Memory Laps

(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 May 2006.)

I don’t just believe in ghosts; I know they exist. They live, invisible but real and generally friendly, wherever we have made memories. We can visit the ghosts from our past whenever the opportunity or need arises.

Some of my oldest ghosts live in and around Drake Stadium in Des Moines, Iowa. I visited them again this spring on Drake Relays weekend.

Much had changed since my last trip here. So much that I wondered if my ghosts were still here, looking out for the legacy.

My first run of this trip felt wrong from the start. Instead of going out the door at our family home near campus, as I’d done for more than 40 years of living in and visiting this city, I ran from a hotel.

A student group now occupies this house. One of them, who could have been me at 21, walked outside to pick up the newspaper without glancing at the geezer gawking from the sidewalk.

From there a two-minute run took me past Drake Stadium, the building that housed the most ghosts. From the first time I saw the place in the early 1950s until my last viewing a year ago, the stadium’s outlines were unchanged. Only the track surface had evolved.

Now I saw what $20 million and a year’s work had done to this shrine of the sport. It looked great, and it brought the stadium up to standards required for hosting championship meets. But the new look didn’t match my old memories of the place.

Gone was the unique track, elevated above the infield, which made runners feel we were on stage. Gone was the old scoreboard, where my name had appeared (in 1961) for placing second in the high school mile, and where last year a message to my late brother had read, “God bless you, Mike. We miss you.” Gone was the gate where I’d turned into the stadium to finish the first Drake Relays marathon (in 1969), and which I’d climbed for unauthorized runs inside as a kid.

With Relays events already underway this day, I couldn’t set foot on the track. I would wait until the meet ended to check on my ghosts.

That Sunday I hoped to find a gate unlocked, allowing a lap or two on this hallowed ground. It’s still the same ground, even after the renovation.

Luck was with me, or so I thought. The new main gate stood open as workers removed the portable toilets.

As soon as I touched the blue Mondo surface, my feet couldn’t stay in an outer lane, where someone of my pace now belongs. I veered to the inside, which approximated where I’d first run (on a crushed brick track) as a high schooler… where I’d trained thousands of laps as a student-runner at Drake… where I’d made the sudden decision on a hot August day in 1966 that running long and slow on the roads would be more fun than going for speed here… where I’d run the last tenth of a mile in the first Drake Marathon.

This was also where at least a few molecules of brother Mike’s ashes remained. The family had sneaked in to dust the former finish line and long-jump pit. I stopped briefly to pay tribute.

My pause was almost too long. Running again, I saw that the workers’ truck was backing toward the gate. One man waited to lock it.

I didn’t quite sprint but did my fastest running in maybe a decade. Visions of being locked inside the stadium, shouting for release by a security guard, raced through my mind and drove me through the gate seconds before it swung shut.

Two competing facts left the Drake Stadium with me. First, my history means nothing to the people who control access to this arena. I’m someone the fences were built to keep out. Yet no barrier is high enough or strong enough to keep me from my memories.

UPDATE FROM 2015

I haven’t had a chance to revisit the Drake Relays since 2006. I tried to get back three years later for the 100^th anniversary, but cancelled flights put a late end to that plan.

The best I could do in recent trips to Des Moines was peer into the tightly secured stadium. The ghosts remained safely locked inside, available for visiting anytime from anywhere.

[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.]

Setting the 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 April 2006.)

Among the many reasons I love teaching and coaching runners is that each new group asks me to prove myself all over again. They don’t know me or my methods. I need to show them that spending the next three to four months on the scheduled training will be worth their while.

We’d barely started a new term in my 10K training class at University of Oregon when a young runner we’ll call Dan questioned me on pacing. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, slow down to the pace I’d suggested for his long runs. I need such challenges every few months to brush up on my sales pitches.

“I have not been hitting my target times, because frankly they seem too slow,” Dan said. He wasn’t rebelling or debating, just wanting an answer. “Explain to me why is it beneficial to run slower for the longer runs rather than coming close to race pace. I thought if you trained slow, you raced slow.”

Runners like Dan make me think before answering them. They won’t accept “because I know so and say so” as an answer. Neither is “this is what I’ve always done and what hundreds of students before you have done.”

He didn’t want to know that others had routinely raced one or more minutes per mile faster than most of their training miles. He wanted to know why my way might be better than the one he thought was right.

