Ambling Along

Manchester Road Race Report--A "Fantasy" Race

2006-11-28T11:41:00.000-05:00

I'm actually a little embarrassed about it, but I had a "fantasy day" race at Manchester on Thanksgiving Day, running 30:47 and winning my age-group, the 60+ division. Before the race, I had been expecting something in the mid-31:00s and had said that anything under 31:00 would amount to a fantasy race. I'm chagrined about my effort, because I think I ought to be able to come closer to predicting my times. And when I run something faster than predicted, I feel that I sandbagged a little. In this case, however, I'll take the result; it was certainly hard earned.

After popping a couple of caffeine pills 40 minutes before the start, I went out in 6:00 flat for the mile. Too fast. My 27-yr-old nephew Jeff went around me at the 800, noting, "Either I'm running too slow or you're running too fast." It was the latter. After the mile, I basically suffered all the way to the finish, but apparently I managed to hold together reasonably well.

I've been thinking about winning an age-group award at Manchester for a long, long time. When I was a high schooler in CT, I won the high school division at Manchester, and I won the open division a bunch of times, but I never came remotely close to winning an age-group award. My friend Ray Crothers did achieve the one-race Triple Crown at Manchester, winning in the high school, open, and masters divisions. My victory Thursday in the 60+ division wasn't the equivalent of winning a 40+ masters title, which Ray did, but I'm going to consider it my own little mini Triple Crown just the same.

Don't get the wrong impression. I didn't do anything very special. The Manchester course record for 60+ is the 27:58 that Joe Fernandez ran in 1991. My time was almost 3 minutes slower. Fernandez came back 8 years later in 1999, when he was apparently 70, and set the record for 70+ at Manchester with an amazing 31:44. When you look at the top level of age-group records, you can only shake your head in astonishment.

I'll never be as fast as Fernandez and many others, but at least I can hope to keep on keeping on. I've run 44 Manchesters in a row now, so I'm still inching my way along to the 50-straight mark. That's how many Charlie "Doc" Robbins ran consecutively before he retired from racing. Speaking of Doc, we had a great "Barefoot Warmup" in his honor at Manchester, despite the cold, wet roads. And his daughter Barrie finished third in her 60+ age-group. Here's a link to the Hartford Courant story about the Warmup.

The Charlie Robbins Barefoot Warmup

2006-11-20T18:20:00.000-05:00

Here's the last reminder about the Charlie "Doc" Robbins Memorial Barefoot Warmup that will take place before the Manchester Road Race 5-Miler on Thanksgiving morning in Manchester CT. The Barefoot Warmup will begin at 9 am just north of the intersection of Main St. and Charter Oak St. In other words, we'll be at the .4 mile mark of the road race course, just before the sharp left-hand turn.

I'll be there in a red and black checkered CPO jacket just like the one Doc often wore to cross-country practices when I was an undergrad at Wesleyan University, where he would join us for Wednesday afternoon practices (rather than going golfing like all his other M.D. colleagues.) I'll be holding my race shoes high overhead in my hands, and spanking the road with nothing but my naked tootsies. I hope you'll join me and do the same.

Once we've got a decent group together, we'll jog barefoot up Main St. toward the start line. I'm told there are photographers and video crews interested in getting
a few shots, and I'm sure Manchester's always friendly spectators will appreciate what we're doing. Also, while I'm not positive about this, I think we'll probably set a world record for a Barefoot Warmup. Given that I've never heard of one before.

I know this all sounds a little silly for a memorial. But the moment I came up with the idea, I felt that it was perfectly right for "Doc." He was a little impish, after all, with that sly grin and twinkling eye of his. And his family and the Road Race Committe have been fully supportive from the beginning. Manchester was "Doc's" home, and the place where he ran 50-straight Thanksgiving Day races, winning twice, and delighting us all for so many years with his barefoot prance around the classic Manchester loop.

So we'll warm up the way he did (it's cool to wear a pair of thick socks, if that will make you more comfortable), and we'll have some fun, and we'll remember the Good Doctor who taught us that the simple way is often the best. We'll do one big loop up near the start area and back, or maybe two if we're enjoying it too much.

And then we'll be finished just 10 to 15 minutes after we started, giving everyone plenty of time to lace on their racing shoes, strip off their sweat clothes, and head up to their appointed positions at the start line. I hope you have a great race.

I know I will. Because I'll be thinking about Charlie Robbins the whole way around, and that pretty much guarantees that I'll be running with a big smile on my face.

Three Days And Counting

2006-11-19T21:58:00.000-05:00

My big Thanksgiving Day race in Manchester is only 3 days away, so it's time to take stock, and I have to admit that everything has gone just fine. In other words, I haven't planned well. As every veteran runner knows, there are two key parts to a successful training plan: Do lots of solid workouts; and invent plenty of excuses--excuses that you'll be ready to bandy about after a disappointing performance.

