Pridentity

I see a lot of potential in a lot of young runners. What separates the ones who approach their potential from the ones who leave people scratching their heads, thinking they really should have run faster? Of all the freshman who run decent times, why do some go on to championships and college athletics while others stagnate. I suppose there are scores of reasons but lately I have come to focus on two that I think might just encapsulate most of the others. If I could choose any two traits for a runner I was going to coach, they would be Pride and Identity. These two would need to then be melded into one, pride in the identity they have chosen, pridentity. What does this mean, pridentity, and it is really necessary invent yet another compound word? Well, I recently saw the word ginormous and instantly had the picture of something bigger than either giant or enormous could convey. After sufficient explanation, I would hope that pridentity would elicit an image far more clear than than the sum of its parts. To start with, a runner needs to have the identity of a runner. This is overlooked by far too many coaches. I have seen so many coaches striking deals with football players, soccer players, basketball players, rugby players, in order to get them to turn out for track or cross country. These people who run are never runners. Not really. That's not their identity. They're interlopers. They're aliens. They're straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers who appear just like all the runners, but as soon as the coach falls asleep, they infect the rest of the team with the idea that running isn't really that important. Let's run to the courts and shoot some hoop. Let's toss around a football during the meet. Running isn't that big a deal. Racing is something to be endured in order to try to get another letter, in order to stay in shape for the real sports. Soon the team is bigger than ever and thus diluted and the coach deluded to think he has accomplished something by getting those few "stars" to run while not realizing  a good coach doesn't need talent to walk on the team; he needs to develop runners who may or may not have talent to beat the ringers from every other team. This is not to say I don't appreciate a good scavenging of other sports. The difference is, I don't want to borrow them, I want to steal them. At least for the season, these people who run will be runners. They will have the identity of runners. If they do not, they will not last long. Once they have the identity of runners, as seeing themselves as runners, as caring about their success in running, then and only then can they take pride in their running.
Pride alone will not necessarily lead to success in running. In fact, pride can really sidetrack a good runner when misdirected. Pride, true pride, not bravado, leads to a certain indifference towards things not encompassed by the source of the pride. If I consider myself a soccer player, I can get last in a race and it affects my pride not in the least. If I am caught up in my popularity, a D on a test means nothing to me. You need to identify with the aspect you have pride in or the pride is useless. Pridentity! There's my athlete. I don't care if she comes in as an eight minute miler or if he runs twenty minutes for 5k as a freshman. If either of these two runners takes pride in their identities as runners they will succeed as runners. Does this mean they will get scholarships or win state titles. Not necessarily. But they will fulfill their potential as runners which is more important and oftentimes actually does coincide with more tangible success. Perhaps more importantly, these are team savers, team builders. Every athlete that looks like a complete loss as a freshman and makes improvement through pridentity is worth fifty mercenaries. I have happily taken the misfits and watched them build a team that embarrasses the interlopers many times. The best thing is watching the non runners start to get it. There's no debating about starting position, no coaches' pets, no increased playing time based on nepotism. There is only the cold hard translation of work into success, judged by numbers that are not by vote and not aided by assists. The  outsider will never get passed the ball even if he can shoot the lights out from beyond the arc. The outsider doesn't need a pass to drop a 4:30 first mile and leave the pack  wondering what just happened to their plans. Some of the mercenaries get this and cross to the dark side, our side. They want to maximize their talent. they have pride in being the best they can be and realize that running is their path to that. They are the converts. They kind of back in to pridentity but they get there just the same. Most likely, they are going to a big college for free and traveling around the country to compete while all of their former big sports teammates and checking the local college intramural basketball or soccer schedule. They are racking up the all state honors and championships while their former friends are hoping their coach is popular enough to influence the voting to honorable mention in their tiny conference in their tiny corner of their tiny pond. The best part is, they were probably inspired by someone whom they never would have talked to in their former life. Pridentity is contagious. Those who identify as runners with pride manifest results that often infect those around them. This is how teams are built. This is the foundation of success. A handful of runts who know who they are and won't accept compromise will not only trump an army of pretenders, but will get a fair amount of defections as well.