I told him that if you’re an experienced runner, already routinely exceeding the distances run in class, fine. Go ahead and run them faster than the target.

Take this as a tempo run, at pace of a race at least twice this long. But run this hard only one or two days a week.

Even the most skilled runners need to back off their best pace most days, saving themselves for the occasional day when they’re supposed to go fast. The many easier runs let the few harder ones go better.

I told student Dan, “Almost no one, even the very best athletes, can run at or near maximum effort day after day. Even they must run less than their best most of the time.”

How much less? About a minute per mile slower than you could race a comparable distance.

Dan was about a 40-minute 10K runner when our class began. That’s 6:30 mile pace, and he took our early runs within 10 seconds of that. No wonder he balked when I targeted him at  7½s.

In fact, I warn students not to obsess over splits. Miles aren’t marked during their longer runs, so they can’t check themselves along the way.

Instead I tell them to relax and let whatever happens, happen with their pace. Run what feels right, neither too fast nor too slow, and it probably is right. Run at a pace that they feel they could have held longer.

Once a relaxed training pace finds itself, let it guide the speed of the faster runs. We take those once a week in Dan’s 10K training class. On this day he’s free to go as fast as he can.

In class after class the results are the same. Each group averages a minute a mile faster on tempo runs (of about half their racing distance) than on the longer, relaxed ones. They run up to TWO minutes faster on interval days.

This class introduces the students to training that I call “overs and unders” – over the race distance (we peak at eight miles in this 10K class) but at a slower pace, and under the race distance at race pace or faster. Full distance at full pace comes only on race day, when it counts.

Approaching the race from both directions helps a runner improve. If Dan doesn’t think this can happen with the training I assign, he might talk with a student named Renee from the previous term.

Renee isn’t new to running and racing. She decided after running two marathons last fall and winter that her speed needed work.

She followed the scheduled training in class, slowing and speeding up as assigned. In her “final exam,” the term-ending 10K race, she scored a 3½-minute PR.

UPDATE FROM 2015

This piece happened to be written on the 39^th anniversary of my first, and fastest-ever, marathon. At Boston that year, 1967, I averaged more than a minute per mile faster than my longest training runs. This experience shaped much of the advice in later writings and teachings.

The coming of the GPS watch has made “letting what happens happen pacing” a harder sell. Now runners can, and do, check their mile pace at any moment. This raises the temptation to race against that watch, all the time, and penalizes running easily.

[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.]

Long Time Coming

(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 April 2006.)

We runners think in numbers, talk in numbers, define ourselves and each other by numbers. The numbers I put up at the Yakima River Canyon Marathon weren’t notable, yet they didn’t go unnoticed.

There’s nowhere to hide as a marathoner anymore. You could look up my time, anyone’s time, on the web. So I’ll save you the trouble. It was 5:01 at Yakima.

A friend asked at the finish line, “Does it embarrass you not to break five hours?” It wasn’t a harsh question. He knew I’d once run more than two hours faster, he knew that I’m a little more visible than other five-hour marathoners, and he was concerned about my feelings at that moment.

No, I told him, this time carries no shame. If slowing down bothered me, I would have stopped running marathons after the first few. Or I would have chosen one now where no one knew me, then run in disguise under an assumed name.

A time goal wasn’t what brought me to this marathon. The final time was the least of what I took away from it (though I confess relief at avoiding a PW – personal-worst time – by a single minute).

Running a race is not all about, or always about, a finish time. Other numbers meant far more to me at Yakima, and are why I chose this marathon on this date. Those numbers are six, 48 and 62.

We runners like giving special meaning to otherwise random numbers. My three marked times measured not in hours but in years:

– Six years since my last marathon, Napa Valley 2000. I didn’t want that latest one, which was unplanned and untrained-for, to be my last. But getting to the next starting line took a long time, after never running longer than 10K for 5½ of those years.

– Forty-eight years since my first race, on another April Fool’s Day. This was my first chance to celebrate the anniversary with a marathon. It had to go better than that first race – of just one mile – when I’d started too fast and not finished. In my next April Fool’s race I’d been knocked down, bloodied and forever scarred in the opening rush. I didn’t view those as bad omens, but instead took comfort from sticking around long enough to wear race number 48 at Yakima.

– Sixty-two years of age. Compared to the 50 States marathoners staging their quarterly reunion at Yakima, my lifetime marathon count is modest. It averages less than one per running year. But I’d run them in my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. I joked during a brief talk at the pasta dinner, “After doing this first one in my 60s, I can re-retire until age 70.”

