My Favorite (Marathon) Mistake

If the "typical" age-group runner were to look at the workouts I post on my training group's blog they would either say the workouts are "too easy" or "too intense." It's always the extremes of the continuum, rarely if ever anything in between. Come out to the track and watch the group go through repeats, and you're more likely to doubt the benefits. 'Nobody,' you would say, 'can improve on that simple a plan.'

The plan rewards patience and consistency: short-distance speed work to focus on the anaerobic system, longer distance repeats to improve the lactate threshhold, long distance runs to develop aerobic and mental fitness, topped off with a few easier efforts here and there. There are no secret workouts, no gimmicks or gadgetry I foist on people; I do tend to get down on the athlete within the first month or so about their shoes, usually after I hear "hey, Coach, I have an ache in my..."

I'm not a control freak who wants to turn every athlete who shows up on Sunday morning, Tuesday evening, or Thursday evening into a "hobby-jogger" "tri-geek" "harrier" like me. Almost all adult athletes have a firm grasp of their strengths, weaknesses, limitations, goals and priorities, so I serve as much as a sanity check or sounding board as I do a provider of workouts. If the athlete has gaps in their plan of action then I feel like it's my role to help out. I'll either refer to materials and resources which have worked in the past, or to seemingly good ideas which failed miserably when I attempted execution.

The relationship is not "one size fits all." Some of my athletes only work with me once a month during an easy jog around the beach. We talk about the mental side of running (and it is true - running is 50 percent physical and 90 percent mental); I provide encouragement and a little humor. Rarely if ever do I need to "spank," because they've done the spanking well enough on their own.

One of my more-active athletes recently missed his desired marathon performance by nine minutes. In spite of his disappointment I had to tip my running cap in his general direction, since he ran about the same time I've done for my best marathon performance.

So, as we stood in the parking lot and talked about the race experience - he ran one of the marathon majors, which adversely affected his race execution - we also talked about some of the other potential barriers to a good marathon performance.

Slow training=slow racing: When we are both working on short(er) track repeats I am more likely to have my heart rate monitor strap handed to me. The most recent 5K he ran, all other factors being equal, would have predicted a couple of minutes faster than his goal time.

Let's remember that term: "all other factors being equal."

He got plenty of long runs - including the "ten the hard way" run with me one Sunday which was the "filling" to his 20-mile "sandwich" run. Trouble was we did more runs at the long run pace and not enough efforts at race pace, which in his case would have been about a minute-per-mile faster.

Family functions+race=focus on everything else: Marathon training - in fact, training for any endurance event - is a selfish activity. As the day approaches the race needs to be looked at like "a day at the office." Without suit and tie. You want to shoehorn a shopping trip, a sightseeing excursion, or a really cool "thanks for supporting my training, honey" dinner when you're in town during the last couple of days before the race? Not a good idea. Sitting on the couch at Barnes and Noble with a cup of Starbucks sounds much better, especially when you spent a hundred bucks in race entry fees and a thousand miles in training. Have we forgotten the term "taper" already? Move the special occasions "to the right" on the calendar, to the recovery days after the race. Sure, you will walk around like a wooden-legged zombie, but it makes a great conversation starter with the waitrons.

P.O.A.&M. or O.U.S.O.B.: Everyone knows all the pithy lines about preparation...failing to prepare is preparing to fail...prior planning prevents poor performance...and so on. Know exactly where your starting corral is relative to the starting line, the first and last five kilometers of the course, and as many of the aid stations as possible. Study the terrain, the turns, the tarmac and the temperatures. Leave nothing to chance.

While in the corral take a look around at your fellow runners. If a lot of them are wearing headphones it might be a good idea to move forward of them, if at all possible. See a lot of matching singlets and tops? The best way to keep from fartleking and swerving away from the "six-abreast-singing-kumbaya-red-rover-my-foot" rambling groups is to get in front of them IMMEDIATELY. Carry your own (throwaway) fluid bottle so you don't get hung up in the first two aid stations on the course. Trust me. You'll thank me later. If you don't the medical staff most likely will.

If you've made it through the marathon training fit, healthy and prepared to run your best race, don't make the mistake of looking at it as another race. There are no guarantees of the next starting line, so make the ones you get to count.

The Kindness of Strangers

"Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure." - Confucius (551-479 BCE)

I made a woman cry this weekend.

I told her something she didn't want to hear.

Before you consider me cold and heartless, let me tell you the front half of the story...

