Dr. David Costill

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1987.)

POOL OF KNOWLEDGE. On its surface this is a story about swimming. But it is equally a running story because of who the swimmer is, how he took into the pool lessons learned as a runner and what advice he now hands back to our sport.

“If only I had known then what I know now,” laments many an aging athlete whose growth in expertise fails to offset the loss of skill. The naivete of youth rarely loses a race to the knowledge of middle age.

Dr. David Costill has beaten those odds. He not only knows far more about sports training at age 51 than he did at 21, but he also performs better now.

Dr. Costill first made his name as an exercise physiologist two decades ago by studying runners at the now world-famous Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. His books (the most recent being Inside Running) are must reading for anyone wanting to know how the runner’s body works.

However, his own running ended in the early 1980s when his knees rebelled. He then returned to his original sport, swimming.

“I had quit swimming after competing at Ohio University,” says Costill, “because that was what swimmers did: retire early. I wanted to stay active in some way after graduation, decided to start running and kept doing it for almost 20 years.”

Then came injuries to both knees. He began swimming only for fitness, and his first efforts were humbling.

“I still thought of myself as a pretty good swimmer,” he says. “But no one in the pool swam slower than I did, because I lacked upper-body strength.”

His skills weren’t lost, only rusty. They came back, and soon Costill was racing again – not only competing but doing better than he had in college; not only better against men his age but better against the clock.

For instance: “My best 200-yard freestyle in college was 2:07. My average time for that distance is now about 1:59.”

One reason for the improvement was mechanical. “Stroke technique has changed over the years,” he says, “and I picked up the new patterns.”

But mainly he improved his training. “I’ve been able to put to use some of the practical lessons learned from running and the laboratory. The main one is to train according to how I feel each day, judging when to push or back off.

“You have to be realistic about how much the body can adapt to and how much stimulus you need to produce the most adaptation. That differs, of course, from one person to another. But the majority of elite-level swimmers could probably get by on about one-fourth the yardage they are doing.”

Costill averages 2000 to 2500 yards a day and takes a day or two off each week. His age-group competitors train three or four times as much, and they accuse him of fibbing about his yardage when he races as well as they do.

He notes that swimmers are more easily seduced by more-is-better thinking than runners are, because overtraining in water hurts less than on land. Runners have our “pounding” injuries to protect us from overdoing.

“People who get into aerobic activity are those who are already highly motived,” says Costill. “If they have one handicap, it’s their motivation.

“First they train too much. Then they start performing poorly. When this happens, they think the only answer is to train even harder, and they perform even worse. It’s a vicious cycle that traps swimmers and runners.”

Costill knows when to work and when to rest. “A final major factor in my second life as a swimmer,” he says, “is that I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to rest up for competition. In swimming you can taper for up to three weeks by just warming up every day.”

What difference does this make? “If I try to compete now without tapering this way, then the times are almost identical to what I swam in college.”

UPDATE.  Now nearing his 80^th year, Dr. David Costill holds emeritus status on both the Ball State University faculty and at the Human Performance Laboratory. Copies of his book Inside Running (and the earlier Scientific Approach to Distance Running) can still be found.

[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 Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, 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.]