Joe Henderson's Writings: March 2015

Thursday, March 26, 2015

See How You Run

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from September 2005.)

How do you run? This isn’t a question of how far or how fast, or of what types of training and racing you do, or of where and when you run. This question asks about the physical act of running.

How do you look compared to other runners? Is your running form efficient or wasteful, safe or risky?

Most runners don’t know the answer because they never clearly see themselves in action. At most they catch fleeting, fuzzy glimpses reflected in store windows, or they see still photos taken late in races (often with an awkward twist while stopping time on their wristwatch). Very few runners ever self-analyze their form from a videot or, better yet, submit to an expert’s critique.

Before looking closely at yourself running, and seeing how you can look and feel better, you need to hear a few facts about form. For instance:

– Form is largely predetermined. Thank or blame your parents for the genes and the early training given. Running started in your second year, and how you’ve learned to move after decades of practice isn’t likely to change quickly or dramatically. At most you’ll smooth some rough edges.

– Form is as individual as a fingerprint. While you might not know how you look while running, you can identify runner friends from a distance. Think about a runner a quarter-mile away, backlit by the sun. Long before you can see a face, you know who’s coming by how he or she moves. If there were one “right” way to run, everyone would run alike. “Right” covers a wide range of possibilities.

– Form follows function. Erase most of your mental pictures of athletes in action. Runners seen on television usually are sprinting or nearly so. They run up on the toes, with powerful arm action, long strides, high knee-lift and back-kick. This is the exact opposite of how to run at half their pace or less. The slower you go, the less you can look like a sprinter.

– Form scores no points in competitive running. If it did, several world-beaters would been non-starters. One of the greatest Olympic heroes of the 20^th century, Emil Zatopek, wasn’t pretty to watch. His head lolled and his face grimaced, but he got where he was going faster than anyone else in his era. That’s the point in this sport: to move well.

We can ignore the benign individual quirks, focusing instead on identifying correctable faults in running form. Fixing them might not make you a better-looking runner, but it could help you run better.

Stripped to its basics, the act of running is a long series of collisions with the ground. These prevent you from falling on your face after you’ve launched yourself forward into the air.

You return to earth 500 to 700 times per foot, per mile. While running, you impact with a force about triple your body weight (and even more on downhills). The stresses on your feet and legs add up enormously over multiple miles and days.

This doesn’t mean that running, by its nature, must shake you to pieces. The body is built to run, with the joints acting as shock-absorbers to ease the pounding. Your choice of shoes and surface also control the impact, and training helps you adapt to it.

Attention to running form helps as well. Taking those collision-steps sloppily increases the jarring – and the risk of injuries that can result from repetitive stress. Smooth, quiet, economical, balanced running can minimize or eliminate the damage.

(More specific tips on refining your form appear in the next chapter.)

UPDATE FROM 2015

In 15 years of teaching running classes and 10 of coaching training groups, I’ve never yet offered a lecture on form. Few runners have ever asked for individual lessons on this subject. If they do, I point them to better advisers than myself. I’ll name some of in the next chapter.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Friday, March 20, 2015

Take Your Time

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from August 2005.)

Last chapter advised letting marathon-day pace naturally follow the pacing of the longest training runs. For most runners those mile times are similar, and sometimes identical.

Here are more ways to predict your race times, these from one racing distance to another. Three physical facts underlie the three formulas below: (1) you slow by a predictable percentage as the racing distance increases; (2) your potential at the longer distances is set by your speed in shorter ones, and (3) you must train for the longer race, or none of these numbers will work.

– Half-Marathon Factor. I’ve long used this calculation, which says that your pace will likely slow by about five percent as the distance doubles. The easy way to do the math is to multiply the shorter time by 2.1 to predict the longer one. A recent two-hour half, say, would forecast a 4:12 full.

My first marathon team ran a half as its only race during the training cycle. Results from the 2.1 calculations were mixed.

Two runners hit their predicted marathon time exactly, and two others came very close. But the remaining dozen missed by as much as 24 minutes, with an equal number over and under. This isn’t an exact science.

– Ten-K Factor. My latest marathon team, now training for Portland, will have raced at least one 10K during this build-up. I’ll multiply those times by 4.8 as another way to see into the future. Under this formula a 50-minute 10K would make possible a four-hour marathon.

In the same month as my PR marathon, I raced a 35-minute 10K. It projected a 2:48 finish. I ran 2:49.

Much later my 10K time stood at 50 minutes. This said I’d run a four-hour marathon, and my time was 4:01.

– One-Mile Factor, more properly called the “Galloway Marathon Predictor.” More than a hundred thousand marathoners have passed through Jeff Galloway’s programs. He recently added a new wrinkle to this training: a one-mile run at good effort (after warming up well).

“We multiply these times by 1.3 to get a good idea what someone’s marathon pace will be,” he says. A seven-minute miler, for instance, could figure on averaging 9:06s in a marathon.

Running a seven-minute mile doesn’t mean you can sneak under four hours in a marathon without the right training. But the reverse is usually true. You can train well for that marathon but probably still not run a 3:59 if you’re unable to clock a 7:00 mile... or a 50-minute 10K... or a 1:54 half... or average 9:06 miles in the longest training.

Multiply out all of the formulas that apply to you. This establishes your realistic range of possibilities.

My purpose here isn’t to drain any of the mystery or surprise from your racing. You can know in advance what you might do, but never what you will do.

Mainly I want you to know going into the race what will be a reasonable starting pace for you. Running at that rate early will assure a better finish.

UPDATE FROM 2015

As a coach I estimate (based on longest-training-run pace) when our runners will finish. But I don’t tell them before the race about that predicted time; they set their own goals.