Run Like a Girl

There's a curious myth abounding in sports that if one wants to succeed, one must acquire masculine traits. In fact, the surest way to motivate through humiliation as a coach is to insinuate an athlete might have feminine characteristics... (What's the matter, your ovaries hurting?") Likewise, the greatest compliment that can be given to an athlete's toughness, bravery or fortitude is to associate them with male characteristics... ("That guy's got balls!") This even carries over to female sports. Saying a girl has balls, which would really seem like it should be an insult, is perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay a female athlete, the bigger the better... ("That girl's got Paul Bunyon's Babe the giant blue ox sized balls!") Unfortunately, like most myths, there is a reason this stigma has taken hold and continues to manifest. When I was young I remember vividly my dad pointing out the girls at high school meets falling across the finish line in tears, needing to be carried away. He was perhaps the first feminist I ever met in pointing out that is no way for an athlete, male or female,to act. It hurts the same for everyone, he said. It should be just as embarrassing for a girl to do that as it would be a guy. I don't remember ever seeing a girl my dad coached doing that beyond her first year. This tradition has carried on amongst many female runners to this day. At the NCAA Pre-Nationals meet a couple years ago, the finish line looked like a battlefield. Scores of women sprawled over the grass, needing to be carried away from the line so the others had room to finish, and then collapse in their own dramatic fashion. I felt the disgust my dad had taught me rising up. That's no way for any athlete to act, male or female. While these examples convey how such a stereotype grabs hold, they do not represent what I most often see when I watch females run. Like most stereotypes, they cling the lowest, most dramatic, most unfortunate traits that can be observed and declare them typical. For people to actually believe these stereotypes, they can't have spent much time around many accomplished female runners, however. Perhaps the most hardcore story I can recall is how Deena Drossin (now Kastor) was stung by a bee in the throat during the World Cross Country Championships and had an anaphylactic reaction that caused her to lose consciousness for a few seconds. When she woke up, the other runners in the race were hurdling her downed body. She popped up, resumed the race, and ended up with a medal. I really think that's hard to top. Of the top ten toughest races I've seen athletes run, I would say at least half were by females. I remember wondering why one of my runners, a sophomore in high school, had a less than stellar race at a state meet. Since the race was over she figured it was now ok to tell me she had a 102 degree fever when she woke up that day and had avoided me before the race so I wouldn't notice and stop her from racing. This same athlete pulled a muscle mid race and still finished close to her usual position in spite of the injury being bad enough that she couldn't run for several days after. Another athlete on the same team once ran on one the most treacherous courses I've ever seen, in fact most coaches that day said it was one of the worst they's seen, with a badly sprained ankle. Oh yeah, she sprained it on that same course during our run through the day before. She ran accdording to usual form in the race, however and ensured her team a New England Championship. Now that's pretty bad ass! Girls have the capability to be tough. I have a lot of memories of girls running on stress fractures or other injuries for coaches who should have known better than to let them. I have found that from a  strictly numbers point of view, a higher percentage of males are likely to give up in such situations than females. This came to mind in a workout the other day where I decided to pace a workout group and not coach from the track like I normally do. As I circled the track, I could see guy after guy standing on the sidelines after dropping out of the workout. There got to be so many that I actually wondered if they could have misunderstood the workout. One of the biggest reasons I knew this wasn't the case was due to four runners I didn't see on the sidelines. There was a pack of three middle school girls churning out the workout as prescribed and another high school girl doing the same thing. They all finished the workout and in fact the high school girl lost count and ran an extra lap, just to be safe. I have coached all four of these girls long enough to know that my biggest job is not to motivate them to run harder, but to try to make sure they don't go Sambo's tigers on me and run themselves into the ground. I have come to the realization that saying to a guy who drops out, "Come on, be a man" would not be appropriate. In this and many other circumstances, I need to say, "Come on, run like a girl!" Eventually, maybe I'll see him run tough enough that I can say, "Wow! That guy's got a pair of double Ds on him!"

