Daylight Savings?

Daylight Saving Time.  Wow, what a misnomer.  Well, it pretty much signals the beginning of the "extra" season; extra snacks, extra beers, extra parties.  I've written about the stretch between Hallowe'en and New Years' Day in the past in terms of social life and in terms of weight control.

So I'm not going to go there.

In most parts of the country the first race/s of the year probably won't happen until the middle of spring.  In the southern-most portions, though, we have a flipped-coin season.  Nobody in their right mind produces a running event between June and September.  At least, not one that's going to make a major profit.  We can train almost every weekend of the year down here, with very little in the way of alibi or excuse for not getting in that run.  Our attire doesn't change all that much, either, with the exception for perhaps a couple of weeks where gloves, caps and tights are a good idea.

Those who live in the cooler climes would laugh at our choice, but that's what occurs when your blood thins out.

But darned if folks don't decide to put their running shoes up for nine weeks, or at least replace them with the party shoes.  I can see the logic and reason of taking a few days to a week off every six months or so, just to give your mind and body a little rest.  Rest as in "other activities which are fun," or "long walks at the places where the shoppers aren't..."  Just as starters.  Taking a week isn't going to kill whatever fitness you built up over the summer; hiatuses which go longer than a week are the ones which will bite you in the fanny.

It always drives me up the wall to talk to friends who treat fitness as a zero-sum activity.  If they can't do it full-bore then to heck with it, they aren't going to do it at all.  Really, the only reason to take more than a week away from a consistent workout schedule is - naturally - an injury.  Some of the things I've considered and done to try and be an athlete and a socially-inept citizen with varying success are below:

Keep the Training Impact - If you track the time spent working out and the intensity level of the work you have the elements to measure your training impact.  For those who haven't read any of Eric Bannister's 2004 research, time in minutes multiplied by heart rate or perceived effort provides a score which can estimate how long it will take to recover from a workout or how much work you're doing each day.  So, if you average an impact of 120 points a day (say, 60 minutes at a 70-percent or a seven-of-ten effort level), you could cut off twenty minutes and work at 80 percent/"eight."  Or...

Split the Time - Daylight Savings only means that daylight is going to be GONE in the afternoon. The post-work run is going to be just as much keeping live batteries in your headlamp and dodging drivers as it is putting one foot in front of the other.  Might as well consider breaking up the workouts into two pieces; they don't have to be equal parts but it can give you two chances to get something in.

Something, Something - Dark, gloomy running during this time quickly becomes a near-solitary effort; why is it I'm the only one devoted to this thing!?  This is where the higher-intensity speed-focused workouts suddenly become more fun.  Keep those long aerobic pieces for the weekend when you have the time to adjust the start and get out for longer.  But there's nothing wrong with working on that speed and keeping that speed up over the dreary days.  The great Zatopek even said that there was a need for great runners to be fast and have endurance.  He did lots of short, intense pieces; a 200 here and a 200 there, next thing you know you've got a mile in.  Or two.  Or three.  Turn the classic "endurance first, speed second" train of thought upside down.

You might find with these three concepts, especially the third, that you're not alone during that last week or two before New Years' Day.

Running In The Information Age

The most difficult part of being an athlete in the information age is not the lack but the abundance of information.  Back in the "good old days" the tried and true strategies were passed along from the more experienced generation to the newer crop of athletes.  Didn't matter so much that many of the "truths" passed along were eventually debunked by athletes who either didn't benefit from the "truth," or by scientists who finally asked the question, "does this stuff really work?"

Now, the problem is that there is too much information, and most of it is either wrong or lacking in detail.  Take for example the use of compression wear; I can see a BOLD TYPE HEADLINE on the cover of a running magazine, see an article in a major newspaper's health and wellness section, and receive an e-mail from a sportswear manufacturer about a pair of tights which will (as I've written before) guarantee faster marathon performances, decreased muscle damage and world peace. 

Once I've paid my $7.50 at the local bookseller for the running mag, I find little more than a three-sentence blurb referring to a research article.  Which happens to be the same article referred to by the major paper.  And, worst of all, neither the article or the blurb...or the advertising for that matter, say anything close to what the research really said.

I'm not saying that fitness writers are foolish people, but sometimes I wonder if research articles, and the fine art of gleaning pertinent information from them, are covered deeply enough in journalism schools.  It doesn't take too much, though, to look at the original article copy (which in most cases are hyperlinked to on-line newspaper articles) and see what the researchers REALLY had to say. 