My best reason for ending the recent “retirement” wasn’t numerical. The marathon teams that I’ve coached the past two years inspired me to do it.

I wanted to show these runners that I believed enough in how they trained to do it myself. We followed the same program of long runs, peaking at 21 miles.

Greeting me at the Yakima hotel was a card signed by the team members. It read, “Since we can’t be here in body, we’re here in spirit.”

A column I posted on marathon day was addressed to coaches. It ended, “Teach by example. Ask them to do no training or racing that you wouldn’t do (and haven’t done, or are doing) yourself.”

I did it and was back watching the latest marathon team train the next day. Now I understood these runners a little better, and respected them even more. After walking stiffly to their starting line, I told them, “I can teach you to walk this way the day after your marathon.”

UPDATE FROM 2015

Yakima 2006 wasn’t the last marathon of my 60s, nor for long a “PW.” Two years later I finished another, Napa Valley, even slower. This would be my last marathon as mostly a runner.

I returned to Yakima in 2014 for the first marathon of my 70s. It was also the first as a walker (mostly). The time of 6:33 still didn’t embarrass me.

[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.]

Final Five

(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 March 2006.)

You can’t believe everything you hear. During a run last year I overheard two runners discussing, and dismissing, a marathon program I’d designed.

They stated, accurately, “They only run long every other week,” and, “They only go over 20 miles once, peaking at 21.” They concluded, “That’s not enough training.”

I didn’t agree on that last point then, as my first marathon team began its training. One year and three completed team cycles later, I have results from dozens of runners to show that their distances were long enough, and run often enough.

The schedule of long runs – just six of them spread across a three-month program, stepping up by two miles at a time from 11 to 21 – fit with my longtime approach to marathon training. That’s to do the least you can get by with, not the most you can tolerate.

The “least” is more likely to take you to the starting line healthy. But runners, especially first-time marathoners, are left to wonder where they’ll find the final five miles. Here’s what I told the latest team in the worry-filled final weeks before their run at the Napa Valley Marathon:

Your training peaked at 21 miles. You might be asking yourself, if you haven’t already asked me, or haven’t found out for yourself in an earlier marathon: how can I now take the big leap from 21 to 26?

I understand your concerns. Had them myself a hundred years ago when facing my first marathon, off a longest training run a mile shorter than yours.

That marathon would be faster than any that followed, when training often was longer. Based on experience since then – as a runner, writer, speaker and now a coach of marathoners – I offer these ways that you’ll find those extra miles.

– You trusted me to help you get this far. Trust me not to have left you unprepared for your finish.

– You get an extra week’s recovery (three in all) between the last long run and the race. Use it wisely, and don’t try to do any “cramming” for this final exam. Your assignment now is to taper down the training.

– You will go new places. Enjoy escaping the “home course,” which has become too familiar these past few months, and exploring the race course that will be new to most of you.

– You will get a major boost from the magic of race day – the crowd running with you and watching you run. Expect the increased adrenaline to give you another hour of strong running.

– You won’t succumb to adrenaline poisoning, will you? Keep your head in the early miles while almost everyone around you is losing theirs.

– You will start slower, or at least no faster (please), than on your longest training run. Look forward to passing people in the late miles, which is much more fun than being passed.

– You will have more help. Don’t worry about getting a drink or finding a bathroom. They’ll be available every couple of miles.

– You will see new faces. Appreciate how you’re part of something much bigger, 100 times bigger in this race, than your Sunday training runs. You’ll never run alone.

– You will have trained as long or longer than most of the runners near you. Look around and think, I feel better than that person looks.

– You won’t face another long run, two miles longer, in two weeks. Don’t hold anything back, as you can take as much time as you want to recover from this big effort. You’ll never forget all that what went into it.

UPDATE FROM 2015

Shortly after I wrote this piece, our team answered the “five extra miles” question. Rains fell and headwinds blew during the 2006 Napa Valley Marathon. Some 500 runners either didn’t show up, didn’t finish or didn’t make the 5:30 cutoff time. Our team of Oregonians lined up all 16 of its entrants, and all finished with at least a half-hour to spare.

Later in 2006 we had our first non-finisher. That one stepped off the Portland course with two blocks to go so a time that disappointed him wouldn’t be recorded. He’d still gone five miles past his training peak.

[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.]