griffith
July 19, 2003: We awakened even before the alarm sounded. I stretched my calves and Achilles briefly, then hit the floor. It was race day, 1:30 a.m., to be precise. Three and one-half hours of sleep would have to do.
I had a sudden flashback to that day in the summer of 2002 when Tom Burr
(my husband of four days) and Jim Stocco made a commitment to run the Vermont 100 in 2003. Before and since that time, the three of us, often accompanied by Tim Potter, have logged many miles together.
In December, Jim turned 50. Tom and I honored him with his very own personalized spoof issue of UltraRunning magazine, complete with his own cover photo, his profile, a story about the Afton 50K Trail Run (which had me winning the July race outright!), our very own “Ask Dr. Potter” medical advice column, a sex advice column, and the upcoming race schedule that included the Jim Stocco Spider Bite 50K, commemorating Jim’s injury, compliments of a very nasty spider in 2001.
Sometime around Christmas, Tom and I decided it would be fun to get married—in Vermont. We decided to keep it a secret. I’m sure Jim thought my excitement about going to Vermont was purely race centered. I was bursting to tell everyone about our wedding plans, especially after Tom presented me with a gorgeous diamond ring. Wearing it would have to wait.
Personally, I would rather train than race. Having previously confined my distance to the marathon, I offered my services as a handler and pacer at Vermont.
Now race day had arrived, and it was our chance to prove that for which we had planned and sweated. A more precise statement would be “that for which Jim had planned” since he had voluntarily assumed the position of chief logistician and planner extraordinaire. Tom and I figured there was no reason to duplicate his efforts.
Continued in our May/June 2004 issue…
A Primal Scream for Cooperation
Teamwork Becomes an Elusive Commodity During a Stab at the Primal Quest Challenge.
by Cathy Tibbetts
My three teammates for the second annual Primal Quest Adventure Race weren’t runners. Instead, they were broad-shouldered, well-muscled adventure racers. With bios that included college wrestling, climbing K2, ice hockey, and bench-press competitions, Steve, Rob, and Carlos (not their real names) all looked good on paper.
“What’s the difference between ultrarunners and adventure racers?” Carlos asked me before the race ever started.
“Egos,” I replied. Little did I know where this was heading.
The 2003 Primal Quest was the biggest and most competitive expedition-length adventure race ever to be held on American soil. Eighty teams from 12 countries, many of them including professional athletes, arrived at race headquarters at South Lake Tahoe on the California/Nevada border the first week in September for a shot at winning $250,000 in prize money. Four-person coed teams were to navigate 457 nonstop miles of flat-water paddling, white-water paddling, mountain biking, rappelling, ascending fixed ropes, orienteering, trekking, in-line skating and scootering, and caving.
It’s not a relay. Teammates must race together and stay within 100 yards of each other at all times or risk disqualification. It’s a lot of togetherness—the best of times when you get along and the worst of times when you don’t.
Continued in our May/June 2004 issue.
The Less-Is-More Training Plan
Or How to Run a Great Marathon on 34 Miles per Week or Less.
by Duncan Morris
Are you the kind of person who insists on seeing a significant return on your investment—your investment of time, that is? If you’re an experienced racer with an eye to moving up to the marathon or a longtime marathoner interested in debunking the myth that high mileage equals a good marathon, this program might be a big step in the right direction, or conversely, quite a few steps less!
Following my 16th marathon in Berlin two years ago, I felt it was time for a change. After nearly two decades of spring and fall marathons combined with the accompanying huge volume of running necessary in most training plans, I was approaching burnout fast. My previously enjoyable training runs were becoming tedious and stale. I decided to focus on shorter-distance racing. After trimming the fat off my former burgeoning running schedule, I penciled in six to seven varying track workouts per month and several significant tempo runs. For the most part, I just ran easily or hard, depending on how I felt that day, mostly with my dogs on trails. Occasionally I took an extra day off. Fun came back into my running life! I felt more energetic and positive about my training. Moreover, I began to see racing times I had thought were gone, and I began to collect some hardware at the local races more frequently.
The Experiment
Following a busy spring of racing 8Ks to half-marathons in my 55-59 age group (on roughly 30 to 35 miles per week), I thought I would run an experiment! My theory was that if I tweaked my training plan I might discover the point where a minimum of investment meets a maximum of return. I needed a new challenge. I would attempt to run another marathon on my 10K training schedule of 34 miles per week! Deciding to run a fall marathon, I began to overhaul my short-distance training program. I cautiously made room for the time-honored 2 3 20-mile long runs and then aggressively bumped up the tempo runs to marathon pace for an extended duration. To accommodate these longer runs, I cut back on the normal maintenance runs to reach my goal of 34 miles per week on average. I felt that whatever endurance I might lose by the reduced mileage would be more than compensated for by the extra-high-intensity track workouts. The process was now complete; all that remained was to make a scientific prediction for the outcome and to pick a marathon. My personal best was 3:11:49, set four years before, but more recently I had run Berlin in 3:21:21 in 2001. I thought it would be prudent to set a goal of breaking 3:20 on my new less-is-more training plan. I looked for a fall marathon and settled on the Royal Victoria in British Columbia on October 12—a fast, rolling course not too far from home. On July 20, I officially began my less-is-more mileage program and 12 weeks later, in horrendous weather conditions, ran 3:19:52. My reduced-mileage plan, which led me to this race, surprisingly enabled one of my speedier recoveries after the marathon as well!
In conclusion, I wouldn’t suggest divesting yourself of your GU futures quite yet, since you will still be required to run a few long runs. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be too anxious to buy into the high-mileage conspiracy either. Shouldn’t our collective goal be to reduce, reuse, and recycle? It makes little sense to squander excess junk miles when you can produce excellent results on 34 miles per week!
Read all the details of Duncan’s marathon training plan, including his day-by-day,
week-by-week schedule in our May/June issue…
Run Less, Run Better
By Substituting Some Alternative Workouts, You Can Save Your Legs and Maintain Fitness.
by Matt Fitzgerald
Matt shares the new cross-training paradigm that even athletes like Deena Kastor have
adopted.
Running’s Worst Pain
A Side Stitch? A Black Toenail? An Afternoon Running
Intervals at the Track? Inner Thigh Chafing? Nope.
by Sil Simpson
I love to run. I love to race. I race frequently, at almost any distance that’s available. For me, most races have two possible outcomes. I can run a good time. I can run a disappointing time.
My challenge in races from 5K to a half-marathon is to beat the clock. I hope to run a good time, to push myself from gun to finish line, and to avoid the temptation to run in the comfort zone. If I can run all the way in oxygen debt, if I can end the race gasping for breath, then I will succeed.
Short races are pretty simple. I can run well or I can run poorly. When the distance gets beyond a half-marathon, however, a third variable enters the equation. I can run a good time. I can run a disappointing time. I can also fail to finish. I begin every marathon with two different goals and with one unspoken fear.
My primary marathon goal is to finish. It’s never a certainty. Within my goal to finish is a subgoal of finishing with dignity. To me, that means running the entire course. I’ll walk through some aid stations, but my goal of dignity won’t allow me to walk for miles.
My secondary goal in a marathon is to run a certain time. I can’t achieve that goal if I don’t achieve the bigger goal of finishing. To run a time slower than my goal is a disappointment, but it’s the lesser of two possible disappointments.
The Unspoken Fear
My unspoken fear is to end the day with a DNF—did not finish. A DNF is failure. I can’t say that it’s my worst fear in life. I can say that it’s my worst fear in running.
Recently I DNF’d at God’s Country Marathon. I faltered. I failed.
Today, I still feel sad. At 16 miles that day, my legs just quit running. They reached their finish line 10 miles too early. It seemed as though the nerve that carries messages from my brain to my legs was no longer a part of my body. My brain said, “Go!” My legs didn’t get the message.
