Little Irritants

(This is the 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

August 1997 (retitled in the magazine). I have to laugh that the Los Angeles Times asked me, of all people, to critique the movie “Prefontaine.” I’m no critic. I prefer to look for the good instead of reporting the bad.

But I took on the L.A. Times assignment and had the article bounce back to me twice for rewrites because it wasn’t tough enough. A few runner-readers criticized me for being too tough on the movie. One reader said, “This isn’t like you.”

No, it’s not. I don’t go out of my way to run down the sport and its practitioners, and more often err in the opposite direction by singing their praises too loudly. I write columns that leave you thinking I must like everyone who runs and everything about running.

Not quite. In the interests of realism and balance, I give you the following list of little irritants in the life of this runner. But the Pollyanna in me can’t help adding that enduring these few negatives adds to the appreciation of the many positives. What I don’t like about running:

The first mile of most runs, before you find a rhythm... Running in darkness when each foot plant is an act of faith... Times unreadable in the dark without holding the watch six inches from your face... Looking down in midrun and seeing the watch still reading “0:00”... Looking down after a time trial to find the watch still running... People who ask for the time of day when you’re in the stopwatch mode.

Ending a run early and walking back to the start, even when injury-control demands it... Courses that start downhill and beat up a cold body... Courses that finish uphill and beat down an already tired body... Courses that pass the eventual finish line before you’re finished.

Waiting for stoplights to change... Waiting for traffic to pass before you cross a street... Jumping on and off curbs... Oncoming drivers who won’t dim their lights for a mere pedestrian... Drivers who don’t signal their turns for you, coast through stop signs, won’t yield an inch of their lane on an otherwise empty road, or drive in the bike lane... Bikers startling you as they silently pass from behind... Unseen dogs that first bark when you’re three feet away.

A pebble in the shoe that feels like a boulder... A rock stuck in the shoe tread and scraping along the road... Stepping on gum or dog poop on the sidewalk... Stinky shoes from running without socks... Slipping into clammy shoes that haven’t dried out from the last run or the last wash... Shoes that disappear from the market as soon as they become favorites.

Running in long pants that seem to restrict leg motion even if they don’t... Cold hands and ears that make you feel cold all over... Finishing into a headwind... Sudden rain showers that catch you underdressed... Invisible patches of ice on the streets that lurk to tackle you.

Being seen walking, even if you believe in the value of walking breaks... Getting caught making a pit stop, even when you tried to be discreet... Spit and snot that end up on your chin, cheek or chest... Sloshing of food or water in the belly... Swallowing a bug or catching one in the eye.

Walkers who hog the inside lane of the track while you’re running there for time... The looks of business-suited travelers when you walk into a hotel elevator in few clothes and a full sweat... Greeting another runner and not getting so much as eye contact in return... Tailgating by runners who attach themselves to your pace when you want to run alone... Watching healthy runners race when you’re unwell and can’t run.

2018 Update. Twenty-one years later I'd change few of these words. But I could (and sometimes did) go column length on many of these topics. 

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The 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, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Long May You Run

(This is the 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

July 2003 (retitled in the magazine). Let’s say that a marathon looms on your distant horizon, a full training program away. Let’s say also that you accept the long run as the centerpiece of this program, trusting it to take you where you want to go.

But you’re still asking: “How long? How fast? How often?” Here are some answers, prefaced by a story on how they originated.

Before my first marathon the long runs peaked at 20 miles. I ran this far several weeks before the marathon, intending another run to be even longer but missing it.

The marathon took a few minutes longer to finish than the longest training run. But it packed almost another 10K into that time because its pace was 1½ minutes per mile quicker.

Later I took shorter long runs and longer ones, ran them slower and faster, ran them more and less often. Never again in almost four-dozen tries did I run a faster marathon than the first one. This experience shapes my answers to questions about the long run.

How long? First, draw your start and finish lines for training. In the beginning, don’t let your ambition outpace your ability. Run no more than two miles beyond your recent longest run.

Wherever you start, aim to reach 20 miles in this program. You’ve heard this figure before because it works. Going 20 builds confidence along with fitness. By running this far, you rehearse most of what a marathon has to offer.

Twenty miles is only about three-fourths of a marathon. Where, you might wonder if you aren’t already a marathoner, will the extra 10K come from if you haven’t trained that far?