I've failed miserably at part two: no injuries, no missed training sessions, no excuses.

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean I'm going to have a great race. I've trained well, but I don't seem to have gotten much fitter and faster. This is part of the mystery of training: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Last April, prior to the Runner's World Half Marathon, I could feel my training come together a week or two before the Half. I knew I was ready for a good race-day effort, and that's what I got: a 1:28:30 half marathon, my best in a number of years.

This fall I figured I'd (1) train harder, (2) lose a few more pounds, and (3) get faster. I achieved numbers 1 and 2, but number 3 never happened. Like I said, the mystery of training. I've had workouts such as 6 x 800 in 3:03 (on a slightly downhill treadmill) and 4-mile tempo runs at about 6:45 pace, but I was expecting more. Not much more, just a nice little breakthrough at some point.

It didn't come. Still, I'm determined to run to my limit on Thursday. Here are my times for the 4.75-mile course the last 4 years, working backward from last year, 2005--32:20, 31:03, 32:15, 32:31. My new division, the 60-69 division, has been won with about a 31:40 the last couple of years.

Since a personal Blog is nothing if it doesn't get truly personal, I'm going out on a limb here to predict what I'll run on Thursday. These guesstimates assume that the weather isn't a big negative factor: Good Day (31:40), Great Day (31:10), Fantasy Day (sub-31:00). Anything less than the Good Day 31:40 would be a real disappointment. Especially since I don't have any excuses at the ready.

The Fantasy Day result is the one I thought I could achieve 2 months ago. Now it seems largely out of reach. But that's why they hold the race, isn't it? To see how far we can stretch ourselves.

Charlie Robbins Remembered By Ted Corbitt

2006-11-12T12:23:00.000-05:00

The great American marathoner, Olympian, ultramarathoner, Road Runners Club organizer and course-certification pioneer (and that's only a beginning, but whew!) Ted Corbitt traveled to Middletown by several buses in late August to attend a rememberance get-together for "Doc" Charlie Robbins, who died at age 85 last August 10. With him, Corbitt carried 5 typed pages of his memories of Robbins. He gave these to Robbins daughter, Barrie, who sent me a copy. Herewith, some excerpts:

*** Had there been no World War II, Dr. Robbins, a talented national marathon champ, would have made an Olympic Team. With training and remaining injury free, he might have made two or three Olympic Teams.

*** Charlie did not exploit his gifted talents fully, but he did cop 11 National Championships>> 5 x 20K; 2 x 25K; 2 x 30K; and 2 Marathon Championships. He was inducted into the Road Runners Hall of Fame in 1974.

*** He was reported to be a light trainer, meaning that he did not train hard and long enough to develop his talents fully. He had the potential to become the first American marathoner to break 2:20, but he would have had to train his body to hold a sub-5:20-pace past the 20-mile mark.

*** An early newsletter of the New York Road Runners Club recorded Doc Robbins as the first person to advocate co-ed road running.

*** Some time in the 1950s, Doc Robbins and two friends had just started a workout from a park near Yankee Stadium, laughing and gabbing as they ran, when a cement truck driver pulled up next to them and yelled, "Why don't you bums go get a job?"
The runners were Herb Benario, a Ph.D. college professor; Aldo Scandurra, an already well-to-do electrical engineer working on his Ph.D. dissertation; and Robbins, an M.D.

*** While most runners do some sort of warmup, Doc Robbins tended not to bother. He preferred to just stand around talking.

*** At one National Championship 20-K, Doc Robbins apparently decided to have some fun, so he started the race from a crouch start like that used by sprinters. Robbins won the race, probably the only National road race championship for a crouch-start runner.

*** Charlie had one quality that's rare among the great champions: He enjoyed running even when there was no hope that he could win. When Charlie was not in good shape, he often raced anyway, purely for the run of it.

Manchester Road Race: "The Charlie Robbins Barefoot Warmup"

2006-11-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

I hope you'll join me for a lowkey--he wouldn't have done it any other way--"Charlie Robbins Memorial Barefoot Warmup" at about 9 am on Manchester Road Race morning in Manchester. We'll gather at the south end of Main Street (at the corner of Main and Charter Oak Street) and jog barefoot up toward the start area and back.

This unofficial Memorial Warmup has been approved by the Manchester Road Race Committee. They've even volunteered to have special crews sweep the street clean for us. They ask only that we start at the south end of Main Street, and that we're finished early enough (like 9:20 am) for everyone to make their way to the Start (10 am) in an orderly fashion.

I'd suggest carrying your race shoes and socks in your hands as we do this Warmup. That's what I'm planning to do. I'm also thinking of wearing old torn khakis and a Navy CPO jacket of some kind. And maybe thick, black framed glasses such as those Charlie wore. But I'm blind and lousy at costumes, so I'm not sure I'll be able to pull this off.