This DNF was the fifth of my life. The others made sense. This one still makes no sense. Twice I dropped from marathons with legitimate, existing injuries. Once, I dropped from a 36-miler at 30. Once, I dropped from a 50-miler at 35. Those were disappointing. This was painful. This still is painful.
On other days I’ve struggled in marathons, but my mind was strong enough to get me to the finish line. On this day, my mind was too weak to get me through those final 10 miles. I don’t know why. Today I’m sad. Today I’m scared. Today I’m determined.
I’m sad because I didn’t finish my favorite race. This isn’t baseball or football. I don’t have another game tomorrow or next week. The race gave out a nice shirt. I can’t bring myself to wear it because I didn’t earn it.
Continued in our May/June issue.
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
The Plain (but Not Simple) 100
A “No-Frills” Century Takes Running Back to the Basics: Survive the Course if
You Can.
by Tom Hayes
Running 100 miles in the mountains is always an adventure, but the Plain 100-Mile Endurance Run adds several dimensions.
First, for those readers awed by the idea of running 100 miles, some elucidation might be helpful. A great deal of the course is walked, not run, occasionally at a leisurely pace. Winners average 5 miles per hour while midpackers are close to 3 miles per hour. Aid stations, often with sumptuous buffets, pop up every one to four hours. These aid stations commonly serve fruit, water, and sports drinks plus generally ham, cheese, or turkey sandwiches; soup; Coke or Pepsi; salted boiled potatoes; pretzels; M&M’s; and chocolate chip cookies. At some races the nighttime aid stations include bonfires glowing ahead through the trees, bubbling cauldrons of soup, and supportive volunteers helping the runners on down the trail, those trails well-marked with fluorescent glow sticks bobbing in the breeze. So you don’t run a lot, and there is great food along the way, but there still remains a very incredulous “Why do it?”
“Why” probably varies with every runner, but there are possibly some general themes. “Challenge,” or test your limits, always comes up. The courses are normally in beautiful or at least interesting locations, making for good family vacations minus the day or two it takes to satiate mom’s or dad’s weird addiction. There is tremendous camaraderie since the 100-mile community is relatively small. While running 100 miles, you never undergo the anaerobic burn of short road races and rarely even breathe heavily for long. Slow, steady persistence (sometimes known as relentless forward motion) can actually win the race. In the case of 100 miles, “To finish is to win” has an even more authentic ring of truth than in shorter distances. Finally, but less often admitted, there is a certain sort of notoriety in being that harebrained lunatic who runs 100 miles on trails for fun.
Continued in our May/June 2004 issue…
Running in Circles in the North Sea
When the North Wind Strikes in the Helgoland Marathon, It Can Cut You in Half, So It’s Either Cry or Laugh.
by Udo Hildenstab
Race conditions: 6 degrees Celsius, a gale-force north wind, and it’s raining cats and dogs. The expressions on the faces of the competitors and the official race starter grimly say it all: this will be no walk in the park.
None too soon comes the obligatory starting shot, which in the case of Helgoland is a blast from a ship’s siren.
Helgoland was, over the war years, almost totally destroyed. Its red cliffs were battered with bombs, bullets, and cannon fire—attacks that nearly succeeded in making it permanently uninhabitable.
In keeping with the history of what amounts to a red brick sitting in the North Sea and sporting a surface area of less than one square kilometer, the Helgoland Marathon is a law unto itself. The race in 2001 saw blazing sunshine. A year later the only thing missing is Noah’s ark.
The island of sheer red cliffs rising from the sea is a haven for birds of numerous species and for various forms of wildlife, but it seems especially hostile to human beings, like going to a different planet. Think in terms of the Planet Fall in the original Alien movie.
The course involves four laps of the island, each lap measuring approximately 10.5 kilometers, plus a 196-meter run-in at the start.
It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to calculate that you must use every inch of the island and go out into the North Sea to get the necessary distance. Luckily, runners can use a stone jetty that goes into the sea as an appendix out-and-back. Not an inch of the island is left unexplored or unexposed by the runners. In summing up the course, especially under today’s conditions, Mayor Frank Botter puts it this way: “It’s like trying to run the 100-meter sprint on a beer mat.” Ah, if only it were beer coming down instead of stinging rain.
Then there is the terrain. Helgoland, this barely discernible dot on the nautical map, has a highland, lowland, and sections that are truly subterranean.
Continued in our May/June 2004 issue…
Roundabout Joe
Getting Lost Is the Easy Part; Getting Unlost Is What Takes Real Talent.
by Tito Morales
You’re in the middle of a run along unfamiliar streets and it suddenly dawns on you that, well, you had in your mind exactly where you wanted to go before you headed out the door, but you somehow took a wrong turn here or there so now
. . . OK. Let’s cut it straight. You’re completely, utterly, and hopelessly lost.
Welcome to the club, Roundabout.
I mean, you sort of think you know where you are. You’ve still got some juice in your legs, and since you haven’t come close to hitting your estimated time of return, you convince yourself that everything’s still A-OK in the running universe. At the very least, you’re certain you know how to get back if you simply retrace how you got to where you are. That is, if you can remember exactly where you took that one left turn. So you keep plugging along, getting yourself into more and more of a kerfuffle despite your best efforts. Call it the Beaver Cleaver mind-set.
Sometimes, it seems, the legs just seem to want to run—all by themselves—and you’re forced to simply go along for the ride. Like the morning I went for a run up in Napa while my wife and I were there celebrating her birthday. I was recuperating from a marathon run just days before and promised her I would be back in about 40 minutes so we could eat breakfast together. Uh-huh. An hour and a half later I was as lost as a faulty Mars Rover and there wasn’t a building or pay phone in sight. I did find a couple of morning strollers, though, but their sense of distance and direction was even more impaired than mine. They had me frantically huffing and puffing my way down a street that must have been the only one in the whole of the United States that didn’t intersect with any others. Maybe they didn’t take kindly to tourists. In any event, the aches and pains I incurred from my foolhardiness left me limping for weeks, and the silent treatment I received from my wife for the rest of that day was not only well earned but is still as vivid to me today as all those endless acres of vineyards.
Read the rest of Tito’s hilarious story in our May/June 2004 issue…
Special Book Bonus
The Long Run Solution: Fourth Installment
by Joe Henderson
Here is Rich Benyo’s introduction to our new Book Bonus:
The two major North American gold rushes are cases in point:
James Marshall, who discovered gold in the mill race at Coloma, California, in 1848, as well as the owner of the property on which it was discovered, Johann Sutter, never profited from “their” gold, and in fact they died destitute.
Two polar opposites, tall, lean, and hawkish Robert Henderson and laid-back well-rounded George Washington Carmack, in a ballet bordering on Greek tragedy, discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896, but neither would reap the huge rewards their discovery precipitated.
It’s similar, in some ways, when contemplating the bestseller book gold rush at the start of the running revolution in the mid-1970s.
Several of the pioneers had long been standing knee deep in the frigid waters panning for gold in the stream of long-distance running. Hal Higdon, who did not toil exclusively in running but who worked several streams (auto racing, true crime), wrote a landmark book in 1971 (Henry Regnery Company, Chicago) titled On the Run From Dogs and People. It is still in print today and deserves to stay in print forever, but it is revered by only a few.
Joe Henderson, who became the editor of Runner’s World in 1970 after a stint at Track & Field News and who lured Dr. George Sheehan into the pages of Runner’s World after their meeting on the 1972 Olympic Games tour, had written numerous running books: Long Slow Distance—The Humane Way to Train (1969), Road Racers and Their Training (1970), Thoughts on the Run (1970), Run Gently, Run Long (1974), First Steps to Fitness (1974), Running with Style (1975), Step Up to Racing (1975), and The Long Run Solution (1976). As an editor, he had shepherded a mass of George Sheehan’s RW columns into Dr. Sheehan on Running (1975).
But the whole landscape was to change, and all within the space of a year.
