Weighting Games

(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 2002 (retitled in the magazine). I’m much less of a runner than I used to be, and at the same time there’s more of me running. Those two facts are intimately linked.

The length of my runs has slipped, settling at about half of the peak amount. My diet didn’t change, so my weight crept up by a pound a year while it went unwatched. When I finally noticed what had happened, the imperceptible gain for a single year had multiplied over two decades into an impressive total.

I’d become heavy only by the skewed standards of this sport, but was heavier than I cared to be. Which is to say: Finally I’d come back around to thinking as most runners do about our weight.

Being super-skinny doesn’t always make a runner better; we’re not promoting eating disorders or obsessions here. But most adult runners could profit from losing some pounds, or think we could.

If you have something to lose, as I do, decide what your ideal weight is, realize how much better you can run at that weight, and judge how you compare to other runners pound-for-pound.

What should you weigh? Please don’t look at the tiny 120-pound frontrunners (and those are the men) in bigtime races and think, “I’m too fat.” You haven’t looked like them since you passed puberty.

And please don’t listen to your mother or other well-meaning kinfolk who say, “You’re too thin.” If you look healthy by the standards of people who don’t run, you’re almost surely overweight for a runner.

Don’t trust the standard charts, which don’t account for differences in your frame size and muscle mass. Body-fat readings are better but inconvenient to check regularly.

The scales give you a daily figure, but only what you do weigh and not what you should. So what should it be?

For longtime runners, the guideline is what you weighed when you ran your best. For newer runners, it might be your weight when you stopped growing up. Or it could simply be the highest number we’ll accept before vowing, This must go.

What difference does it make? One of my all-time favorite teachers is Tom Osler. In his Serious Runner’s Handbook he wrote, “Every pound of unneeded weight has a measurable effect on a runner’s final time. From my own experience I estimate that I lose two seconds per mile for each excess pound of body fat.”

This is only Tom’s experience, but he’s one of the wisest and most analytical runners I’ve ever known. His formula means that a 10-pound gain would slow a runner’s times by 20 seconds per mile – which becomes a full minute in a 5K or four-plus minutes in a half-marathon.

If statistical results don’t concern you, then maybe physiological ones do. Each added pound adds about three extra pounds of force to the feet and legs.

Running “heavy” feels tighter and less fluid. It’s less efficient aerobically, since the VO2-max formula has weight as one of its components.

How fast do you carry your weight? Size, or lack of it, matters in our sport. The best athletes are small and light.

Very few runners ever beat their weight in a marathon. That is, run fewer minutes than their weight in pounds – which requires a 130-pounder to break 2:10 and a 200-pounder to run sub-3:20.

This formula discriminates against women, the best of whom seldom run within 30 minutes of their poundage. The fastest woman for her size appears to be Marian Sutton of Britain, who weighed about 140 pounds when she ran 2:28 (a weight-to-time factor of plus-eight).

The greatest man, pound for pound, probably was Derek Clayton. The Australian set a world record of 2:08:34 while weighing about 160 – an amazing minus-31 factor. Much more typical is Bill Rodgers, who PRed at 129 minutes and 128 pounds.

How close have you come to “running your weight?” My best was plus-22, and that was a long time and a lot of pounds ago.

I’m less of a runner now, but there’s also less of me running than when this year began. I picked an acceptable weight, midway between my old low and recent high, ran a little more and ate a little less, and have reached that new level.

Running far more and eating much less might take off even more weight. But I enjoy both activities too much to make grim work of them.

2018 Update. Full disclosure: I’ve never been heavier. It’s easy to blame treatment for prostate cancer, which resulted a dozen extra pounds that have stubbornly stuck around for 10 years. But shorter and slower runs, which evolved into mostly walks, surely contributed also to the added poundage.

[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, Next Steps, 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.]