Week 3 - Progress

The third week of my Summer/Fall 2011 training schedule is in the books. Total mileage just a bit over 70 which is more where it should be. The 80 was a blip on he radar last week. this brings up a conversation I had on a run last week. One sure sign of a rookie runner or coach is exact numbers on a training schedule or diary. I remember when I was a rookie and would try to hit 100 mile weeks in college. (Yes, in running, we're rookies longer than in any other sport. Some people go their entire careers as rookies.) I would do silly things like tack on extra mileage to a long run or warm ups and warm downs or even sneak out for a an extra run on Sunday to get the magic number. Then, with some help, I realized that training this way allowed the tail to wag the dog. The individual workouts and runs were what was important and they added up to whatever they added up to. To make the mileage more important than the runs was totally backwards. Now my mileage is all over the place week to week. If I'm up around 100 miles, I could hit anywhere between 95 and 105. Right now I'm aiming not at any mileage whatsoever but rather an hour of running a day. More workouts, a second long run, or faster paced running will put me up around 80. A down week like this coming week will probably yield only about 60. Last week I hit 72. I had a great road tempo run which was probably a slightly long four miles at sub 6 pace. (Closer to 5:50 actually). I had a great fartlek interval workout at Lake Padden which got me down around 5k pace for awhile but also gave me another run of 5.2 miles at 6 flat pace. Sunday I resurrected my hill climbing skills by going up to Cedar Lake (a roughly 1200 foot climb) and then back down via the newly constructed raptor Ridge. I'm pretty stoked about Raptor Ridge opening up as it really gives more access to the back section of Chuckanut for when my long runs get legit again. I guess 2 hours yesterday is kind of legit but at some point they'll be up to three hours again and I already have a couple courses picked out to keep things interesting. I also got my 16x100 - barefoot - in on Friday and they went far better than the week before. So out of seven days I got two hard quality days, one medium quality day and a long run and still felt pretty good on the trail this morning. Also had four solid lifting days. No real pains, feeling pretty good as I head into my down week this week. Down weeks are mixed blessings as they often serve as test weeks. So while I get to drop the mileage a bit, I have a test workout on Wednesday and a time trial on Saturday. Hopefully they'll go well and serve as confidence boosters. It's been a month since I did both of those in the suffocating heat and humidity of Connecticut so i look forward to big improvements. We shall see!