The scientific method, for those of us who might have forgotten it from high school, can be summed up this way: 

Smart people try stuff out.
I wonder if I can duplicate it?
What happens if I change a variable? 
I better write this down so someone else can try it later.

When it comes to the "write this down" part of science, research articles are set up in a fairly standard form:  Title, Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion.  The title is pretty much that 25-words-or-less "what happens" statement.  That's what makes research so easy to find.

The abstract is for those persons who don't have a lot of time to spend reading lots of words or looking at pretty graphs and charts.  Each of the sections are boiled down to one or two sentences each; perfect for search engines and the like.  The introduction gives the researchers time to talk about what inspired them to do the research; any studies they felt like replicating, or what variable caught their attention.  In the case of compression wear, for example, was there a difference between sprinters and distance runners?  This is where the hypothesis is written, the "I think this will happen when I change this variable..." statement.

The method section goes into the details of how the experiment was performed, just in case another researcher months or years down the road wants to test out the theory to see if the same thing happens.  This is where you find out if elite athletes were tested, or if treadmills were used, or the kind of treadmill, shoe, sports drink, etc.  One of the thing to look out for when reading the hypothesis or method of the test is the difference in control and treatment.  If a researcher is testing whether a sports drink is effective, are they comparing to water...no fluid...a different sports drink...or a different dosage.  Sometimes the researcher intentionally or unintentionally skews the difference between control and treatment to favor their hypothesis.  In my humble opinion this is the second piece of the article...but of the most importance.

In most cases the results section of a research paper - unless you've studied statistics - is of the least importance.  If you've studied statistics then you will probably be able to assume for yourself whether or not a researcher uses the terms "of statistical significance," which you'll find mentioned (or not) in the discussion section.  This is the place where the researchers are going to tell the reader, "we tried this and found that."  Even more important, this section is going to tell you the, "if we had it to do all over again, we'd try this," or the "if we can get some more money for research, and perhaps a few well-intentioned undergraduate student assistants, we'd like to look at..." statements.

So if an article's abstract catches your attention, then go to the article's discussion, where the really smart folks can tell you why they think they got the question figured out right.  After that, if you want to know what got them to that point, you can go to the references section at the back of the paper.  Lots of footnotes usually means more refinement on an old question...or another group of folks saying, "it works, and here's why."

Achilles. Heal.

One of my favorite running couples, Betsy and Aaron, came my way this last weekend, which gave us both a very good excuse to run together.  The run was a rare treat; in the past we've not been at equivalent fitness levels - either I was on the mend or they were.  Okay, Aaron probably would have whipped both of us if not for jalapeno peppers the night before, but that's another topic altogether.

Betsy spent a lot of the run in a state of concern.  In her haste to be packed up and out of town she apparently overlooked the physio tape she uses to support her Achilles' tendon.  I reminded her as I finished off my pre-run coffee that I was not that long out of the woods from my own chronic tendon troubles.  The effort level for the run was going to stay comfortable for all of us; sending the least-wounded and gimpy of the trio back to my house to get the car and pick up the others was nothing any of us wanted to do.

If you've never had issues with your Achilles' tendon consider yourself fortunate.  If I'm not mistaken (I'm not, I took the time to look in the book.), physical therapist and author Jeff Dicharry wrote in his book "Anatomy for Runners" that 80 percent of runners are injured.  It's not only the injury part that is less than fun; add the inability to do anything fun while you're recovering.  That pain in the heel may - or may not - go away after a healthy dose of what my military friends call "Vitamin M," which is another term for one of the more common non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents which can be taken by mouth.

I don't consider taking NSAIDs as my latest (as my loving bride jokingly calls them) "hobby horse," otherwise known as the pet peeve of the month.  I'll say I take far less than I used to, and more for those days when my head - and not the head of my metatarsals - aches.  I learned over time that the prostaglandins and those other hormones and chemicals which would make my heel swell after a run that was too hard in intensity, to long in duration, or too soon for sufficient recovery was trying to, um, encourage me to either rest or take up an activity which was a little less damaging while I figured out what was going wrong.

There are multiple treatment options for this and other overuse problems, most of which I took the time to point out to Betsy.  On those days when my calves feel very tight, usually on days when I've done speed training, I'll make certain to use a self-massage tool like the TP Baller Block or "The Stick."  While it's a pale imitation to the hands of a good massage therapist, you can't go wrong budgeting for a hands-on session once a month...or more often if you're running high mileage.  Make sure, however, that you massage the entire muscle, proximal-to-distal, medially, centrally and laterally.  In plain English, that's from the crook of the knee to the heel.  After you do that, don't forget to roll the arch of your foot.