I was standing out in a grassy transition area with thousands of bicycles on racks all around me, watching athletes check in their bicycles for the Ochsner Ironman 70.3 New Orleans.

Many questions were asked of me: Where was the exit from the lake? Where would they enter the bike course? How would they return to transition? How would they start the half-marathon run? Most of the questions were not difficult, and it was my job to answer them, in the hope their race day would be less chaotic.

Two hours before transition was scheduled to close, the young lady showed up to check in her bicycle. Unfortunately, she forgot to place the number tag on the bike frame. "Sorry, we can't check in your bike," is the response she received from our crew.

Later in the weekend, as the sun encouraged a state of giddy delirium, the crew began to think unthinkable thoughts: What if a dishonest triathlete (A rhetorical question; I know of no dishonest triathletes...) were to peel the number off their less-expensive bike and place it on another, more-expensive bike? If volunteer workers weren't following instructions to the letter, or closely paying attention, there was the outside chance of a bike upgrade at the cost of a race entry. There was the method to our madness; we HAD to be certain the number on the athlete's wristband matched the number on the bike; no tag number on the bike meant we couldn't tell if the bike truly belonged in transition.

The crew asked her to see me.

She, an experienced triathlete, spent 20 dollars to bring her bike by taxi. Telling her "no" meant she had at least three 20-dollar cab rides on her evening agenda. (If I were a dishonest race volunteer, I would have asked for a kick-back from the cab company.) Was there any way possible for us to tag her bike frame and let her check the bike? She PROMISED she'd bring the tag in the morning.

Mind you, this was the tenth instance of "missing number" I encountered in six hours. If we had blank tags we might have been able to assist in this situation. But we didn't. I told her she had to go get her tag before I could check her bike.

The issue of pre-race preparation isn't strictly related to multisport athletes. Runners, too, can suffer the consequences of "transient brain flatus," "senior moments," or...more crudely put, "CRS." It's just that triathletes have so much more to "un-prepare" for than runners.

Or do they? Large road races like the Classic don't have expos ONLY because out-of-towners like my wife and I want to drink beer while picking up our race swag.

Race expos also exist because we leave our homes 15 minutes later than we originally planned, rushing to get to the race. We don't pack the night before. We don't use checklists. We don't prepare "the bag" with the extra socks, shorts, shirt, pins, number belt, hat, sunglasses, and so forth...much to our peril on race day. All I have to do is remember 2007's Classic, the wind and the cold in Tad Gormley Stadium, and the 20-dollar windbreaker...the picture becomes more clear.

Add to the sartorial preparation the physical, mental and emotional preparations (like previewing course maps, knowing terrain, training accordingly) which can mean the difference between success and failure, and Lord Baden-Powell's advice to the Boy Scouts rings more clearly. Be Prepared. Read the information on the race web site, the paperwork in the race packet, and the participant feedback from previous years, if it's available.

The individual racer can choose to slow down a little bit and prepare for race day (checklists, laying out items on the bed, dressing a stuffed animal, and so forth) so they don't have to pay a 300% "unprepared tax" and raise their blood pressure.

...So how does the story end?

Well, the young lady returned to transition with an hour to spare and her bike was checked in. She was in a much better mood, especially after I offered to give her a ride back to her hotel and we shared some of our "supplies" with her.

The next day, she ran through transition on her way onto the run course, yelling, smiling, and slapping me a high five.

What was that Tennessee Williams had Blanche Dubois say at the end of 'A Streetcar Named Desire?' "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers..."

Don't be forced to depend on the kindness. Be Prepared.

Things Aren't Always As They Seem

"There's one guy we don't have to worry about." - Gordon McKenzie, American marathoner, thinking about Abebe Bikila (standing shoeless), before the Rome Olympic Marathon (1960)

The nice thing about sports is it's loaded with irony. The media are not the only ones who tend to get the predictions wrong more often than not (think Bode Miller in Torino rather than Michael Phelps in Beijing), coaches & individual athletes do so, too. While you can make an educated guess as to how well a person is going to perform from the exterior view it's much harder to tell what lies underneath the flesh, dwells within the muscle, bone & nerves of the individual. You cannot measure drive - heart - of an athlete by their physiological data.
One of my favorite training partners in the past five years, if you looked at him before a workout or a race, you would not be a bit impressed. In fact, he always looked more like a misplaced softball player than he did a road racer. I think nearly all my best workouts/races always had something to do with him...and many of his with me. Before a knee injury cut short his career about two years ago, he went on a tear...ended up winning a local half-marathon, ran some great trail ultra-distance races, and such. I miss not having him around to sharpen me up.