Law of Diminishing Returns

After seeing so many different athletes and coaches come up with so much success with a vast array of different training philosophies, I decided there must be something more than just the philosophy that leads to that success. The converse was true as well in seeing coaches and athletes copy what they had seen work for others and fail to come even close to matching the results. If tempo runs aren't the answer, if mileage isn't the answer, if quarters aren't the answer, what is the answer? The first step was to try an experiment with my own running and those that I coach. Some may hypothesize that after having a team win a national championship with one type of training, that I had found the secret... that was the only training scheme I should ever use. My hypothesis was different, however. If there were principles behind that training scheme that made it work, then following the same principles while changing the workouts themselves would continue to produce results. In fact, by changing the workouts, I was actually following the principles behind that season's success more than I would have if I had repeated the workouts. Read that again, is your mind blown? Here is where coaches and athletes fall into the the catastrophic plateau and crash cycle. By repeating the same training schedule multiple seasons or years in a row, they are actually violating the principles that allowed them to succeed off of that training schedule. But how can this be?
There are several reasons why frequently changing training plans is of value to a runner. I try to boil them down to certain fundamental training principles that, when understood, can produce a myriad training schedules, each markedly different from the last, and all effective when executed properly. These include the SAID Principle (specific adaptation to imposed demand), the principle of supercompensation, and the principle of progressive overload and most importantly, the law of diminishing returns. I believe that with a mastery of how these principles apply to runners in general, but more importantly how they apply to specific athletes, a coach or runner can follow almost any general running philosophy and not only improve but excel. Without going through an entire lecture right here, the principles can be summed up as
1) SAID - Each athlete responds to training in a specific way. He or she will have a physiological reaction to a training stimulus that might be partially predictable through basic physiology but will also be unique to that runner. A coach's first job is to understand how each athlete responds to each aspect of training. We have already lost over 50% of coaches and I hate to say possibly over 75%.  In the last year alone I have talked to over five coaches who insist there is little variability among runners in response to training modes. This is truly a shame for their athletes.
2) Progressive Overload - Progressive overload is the obvious tenet that in order to improve, you need to do more than you have done before. To get better, stronger, faster, you need to gradually - read that again, gradually - increase the amount of workload from what you are used to. In referring to SAID, this will have a predictable effect on you. You don't simply get stronger or faster from the work though. You actually initially get weaker and then stronger with proper recovery. This leads us to our next principle.
3) Supercompensation - This is the reason why training works. Any time you do more than you have been used to, you have introduced a new training stimulus to your body. This stimulus will have a specific effect on you that may or may not be the same as other runners on your team (see SAID). Your reaction to this stimulus will initially be fatigue; if you allow yourself to recover you will then not only compensate (regain strength) but SUPERCOMPENSATE from that workout. To supercompensate means to rise above in strength, speed, flexibility, or whatever from where you were before. You don't just recover to where you were before, you get better. This seems like such an obvious idea but it is so often misunderstood. So much can go wrong with this principle right here. If your stimulus is too hard - not progressive, you will not recover. If you do not recover from the initial stimulus either because it was too hard, or because a subsequent stimulus was too hard, or because another hard stimulus was applied before supercomensation took place, you will not improve. This is why we don't run workouts for the sake of running workouts. If sick, injured, burnt from a long hard week/month, etc., you will not be able to even compensate, much less supercompensate from a workout. That's right, training could make you weaker! If you can master Progressive Overload, SAID and SUPERCOMPENSATION, you don't even need a training schedule. If you truly have those three principles down, you can come up with workouts day by day and do better than any schedule by any coach would get you. (It's takes years and years and hundreds of athletes to truly master those principles, however, so for roughly 99% of runners and coaches, a schedule is still necessary.
4) Law of Diminishing Returns is the monkey wrench in the whole idea of repeating your successful schedule season after season. This is where the recurring schedules get all screwed up. If you know what a workout will do for you, if you know how to time your workouts so that you recover and then get better and then do another one, you are probably going to have a good season. Now, you go back to the drawing board and get ready for your next season. If you think, like many athletes and coaches, that you will stick with what worked, you just might have killed that season. After six months or so of doing a certain type of work, you will not have the same adaptation you did before. Progressive Overload says you need to gradually build different systems in your body at a higher intensity or volume than you did before. When these systems are being stressed for the first time, they will quickly respond and require little stimulus. When they are used to being trained, they will need far more stimulus for far less benefit. The supercompensation curve on a well trained VO2 is virtually nil. Tragically, VO2 changes little after a single season of working it to capacity. Your SAID has actually changed! Now all of a sudden you are in a corner. You either get no improvement from the work you do or, in order to get improvement, you need to risk burnout or injury in order sufficiently overload a system already working at near capacity. This is why repeating the same schedule season after season or year after year doesn't work. This is also why new training plans, often no matter what they are, seem so good at first. They work because they are new. They are operating on a system you haven't bled dry yet. Progressive overload combined with the law of diminishing returns says that you should overload a system you haven't overloaded recently. This is why you hold to the principles above but apply them with completely new training schedules. Stress systems you haven't stressed, or minimally stressed before. Did you just do great off of  series of 100 mile weeks? Awesome! Now cut it to 60 and work some different intensities, or even cross training. Or perhaps you just dropped your mile repeats time by 30 seconds over the course of a season by doing them every week. Awesome! Now stop doing them. Run longer repeats slower, or shorter repeats faster, or stop doing repeats altogether for six months. The bottom line is whatever you have just made really strong will stay pretty strong for far longer than you think. It will also not get much stronger once you have near maximized it and to make it stronger your risks far outweigh your benefits.