Bantam Books bought Dr. Sheehan on Running and in 1976 published it as a mass-market paperback—and it took off. In 1977, reformed fatty smoker Jim Fixx, who had been saved by running and who had spent a year mining the ore pockets of long-distance running including weeks upon weeks at the Runner’s World offices, published The Complete Book of Running, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there for nearly a year.
George Sheehan would follow up with Running & Being, which became a bestseller and a classic, but in all the excitement, The Long Run Solution, one of the best running books of its generation, was overshadowed, overwhelmed, and overlooked.
A handful of rickety-in-the-joints codgers at once lament the book’s having been overshadowed by brighter lights while jealously hoarding the memories of the book’s flashes of gold and maybe even verging on wanting it to keep its place as “our” favorite book of the running revolution.
Joe Henderson’s The Long Run Solution was published in trade paperback for $3.95 by World Publications, the
book arm of Runner’s World. It is not a complicated book and it has no long James Joyce-like run-on sentences, even
though it is about running on . . . and on and on. Joe Henderson doesn’t write complicated sentences.
He writes spare, insightful sentences, and he strings them together like a stonemason working with emeralds and
rubies and sapphires to build not a massive edifice but a wall over which he entices us to jump in an effort to get to the other side, where he has been running and playing and extending the joys of childhood well into middle age—and beyond.
Goals are ends. Destinations. Stopping places. Two things happen with them: either you reach them,
or you don’t. And either way you stop, from satisfaction or from frustration.” Pretty simple and pretty profound at the same time.
Joe’s little book wasn’t filled with training advice. It didn’t meet the no-pain-no-gain philosophies. It quoted practical scientists looking at running rather than philosophers who weren’t really talking about running when they uttered their profundities.
Joe’s book was the simple manifesto of citizen long-distance running at that very critical time. It said, simply, that even if you have graduated from college you can still run—and you don’t have to run hard in organized competition until you puke. You can enrich your life (both physically and psychologically) by running gently for an hour a day, occasionally testing yourself against yourself by racing, but hey, if you don’t feel like it, that’s OK too. Just run for an hour to fulfill your design as a human being, where your largest bones and muscles are in your legs, and for good reason.
Lower your pulse rate. Knock your cholesterol down a few notches. Keep your weight down. Feel better. Get addicted to euphoria that is self-generated by becoming the joyful animal you can be.
Joe’s message was simple: just do it. His approach was simple: simple sentences, simple running habits.
Certainly, some of the book’s references are getting a bit long in the tooth after nearly three decades. And a few references (like Tom Bassler’s claim that if you run a marathon you are automatically vaccinated against heart disease; consider Jim Fixx) have proven to be less than scientifically sound.
But the book’s strengths are its incredible readability and its stone-wall solid approach to making running a part of your life.
There isn’t a five-year period in which I don’t pick up The Long Run Solution and read it again, both to bring back the energizing effect of validating long-distance running as an adult pursuit and as an antidote to a too-pressured, too-stressed life.
Over the years I’ve done what little I could to persuade some publisher somewhere to commission Joe to do an updated edition of Long Run Solution. But then I come to my senses and relent. Would I want someone to paint tattoos and nose rings on American Gothic? Or perhaps more appropriate, would I want to see all the characters in a Norman Rockwell painting exhibiting shaved heads?
As with many timeless treasures, The Long Run Solution has the power to circle around through decades of time to take another pass over the stadium, and in many ways the time is right yet again. Today’s long-distance runner enjoying this simple little sport and lifestyle can learn much from this simple little book. Enjoy your running. Allow it to simplify your life while highlighting it with a golden hue.—Rich Benyo
I think I’ll give M&B a try. How can I
Volume 8 | Number 4 | July/August 2004
Departments
Editorial
The Newer Traditions of Boston
by Richard Benyo
Boston was hot this year. Not as hot as 1976, when the temperature rose to 95 degrees and the frontrunners—and everyone else—wilted and the sympathetic spectators ran hoses from their houses to cool down the struggling runners. The race that year came to be called “the run for the hoses.”
It wasn’t quite as hot this year, but for runners from the Northeast who had suffered through another long, cold winter, heat training had not been one of their options. Faced with predictions of an exceptionally hot race day, visiting runners from the Southwest, for instance, felt little threat and much confidence in handling the heat. But for most, slowing down and taking on additional fluids was the order of the day. Official high temps were 83 at the start in Hopkinton, 80 at the halfway point in Wellesley, and 85 at the finish in Boston. Humidity hung around 40 percent.
Common sense and conservative running among the participants made for some impressive numbers under the circumstances: 20,344 runners had entered; 17,950 started; and an impressive 16,743 finished.
Continued in our July/August issue. Rich’s annual pilgrimage to Boston is a mix of
old and new.
On the Road with Barry Lewis
Taking Stock
Barry’s last M&B column.
My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It)
by Starshine Candoff
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, October 22, 2002—I stood on the starting line of the 2002 Marine Corps Marathon, knowing somewhere within me that I had no business doing what I was about to do. All around me I could feel the excitement of the participants, the electricity of the crowds, the beat of the prerace music, and my fiancé grabbing my hand now and then, squeezing it excitedly, trying desperately to get me to relax.
“You’re ready,” he said, looking me in the eye. “You’ve done all the work. Trust your training. We’re going to take it out nice and easy the first few miles. You’re going to be awesome.”
I stretched some more, concentrating on my right leg, grateful that he was there. Beginning his running recovery from a stress fracture, Darris, a 2:45 marathoner, was going to pace me through my fall race today. Goal: 3:20—3:25 acceptable, but five months sweat equity put toward 3:20. And I was ready, in terms of training at least. I had run consistent long runs throughout the summer, as high as 24 miles, with the final miles still under eight-minute pace. My average mileage was 65 miles per week. I had run several half-marathons leading up to race day, some as comfortable tempo runs with plenty left over, some as races in which I ran the requisite time to fit in to the formulas that converted half-marathon time to full marathon time. Tempo runs, speed work, taper, hydration—it was all there. I was in the best shape of my life, ready to PR. But there was something I wasn’t telling him.
Continued in our July/August issue…
I want this issue delivered right to my house.
Subscribe
Columbus Marathon
Fall Running Weather in Mid-Ohio Can’t Be Beat–Nor Can Its Marathon.
Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.
On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:
I AM 47 years old and have been running for 20 years. I typically do a spring and a fall marathon, these days just under
four hours. My pair of sub-3:00s at this point will never be joined by a triplet. My question involves immediate postmarathon
workouts. My habit has been to do a gentle two- to four-mile run the day after the marathon. I’ve found that it seems to flush
some of the tightness out of the legs and offers decent recovery to regular running. Some of my friends insist that it’s damaging
my recovery and I should just lay off the week after a marathon so I don’t further damage already damaged muscles.
When I tried that, however, I spent the week walking around like a rusty robot from a 1950s sci-fi movie.
What’s your advice?
Our experts answer this question in our July/August 2004 issue.
About the Authors
Among this issue’s stellar cast of authors are Ian Torrence, Rachel Toor, Rob Rickard, Doug
Kurtis, Eileen Duggan, Dan Horvath, and Tito Morales.
Features
Along the Colorado Trail
An Attempt to Lower Buzz Burrell’s Record for the 468-Mile Course Taught Us More Than We
Had Dreamed.
by Ian Torrence
Foreword
By Hal Koerner
A road winds southeast out of Bailey, Colorado, just off Highway 285 where the Colorado foothills begin to take a new shape. I had driven that road many times in search of the place where I would begin my three- or four-hour trail runs away from the hordes of people who now call the Front Range home. I had logged countless miles on that stretch of the Colorado Trail, never knowing that one day it would carry me across the state, revealing just how important trail running had become in my life.
It was this same segment of the Colorado Trail that also caused me to question whether Ian Torrence and I had made the right decision in trying to break Buzz Burrell’s speed record for the entire 468 miles.
