Rest of the Week

(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 2007.)

I was about to call this a column of outtakes from the previous piece (“End of the Week”). But this one might mean more to you than the original.

The new one speaks of two runners who didn’t train many days, but ran a lot when they did, and had better results this way than when they trained more often. They are two old – in both senses of the word, aged and longtime – friends of mine.

First some personal scene-setting. Twenty years ago this spring I retired as a streaker – that is, a runner who never took a voluntary day off.

My last and longest streak had reached almost five years, and I realized that the everydayness was not longer in my best interest. It had flattened my running, leaving every run the same – slow and short.

I’ve always looked up to older runners, because they show me where I might go as my years add up. One penalty of aging is slower recovery time between big efforts.

This time I looked to George Sheehan for guidance. You know him as one of the finest writers this sport has ever known – or if you were lucky enough to hear him, the greatest speaker. I know him as one of the best friends I’ve ever had in running.

George ran to race. He never kept count but probably raced more than 1000 times, averaging one a weekend for 20-plus years.

He also raced very well, though he downplayed his results while writing and speaking so as not to distance himself from his audiences. He was the first runner older than 50 to break five minutes in the mile, running 4:47 at that age.

George’s routine at the time was to run almost daily, usually four to five miles on days when he didn’t race. Then in his mid-50s his racing times began slowing more dramatically than he could accept.

He dropped from six to five runs a week, and started improving again at races. Four days, more improvement; three, better yet. This was the least running he would accept.

The Sheehan plan for the rest of his racing life was two runs during the week of about 10 miles apiece, and a race or longer run (usually the race, seldom the long unless it was IN a race). This is to say, he ran twice as far, half as often as before. One result: setting his marathon PR of 3:01 a few days shy of his 61^st birthday.

John Keston is another much-admired friend of mine. Pre-Ed Whitlock, John was the oldest runner to break three hours (at 69-plus) and the first over 75 under 3:30. He raced even better at shorter distances, setting dozens of world and American age-group records.

In his 70s John took a lesson from serious weight-lifters who said they needed 72 hours between hard sessions. He adopted a routine that remains with him today (at 82): a two-hour run every third day, with a walk of similar time on his recovery days.

I might never match John Keston and George Sheehan by resting more days than I run. And surely I’ll never run as fast in my upper years.

But the purpose of their program is well worth considering, by me and maybe by you too if you have lots of mileage on you. The goal: to run longer and better each time out, not less well on more days per week.

UPDATE FROM 2015

George Sheehan continues to teach new generations of runners through his writings. The latest posthumous book is The Essential Sheehan.

John Keston turned 90 in December 2014. He plans to extend his marathon career into the new decade. His memoir is titled Expressions of Aging.

[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, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

True Miles

(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 December 2006.)

How far did you run today? Chances are, you think you know. Chances are even better that you’re at least a little off.

The mile is the gold standard of running in the U.S. Runners here talk in terms of minutes per mile and miles per week.

You know exactly what a mile is: 1760 yards, or 5280 feet. But running exactly a mile isn’t so simple.

A true mile is hard to find. Distances resist measurement to the degree of accuracy that runners demand.

I can’t tell you how long my run was this morning. Outside of races, I don’t need to know – don’t even want to know, because that would remind me daily how much I’ve slowed through the years.

Almost 40 years ago I opted out of mile-checking. Instead I ran by time periods – 30 minutes, an hour or longer – without knowing or even estimating the distance covered in that time.

This practice, still followed today, greatly simplified my running: no courses to plot or follow. A minute is the same length no matter where it’s run, and more easily and accurately measured than a mile.

Despite this preference for by-time running I’ve stayed interested in how, and how well, courses are measured. That’s because I want my race distances to be as correct as possible, and because most runners still run by the mile, and because my students insist on knowing how far they run.

So let’s look at the ways runners check their miles, from least to most accurate. This list also traces fairly closely the history of measurement.

– Wild-guess method. After winning one of my early road races in “world record” 10K time, I guesstimated the true distance at 5¼  miles. The race organizer apparently hadn’t even quick-checked the course by car.

– Pedometer method. These devices, which I tried and discarded early on, are hopeless for runners. They’re good at counting steps but not at calculating the length of those steps, which vary widely from runner to runner and for you within any run. You could guess distances as closely, which means coming within a mile.

– Minutes-to-miles method. Here you run a unmeasured course and divide the total time by your typical pace per mile. But that pace differs from day to day, so your estimate could be off by a half-mile in either direction.

– Car method. This remains the most common way to measure courses. Its weaknesses: car odometers aren’t always accurate and aren’t calibrated closer than tenth-miles; you can’t often drive the shortest possible route that a runner would take, and you can’t drive off-road where a runner might go. Cars almost always measure courses longer than they really are.