As you can tell, I believe this Memorial Warmup should be a fun remembrance. We don't need any speeches. Doc wasn't a big talker, after all. He let his feet do the talking, and we should do the same.

I'm sure several members of Doc's family will join us. I haven't talked to Bill Rodgers yet, but I will. And I'm hoping he'll be there too.

See you Thanksgiving morning.

Rating Sports By Drug Effectiveness

2006-09-17T13:40:00.000-04:00

This post is basically a restatement of the previous one. It's a writing experiment of sorts. There are many ways to say the same thing, after all.

The last post tried to make the point that drug-use in a sport is related to the effectiveness of drugs at improving performances in that sport. In other words, if blood-doping doesn't improve running performances, then no runners will blood-dope, and distance running will have no drug-related issues. If blood-doping works, then runners will be tempted to try it.

Below I rate various sports according to the degree to which doping (primarily steroids/testosterone/hgh, or blood boosting of various sorts, including EPO) will improve performance in the sport. The top score is 100, which I have arbitrarily assigned to weight lifting. The lowest score is 0, which I have arbitrarily assigned to table tennis. All other sports fall somewhere inbetween. The higher a sport's rating, according to this system, the more likely that the sport will have doping-related problems. (The amount of money involved in a sport also influcences drug-use, with bigger-money sports attracting more drugs, but I don't want to deal with the $$$ effect in this column.)

This is not a scientific ranking, and I am providing no explanations, as that would eat up too much space. You're invited to give your own ratings and explanations in the "Comments" section.

Rating Sports According To The Degree That Drugs Improve Performance In The Given Sport
Weight lifting: 100
Bicycling, multiday events: 90
Shot: 90
Running, sprints: 80
Running, distance: 80
Bicycling, one-day endurance events: 70
Running, mile: 70
Crew and Rowing: 70
Football, linemen: 70
Boxing: 60
Bicycling, sprints: 60
Swimming, sprints: 60
Swimming, distance: 60
Baseball, batter: 50
Javelin: 50
Sumo: 50
Speed Skating: 50
Football, backfield: 40
Baseball, pitcher: 30
Soccer: 30
Basketball: 20
Hockey: 20
Pole vault: 20
High jump: 10
Golf: 10
Archery: 10
Tennis: 10
Golf: 10
Figure skating: 10
Yachting: 10
Equestrian: 0 (unless the horse is doped)
Table Tennis: 0

Please use the "Comments" to add new sports, and/or give your own ratings and explanations.

Why Runners Take Drugs, And Fail Doping Tests

2006-08-31T10:47:00.000-04:00

Some friends who've got a better pulse on the track world than I do began telling me several weeks ago, after the Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin escapades, that more big names were going to fall. They evidently knew something. Marion Jones and LaTasha Jenkins have since failed doping tests, at least if we're to believe reports of their "A" sample results that have been widely circulated. I don't know if there are more to come. Several big names are in play, among the track gossip crowd, but who really knows?

I do know one thing, however. It would be wrong to assume that track is an unusually "dirty" sport, certainly not in the sense of betting and street drugs and broken arms and unsavory characters. The opposite is much more true. Track and road running are probably the most uplifting sports anyone can think of. Craig Masback and his friends aren't making this stuff up. It's the truth. Just consider all the youth events, and the charity fund raising, and the middle-agers fighting the $100 billion obesity epidemic, and the old farts who are absolutely astounding in their determination and achievements, and the unbelievable support for women on the playing field.

Track and field and running in general are the ultimate, mass participation, good-for-you and good-for-your-community sports.

So why do so many big-name track athletes apparently take drugs? And fail doping tests? That's simple. Because drugs work better for runners than they do for athletes in other sports. The payoff is direct and immediate.

Imagine for a moment the world's best table-tennis player. Now imagine that player on steroids. Is he any better? No way.

Or imagine Michelle Wie, the slender, long-hitting golf prodigy. Now imagine Wie on EPO. Is she any better? Not a chance. On steroids then? Would more testosterone help Wie or Tiger Woods hit the ball farther and straighter? You might be able to construct an argument for this one, but I don't think you'd gain many supporters. What Wie and Woods both have isn't something that would be improved by thicker muscle fibers or more red blood cells.

However, a sprinter with more powerful muscle fibers, courtesy of steroids, will almost certainly run faster. If you don't believe that, I give you Exhibit A: Ben Johnson, 1988. A distance runner with more red blood cells (thank you EPO), in balance with his total blood plasma, will almost certainly run faster for longer, which is what we distance runners breathe and sleep and train and eat to do.