We had covered only 40 miles in our first day on the trail, and I had already lost confidence in a plan that would necessitate nothing less than 50-mile days for the next week. This doubt of pulling off what would be the biggest accomplishment of my trail-running and ultrarunning career was something I had not thought of. I knew I had to think of something, though, because my two-week-old Leadville Trail 100 legs were beginning to call to me—a sure sign that the cumulative miles I had run this year in preparation for this endeavor might have caught up with me.
I hadn’t been running competitively very long, so when I entered the ultrarunning foray I patterned my training and racing schedule after people whom I had seen achieve great success. It was no surprise that one of the individuals I had long admired and watched excel was running right beside me. He, unlike others, subscribed to a very aggressive racing schedule, leaving 50- and 100-mile races in his wake. I, too, felt this was the path for me, although at this moment, I couldn’t help wondering whether I was the only one feeling stretched. With that, I was reminded of a line from a song I once heard: “With a shorter past there’s a greater hurry, let the moment last, there’s no need to worry.” I had raced so much in the last few years trying to become a great ultrarunner that I had forgotten what drew me to the sport in the first place: time being spent with friends, enjoying the outdoors, and creating awareness of the parallels that it brings to life. Oddly enough it wasn’t but a mile earlier that I had told one of my faithful crew members, “Don’t worry, Rich, we’ve got all day!” And we did have all day to do the things that come easily. Luckily for us that included running, and that was what we were going to do.
**********
While we sipped from our brews in a Moab, Utah, bar, Chris Martinez and I swapped stories from a day that came to pass in September 2003 along the Colorado Trail. “I thought I was going to throw up,” Chris said to me. “I was scared. That thunderstorm was coming in real close, and that second climb up to Molas Pass almost killed me. It was one of the hardest runs I have ever done. I don’t know how you guys did that for as many days as you did.”
Chris was speaking of the day he joined 27-year-old Hal Koerner for a 21-mile section of the Colorado Trail in the San Juan Mountains south of Silverton, Colorado. Hal had already run 375 miles in seven days when a fresh Martinez hooked up with him. “He let me lead up the first climb, but I had a funny feeling like I was holding him back. When we crested the Continental Divide, he took off. I had real trouble keeping up with him on the second climb going up to Molas Pass. On the way up, Hal asked whether I might be able to keep him company for a couple more miles, but I had to decline. I was done.” I knew Chris was done, too. When he arrived at Molas Pass with Hal, he was looking haggard, with enough strength only to find his food sack and fall into a reclining position.
Then there was Hal. He sauntered up to our two vehicles. His sunburned lips poked out from under his visor, but so did his smile. He knew he was getting close to the end. He talked only positively and still held the excitement in his voice that he had had nearly 400 miles before. Eighty miles separated Hal from the end of the Colorado Trail. What would seem like an impossible task to most, finally sounded quite doable to Hal. He was going to finish, and the end was in sight.
You can read the rest of Ian’s story about their historic run in our July/August
issue.
A Horse Called Slick
The Sport of Ride and Tie Sends Three Runners With Eight Legs on a Journey of Discover.
by Rachel Toor
Summer 2000–We’re sitting around the campsite the night before the 30th Annual World Championship Ride and Tie. I’m talking to Warren Hellman, a San Francisco venture capitalist. Warren is cute, in a 60-something Woody Allen-ish kind of way. He was president of Lehman Brothers when he was 28 years old. These days he buys companies and does endurance sports. He’s nursing a sore hamstring.
“How’d you get injured, Warren?”
“Yoga.”
“Yoga?”
“I was sitting on the floor with my legs split,” he says. “My yoga teacher commended me on my flexibility. I said, ‘Oh, yeah, watch this: I can get my chest to the floor.’ Then, pop.”
It’s a competitive crowd I’m hanging out with, here in the mountains just north of Santa Cruz in Northern California. We’ve come to race in a sport that has been described as what would happen if you took the Kentucky Derby and the Boston Marathon to Outward Bound. The people who are attracted to this crazy sport tend to be involved in equally crazy sports: ultrarunning and endurance horse riding. Among us in camp are bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, contractors, engineers, teachers, academics, loggers, small-business owners, large-business owners, veterinarians, accountants—fairly diverse, except that we are all white and most have enough disposable income to own and train horses.
A must-read in our July/August issue.
Double the Spectacle
Adventure Running Is All Well and Good, But a Little Planning Goes a Long Way.
by Rob Rickard
Wow! Our first view on this trip to the Grand Canyon took our breath away. Little did we know that in less than 12 hours it would take our breath away in a literal sense—at least for five of the six of us. My wife, Betty, said she was the only sane one in our group. The flight attendants on our flight agreed with her. Betty came along just to enjoy the trip and observe one of God’s wonders. (And, as she said, “To take home whatever is left of you after the run!”) She enjoyed the trip, except for one night. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The other five of us (we could not decide whether to call ourselves the “Old Ones” or the “Canyon Double-Crossers”) who were planning on running the canyon were kind of a motley crew. Gary Parcher, from Portland, Oregon, was the kid of the group at 56 years young. The rest of the team was made up of Lee Fields at 59 and Eb Englemann at 60, both from Salem, Oregon; Joe Dana, of Tucson, Arizona, at 66; and me at 59. Spring chickens we were not. But we enjoyed running the trails, especially when we could make it an adventure run as challenging as this would be. We had all been doing ultradistances for 10 to 20 years and had been running together most of that time. Joe and Eb originally did the double crossing in October 2001. After hearing of their adventures, the rest of us immediately started planning our own version of the canyon crossing, so Joe and Eb agreed to be our guides. After finally aligning five schedules, we selected May 13 for the start of the crossing. We built in a couple of days on the front and a few days after that for recovery and started making plane reservations and hotel accommodations. Since Joe lived in Tucson, that became our headquarters. We were all concerned about the May 13 date because temperatures would already be very warm by that time, but our busy schedules would not allow much flexibility. We would just have to adjust. (See “Lessons Learned” on page 64.)
Finally the departure date of May 11 arrived, and we all (minus Joe, of course) met at the Portland airport. We had a great trip. Our behavior on the plane was just good enough that we were not handed a parachute and shown to the door. About the same time that we claimed our baggage, Joe found us, so away we went, with a stop at a sporting goods store to pick up last-minute articles we had forgotten, such as flashlights, sun hats, and sunscreen.
If you ever dream of running at the Grand Canyon, this article is your primer. Continued
in our July/August issue.
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
Magical, Mystical, and Enchanting
One More Annual Romp Through the Exotic Bangkok Marathon.
by Doug Kurtis
After I had won several Asian marathons, a Vietnam veteran suggested I find a way to travel to Bangkok. He said that of all the countries he visited, Thailand created the best flavor of an Oriental experience. Subsequently, I attended the first five Bangkok Marathons and after a 12-year hiatus was invited to return in 2003 to observe this intoxicating place and event.
1987 marked the inaugural race, and it was spectacular. King Bhumibol Adulyadej was celebrating his 60th birthday, and many special activities were planned. Every 12th birthday represents entry into a new stage of life, and the opening of the Rama IX Bridge commemorated the occasion. This beautiful cable-stayed bridge opened on the day of the marathon. In the companion 10K, almost 90,000 people ran or walked, as this would be their only opportunity to view the bridge on foot.
From the moment I arrived in 1987, I felt like an honored guest. My greeters at the airport draped around my neck a beautifully fashioned Malai necklace made up of fragrant white jasmine buds threaded with colorful marigolds and orchids. Friends of the marathon organization staged prerace and postrace dinners and also made themselves available to take us on cultural tours, shopping trips, and an exploration of the nightlife for which Bangkok is noted.
Our field trips were like nothing else I have experienced. After a boat trip down the Chao Phraya River past floating markets, I was introduced at a snake show and asked to let the performers drape black viper and boa constrictor snakes around my neck. I hate snakes, but I have the pictures to prove I was a good sport about it all. I did learn one thing, as did the gasping crowd when some of the snakes were let loose: slower snakes are usually the venomous type, while the fast-moving snakes are just trying to get away from all the commotion.
