Oh My, Dubai!

Not too long ago I was singing the praises of the American Olympic marathon trials for having 4 guys dip under 2:10. Amazing, I thought. And I was so proud when we had two Canadian guys go under 2:11:30 at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon.

And then the Dubai Marathon happened this past weekend.

To crack the top 10 in that one, you had to run under 2:07. There were four guys under 2:05 – many of whom came out of nowhere. In fact, the guy who won it hadn’t even done the distance before.

This is getting ridiculous. If the Olympics were about lining up the top 50 guys on the planet regardless of country, I’m not sure you’d see a North American in there. It’s starting to feel like you could just take any Ethiopian or Kenyan kid and turn him into 2:05 guy. As if 2:05 were run-of-the-mill.

Of course, this is not the case. I imagine there are plenty of Ethiopians and Kenyans who are broken in the quest for marathon greatness. But there must be so many guys trying. And it’s all driven by bucks: appearance fees, prize money, sponsorships. I don’t have any research on this, but I bet it wouldn’t be that hard to set up a kind of running factory in east Africa. If you were an agent, you could put up the bucks to create a training group. It wouldn’t take much to entice a slew of promising runners – you wouldn’t even have to have a great training facility – to a guy looking to drag his way out of poverty, three meals a day is probably a no-lose situation.

And then you run them 3 times a day, keeping them fed and watered. All you’d need is one or two guys to come out of the group. With the kind of money American, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Marathons are paying out – bam – you take your cut, some of it goes back to feeding the other horses, and the guys who make it build big houses and dig wells for their villages. Everybody wins!

Except for the majority of guys who break themselves along the way.

Now, I’m just making this scenario up – but I wonder if this kind of thing is what keeps feeding the system with 2:05 guys. And, hey, why not? It’s an opportunity for them (and enterprising agents) – and we get to sit up in the stands and watch these guys redefine what we thought human running potential was.

But let’s not fool ourselves: it’s not love that drives a guy to 2:05.

Winter Toughness

Not Dartmouth -- but might as well be!

The sidewalks are covered in ice. The trails are covered in ice. There are still some running folks braving the bitter cold and poor footing. Not me. I’ve brought my running show inside to the treadmill. After falling on ice during a  run and breaking a rib a few years ago, I’m less inclined to hit the roads after Friction has packed its bags and moved to a timeshare down in Florida for a few months.

I do, however, feel a little guilty when I see those brave souls wrapped in five layers, shuffling along gingerly – it’s a uniquely northern ability to run on ice, and I’ve turned my back on it.  Perhaps I’ve become a bit of a wimp.

But my running has never been part of some “tough guy” self-narrative. I am far from being tough. Well, maybe that’s not true, depending on how you define tough – you could argue that my last week’s workouts (6x1k fast, with 3 of those ks under 3:20; 7 miles at 6:00/mile pace on the treadmill; and 21k on the treadmill, with 8k at marathon race pace) called upon a kind of toughness. I pushed myself into different levels of discomfort in all of them. I did the hard thing instead of the easy thing. Maybe there’s some toughness in that – in all running, in fact.

I guess it’s just that I don’t value the kind of toughness that measures itself against the (in)abilities of others. I used to. I used to be out on the bitter and icy streets, thinking how much tougher I was than those runners who wimped out on the treadmill or, even worse, dumped their run altogether because of the conditions. But I’ve mellowed. I now measure my toughness against my goals – am I doing what it takes to reach them? I don’t worry too much about what I think other people might think. Well. Most of the time I don’t.

I salute those runners still out there braving the cold. Some are there because there’s no easy alternative – not all folks are as lucky as I am to have easy and cheap access to a treadmill. Some are out there to prove something to themselves or to others. And some just don’t think about it one way or another – they just run. I respect all of them – even if I don’t share the same motivation.

Running from the Belly

Training with a buddy has been interesting. He’s taught me a lot about running, especially how to run better on the track during fast intervals. As a former national-level middle-distance runner, he’s got loads of personal insight.

One thing he said to me still makes me laugh when I think about it. We were doing 400m repeats (68s), and during the middle intervals of the workout, I was struggling to maintain the pace over the final 100m. So what I was doing was pumping my arms wildly to make my legs go faster. After letting me carry on like this for a couple of intervals, he politely informed me that runners run with their legs, not their arms. 

True enough!

He explained what he meant: when you need to dig deep for speed, you need to look for it in your legs – relaxing, increasing turnover, keeping the knees up – and in your lungs – relaxing your breathing. Swinging my arms wildly was only making me tense up and slow down. The key to “digging in” is not, as I thought, to force things and tighten muscles like Hercules lifting some huge rock; it is to relax and channel power to where it’s actually needed – in the legs and lungs.

With this insight, I was able to maintain and even increase my pace in the late stages of that 400 interval workout. I became more mindful of my reaction to the gut-searing lactic panic that comes when I’m struggling to run fast. My attention on my legs and lungs become narrowly focused, and I was constantly adjusting to stay tall, fluid, and relaxed.

Recently, though, we’ve been pushing the length of our long runs and threshold runs in preparation for the marathon. This is new territory for him. And something interesting emerged in the early stages of our build up – he had trouble finishing some of the workouts and long runs. In fact, he had to stop during some of our longer threshold intervals, especially during some of our treadmill workouts.

What makes it so interesting is that he didn’t stop because his heart was overtaxed or his lungs were searing with pain or his legs weren’t strong enough. A 3:35-3:45/k pace is not a struggle for a guy who used to average close to 3:15/k for 10k. It was all mental. He just couldn’t lock in the pace and drive the car (so to speak) over the long haul.

After this went on for a few weeks, I just happened to mention during one of our long runs that, when I run long, I run from my belly. I explained that I take the pinpoint of my attention and move it down to a spot just below my navel and then leave it there. I let the thoughts in my head float and shift like clouds in a big blue sky and pay little attention to them. I step back from a narrow, focused attention on the chatter in my head or the pain in my feet (or whatever) and just sort of rest in a broader sense of awareness of my body and the environment as a whole. I still check my form and self-correct – but I don’t micro manage it like I need to on the track.

After that run, he told me that he tried running from his belly – and it worked! He did fine. He locked in the pace and drove the car home. Since then, he’s completed every longer threshold workout as well. No problem.

I think what was happening was that he was using his mind on long runs the way he’d learned to use it on the track – focused, intense attention. But the energy required to keep this up was just too much, and his mind was fragmenting mid run. There wasn’t enough going on to keep that kind of mind interested and engaged. It was the wrong mind to use on long runs. It wasn’t marathon mind.

I don’t know if any of that makes sense – and maybe it sounds a bit too hoaky – but I do think a different kind of mental activity is required for longer running versus shorter, faster running. And for anybody having trouble on the treadmill, trying to shift from narrow to broad awareness (from the voice chattering in your head to the space that receives that chatter) and putting attention in the belly might help.

I do my treadmill (sorry, dreadmill) running without any extra stimuli – no tv, no music, just me and the machine in a small room – and I do fine. Maybe I’m just kind of vacuous, but I like to think my mental ease on the long run has more to do with running from my belly. It isn’t about locking it in and disappearing; it’s about locking it in and expanding -- your awareness, that is, not your belly!