Runners are pure physiology textbooks on legs. We don't swing bats or clubs, we don't throw or catch various spheres, and technique is essentially non-existent. Who doesn't know how to run? We learn it shortly after learning to toddle, right? (Funny aside: After Gerry Lindgren won the 1967 NCAA XC Championships in frigid Laramie, WY, I heard him explain to several reporters that his success was based on the fact that he was a left-footed runner. "I always lead with my left foot," Lindgren said. Let me tell you, the pencils were moving fast, the reporters' notebooks filling with this startling information.

Imagine a blind runner. Could he be the world record holder for 100 meters or the marathon? Physiologically, the answer is certainly yes, though certain practical issues would have to be overcome. Try to name another sport where a blind person could become the world's best. (I'm sure there are some that I'm not thinking of right now, but I bet there aren't many. Oh, sure, weight-lifting. Pure physiology. Pure steroid world.)

This isn't to make excuses for runners who take drugs. There are no acceptable excuses. But I would like people to understand that the seemingly large number of drug offenders among runners doesn't mean that running and track/field are dirty sports. They aren't; they're the exact opposite--fresh, open-to-all, extremely exciting and rewarding sports.

But they're also sports wherein, if you choose to take drugs, you'll likely improve. The payoff is more direct and more immediate than in other sports. For some, unfortunately, the temptation is therefore irresistible.

A Thanksgiving Day Proposal: The Charlie Robbins Memorial Barefoot Warm Up

2006-08-27T18:49:00.000-04:00

I’m finding it hard to let go of Charlie “Doc” Robbins, who died about 10 days ago. He keeps coming back into my thoughts. Maybe I’m just looking at my own mortality; I always thought that Doc would outlive me, and often told people this. I’m also feeling guilty that I won’t be able to attend the gathering that’s being held Monday night in Middletown for friends and family. Instead, I’ll think about Doc on my run Monday afternoon. At some point, I’m sure I’ll take off my shoes, and feel the gritty road under my feet. This will remind me that life can be tough at times, but there’s no gain in complaining. We all do better when we simply bend and get on with it. That’s what Doc did. In the 40 years that I knew him, I absolutely, positively never heard a complaining word from him.

[If you can make the Monday night gathering, here are the details: Friends and family will gather to remember Charles A. “Doc” Robbins, Jr., M.D., who passed away on August 10, 2006. We will gather to share our memories and to heed Charlie’s last wishes regarding his arrangements to,” Be cheerful!” Please, join us on Monday, August 28, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm at Tommy’s Restaurant, 825 Saybrook Road, Middletown, CT 06457. Tel: 860.346.8686. email:barrettrp@gmail.com ]

I was thinking of Doc on my long walk this morning, a warm, pleasant drizzle soaking through my shirt and shorts. What else can we runners do to remember him? And I came up with a good and appropriate idea; at least I think it’s a good one. More in a few paragraphs.

This afternoon I called Doc’s daughter, Barrie. She and I have met a few times, but don’t know each other well. In an email to me, she noted that she didn’t think she’d do very well at expressing her thoughts about her father. But I found her engaging and interesting, thoughtful and at times even funny. We had a great chat, and shared a few laughs.

She remembered that her father was always very straight forward in his words and dealings. He didn’t weigh his kids (Barrie and a 22-month older sister, Chris) down with a lot of life lessons, but always told them that lying and littering “just wouldn’t work out.”

“He was also about as unjudgmental as a person could be,” Barrie recalled. “He didn’t care what you looked like or wore, or what car you drove. He didn’t care if you were a child or an adult. He treated everyone the same. It was one of his nicest qualities.”

After his divorce in 1978, Doc moved into a house that I never saw but heard described many times. Usually people called it a shack. Some had less flattering terms for it. Barrie told me it could have been considered a 2-room affair, except that no one ever completed framing the perhaps 20 x 12-foot space. It had no hot water. Doc’s old road-race trophies, I have heard from others, were variously used as door stops and containers for his nails and screws.

“At the end of his life, when he was living with my family, the same two shirts and two pairs of underwear would show up in the laundry chute every week,” said Barrie. “He thought he was living in luxury to have someone wash them for him. He left just about nothing behind—a hammer, his wood-cutting maul, and a few other tools. He had divested himself of everything else, donating it here and there. Other people may claim that they live a simple life, but my dad walked the walk.”

In the end, Doc caught an infection that proved too much for him. “He wasn’t sick long,” Barrie told me. “He went fast, just the way he would have wanted.”

Barrie, like most of us, will have trouble matching Doc's 50-straight Manchester runs, but she has run the race continuously since 1978, including three years when she was pregnant with her three children. About half the time, she ran barefoot, and I’d be surprised if she doesn’t do the same this November.

We could all do the same, but that wouldn’t be realistic. I’d like to run fast-for-me this year, and I’m just not gnarly enough to do the whole distance barefoot. So here comes my idea. How about, a half hour before the Manchester start time, we all do a barefoot warm up jog up and down Main St.?