Other trips included an alligator farm where a father and son team showed their skills at wrestling the reptiles. Equally impressive were the hand-punched artwork designs done on various shapes of animal skins. The work was very
meticulous and colorful. One excursion offered us the opportunity to ride on elephants or have them step over us. They are much more nimble than you think.
Continued in our July/August issue.
The Marathon From Hell
The 1904 St. Louis Olympics Were Scabbed onto the World’s Fair, a
Recipe for Disaster That Only the Hot August Marathon Could Top.
by Eileen P. Duggan
Modern-day marathon runners are fond of recounting their tribulations on Boston’s Heartbreak Hill. But imagine the hardships endured by the runners in the 1904 Olympic Marathon as they navigated hilly, unpaved roads while choking on dust and exhaust fumes and fighting oppressive heat. Even those who availed themselves of a little spiritual, medicinal, or physical help from their friends along the way found the course unforgiving.
One hundred years ago, the first modern-era Olympic Games to be held in the Western Hemisphere came to St. Louis, Missouri, a bustling river city that was in the midst of a world’s fair to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.
The marathon, which kicked off at Washington University in St. Louis, was certainly the most colorful event of the III Olympiad. The Games received mixed reviews and were overshadowed on the world stage by the 1904 World’s Fair. The Olympics were included under the umbrella of the fair’s Department of Physical Culture.
“At no time during the race was the Greek record for the distance in danger,” understated Charles J. P. Lucas, in his book, The Olympic Games 1904. No record breaker, the marathon at least deserves points for its grueling conditions, unique cast of characters, and bizarre occurrences.
This entire article is reprinted on our Web site.
Sunmart Texas Trail Endurance Runs
America’s Largest Ultra Is Also One of Its Best, For Beginners and Elites Alike.
by Roy Pirrung
When you hear someone say “I’m running Boston” or “I’m running Chicago,” it is synonymous with the Boston Marathon or the Chicago Marathon. Two of the great running events in the United States can be identified simply by the names of the cities that host them. The same holds true for “I’m running Sunmart.”
It isn’t often that a sponsor’s name is what a race name reflects. In this instance, the sponsor’s name is synonymous with a great running event. Everyone knows Boston, everyone knows Chicago, and everyone who has ever run an ultramarathon probably knows Sunmart; but for those who don’t—here is all you need to know.
Fourteen years ago, John Cook, the president of Petroleum Wholesale L.P. (Sunmart), decided to share the beauty of his beloved running trails in Huntsville State Park, about an hour’s drive north of Houston, Texas.
As he ran the rolling grounds of the park, he often wondered how he could get more people out in this area to see the natural beauty and idyllic setting. One day it dawned on him to sponsor a running event in the park.
Originally, two races were planned, one a marathon and the other an ultramarathon. Cook and his wife, Marchita, participated in the marathon, as did some of his associates. Eventually, the marathon was dropped, and a 50-kilometer race was added to the slate.
One year, Vice President Richard Osburn was running stride-for-stride with his wife, Stephanie, when she said he should go on because she was having problems. He offered to stay with her. She thought that was nice and told him so. He told her that had he been running on PR pace, he would have left her without a second thought.
I guess that kind of sums up how the folks at Sunmart feel about their park and their running. The corporate sponsor operates a chain of gas stations, convenience stores, travel centers, and truck stops. The company knows how to deal with people, and most important for this event, with runners. (Visit the company at www.sunmart.net for information.)
Continued in our July/August issue.
To His Own Drummer
Alan Culpepper Works Alone–Without a Coach, Without a Training Group–To Be America’s Best.
by Tito Morales
This is the way it’s been portrayed in the Wild West: the mysterious outsider rolls into a community reeling with disillusion and single-handedly turns things around for the better. Think Shane or High Noon.
As Alan Culpepper lined up for the start of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials in Birmingham, Alabama, on February 8, 2004, he was surrounded by athletes who had done the bulk of their preparation under such high-profile group-oriented programs as the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, the Nike Oregon Project, and Team USA.
In the sport of distance running, Culpepper, who not only is self-coached but prefers to train alone in the mountains near his home in Lafayette, Colorado, is looked upon as an anomaly of sorts.
The 31-year-old is not only independent minded, but he has also sometimes been characterized as uncooperative, misguided, and downright stubborn. It has even been suggested that he will never reach his potential unless he joins forces with a reputable coach.
At the end of the blustery cold day in Alabama, however, it was Culpepper who impressively outlasted the field and emerged as America’s best hope for the marathon in Athens.
Afterward, the victor politely smiled and posed for photographers; patiently sat through all the postrace interviews; and then, much like the Lone Ranger, quickly and quietly left the city to return to the solitude of his Western ways.
U.S. elite-level marathoning has not looked this promising in quite some time.
Read the rest of this terrific profile of Culpepper in our July/August issue.
The Marathons of Ohio
When It Comes to Beautiful Courses and Well-Organized Marathons, Ohio Is Special.
by Dan Horvath
Dan’s article profiles ALL the marathons of Ohio. Don’t miss
it in our July/August issue.
I think I’ll give M&B a try. How can I
Subscribe?
The Paperchase Marathon
Along Against the Distance and Myself, I found Opportunities for Growth.
by Berry D. Simpson
M spending the night in my wife’s Ford Explorer wasn’t such a good idea, but I doubt that I would have slept much better in a motel. Most motel beds are no more comfortable than my foam pad, and if I had gone to a motel at 3:00 a.m., when I first arrived in Amarillo, I would have wasted at least an hour checking in and then checking out the next morning. I got more sleep in the car. Staying overnight in a motel would have cost me more money and more sleep. Gentlemen don’t make their ladies sleep in the car. But since I made this trip by myself, sleeping in the car made perfect sense to me. And besides, once I crossed the finish line, it didn’t matter anyway. I was happy with all my plans now that the race was over.
The awards were presented inside a shaded picnic area with lots of benches and tables, and when I got there, plenty of cold drinks, fruit, bagels, and other refreshments were left. Typically, all the good stuff is gone by the time I finish. I was limping on my right leg, and I was exhausted; but that was trivial compared with the Lone Star Paper Chase Marathon finisher’s medal around my neck.
The ceremony was almost over by the time I got there, but I didn’t mind the fact that it started without me. This was a slow marathon even for me, and I was happy just to have a place in the shade. Many of the other runners, especially those who had done the half-marathon and 10K, had showered and changed and looked very civilized. Walking among them I felt awkward, like a stinky, sweat-soaked, beat-up, old-man slob. At least I was a proud slob with a medal.
I selected a place at one of the tables beside a veteran high-mileage runner. The fact that he was still dressed in his shorts and T-shirt and race number told me that he ran the marathon, too. He looked so rested and content that he must have finished quite some time ahead of me. I had a difficult time crawling into the seat of the plastic picnic table with my knotted postmarathon legs, but once I finally settled in with my food and drinks, he asked, “So what’s the answer?” He was grinning and opened my water bottle for me.
I said, “What’s the question?”
“Will you ever do this again?”
“Yes!” It was the only answer. “Of course, I’ll do it again. Many times, I hope.”
Continued in our July/August issue.
Special Book Bonus
The Long Run Solution: Fourth Installment
by Joe Henderson
Here is Rich Benyo’s introduction to our new Book Bonus:
The two major North American gold rushes are cases in point:
James Marshall, who discovered gold in the mill race at Coloma, California, in 1848, as well as the owner of the property on which it was discovered, Johann Sutter, never profited from “their” gold, and in fact they died destitute.
Two polar opposites, tall, lean, and hawkish Robert Henderson and laid-back well-rounded George Washington Carmack, in a ballet bordering on Greek tragedy, discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896, but neither would reap the huge rewards their discovery precipitated.
It’s similar, in some ways, when contemplating the bestseller book gold rush at the start of the running revolution in the mid-1970s.