Now I am not saying you will stay fast if you stop running. I am saying that once you have great endurance, you will keep that endurance with far less volume than it took to get it.  I am saying that if you have great speed, you can maintain most of that speed with far less intensity than it took to get it. When you hear of athletes plateauing  and burning out, it is usually not because their training in any given season was no good. It is because they failed to change that training in order to combat the law of diminishing returns. And probably once they stopped improving, they pushed the supercompensation principle too hard and failed to recover. When I see how little American runners have improved on a macroscopic scale in the last 30 years or so, I attribute it to this. Not that thirty years ago all the guys were talking about law of diminishing returns, but that they were so much more flexible with their training. Runners today are too uptight about holding to a specific rigid schedule and it's killing them. The flexibility of the past helped runners race more often and more successfully and improve many more years than they do now. So once a schedule has worked, banish it for at least a year. Try something completely different and see what happens. So long as you keep with the first three principles, and respect the fourth, it could be the best year of your career.

Week 2 - Off the Res

At first the good news. 80 miles this week; feeling pretty good. I must apologize to my coaches, however - all 25 of them - for deviating from the schedule a bit. If you makes them feel any better, I'm sort of known for doing this. I honestly think both my high school and college coaches were two of the best there are and I did the exact same thing to them. Actually much worse, in all honesty. To their credit, they both gave me considerable leeway in my running program. While I exemplified the quote "give an inch, they'll take a mile," in using up all their leeway and then some (and then some more) we seemed to work out an amicable understanding that kept me improving throughout my high school and college years and beyond. I believe this should be a lesson to all coaches that in the end, the career of a runner belongs to the runner, not the coach. As a coach, you advise and present a strong case for your program and hope you build enough trust with your runners that they listen to you. I fell as a coach I accomplish this pretty well but at the same time can't think of an athlete I've ever coached who does exactly what I tell them all the time. When it comes right down to it I think this is for the best. In the end, a coach is an observer and only the runner goes through the actual details of the workouts, the races, all of it. The more experienced a runner gets, the more the runner needs to take in all the information and process it to find a plan that works. Sometimes, that plan will be what the coach says, sometimes it will be easier, sometimes harder, sometimes completely different. A smart coach not only accepts this, but encourages it and hopes to cultivate it. Only the insecure coaches need to see their plan followed through to the letter. Ironically, by forcing the training minutiae, the biggest deviation in the plan usually comes in races. A coach who cannot allow the athlete to make his or own decisions in training is usually the coach who sits and wonders why his athletes are so weak that they end up injured or slower than expected at the end of the season. This is not to say that athletes should be going by their gut every day of the week. A good training plan is an outline that will propel the runner to success. The program is just an outline, however. Ad-libbing is an integral part of the equation. So if my coaches will accept the preceding as my excuse, I will now confess to playing with the schedule a bit. Part of it was practical as I needed to switch my Thursday run to a long run with Rebekah. After that, things just kind of spiraled into to my all to familiar stream of consciousness training. In summary, early week went according to schedule, my sub tempo was a little faster than planned and I had to shorten my tempo workout as it too started too fast. The long run just got thrown in and Friday included some solid strides in the form of my 16x100 on 60. After that, Saturday turned into another sub tempo which flt a lot more like a tempo run. To finish the bastardization of the week, I went 15 today as that was what the group I was with was doing. All in all, like I said to start, I think it was a good week, but I think I'll try to stick closer to the plan this week. In future weeks - we better just put this out there now as my previous coaches would expect it - I might have a few more races than are on the schedule.