Not every athlete exudes what my father once desctibed as bad-ass in three easy lessons. A great case in point can be found in the realm of masters' swimming. A (relatively) slender, cardiovascularly efficient young(er) guy can be on the blocks at a masters' meet next to someone ten years older with a serious case of dunlap disease (the disorder where ones' midsection has done lapped over ones' belt line)...yet the paunchy, hoary one might be the one handing back the @$$ of the younger, relatively svelte, technically less-efficient swimmer at the end of the event. Trust me on this one. I've stood on the deck trying to find a way to graciously stuff my butt cheeks back down into my Speedo after having them handed to me by one of my adipose-enhanced training mates.
Our favorite local beer/bite hangout didn't quite go all-out last night for St. Patrick's Day; they did offer corned beef & cabbage, but we avoided it. It's not that I doubt the uniqueness or the genuine-ness of a place with the last name of O'Brady's, but I knew it would not sit well in my tummy either last night or this morning...especially this morning, in the pool... They did surprise us with some new appetizer items, one of which is a fried calamari, something we don't see much of unless we assault an Italian joint, a place I eat at only under extreme duress. My friend Paul doesn't do calamari, but Suzanne & I will try anything on the menu there at least once to make certain it's not bad. It wasn't the classic overly-chewy squid rings, though. A tad more on the crunchy side, as though they had been fried a little longer than the average bear. However, there was no overwhelming garlic smell/taste (and I like garlic!), nor serious grease...not bad with a side of marinara.
We're approaching the mid-term for our performance system, which means it is high time to do what is better known around here as brag sheets. Unfortunately, with this system, you might be in the walk on water, talk to God realm in all of your duties, but if your duties don't exactly line up with the standards, you are screwed. Yep, you can do all the good things for your fellow employees, your instructors, your courses & the service at large, but if you can't justify it, it's like you did nothing for the past six months but sit on your butt, drink coffee & write blog entries. Oops, I did it again, didn't I?

Is any one else as offended as I by the audacity of big corporations, ostensibly owned now by the federal government (& hence owned by the taxpayer), giving millions of dollars to executives for driving the business into the ground during the previous year? And then, my co-worker tells me some of the executive recipients are people who left the company. Well, I guess that blows the if we don't pay them their bonuses they might leave argument right out of the water, doesn't it?

Oh, & for those of you who don't know the rest of the story: Bikila destroyed the Olympic & world best times for the marathon; McKenzie finished 18th. As Chuck Berry sang: C'est la vie...most days you never can tell...

Nuts to You

Still, we are having what I sarcastically call Climate by Sybil. Our hopes are raised by 60-something degree tempeatures, bright sunshine and nearly-perfect conditions, only to be dashed by the onset of sub-freezing crud. I must admit I felt a great deal of sympathy for my athletes as they went through their paces last Tuesday night in the chill with the 20mph gusts kicking the daylights out of them on the front stretch; I did my workout a couple of hours earlier and had my behind kicked on the back stretch. And it was bad enough I lost count of where I was supposed to stop my repetition during the first part of my run.

Yesterday was even colder during the daytime. I resorted to dressing a little closer to an athlete and a little less like an analyst; wearing a technical fiber (tight) top under my dress shirt. I looked like a cross between Johnny Cash and Johnny Gray. But, why am I complaining? I live in Florida. Because I can?
This week has been enough to make my nut-sized brain feel more like a chestnut roasting o'er an open fire. I'm doing the number crunching on a information professional training adequacy survey, plus trying to make sense of the government contracting process. The number crunching isn't so bad, more mentally-draining than anything else. The contracting process, however...woo hoo hoo...that's the reason there are contract officers' representatives (COR), with requisite educational background and all, isn't there? If I can help my commanding officer to understand this stuff I probably deserve a job working as a COR...or a Purple Heart, or an early retirement.

My lunchtime habit of having french-fried potatoes is probably going to have to come to a screeching halt soon enough. I'm not gaining any weight that I can tell right now, and it's not like I can't fit into my size 32 jeans or slacks. Really, most of the weight I think I used to have as fat has probably been burned down to more lean muscle tissue. I can't tell the difference too much, including the times when I'm in the pool (I still have a hell of a time trying to float, but I'm slowly getting a little bit faster here and there...more strength...and so on...). However, I've got to drop a couple of pounds so I don't have to carry them on the bicycle with me this summer...and the only thing I can remotely think to sacrifice (something inherently unhealthy I eat on a regular basis) are french fries.
Man, is that going to suck. Hard. But I guess that's part and parcel with wanting to be an athlete. Nobody who wants to achieve anything in athletics ever achieves it without a little bit of self-sacrifice.