Several of the pioneers had long been standing knee deep in the frigid waters panning for gold in the stream of long-distance running. Hal Higdon, who did not toil exclusively in running but who worked several streams (auto racing, true crime), wrote a landmark book in 1971 (Henry Regnery Company, Chicago) titled On the Run From Dogs and People. It is still in print today and deserves to stay in print forever, but it is revered by only a few.
Joe Henderson, who became the editor of Runner’s World in 1970 after a stint at Track & Field News and who lured Dr. George Sheehan into the pages of Runner’s World after their meeting on the 1972 Olympic Games tour, had written numerous running books: Long Slow Distance—The Humane Way to Train (1969), Road Racers and Their Training (1970), Thoughts on the Run (1970), Run Gently, Run Long (1974), First Steps to Fitness (1974), Running with Style (1975), Step Up to Racing (1975), and The Long Run Solution (1976). As an editor, he had shepherded a mass of George Sheehan’s RW columns into Dr. Sheehan on Running (1975).
But the whole landscape was to change, and all within the space of a year.
Bantam Books bought Dr. Sheehan on Running and in 1976 published it as a mass-market paperback—and it took off. In 1977, reformed fatty smoker Jim Fixx, who had been saved by running and who had spent a year mining the ore pockets of long-distance running including weeks upon weeks at the Runner’s World offices, published The Complete Book of Running, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there for nearly a year.
George Sheehan would follow up with Running & Being, which became a bestseller and a classic, but in all the excitement, The Long Run Solution, one of the best running books of its generation, was overshadowed, overwhelmed, and overlooked.
A handful of rickety-in-the-joints codgers at once lament the book’s having been overshadowed by brighter lights while jealously hoarding the memories of the book’s flashes of gold and maybe even verging on wanting it to keep its place as “our” favorite book of the running revolution.
Joe Henderson’s The Long Run Solution was published in trade paperback for $3.95 by World Publications, the
book arm of Runner’s World. It is not a complicated book and it has no long James Joyce-like run-on sentences, even
though it is about running on . . . and on and on. Joe Henderson doesn’t write complicated sentences.
He writes spare, insightful sentences, and he strings them together like a stonemason working with emeralds and
rubies and sapphires to build not a massive edifice but a wall over which he entices us to jump in an effort to get to the other side, where he has been running and playing and extending the joys of childhood well into middle age—and beyond.
Goals are ends. Destinations. Stopping places. Two things happen with them: either you reach them,
or you don’t. And either way you stop, from satisfaction or from frustration.” Pretty simple and pretty profound at the same time.
Joe’s little book wasn’t filled with training advice. It didn’t meet the no-pain-no-gain philosophies. It quoted practical scientists looking at running rather than philosophers who weren’t really talking about running when they uttered their profundities.
Joe’s book was the simple manifesto of citizen long-distance running at that very critical time. It said, simply, that even if you have graduated from college you can still run—and you don’t have to run hard in organized competition until you puke. You can enrich your life (both physically and psychologically) by running gently for an hour a day, occasionally testing yourself against yourself by racing, but hey, if you don’t feel like it, that’s OK too. Just run for an hour to fulfill your design as a human being, where your largest bones and muscles are in your legs, and for good reason.
Lower your pulse rate. Knock your cholesterol down a few notches. Keep your weight down. Feel better. Get addicted to euphoria that is self-generated by becoming the joyful animal you can be.
Joe’s message was simple: just do it. His approach was simple: simple sentences, simple running habits.
Certainly, some of the book’s references are getting a bit long in the tooth after nearly three decades. And a few references (like Tom Bassler’s claim that if you run a marathon you are automatically vaccinated against heart disease; consider Jim Fixx) have proven to be less than scientifically sound.
But the book’s strengths are its incredible readability and its stone-wall solid approach to making running a part of your life.
There isn’t a five-year period in which I don’t pick up The Long Run Solution and read it again, both to bring back the energizing effect of validating long-distance running as an adult pursuit and as an antidote to a too-pressured, too-stressed life.
Over the years I’ve done what little I could to persuade some publisher somewhere to commission Joe to do an updated edition of Long Run Solution. But then I come to my senses and relent. Would I want someone to paint tattoos and nose rings on American Gothic? Or perhaps more appropriate, would I want to see all the characters in a Norman Rockwell painting exhibiting shaved heads?
As with many timeless treasures, The Long Run Solution has the power to circle around through decades of time to take another pass over the stadium, and in many ways the time is right yet again. Today’s long-distance runner enjoying this simple little sport and lifestyle can learn much from this simple little book. Enjoy your running. Allow it to simplify your life while highlighting it with a golden hue.—Rich Benyo
I think I’ll give M&B a try. How can I
Subscribe?
Volume 8 | Number 5 | September/October 2004
Volume 8 | Number 6 | November/December 2004
Departments
Editorial
State of the Sport
by Richard Benyo
U.S. presidents give a State of the Union report each year. Many governors give a State of the State address on an annual basis to keep the citizens apprised of how well or badly things are going, the report usually tilted toward matters fiscal.
Each year in July, the “State of the Sport” of running is released by USATF’s Road Running Information Center. The report concentrates on three specific areas: the industry, the participant, and the road race.
Unlike many such reports, which are comparable to slogging through oatmeal, the USATF State of the Sport report is relatively easy reading.
It’s always fun before reading the results of the report to jot down some notes of our own based on our personal observations from having attended races within the previous year and from communicating with a variety of folks within the sport to see how our own observations square with the “official” observations that are based on firm numbers. In other words, is intuition stat friendly?
Sometimes we’re off a bit. Other times we’re right on the money. This year it was a little of both.
Continued in our November/December issue.
On the Road with Joe Henderson
The Ancient Marathoner
We met in person only once, and then for less than an hour almost 30 years ago. Yet I count Jack Foster as one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had. Like all the great ones, he has never stopped giving.
Measured by the most said in the least words, one of the best books ever written about running was really just booklet length—Foster’s Tale of the Ancient Marathoner. Its first words, and far from its best, aren’t his but mine that introduce him to readers.
“If a friendship can be measured by the number of letters two people exchange,” I wrote in the foreword, “then I can count Jack Foster among my best friends. On my desk here now is an inch-thick folder of lightweight blue aerogrammes postmarked ‘Rotorua, New Zealand.’ I feel I know Foster about as well as I know any runner.”
At the time we hadn’t yet met. We tried at the Munich Olympics before the marathon he ran there at age 40.
You won’t want to miss Joe’s fond memories of the amazing Jack Foster.Continued in our November/December issue.
My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It)
by Christofer Machniak
Hopkinton, MA, April 21, 2003—The bus buzzed with activity. Some folks told jokes while people traded stories about past marathons and what they hoped to run. And everyone, at some point, jockeyed for the one bathroom.
On the hour-long ride out, I was talkative at first, getting to know my neighbors, all from Michigan. Some I knew, some I didn’t. I was wearing two hats: one as a 28-year-old runner preparing to compete in my first Boston Marathon and another as a journalist preparing to write a column about my experience for the daily newspaper that employed me, The Flint Journal.
Continued in our November/December issue…
I want this issue delivered right to my house.
Subscribe
Lincoln Marathon
In a land where football is king, the marathon has made its own way.
Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.
On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:
Happy Trails. My company recently relocated me to a big city.
It has changed my running habits tremendously—and not for the better.
When I lived in the ’burbs, there were plenty of places to run, from bike
trails to river walks. Where I live now, there are few long stretches of
anything on which I can run. There are, however, some nearby mountains,
and last weekend I drove out there and thoroughly enjoyed the peace
and quiet and the challenge of adapting from asphalt to trails, with all
the attendant pitfalls. Can you ask some of your trail experts how best
to learn to run trails well after constantly running asphalt? I love
the nearby hills and would love to learn to roam through them in a more
natural and efficient way.
Our experts answer this question in our November/December 2004 issue.