The Manchester Race Committee apparently plans to “retire” Doc’s number, #1, and that’s appropriate. But all of us who knew and loved Doc—and those who only read about him, but appreciated him from a distance—ought to do something too. We ought to toss off our shoes for a few minutes to celebrate the Doc Robbins Memorial Barefoot Warm Up on the streets of Manchester.

See you there. Don’t be late.

Time Magazine Beats Me To The Punch

2006-08-23T10:49:00.000-04:00

I ride my stationary bicycle for 30 minutes every morning. First I get up at 6 a.m., then I surf a few favorite sports-med Web Sites, then I send several emails to the office, then I ride my bike. I pick up the morning paper, and the magazine at the top of my pile—Time or Business 2.0 or Discover, or whatever it is—and I hop on the bike. It wakes me up, and I learn something new from my reading.

This morning, I read Time magazine (the one with the Hillary Clinton cover), from the back page forward. Jeffrey Kluger has a very clever essay about Grover Cleveland, the planet Pluto, reasons why Europe shouldn’t be considered a continent, and making distinctions between a panda’s raccoon-like characteristics and its bear qualities. I adore writing like this.

Flip the page. Johnny Depp will be a singing barber in his next movie. Flip the page. Another funny essay, this time Joel Stein on cupcakes, the latest comfort food. Flip the page. Holy guacamole!

Here’s a full page article by Michael D. Lemonick on the war between Gatorade and Accelerade. In Time magazine, of all places!! I’m stunned for several reasons, not the least being that—please believe me; please—I had been thinking of writing something on his subject just moments before. Right when I clambered onto the bicycle. Honest.

Now I have proof in my hands that Time magazine has beaten me to the punch, errr, the sports drinks anyway. I’m ashamed and abashed. This is a little like Runner’s World getting an exclusive interview with George W. Bush when Time can’t. Wait a minute, that actually happened didn’t it? It happened back in 2002 when Bush spoke to RW reporter Bob Wischnia while the White House press corps drooled and scratched its collective head from just outside hearing range.

Anyway, now Time has turned the tables on us. This is a disgrace. I read the article quickly, hoping that Lemonick—I wonder if his real name is Lemonade, and that’s how he got interested in this subject?--has missed all the important nuances. It’s a subject I’ve been studying for almost 40 years, so I should know.

You’re right. Accelerade didn’t exist 40 years ago, so I’m stretching the truth a little. But not much. In the winter of 1968, I got a call from exercise physiologist David Costill, Ph.D., inviting me to his lab for three days of testing. I couldn’t say Yes quickly enough; I had always wanted to be poked and prodded in a lab, figuring it might turn up some new ways to make me faster.

In Costill’s lab, I ran 20 miles each day, once drinking nothing, once drinking water, and once drinking Gatorade, this sports beverage that was thinking about marketing itself to runners. I felt great the day I drank nothing (which was my custom), and crappy the two days that Costill foisted the fluids on me. Nonetheless, the good doc announced that my body had actually performed most efficiently when I drank the Gatorade.

Ever since then, I’ve followed the science of endurance performance and fluid consumption as closely as I can. It’s gotten more confusing in recent years, as we’ve learned that marathoners can actually drink too much, which can lead to hyponatremia, a potentially dangerous condition. Of course, this is extremely rare. It’s much more common for runners, particularly faster ones, to consume too little fluid while running. Over several hours, this can lead to dehydration, which can impair performance and raise body temperature.

Another confusion: Accelerade and some other products have produced research results showing that a sports drink with a small amount of protein, along with carbs and sodium, has its benefits. A lot of this science hasn’t been very good, frankly, but some of it is solid enough.

In the last several weeks, two new reports have added to the murky waters. That’s what Time reported on, to my surprise. But, yes, I was right: Michael Lemonade missed an important nuance in the papers. He writes that the two papers “contradict each other.” This is totally wrong. While the papers are both about sports drinks, they raise and then attempt to tackle completely different questions.

The Gatorade paper, in Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise, looks at the performance effects of sports drinks consuming DURING exercise. The Accelerade paper, from the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, looks at rehydration effects of sports drinks consumed AFTER exercise. Big differences.

By the way, the Gatorade paper unsurprisingly concluded that Gatorade is best for performance. The Accelerade paper unsurprisingly concluded that Accelerade is best for rehydration. It failed to note, however, that rehydration AFTER exercise is not a big deal. It’s easy to achieve; you’re facing no big time pressure; take a handful of hours if necessary. It’s hydration DURING exercise that athletes care about.

I’m running out of space here, and I have a tendency to drown in the oceanic waters of sport-drink research, so I’m going to cut to the chase. Here’s what you need to know about sports drinks and their effects on your performance and health.