It comes from the magic of race day. That day brings soul-stirring conditions that you can’t duplicate on solo and small-group training runs. The excitement carries you many extra miles, but not an unlimited number. If you train yourself to 20 miles, race day will take you the rest of the way.

How fast? The training run is not a race. Treat it like one, and you may recover too slowly from one long run to the next. Full recovery from “races” of 10 to 20 miles takes most runners several weeks, and you don’t have that long to wait between these training runs.

So instead of pushing the pace, focus on upping your distance. Back well off from the fastest you could run. Train one to two minutes per mile slower than you could race this same distance – or maybe that much slower than you might race the marathon.

You could surprise yourself by running a minute or more per mile faster on marathon day than you’d trained, even at the longer distance. Again credit the race-day magic.

While you’re at it, credit your training. If you backed well away from race pace, you covered much less than full marathon distance but ran almost the full amount of time that the race would take. You were ready to spend this much time on your feet again, but moving them faster.

How often? If the question means how often to run a particular distance, the answer is once. Runners like having a sense of progression, so make a steady march up in long-run distances without repeating any of them.

The steps themselves are small. They progress from shortest to longest by two miles at a time. With these runs requiring ever-bigger efforts, and therefore ever-longer recoveries, they’re best not taken weekly but only every second or third weekend.

Set the program’s length by where you start. An eight-mile beginning leads to a three- to four-month program. A half-marathon start can shrink the program to as little as two months.

The longest run before the marathon is the last and hardest one. Place it at least three weeks before the race; a full month is better.

What to do between long runs? Recover from the last one and recharge for the next one with mostly easy running.

When one part of the training program (the long run) goes way up in effort, another (the remaining days) must come down in compensation. Shorter runs help make the longer ones work.

2019 Update. I wrote this piece two years before starting to coach a marathon team. The peak training distance for them was 21 miles. They taught me that the best predictor of marathon time was their 21-mile training pace, which they could expect to carry on for the extra five miles on race day.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The 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, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Trial Mile

(This is the 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

July 2001. The mile holds a special place in my memory bank. This was the first distance I ever ran for time, in 1954. I’ve raced the mile more often than all other distances combined.

But my best mile isn’t one that netted me a state high school title. It isn’t one ended before 4:20 had ticked away. These times are pleasant but ancient memories.

My best mile is as fresh as today’s run. It takes twice as long to complete as those old races and is my slowest mile of any day. But it’s the best mile because it gets me going and keeps me going.

The best mile also can be the longest one in ways other than distance and time. Ron Clarke, the Australian who monopolized the world records in the 1960s, once said, “The hardest step for a runner to take is the first one out the door.”

The laws of inertia state that a body at rest wants to stay resting, and one in motion wants to keep moving. These also are basic rules of running.

You can trick yourself into taking the first big step out the door by saying, “I only have to run one mile; I can do that in my sleep.” It’s more comforting to think this way than that you have to run five or more miles no matter what. Once clear of the doorway, the momentum usually kicks in and one little mile leads to many more.

How many more miles you run depends on how you’re feeling. That’s the second great value of the first mile, as a simple test of true feelings.

A profile on Kenyan Cosmas Ndeti appeared in the New York Times before one of his Boston Marathon victories. The lines that influenced me most read, “He runs according to the way he feels each morning, not according to any rigid schedule. He has been known to wake up, run for a kilometer, then climb back into bed.”

When this story ran, I was limping through a spell of achilles tendinitis. It had lingered for more than a month, without improving, as I’d tried to tough out “easy” half-hour runs.

Taking a clue from Ndeti, I listened more closely to what the achilles told me each morning. Because “miles” and not “meters” is my first language, I ran a mile and then decided what to do next.

If signs of trouble appeared or didn’t clear, and especially if they worsened, I forced myself to stop for that day and try again the next. The pain eased within a few days and disappeared within two weeks.

You might ask, why even bother with this trial mile? Why not just decide whether to run or not before dressing and going out the door?

“Listen to your body,” we’re told, and let it be the judge of what to do or not. But what do we listen for, and when?

The truth is that the body lies before most runs. We need a better test of feelings than what it says at rest.

If I heeded all signals of stiffness, soreness and simple resting inertia before the start, I would skip half my runs. And I’d go too far or fast in the other half when enthusiasm overrode the warning signals.