About the Authors
Among this issue’s stellar cast of authors are Tito Morales, Denise Dillon, Jeff Horowitz,
John Keston, Kenneth Williams, Dan Horvath,and Dr. Edward Kozloff.
Features
Rejoice! It’s a Beautiful Day
Hard Work and Long, Hard Miles Led Meb Keflezighi to Athens and to a Sterling-Silver Day.
by Tito Morales
Six weeks before the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, Mebrahtom Keflezighi, one of the prerace favorites, phoned his longtime coach, Bob Larsen, to inform him that he would be withdrawing from the February 7 competition.
Keflezighi, affectionately known as “Meb” throughout the running community, had been enduring the worst of all possible luck in his preparations. First, he was battling a variety of physical ailments, including tendinitis in one knee and then the other. Then, to make matters even worse, he had come down with a horrific case of the flu that had prevented him from running for three full weeks.
Larsen, though, who also happened to be the 2004 U.S. Olympic team men’s distance coach, convinced his runner that it was still too early to make that type of decision.
Debilitated by his influenza and with a rapidly shrinking window of time in which to ready himself, Keflezighi made the commitment to train as minimally as possible. There would be no 100-mile weeks and no runs exceeding 20 miles. For the longest of stretches, in fact, the distance star was reduced to biking more than running.
“It was difficult,” Keflezighi admits, recalling his mind-set while approaching the start line on a blustery winter morning in Birmingham, Alabama. “You’re not sure if you’re going to hit The Wall early. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
What happened, though, defied probability.
Continued… This entire article is reprinted on our Web site.
A Marathoner’s Next Frontier
A Marathon Goes Only So Far, but There Is a Whole
World Beyond 26.2.
by Denise Dillon
Congratulations! You just finished a marathon, the one you’ve been diligently training for over the past many months.
So how did you feel after crossing the finish line? Like going another five or 50 miles? Probably not. If you’re like most people, after the initial exhilaration of finishing wears off, you just want to get your medal and sit down for a good, long rest. After all, you just ran 26.2 miles! Isn’t that enough?
For some people, the answer is a resounding no.
More and more people are taking that next giant step into ultrarunning. For the uninitiated, ultras are anything longer than 26.2 miles—but ultras really start at a distance of 50K (31.1 miles).
That said, many hard-core ultrarunners say an ultra has to be at least 50 miles.
While races vary, other common ultraruns are 100K and 100 miles—and beyond.
Rather than set a specific distance, other ultras set a specific time. There are 8-, 12-, 24-, and even 48-hour races. Beyond these there are six-day races. Marty Malin is race director of the Badgerland 12- and 24-hour runs in Greendale, Wisconsin. Over the past 21 years, Badgerland has had anywhere from a dozen to two dozen people a year trying to see just how far they can run in a 12- or 24-hour period. Most of the time the race is held on a track. You got it: round and round and round, switching direction every three hours to balance the stress on the ankles and knees. Just how many times around? Well, the most anyone has done at Badgerland in 24 hours is Roy Pirrung. He ran 555 laps—137.99 miles.
A must-read if you’re thinking of moving up to ultras.
26.2, Four Ounces at a Time
Marathoning the Medoc Way.
by Jeff Horowitz
After 80 marathons, it was easy for me to believe that I pretty much had the marathon experience all figured out. The scenery would vary somewhat, the hills would be steeper or lower or not present at all, and the crowds might differ in size and enthusiasm, but the overall experience would always basically be the same. There would be an adrenaline rush at the blast of the starting gun. There would be early optimism, shouts of support, and periodic aid stations. There would be eventual fatigue, perhaps blisters, perhaps a cramp or two. There would inevitably be a moment of truth, accompanied by teeth gritting, and then perseverance, and euphoria at the finish line. This is the beauty of the marathon—its predictability and its simplicity. You just run 26.2 miles as fast as you can, and if you do it right, there are usually precious few surprises along the way.
Or so I thought. Then I heard about a marathon that is different from all the others, one whose name brings a smile to the face of those who are in the know: the Marathon des Chateaux du Medoc, or, as it is more commonly and simply called, “Medoc.” If the marathon is the serious-minded older sibling of running, then Medoc is the wild child, looking for the nearest party. In a sport defined by discipline, Medoc is the Dionysian exception, a race that is more revelry than competition.
Continued in our November/December issue.
I like this magazine! How can I
Subscribe?
Run for Your Life
Aging Is Not the Enemy of the Runner as Long as the Running Can Be Kept Fresh.
by Gary Dudney
A lot of truth is in the old saying, “Age slows running, but running slows aging.” Age does take an inevitable toll on the body. Runners who ignore the aging process and press on with their workouts and racing goals unchanged from their younger days are very likely to find themselves “running” into trouble. But the flip side is that runners who adjust their running to take account of the changes in their bodies can find running to be something of a fountain of youth. Active runners in their 40s, 50s, and beyond manage to stay trim, fit, and energetic while the nonrunners around them are turning into couch potatoes.
What separates runners who tap into long and satisfying second running lives after 50 from those who develop one career-threatening injury after another until they give up on running altogether? The chances are that the successful runners have made some key physical and mental adjustments along the way. The precise adjustments for coping with age vary from runner to runner. Nonetheless, common themes do emerge when the practices of many successful older runners are examined. Strength training and cross-training are two major components of many older runners’ routines. Shifting from shorter, faster races to longer, slower races is another common practice as well as moving from road running to trail running. Finally, most runners have a story about a significant adjustment to their attitude or the way they perceive running that they believe has kept their enjoyment of running alive.
Continued in our November/December issue.
Finding a Healthy Stride
Running Hard Can Unearth Hidden Talent.
by Steve Prudhomme
Bill Means sat on the bed in the tent set up next to the finish line of the Pikes Peak Marathon in August 2003, an IV connected to his arm. He looked both exhausted and elated. Four years earlier, Means, 50 pounds overweight and with a cholesterol reading close to 300, would never have imagined running to the top of 14,110-foot Pikes Peak and back and finishing first in his age group and 12th overall. In 1999, if he had conjured up an image of being connected to an IV, it likely would have been a result of health problems—perhaps the heart attack his doctor predicted he would suffer unless he changed his ways.
On this particular summer day, however, Means’s heart was beating fast for all the right reasons.
Means lives in Woodmoor, a community about 20 miles north of Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is on the verge of joining the masters division in running. “I’m 39 and holding,” Means jokes. He is married and has three children, ages 8, 6, and 4.
Means is a veteran of eight marathons. He has run the Pikes Peak Marathon four times and Boston once. His best marathon time is 2:57:35. This summer he completed a daunting double: the Pikes Peak Ascent on a Saturday and the Pikes Peak Marathon the next day.
At 5 feet, 7 inches and 130 pounds, Means looks like a runner: wiry and with little body fat. He moves with grace and speed, and his friendly face, topped by a bald pate, belies the heart of an intense competitor who doesn’t give in to pain. To the outside observer, Means undoubtedly developed these skills and competitive instincts during a lifetime of running. In actuality, it has been only five years since he began running, yet he has experienced a lifetime of change during that period.
Continued in our November/December issue.
Run Long, Walk Short, Move Forever
As We Age, a Little Bit of Kindness to Ourselves Can Provide Tremendous Results.
by John Keston
At the 2004 Napa Valley Marathon, where I was part of the marathon college,
a day-long series of seminars and round table discussions staffed by marathoning VIPs, Dick Beardsley and I discussed our current training regimens. Dick had been interested in my training method and had kept up with my running achievements. He suggested that I might share my way of staying fit and injury free with our running brothers and sisters, especially those who cannot sustain high-mileage training.
Dick, of the famed “Duel in the Sun” with Alberto Salazar at Boston in 1982, had made a comeback in recent years from a terrible farm accident and addiction to painkillers. He knew also that I had come back to racing well from a broken hip (the result of a bicycle accident) in October 1997, which required a pin, plate, and screws that are still in place in my hip.