– Map method. Using a large-scale map, we once measured with a ruler. Now this method is easier with web devices by the dozen (Google “running routes” for a list). These can be fairly accurate – if the course involves mostly straight-line running. The more curves, the lower the reliability of plotted distances.

– Track method. If you don’t mind feeling like a caged hamster, run on a track. Standard tracks are four laps to the mile. Unless they’re 400-meter tracks and your four laps fall about a dozen yards short of a mile. Or unless you run in lanes other than one, when each lane out from the curb adds several yards per lap.

– Bicycle method. This one is better than any above, but not so good as the one below. You attach a speedometer to your bike, then calibrate that device on a route known to be precise. This is how I measure courses, with a true mile being 1.04 on the dial. (Walking with a measuring wheel, after calibration, works just as well as biking the course but takes much longer.)

– Certification method. The only recognized way of certifying courses is with a counter mounted on the bike wheel, calibrated against a short course measured to a surveyor’s degree of accuracy – to the inch. The race course must then be ridden carefully, along the shortest possible route. If a course is advertised as “USATF certified,” you can trust that the miles are the closest possible to true. But only if you hug the course as measured, which isn’t possible in crowds and means you run a bit beyond full distance.

Complicated, isn’t it? You can see why I opt for by-time running.

All you do here is punch on the watch at the start and off at the finish, and you know precisely what you ran – not how far but how much. You can trust today’s watches to measure true minutes.

UPDATE FROM 2015

I wrote this column as the dawning of the GPS revolution. These watches and phone apps have taken over as runners’ preferred form of measurement, but they put more faith in these devices than they deserve.

In my marathon training group, three runners wearing the same brand and model of GPS watch can get three different distance readings. The discrepancies aren’t huge, maybe a tenth of a mile over double-digit distances. But if the technology were perfect, they’d all agree to the hundredth.

GPS’s still rank below certification in accuracy. If your watch and the advertised distance of a race course disagree, it’s your reading that isn’t quite right.

[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.]

Weeks Without Miles

(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 December 2006.)

As my latest marathon team began training this winter, a local newspaper reporter asked me to explain the program for a story he was writing. This wasn’t a knows-little, cares-less writer, but an ultrarunner himself.

Lewis Taylor wanted to know why we “run so little mileage.” I wrote a sidebar to his article, rationalizing the training in four ways:

– Basic Training. Runners can enter the program with a modest distance background, but not without any. The recommended prerequisite is a recent six-mile run, with as long a buildup to this distance as needed. The first month of the program, when the long runs increases to 10 miles, is a trial period. Runners test whether they want to or are able to continue.

– Long Runs. Marathon training truly begins when long-run mileage reaches double figures. From there it increases by two miles every other week, from 11 to a peak of 21. Most runners need more recovery time than weekly long runs would allow. The long run is by far the most important ingredient in marathon training, and runners must go into it healthy and well rested.

– Recovery Runs. Most runs between the long ones need to be low in distance and light in intensity. Runners usually rest at least the day before and after the long run. Weekday runs last no more than an hour and often closer to a half-hour. Runs on weekends between long runs are about half the previous week’s distance. Three easy weeks separate the last long run (the longest) and the marathon.

– Race Day. New marathoners ask, “If we’ve only trained 21 miles and the race is 26, where do the other five miles come from?” They come from the magic of race day – the crowd running, the supporters watching, the excitement of this “graduation day.” Most runners not only cover the final five miles, but average the same pace in the marathon as they did on the longest training runs.

Note that this summary never mentions weekly mileage. That’s because it matters so little in the success of a program. What matters most is getting through each long run, then getting over it before trying the next one.

Don’t just trust me on the weeks-without-miles approach. Listen to two giants of the sport, George Sheehan and Jeff Galloway.

George’s performances tailed off and his energy waned in his early 50s. He went from running six days a week to five and felt better; dropped to four, better yet; then to three, where he stayed. Off two runs of about an hour each in midweek and a long one or race on the weekend, he set his marathon PR of 3:01 at age 61.

Jeff is known both for his walk-break advice for the long training runs reaching or topping marathon length. The least-quoted part of his program is what he asks runners to do between the long ones, which is very little.

At Jeff’s summer camps I’ve heard him say, “Run one hour, total, the week after a long run. This can be two 30-minute runs or three 20s. Just be sure to limit yourself to that hour.”

This is another way of saying, do nothing that interferes with the long run. I’d say the same.

(Don’t miss another point that George and Jeff both make. They refer to their easy runs in minutes, which the best use of time-running. You can’t hurry time, so you relax and let an easy pace happen.)