Right before the run is the wrong time to listen to the body. That’s when it likes to tell its biggest fibs – trying to convince you that it feels better or worse than it really does.

Sometimes running injuries go into hibernation between runs. You tell yourself at the start that you’re okay, you try to run as planned, you overdo, the pain comes out of hiding, and you suffer a setback by not stopping soon enough.

Just as often, though, the problem feels worst when you’re not running. You think before starting that you’re hurting and need another day off, when the warmup might have worked out the stiffness and soreness.

The trial mile, the best of your miles, acts as a truth serum. It gets you out the door and then 10 minutes later tells you honestly what you can do that day. Listen.

2019 Update. My fast miles are long gone, never forgotten. The most important mile remains the slowest one – the first. I still use it as a daily warmup and a go/no-go test. It’s needed more that way at 75 than it was at my best racing age, 25.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The 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, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Take Care Out There

(This is the 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

July 2000. This magazine opens each month with the stuff of dreams – an oversized photo featuring a “Rave Run.” You not only don’t see cars in these shots; you rarely even see roads.

Our own courses seldom measure up to these high standards. Yet we have routes that rate private raves. Definitions vary widely, but one trait links them – few or no cars.

An irony here is that we drive to places that let us run away from traffic. The finer the course, the longer the drive usually is.

Even for everyday runs I’ll often take almost as much time driving to the course and back as I spend on running it. One route travels in and around the local fairgrounds, where very few drivers usually go at my running hour.

One day this winter, though, a fleet of rumbling, belching trucks took over this spot for a loggers’ convention. They disturbed my peace and offended my sense of place. I thought, How dare they take over my course!

But the public road courses are never ours, no matter what the laws saw about shared access and rights-of-way. The roads belong to the vehicles, if only because they’re built at least 10 times our size and powered to travel more than 10 times as fast.

Most of us still run on the roads because they’re always right outside our door, they offer smooth, weather-proof surfaces, and (in town at least) they are lighted for early-morning and late-evening runs. We hit the roads for this convenience, and in doing so court their dangers.

Stories of collisions between cars and runners seldom end as happily as Laurie Corbin’s. She ran in the Olympic Marathon Trials and was thrilled to be there – or to be anywhere – a month after being struck down by a car and seriously injured during a training run.

Many runners can recall near-misses in chilling detail. One morning I shuffled into an intersection on a green light. From the left, through the red light on the otherwise empty street, came a taxicab at full throttle.

The cabbie saw me too late. His tires screeched and smoked as he slid past the spot with the invisible “X” where I would have been if my brakes hadn’t worked. The driver looked at me with an embarrassed shrug, while I put a hand over my heart in relief.

This incident didn’t result from the driver’s intent to do great bodily injury, but from his inattention or impatience. That’s the case with most road problems. Our best defense as runners, then, is to stay hyper-attentive and extra-patient ourselves.

We see drivers much clearer than they see us. We see them rubbing sleep from their eyes while trying to harness hundreds of horsepower of potential mayhem.

We see drivers with the day’s newspaper folded across the steering wheel. We see them eating, drinking, smoking – sometimes all at once – or holding a cell phone in one hand and gesturing to the unknown listener with the other.

Drivers speed as if the limits were the slowest pace they could legally travel. Drivers wander into the bike lanes, which serve equally well as running lanes.

Drivers turn without signaling for mere pedestrians, or drive at dawn or dusk without lights. Drivers gun through yellow lights and coast through stop-signs without looking to see who might be about to dash across their path.

If it makes you feel better, point a warning finger (no, not that finger) at the offending driver. But don’t shake a fist or shout an obscenity – and please don’t pound the side of a car or run over the hood like a steeplechaser on the water jump. This is the runner’s version of road rage, and it can have dire consequences when drivers hold a deadly weapon in their hands.

When you point a finger, remember that three fingers point back at yourself. You drive more than you run, and probably make the same mistakes that infuriate you in other drivers.

Examine your own habits, both as a driver and a runner. Then promise yourself and those who love you that you’ll drive more courteously and run more defensively – and vice versa.

Run as if the drivers can’t see you. Drive as if the lives of unseen runners are in your hands.

2018 Update. These days, when steps are slower and time is freer, I usually drive from home to wherever the cars can’t go any farther – there to put in my miles.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The 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, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]