The zero-drop shoes are pretty much out of the question, from personal experience.  And just to make certain I'm not tugging on the tendon too much I add a small wedge of silicone rubber in the heel of my running shoes.  If I'm on the road doing one of those things I get paid for, which includes a great deal of standing up, I'll even place the wedges in my work shoes.  I've also been fortunate to find black leather walking shoes which don't look like sports shoes.

And say what you want about the treadmill being a piece of machinery sent from the infernal regions, but I'm all in favor of using them for training.  Sure, they're boring as hell and you don't get any of that nice, cooling breeze, but I've done 75 percent of my training mileage since my injuries on them.  I'm only a little slower than I'd like to be, and I'm getting in anywhere from 35-to-45 miles per week (easy running, hills, tempo running and speed repeats) without walking like a guy ten-or-fifteen years older than I am.  Plus I can control how fast I run and how soon I finish; should that tendon decide to act out four miles into a planned five-mile run on the road you've got a sweaty and often painful walk to your car or the house...or wherever the run started.  Should the slightest thing begin to feel wrong on the treadmill, one punch of the "STOP" button calls it a day.

Speaking of calling it a day, it doesn't hurt to have those rest days - or at least "days when I'm NOT running" - plugged into the schedule.  Want to walk the dog or spend the day on the couch, that's fine.  Doing something that isn't aggravating what you aggravate when you run I would count as "rest," too.

I can lay no promises or hard-and-fast timetable on recovery.  Depending on the level of injury and the willingness to LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE, the only thing I can say is "it takes time."  Impatience, stubbornness and hubris will most certainly make an injured runner more desperate, more angry, and more willing to accept "silver bullet" recommendations.  No injury is caused by a single factor, and no single fix is going to take care of it.

Less Is More

Music was a constant in my house while growing up.  My father worked at a radio station and had a large record collection; both my maternal and paternal grandparents performed either on stage or in studio.  Even during his retirement years, my grandfather would pull out his old Gibson, sit on the couch and play the occasional bluegrass tune.  I developed an ear for melody, harmony and an appreciation of structure.  To this day I find live concerts (with extended jam sessions) irritating because I start to compare what was done in the comfort of the studio; a couple of artists get a “free pass,” sure, but I want to hear the arrangement duplicated as close to the original as possible.

I have discs from some big name groups which, once you hear the tracks which didn’t necessarily see the light of day, you begin to wonder the classic question “what in heaven’s name were they thinking when they did that!?”  Why, in the middle of a tune with a crunchy guitar riff and bass groove would you inflict a weenie keyboard solo?  The instrumental would have been better to fade out before that last fifteen second reprise of the tag.  Okay, I’m not a producer and I’ve never played one on television but sometimes you know like you know when someone’s added one too many things to the painting.

Like a hair barrette on the Mona Lisa.

I get the same feeling when someone training for a marathon tells me they have a 20-miler on the agenda.  Training runs of that distance, especially when run by first-time and relatively-inexperienced marathon aspirants, are a closer to four-hour journey than to three.  Add to the mix the low-level orthopedic trauma and the need for recovery – an easy concept to explain to spouses and significant others, difficult to explain to children. 

Hard to hear as Billy Ray Cyrus.  Or Miley, for that matter.

Two and a half hours of running at a pace closer to the desired pace on the marathon day is much better.  It is true that you’ll still be hit like a wrecking ball, and perhaps a little dragged out the following day, but you can repeat the process the following week.  Even better than a repeat is a slightly shorter long run, around two hours in duration which is a little faster, then do another 150-minute jaunt the week after that.  Not only do shorter “long” training runs done on a repeat basis make sense from the physiology standpoint, but more importantly from the mental.

Say you decide to do that twenty-miler and completely "crater" it.  If that training run is half (and in the case of some training plans, more than) your weekly volume and you can’t get it in, or you crash and burn it’s not impossible to imagine the mental state at which you’ll be.  "Soup sandwich" is a commonly-used term in my world.  Of course, it’s no guarantee that your mind will be in any less of a state of freak-out if you were to attempt and fail during two or three two-and-a-halfs.  (I had to bail on two sixteen-milers during my last attempt at the marathon, but it had more to do with unresolved achilles tendon issues – overtraining – than it did a lack of training.)

Shorter quality is better.  Less is more.