Fear

FDR's most famous quote might be, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." When I was younger, I hated this quote because it was always used in movies or by sports coaches to somehow manipulate people to happily risk their lives or health. My personal belief was, and still is, there are lots of things to fear and a healthy fear of those things kept me from doing a lot of damage to myself. This applied to life in general as well as running specifically. For instance, the fear of injury, overtraining, and later in life atrial fibrillation and even death has kept from doing some incredibly stupid things that I would have happily done if I subscribed to the notion that there was nothing to fear but fear itself. (You see, I'm not afraid of fear so sans that I would be afraid of nothing and would have killed myself many times over by now.) I actually took the time to look up the context surrounding FDR's speech, however, and more importantly, the sentence he followed it up with and ever since then I think it's one of the most powerful things ever said. (I still believe anyone using the initial quote out of context should be given time alone with some of my top fears, however, just to learn the difference.) Here is what FDR followed up with."Nameless, unreasonable, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." FDR wasn't speaking of going into battle or some life threatening event; he was speaking of living day to day existence in a rather bleak period of American history. He was saying that Americans would bounce back if they just kept doing what they do well and didn't let themselves get crippled by an intangible sense of doom. Over the years, I have seen how incredibly applicable this is to runners when it comes to racing. While a healthy fear of extreme conditions, hills, terrain, weather, and even a fast pace help to ensure a smart race, a random fear of racing and anything but perfect conditions is in itself a race killer... and sooner or later will be a career killer. The fear of racing in and of itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is bad enough when it happens to individual athletes but is absolutely tragic when it becomes institutionalized. Many years ago it struck me that running is pretty much the only sport there is in which the "experts" tell you not to participate in the sport itself. I have always been a fan of racing, it's the reason I train the way I do. So for most of my life, coaches and other runners have been telling me I would burn out from racing so much. Well, I'm not afraid of racing and I'm not afraid of the fear of racing so I never burned out. I'm betting I have about as many races under my belt since the age of ten as anyone. Thirty years of liberal racing has not yet burned me out the way people said - and still say - it will do to a runner in only a few years. Racing doesn't burn you out. Freaking out about racing burns you out. I see the way some people act leading up to races and I know I would never have lasted four years in the sport if I did that to myself five or six times a year much less thirty or forty. Teaching young runners to fear racing is not a good thing. Telling them that if they race a few weeks consecutively or even a few times in a certain week they will burn out is nothing but counterproductive. If people like to race, let them race. If they don't like to race, well, they're in the wrong sport, but those people you can save for only a couple races a year. I've never been one of those people who think any runner can be a champion if they have the right attitude. I have too much respect for the physical side of the sport to think that. However, I used to always tell my teams that if we were to race on potential alone, we would lose. We would not win due to our superior physical prowess, but rather a combination of substantial physical ability and a superior mindset. This mindset is what separated all my championship teams and all of my personal accomplishments from the people and teams we defeated. A healthy fear and subsequent caution in regards to that fear mixed with an absolute indifference and or disdain for any  "Nameless, unreasonable, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance" is the key to success not only in this sport, but in life.  

Week One Progress Report

Today ends the first week of the schedule produced by the collective conscious of the Connecticut Running Camp. The week started with the revelation that I'm pretty out of shape. My deplorable time trial on Monday was tempered a bit by the fact that I had run six races in a little over a week, however.  With this in mind, I figured recovery would be just as important as training and finding the right balance would be tricky. My five mile sub tempo on Wednesday did not lead to much confidence in this regard. While I thought 6:30 pace would feel disappointingly easy, I actually had to kick hard to average under that pace. The combination lack of fitness and fatigue from all the races was coming back to haunt me. Thursday helped things turn around a bit with a fairly comfortable and actually pretty quick four loops (10.4 miles) around Lake Padden. Friday was another good run with some strides and an overall solid pace so it seemed like I had finally started to thread the effort/recovery needle. Saturday was supposed to be a traditional EMH workout but Tesseract was doing a Padden workout so I decided to compromise with EMH 400s around Padden for 3.35 miles. The workout went well with the only setback being a little less speed on the hard portions than I had hoped for. Overall, however, it was a positive indicator. I was scheduled for an easy 13 Sunday which turned out to be far too easy and not quite 13 due to some planning errors but in keeping with the goal from the beginning of the week, I figured erring on the side of a little extra recovery would be fine. Overall I got 67 in for the week and had three quality workouts and two other legitimate medium days. I want to be back into the 16s in  four weeks and preferably under 16:40 so we'll see how that goes. I look forward to week two of my schedule. It's good to have some focus again!