BEFORE you run, it doesn’t make a big difference what you drink. You should drink some, but not too much, or you could get nauseous once you start running. (You might also have to stop and pee, which will definitely make you slower.) DURING your run, Gatorade wins. You need water, sugar, salt, and little more, and you need them fast. Those are the ingredients in Gatorade and other similar sports drinks like Powerade. Stick to the simple approach. AFTER your run, even the folks at Gatorade admit that you should try to get a little protein with your carbs. The protein will help repair any muscle microtrauma caused by your run, and the carbs will resupply your glycogen supply. (The argument that protein also assists in glycogen re-supply rests on very thin ice, from what I’ve read.)

But as I noted above, the AFTER a run scenario is a fairly relaxed one. There are lots of ways to get carbs and protein after you run, including water and yogurt, or chocolate milk, which has gotten a lot of good press in the last year. You could consider the AFTER a run situation a little like a visit to a doctor’s office for a checkup. It’s fairly routine stuff.

Whereas, your DURING a run needs are like an Emergency Room visit. You need help, and you need it now. Particularly if the run happens to be a race, and even more so if it’s a marathon. That’s why I’d pay the most attention to studies of fluid effectiveness DURING exercise.

On Turning 60, And Gen. Ferdinand Foch

2006-08-21T23:28:00.000-04:00

I spent last weekend on Bermuda to celebrate my 60th birthday. I knew where we were going, but nothing else; my wife Cristina handled all the other details—the stuff that can make travel a burden. As a result, I got to relax totally, exactly as I wanted.

The big day was Saturday the 19th. Over breakfast on our verandah, Cristina gave me a striking silver-and-gold Eternity ring. It fits on my pinky finger, next to my mobius-strip wedding band. I don’t much like rings and other adornments. But I love the way these two rings nest together.

Saturday was also Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday. I’ve known about our shared birthday since 1993, the first year of his presidency. Being a writer, I always figured that I could one day turn this coincidence to my advantage in some amusing Op-Ed piece or an essay on the foibles of us baby boomers. Unfortunately, I could never think of anything to say.

We were born on the same day and year. Clinton strode like a colossus on the stage of human events. I ran quietly around the world’s perimeter. He had sex in the office; I didn’t. That’s about the end of it.

I know runners who mark their birthdays with prodigious feats, like running their age in miles or kilometers or whatever. And I was feeling the need for something significant. But not the energy. My fitness has slipped away since late spring when I ran a nice 1:28+ in the Runner’s World Half Marathon. In June, I had a bad Comrades Marathon in South Africa. Who wants to train in the heat-humidity of July and August?

Yes, I was in the doldrums, no doubt about it. I was foundering in a Bermuda Triangle of aging, wondering, doubting. I didn’t run on Thursday, our travel day, or Friday, our first full day in Bermuda.

On Saturday, starting to feel disgusted with myself, I forced my way through steamy Hamilton and out to the Bermuda Rail Trail. I didn’t cover 60 miles or 60-K, but I did more than 60 minutes (90, in fact), and you’ve gotta take whatever victories you can.

On the trail, I tried to figure a way out of the doldrums, and I soon saw that there was only one possible path. My son taught it to the whole family his freshman year at Harvard. Dan wanted to major in physics, the subject that seems to draw Harvard’s genius crowd. Too bad for Dan. He came from a mediocre, inner-city public school. The genius kids were preppies with dozens of AP classes to their credit. Dan was two years behind them the day he hit the ground in Cambridge.

Reading his infrequent emails, we got a bit concerned. He was barely keeping his head above water. But he refused to buckle. He even made us laugh when he introduced us to the French World War I general Ferdinand Foch. Describing his physics challenges, Dan used a famous quote supposedly attributed to Foch, who found himself in deep doo-doo at the Battle of the Marne: “Ma droite est enfoncee. Ma gauche cede. Situation excellente. J’attaque.” ( Loosely translated: “My right flank is crushed. My left is giving way. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”)

Foch won the battle and the war, and Dan eventually graduated with honors in math.

I knew I needed to follow the same approach. Yes, the body is slowing, but whose isn’t? And what’s the point in lamenting it? I must attack. It’s the only viable plan.

The goal and strategy are clear. On Thanksgiving morning, I hope to run the Manchester (CT) 5-Mile for the 44th year in a row. I won the high school division in year one, 1963. I won the open division 9 times. But I have never won an age-group division at Manchester. This year I will be 60, a new age group. It’s time to put everything on the line to see what I can do on November 23.

If my program goes well, maybe I’ll use this space to share some of the small steps with you. If it goes badly, I’ll cry into my beer alone. At 60, I have too much dignity (I hope) to whine out loud.