The Napa Valley Marathon, on March 7, was celebrating its 26th year and had opened the field to 2,200 entrants. There was a full complement of runners. Many attended the seminars offered by famous runners and writers in the marathon college on Saturday, the day before the race, where they heard experts propound training methods, tips on completing the course, and the various dos and don’ts.
The predominant recommendations were go out slowly, hydrate (but don’t overdo the water), stay relaxed, and hook up with someone attempting a similar finishing time. Camaraderie is helpful along the way.
At the seminars, at chance meetings, or at the marathon expo, various race officials and seminar participants asked whether I was planning to run the race. My reply each time had been: “Well, I’m not in shape at this point to run a marathon, but I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.” I was truthful in my explanation that I was not marathon race ready, but I had that always-optimistic runner’s sense that I could do it.
Read the rest of this terrific article by John Keston in our November/December issue.
John is a multiple world- and age-group record holder.
Ode to 18
Running Long Is Still Impressive, Especially If You Make It Look Easy.
by Kenneth Williams
Anyone who’s ever run 18 miles on a Sunday morning and then tried to stay awake
during church services will identify with Kenneth’s funny piece, published in our
November/DecemberAugust issue.
I think I’ll give M&B a try. How can I
Subscribe?
3 X Jack
Insights Gained From Running Could Be Applied to Real Life If We Let Them.
by Jack McDermott
Three tales by Jack, something for the funny bone. Hilarious illustrations.
Common Spaces
Runners Share Common Spaces With SUVs and Vicious Dogs. Is There No Safe Haven?
by D. Christopher Risker
Previously, in her “On the Road” column for this magazine [July/August, 2002], ultrarunner Ellen McCurtin observed: “Our modern world is certainly not pedestrian friendly.” I thought this was as much unremarkable as it was remarkable, having recently survived an attack by a four-legged boxer at the end of a 20-miler. Of course, it is obvious that Ellen’s observation is true for any of us who travel the roads unprotected by an envelope of steel. We obviously live in a very mobile world, but little of the mobility involves foot traffic, except for folks like us who run the roads. On a recent run, I wondered why we runners shouldn’t be able to expect more cooperation from the users of the roads we run.
Ellen noted obstacles that runners meet along the road that limit their ability to run freely and that offer virtually unlimited dangers, ranging from gated communities to loose dogs and monster SUVs. The infringements on our sense of freedom on the open road increase daily. It would have depressed even Jack Kerouac, and he was in a car. It is frustrating to run down a lovely tree-shaded road only to meet a guardhouse next to a gate protecting what used to be an open road from the likes of us. It is equally frustrating to feel the sting of a cloud of sand thrown up from a passing SUV on its way to the local soccer field. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, isn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t always thus, was it?
This thoughtful essay continues in our November/December issue.
Edward Payson Weston and the 1861 Inauguration
The Feats of the “Pedestrians” of the 19th Century
Continue to Astonish Historians of Running.
Dr. Edward H. Kozloff
World-renown sports historian Ed Kozloff shares a rare manuscript, detailing the exploits
of famed pedestrial Edward Payson Weston. Printed in its entirety in our November/December
issue.
Eccentricities of a Long-Distance Runner
Stop and Look in the Mirror. If You Can’t Laugh at What You See, What Can You Laugh At?
Dan Horvath
My wife tells me I’m anal retentive about my running. She can’t be right, can she? Perhaps a bit eccentric. Yeah, I can accept that. But anal retentive? Ignoring for the moment the thought that only an anal-retentive person would look up something like “anal retentive,” I looked it up.
The term dates back to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory. Essentially, the concept is that frustration during the anal stage of psychosexual development (which includes toilet training) leads to a fixation resulting in certain personality traits or disorders. The term has come back into the modern lexicon in recent years and is popularly used to describe someone who is obsessive, compulsive, or eccentric in some way. In this context, it is often related to some personal habit, ritual, or activity.
How about you? Are you anal retentive? The fact that you’re reading a publication dedicated to marathoning, ultrarunning, and “beyond” (whatever that means) may be somewhat telling. The medical profession tells us that we need about 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, three times per week. Although doing more may also be helpful, there is some disagreement about this, and there are definitely diminishing returns. So when we are out there running for hours at a time and spending several more of our waking hours preparing for or thinking about our running, aren’t we being just a bit excessive? Might there not be something slightly askew in our brains?
Dan looks at the eccentric side of runners, poking fun at himself along the way.
Special Book Bonus
Thirty Phone Booths to Boston: First Installment
by Don Kardong
Here is Joe Henderson’s introduction to our new Book Bonus:
We can’t see a golden age while it is happening. We can’t spot the greatness of an era until we’ve seen how far it stands above the years that followed.
Given a generation’s perspective, we now see the 1970s as the golden age of U.S. men’s marathoning. We can say the same for U.S. writing about running, and in two cases the names of runner and writer overlap.
Look at all the ’70s yielded: In Olympic running, Frank Shorter’s gold and silver medals at Munich and Montreal, plus the fourth places of Kenny Moore and Don Kardong. In bestselling writing, for all topics, the running books of Jim Fixx, George Sheehan, and the Bob Glover–Jack Shepherd team.
These authors earned their success. They wrote well and delivered the right message at the right time as running and running bookselling boomed together.
But I would argue that Fixx, Sheehan, and Glover–Shepherd weren’t the best writers the ’70s spawned. For quality and durability of their work, I would go with Moore and Kardong. They have more in common than their near misses at the Olympics. Moore and then Kardong a few years later were Pacific Northwest–born, ran for Pac-8 (now Pac-10) colleges, were world class in track before turning to the marathon, and peaked in the 2:11s.
And both broke into writing about running in a magazine that I edited at the time. Moore first appeared there in 1970 and Kardong five years later.
Kenny would say now that he didn’t “write” for Runner’s World then. The magazine reprinted a piece of his from the University of Oregon alumni publication.
Don wrote an original article for RW. How it came about is a funny story in itself, one best left for him to tell. How he tells stories distinguishes him from his fellow fourth placer. One isn’t better than the other; they’re just different.
When I first talked to Kenny Moore about rerunning his article, he was studying for a graduate degree in creative writing. He was in training for the career to come.
When I asked Don Kardong to write his first article, about his 1975 trip across the newly opened borders of China, he was working as an elementary school teacher. A career as a writer? You can’t be serious.
His apparent lack of seriousness, or at least his inability to take himself and the sport too seriously, would distinguish his writing and endear him to readers. With Moore, you expected to be impressed by his thoughts and observations. With Kardong, you expected to be amused by his experiences and misadventures.
This isn’t to say that Don writes the way a slapstick comic performs. He’s no buffoon. His relaxed style features a gentle jibe here (often aimed at himself) and a clever turn of phrase there. The writing appears to entertain Don as much as it does his readers. It seems to be his break from the serious contributions he makes to the sport and to his community.
He helped professionalize running as a cofounder of the Association of Road Racing Athletes. He served as long-distance chairman of USA Track & Field and as president of the Road Runners Club of America.
At home in Spokane, Washington, he launched and still works on the Bloomsday 12K race, of which he is now executive director.
His writing pace has slowed of late, and not just because of competing obligations. Curiously, Runner’s World hasn’t assigned an article to this longtime favorite of its readers for more than two years. (A brief column of his does appear once a month on the RW Web site.)
Don will write feature articles again, somewhere, sometime. Meanwhile you don’t have to wait to read him again. Over the next several issues, Marathon & Beyond will serialize his first book, originally published in 1985 by Macmillan.
Thirty Phone Booths to Boston takes its title from an offbeat article by the same name. He covered the 1981 Boston Marathon by calling pay phones along the course and asking whomever picked up to tell him how the race was going.
This and 22 other pieces of vintage Kardong make up the book subtitled Tales of a Wayward Runner. Smile and laugh along with the author, remembering that this runner–writer from the golden age runs and writes onward a generation later.
Don’s entire book will be printed (in serial format) in M&B over the next several issues.