I only tell them the opening pace that will serve them best. Beyond the training, which is already in the bank on race day, and the weather that day, which no one can control, nothing has more to do with the final result than how well the opening miles are paced.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Pick Your Pace

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from July 2005.)

My second marathon team of the year is well into its training now for the Portland Marathon. The questions that the first group asked are replaying regularly again.

Among the most popular requests is, “How fast should I train on the long runs?” My answer isn’t the same one I would have given before working with team one last winter and spring: “run slower than your projected marathon pace.”

A runner named Rebecca Montgomery from team two had heard similar advice, only more so. “I have read every book I can find about training,” she said, “and there’s something I don’t understand. Why, as many books say, should the long run be slower than your pace for the marathon?

“I figured out that I could probably run a marathon in about 4:30 [10:20 pace], and so my long runs should be 11-minute-plus miles. That feels excruciatingly slow.”

Then she popped that big question: “What do you think should the pace be for my long runs in preparation for the marathon?”

Rebecca didn’t get the sound-bite answer she wanted. My explanation was multi-parted. The first part was that slower-than-race-pace training works best for faster runners who have higher racing gears available to them.

I could average 90 seconds per mile faster than training pace for my early marathons in the three-hour range because I’d go faster yet in shorter races. But when the marathon times later reached four hours or more, I’d lost the higher gears and now trained for and completed marathons at about the same pace.

My second answer to Rebecca addressed the common mistake of calculating bass-ackward. Runners set a marathon time goal, then try to train at that pace. It seldom fits them because the goal – qualifying for Boston, breaking a round-number time – has little to do with current fitness realities.

My advice: let the training pace set the marathon pace instead trying to work out the timing in reverse – forcing a guesswork pace onto the training. And then let whatever happens happen on the long runs. The pace that feels right usually is.

I never suggested an exact training pace to anyone on marathon team one, but let it settle out naturally. That team had its graduation day in June. All 16 of our group finished at Newport, Oregon – in times starting at 3:26 and ranging far upward.

Two runners hit major walls that day for health reasons. The others averaged within 15 seconds per mile of their pace for the longest training runs (which for them was 21 miles). Three runners finished their marathons within two seconds of that pace.

For all but the fastest runners, this might be the best measure of marathon potential: continuing to the finish at the pace you’ve practiced. As with any reliable gauge, this one isn’t based on what you dream of maybe doing someday but instead on what you really have done lately.

UPDATE FROM 2015

That first team of 16 was a tiny sample from which to draw a conclusion about judging marathon potential marathon times. Now we’ve had hundreds of finishes, and I’m even more sure that the guideline above applies to most of them: the best single predictor in the race is the per-mile pace of the longest training run, multiplied by 26.2.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

How Much Is Enough?

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from February 2005.)

It’s instructive what you can hear while running when you aren’t too busy talking and don’t have recorded music or news talk plugged into your ears. Here’s what I heard one morning:

Two runners came up behind me. One did most of the talking, his volume growing as the gap between us shrunk. The first words I caught were “new marathon training program.” Then “only run long every other week.” And louder, “They only go over 20 miles once, peaking at 21.”

The men passed me with a small wave from one and a nod from the other. They didn’t know me, or that I’d overheard them. The gap between us grew again. The last words I heard were, “not enough training.”

Says who? Themselves, from their marathon experiences? Another writer whose schedules they’ve read? They weren’t reading my writing. And their experience didn’t match mine.

They were talking down a training program being adopted for the first time locally. That was my schedule, written for a marathon training team I was coaching that winter. The runners whose critique I heard were right in their description. But they were wrong, I had to think, in their conclusion.

Yes, the long runs would come every other weekend, going up by two-mile steps from 11 onward. (This came after an first month when runners built by one weekly mile from seven to 10, testing if they could or wanted to continue.)

Yes, the distance would peak at 21 miles, the only training run above 20. And yes, these runs would be long enough for most runners. (The most common cause of breakdowns in training that I’d seen was too many too-long runs with too little recovery between.)

These ideas weren’t wild guesses at what might work in marathon training. I didn’t make any of this up lately just to attract shortcut-seekers. This type of training already had a long history, starting with my own entry into marathoning in 1967.

Ten years later, readers first saw an early version of this program in a Runner’s World article of mine. The latest incarnations of the schedule appeared in two editions of my the book Marathon Training, published initially in 1997 and revised in 2003. The text changed, that is, but not the training plan, which had long since passed the testing of time.

I heard from very few of the books’ readers, which wasn’t a bad sign. You know how we runners are: we don’t quietly swallow our disappointments. Anyone who felt led far astray by Marathon Training, version I or II, would have let me know quickly and vociferously.

Yet these complaints were rare. The books silently answered the early-morning talkers who’d concluded “not enough.”

UPDATE FROM 2015

A better rebuttal would come in June 2005 at Newport, Oregon, when my first team reached its graduation day. This was a small group, numbering just 16. All finished, most for the first time.

None of the teams since then has grown beyond a few dozen. In fact, I now limit team size to 30 so I’ll know each runner by name, face and life story – and so they’ll all know that I’ll care for and about them as if they were family members. That could never happen when I wrote articles and books for far larger but largely anonymous audiences.

We originally named this group Joe Henderson’s Marathon Team. The runners themselves soon abbreviated it to Joe’s Team, which was a better fit. It focused less on me because the coach could have been any old Joe, and also because the team included half-marathoners from the start.

Our numbers per team remain small, but they add up. I write here from the 10^th year of this marathon coaching.

The completed rounds of training (of four months each) now total more than 20. The finishes (including multiples by some runners) now top 500 and the finish rate is 99 percent. The program works.