Charlie “Doc” Robbins: 1921-2006, RIP

2006-08-13T13:52:00.000-04:00

I first met Charlie Robbins on a chilly, fall afternoon in September, 1964, as Jeff Galloway and I were warming up for cross-country practice. A short, lithe figure came jogging across the practice football field toward us. Although he moved efficiently, like a well-honed runner, he was dressed more strangely than any I’d ever seen: barefoot, and wearing torn cotton khaki pants over a dark blue woolen Navy CPO jacket. Beneath the jacket: green hospital scrubs. This was “Doc,” as we all called him, one of the greatest U.S. road runners I’ve ever known, and definitely the most unique.

Robbins died last Thursday in Middletown CT, where he lived with his daughter Barrie. He was 85. There will be no replacing him.

A longtime psychiatrist at Connecticut Valley Hospital, Robbins was best known for his barefoot ways, and his 50 straight finishes in the Manchester CT Thanksgiving Day Road Race. The race probably owes its survival, and its current fields of 12,000+ runners, to the fact that Robbins, a local star from Manchester High, kept returning to the race through its lean post-WW II years. He won it in 1945 and 1946, and would eventually have run 57 consecutively except for the year, 1951, when he was virtually penniless in medical school in Cinncinati, and couldn’t afford the train fare home.

In his heyday, Robbins showed his speed throughout New York and New England. He was a regular on the road-racing circuit, regularly running 10 miles, 20K, and similar distances at just over 5 minutes per mile. He won a total of 11 national championships from 20K to the marathon, though the marathon was longer than his best distance. In many attempts at the Boston Marathon, Robbins’s best finish was his third place in 1944, when he ran 2:38:31.

While his other doctor friends played golf on their Wednesday afternoons off, Robbins always showed up for a running workout at Wesleyan University, high on a hill overlooking Middletown. Everyone who ran there, from Spike Paranya to me and Jeff, to Bill Rodgers and Dan Moynihan, to the hundreds since, looked forward to our regular visit from Doc. We would scan the horizon for his unmistakeable figure—all 5’ 7” and 115 pounds of it—and welcome him to “tag along” (his words) on our workouts. Afterwards, he’d hang and chat for a few minutes, easy going, all smiles. A neurotic guy like me would have dozens of questions: Am I doing this right? How long should I taper? Do you think I did too many 400s this week? He had a stock answer. “Don’t worry. It’ll all work out fine.” And it almost always did.

Aside from the countless runs, I have one other indelible Doc Robbins image in my head. During the winter, we ran indoors on an asphyxiating 10-lap cinder track in the “cage,” where the baseball and lacrosse teams also practiced. In a corner of the cage, a long, thick climbing rope dangled down from the girders high above. It got little use, as failure was almost guaranteed. I probably tried it once or twice, and managed about two hand-over-hand tugs upward before surrendering. But Doc could scoot to the top, no problem. I still don’t get that.

As he got older, Doc slowed down like the rest of us, only not as much. It seemed that every time he entered a new age-group at Manchester, he set an age-group course record. When he turned 80, he broke the record by 7 minutes, knowing full well that his friend Bill Tribou would run even faster the next year when he turned 80. Which Tribou did.

But Tribou cheated, after a manner. He actually trained for his races. Doc didn’t do that in his later years. He just lived actively, and let the races come. For many years he lived in a shack in the woods, and spent hours chopping wood for his wood stove, breaking rock for his gravel driveway. He rarely ran more than 2 miles at a time, and when he did, he always risked getting picked up by the State Police, which actually happened on a couple of occasions. The radio report must have sounded something like this: “Could you check the records for a guy who says his name is Charlie Robbins? I just picked him up while he was running on the side of the road in torn shorts and no shirt or shoes. We got a call from someone in town who said there was a crazy man on the loose.” That was Doc, and you didn’t have to go into a Connecticut criminal database for a positive ID. You could just ask any road runner in eastern Connecticut.

Doc didn’t wear shoes, because he found them unnecessary, like so many other modern conveniences. He loved the steamy summer races when the ashphalt turned soft and cushiony. Below 50 degrees, he might don a pair of old wool socks. In desperate times, when the temperature Thanksgiving morning in Manchester dipped below freezing, he’d show up in a pair of those rubbery aquasocks. He didn’t need anything more.

I last saw Doc after the 2001 Manchester race, his 50th in a row. He looked much the same as he had on our first meeting, in 1964. At the time, I remember thinking that he would almost surely outlive me just as he had out climbed me in the Wesleyan cage. He was a legend in his own time, and a legend we all cherished and wanted to see again.

[Statistical note: Doc’s verified 50 straight Manchester finishes isn’t the record for consective-year finishes in a road race. The remarkable Dipsea Demon, Jack Kirk, completed Dipsea 68 years in a row, a record which will be tough for anyone to beat. I never met Kirk, but his life, particularly the hermit-in-the-woods part, seems to have many parallels to Robbins’s. Makes me wish someone could have gotten these two together.]