MB's Gumpian Moment For The Month

'They just couldn't believe that somebody would do all that running for no particular reason.' - Tom Hanks, as Forrest Gump, "Forrest Gump" (1994)

Sometimes as we head into the university track facility, a parent or walker or jogger who has seen one of our three-times-a-week workouts asks the inevitable question, 'so what are you guys training for?' At first, I flippantly told them, 'life,' and left it at that. Now I think to preface my comment with, 'this may sound a little flippant, but...' It tends to win friends and positively influence people a little more, I guess. Perhaps I'm starting to become more coach and less athlete.

I hope not; I love being an athlete. In spite of the fact I pay for my running habit; right now I get $500 worth of Snickers Marathon Bars, a singlet, a couple of technical fiber shirts, a hat and a pair of shorts per year, my goggles, glasses, shoes, bike stuff, sports drink, race entry fees and all the other stuff comes right out of my pocket. I am 90-percent certain that I like it that way. Snickers Marathon Bar asks me to race six times a year in their gear. That's not a lot of races, unless you're a marathoner. Since I'm a 10,000-meter to half-marathon specialist, who also dabbles in multisport, with a conservative training/racing schedule I can do six races a year.

However, it's a sign of weakness around this town should you decide to be conservative in your racing. Fail to show up at every little podunk, rancid possum (approximate) 5,000-meter road race and people start to talk about injuries. Since I only have to race six events a year to please my sponsor, I can be selective on what I want to do and when I need to be ready to race. And, in order to encourage my sponsor to keep me on their rolls, I choose larger regional and national-level races outside of town. Because probably 70 percent of my races are not local, people who don't know when/where I race think I do a whole hell of a lot of running for no particular reason.

I did a local 5,000-meter road race two weeks ago as an early-season fitness test. It wasn't great, but it wasn't a bad start to a season delayed by six weeks of no running whatsoever because of injury (fractured humeri heal slower when you run at the same time they're trying to heal). I managed to stay seconds ahead of a local runner who tattooed a bulls-eye on my @$$ this summer. He told me, straight to my face that his goal this fall was to beat me - why I was his goal I have no particular clue. Actually, I do; the guy is in his early 50s and focuses strictly on 5,000-meter races, which (to paraphrase Sam Mussabini, in Chariots of Fire) is "tailor-made for neurotics." He trains strictly for local events. He's become stronger since he started training with this focus. He's also wound up like a cheap freaking watch, the way I used to be before I got married.

Last weekend, I filmed my athletes at a 'relatively competitive' 5,000-meter race. The guy who has been gunning for me ran a decent race, but was beaten soundly (a minute or more) by a runner who came from New Orleans, who drinks Budweiser like it was iced water (I had a great time the next morning as we all ran an eight-mile run on the Bayou, after which he killed off three Buds.). And boy, was the guy p!$$ed.

Hello? McFly?

It's an object lesson I've provided to my athletes in the past two years, and one thing I spoke of often with my coach in the last year he worked with me:

Sometimes you have to find a new challenge; whether it's a different location, doing races outside of your home turf, a different distance (such as going from the 5,000 meters to the 10,000 meters and up...), a different discipline (from cross-country to track or road racing), or a different sport altogether...in my own case, multisport events. A change of scenery and a change of competition is almost always a good thing. It provides you the opportunity to find out where you truly stand in comparison with the rest of humanity. Oh, sure, we all can be heroes in our hometown. But there are races where I can run a personal best and be fortunate to get third in my age group, after the top-three are awarded in the masters' division. Far be it from me to get arrogant and say I think it's not fair. If there are guys out there who are my age that are training more consistently, are blessed with better genetics, and run smarter, faster races...more power to them. I want to know what they are doing in order to see how I can improve myself.

I've started to think seriously about whether I can run for no apparent reason other than the love of the sport, the visceral pleasure that comes from propelling myself up a hill or around a track. If nothing else, perhaps to pull others along to a fast time. It doesn't seem like a lot of sense in this 'I placed fourth in my age group in this 5K race; all I have to show for it is this stupid ribbon which I'll now use to wipe my @$$ and drop in the rubbish bin' society. Beer glasses break. Medals tarnish. Ribbons fade. Tattoos can be lasered off. Sometimes all we have to show for our sport is what we show up with in the first place.

Desire.