If or when the marathon bug bites me again, I’d need to make only two changes in what I already do. One, of course, would be to gradually and greatly increase the length of one run every other week.

The other change would be to compensate for that extra effort by resting more often. I favor the formula of one day off for each hour of the long run.

That’s up to four days off per week, and it’s more than I’d want to take very often. One reason my own marathons are so few – just one in the past six years – is that I like my little daily runs too much to trade many of them for a big run.

Weekly mileage doesn’t count for me. But the number of runs per week does matter, a lot.

UPDATE FROM 2015

I didn’t know it when Lewis Taylor interviewed me but soon learned that he was a hard-training, high-mileage runner himself. He his credits would include the Western States 100-mile race.

Jeff Galloway has loosened his recovery-running recommendation. He now allows a total of one to two hours during the week – a pair of one-hour runs or four half-hours, for instance.

My marathon finishes have totaled just two since this article first appeared. For both, I trained almost exactly as outlined here.

[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.]

Surviving the Big Injury

(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 June 2006.)

An ex-student of mine, Kyle Carnes, reminds me of myself a couple of generations ago. He studies journalism and he runs, as I did as in college. His running sometimes crosses over into the writing, as mine also did then.

At work recently on an article about weathering his first big injury as a runner, Kyle asked for my comments. My passions for both the craft and the hobby that we share are such that answering him took hours. Here is the short version:

I’ve survived the Big Injury the runners fear, and probably need. Nothing grabs your attention so powerfully as a career-threatening injury.

An entire book – Run Gently, Run Long was its title – grew out of my Big Injury. Almost losing the running taught me lessons that I otherwise might not have learned.

This story began more than 30 years ago with the first signs of a bony growth on my heel, which I later learned was cutting into the achilles tendon. I ignored the pain for months – until it wouldn’t allow normal walking, let alone running.

A doctor said, “You might never run again unless that calcium deposit is removed.” I worried about not running again even if the surgery was done, but had to take this gamble.

The simple out-patient operation (which also repaired the achilles, sawed almost in half) and its immediate aftermath devastated me emotionally. I spent the first dreadful night after the surgery back in the emergency room, being calmed from a serious panic attack.

Rehab took the only form it could, in small steps forward mixed with a few in reverse when I tried to rush nature’s recovery timetable. First came biking while still in a cast, then crutching a mile, then walking that mile, then run-walking it, then running very slowly (even the walkers passed me on the track), then gradually upping the distance and pace.

Progress seemed to take forever at the time, but I now see how quick it really was. Seven months post-op, I finished a marathon. It wasn’t one of my fastest but was the happiest.

The Big Injury taught me lessons about speed limits. Before this breakdown I didn’t know there were any.

I loved to race and had the freedom then – before wife, before children, before middle age – to compete every weekend or even more often. My racing totaled 20, 30, even 40 percent of the weekly mileage.

With post-surgery hindsight I saw this was way too much. My speed limit (racing miles plus any speed-training miles) was no more than 10 percent of the total mileage.

Below that limit I felt good and raced well. Beyond it my results were predictable: first declining performance... then chronic low-grade pain and fatigue... and finally injury or illness.

At least nine in 10 of my miles needed to feel easy. A second speed-limit sign popped up here: my best results came when most of the running was at least one minute per mile – and usually closer to two minutes – slower than I could race a similar distance.

I became a follower of Bill Bowerman. Before meeting him and before my move to his hometown of Eugene, the Big Injury made me a believer in the system he called “hard-easy.” The legendary University of Oregon track coach mixed tough training days with relaxed recovery days.

Bowerman was an experimenter. (His tinkering with shoes led to the company that would become Nike.) He found that few of his athletes could train hard for even two days straight without compromising their performance.

Steve Prefontaine was a rare runner who could thrive on two-hard, one-easy. Most of the school’s runners did better on one-and-one. Two-time Olympic marathoner Kenny Moore ran best on one-hard, two-easy.

Runners with less talent and more age than Bowerman’s test subjects might be better served by a program of hard-day, easy-WEEK. That was another big lesson from my Big Injury.

The biggest lesson from this episode: you don’t fully appreciate what running means to you until you’ve almost lost it. You search for ways to keep from losing it again.

UPDATE FROM 2015

Dr. Steve Subotnick did good work. The left heel that he repaired in 1973 still lets me run on it without pain.

In more than 40 years since that surgery, my running hasn’t been threatened that way again. Little interruptions have come, of course, but not another Big Injury. This is mostly because I never ran as far or fast again, or raced as often, after that big one grabbed my attention.

[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.]