We all have our limited number of days before we shuffle off this mortal coil, and Doc had no illusions about his time or place. A few years ago, he told a New York Times reporter: “I used to think a fair amount of brains were involved in living longer. Now I think it’s 99 percent luck, and 1 percent anything else.”

So, live simply, and enjoy today. It’s as good a life lesson as any of us will ever receive.

Top photo: Courtesy Kid's Running

The Kelley/Ocean Beach Race

2006-08-08T15:05:00.000-04:00

On Saturday morning I ran the John J. Kelley Ocean Beach 11.6-mile race in New London for the first time in many years. When I started to fill a notebook with my thoughts, the word count too fast exploded into the thousands. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish that essay, though I hope I will. At any rate, here’s the condensed version.

The Kelley race, 44 years old, is a little known national road-race classic, still no-entry-fee after all these years. What’s more, all runners get free admission (normally $16) to Ocean Beach Park with its sparkling beach on eastern Long Island Sound. And after the race, free soft drinks and clam chowder, not to mention a cooling dip in the calm Sound waters. I won the race a few times in the 1960s and 70s, when lots of good New England and New York runners came down to enjoy a day at the shore, but then moved to PA.

Before the start on Saturday morning, Kelley, who grew up in New London and still lives in nearby Mystic, made a brief but impassioned plea that his name be moved to second-billing, behind that of his wife Jess Kelley, who passed away three years ago. It seems likely to be adopted by the race committee, who loved Jess as much as any of us. After her death, I wrote a quick essay for the New London Day. For some reason, it’s at this web page.

In the old days, the Kelley race started at noon, like every other race on the New England road scene, and I remember racing it on days when the temp was literally higher than 100 degrees. Now we start earlier, and the horrid heat and humidity from the middle of last week had departed. It wasn’t a bad day for road running, and I decided to run at a comfortable 70 percent effort.

At three miles, we passed Patti Dillon and Tom Fleming manning a water stop. Patti, who now lives and runs in New London, was jumping up and down (as usual). Tom was quieter, back in the area for the first time since he won this race in 1973. Later in the day, Patti and Dan Dillon would host a backyard party at their place, where Dan talked happily about his strong 9th place raceday effort, behind a gaggle of teens and twenty-somethings, and Patti waxed on about a recent 150 mile training week, and Tom shook his head and muttered, “A hundred a fifty miles, what’s that about?” and remembered a year when he ran 2:14+ at Boston at 179 pounds. “I was just coming off an injury. I wasn’t fit at all, and I still ran 2:14.”

A mile later we passed the home where Jan Merrill grew up and often handed us water cups with the rest of her family. Anyone remember Merrill? She and the family weren’t there this year.

Then came the mile where I once looked in Norm Higgins's face—we were side by side far in front of everyone else, and running way too fast IMHO—and realized he was in a trance. His body was thrashing wildly, but his eyes were white and unfocused. I wanted none of this madness, so I backed off, and he beat me, even though I was young and fast at 24 and he was old and gray at like 35 or something. It was one of the more startling performances I’ve ever seen.

We passed the building where I had my first editorial job, where I ran to work with my clothes in a backpack, then filled a bucket of water, and poured it over my head in the woods out back. We passed the apartment where I lived after my Peace Corps days in El Salvador. One morning at 7 am, six months after my then-wife and I returned from El Salvador, the doorbell rang. It was two of the kids from Salvador, now illegal aliens in the U.S., wanting me to help them out somehow. That’s a really, really long tangent.

We passed the house near the 10-mile mark where I lived for five or six years, where my 3 year old daughter, dressed in coveralls and cute as a spring flower blossom, handed me a cup of water in midrace in 1983. It splashed everywhere. A newspaper photographer caught the moment, and it became my favorite personal running photo.

She’s waiting for me again, now 25, still with a water cup in her hand. I deliberately splash the water into the air, as a friend takes our picture. I hope it comes out and looks exactly the same, sorta, only different, from that photo of 23 years ago.

Things change, after all. But I try to keep the changes as minimal as possible. Returning to run the Kelley race seems to help.

Running In Extremes

2006-08-04T07:45:00.000-04:00

I would love to be able to report that I am prisoner to no rules of running. This is supposed to be an activity where one runs free, after all. The run is supposed to be a time when we throw off the shackles of personal and corporate restrictions to run almost naked, to run to another drumbeat, to run with mind and body fully liberated.

I would love to be able to say these things, but I can’t. There are rules to my running. Many of them. Always race on Thanksgiving Day, for example. I’ve done this the last 43 years in a row. Always run, and swim, on January first, a tradition I’ve held to for nearly 40 years. Always run in a blizzard. Always run when the temperature drops below zero F. And, of course, always run when the temperature creeps up past 100.

I’m not sure that the thermometer readings ever got that high this week in the small PA town where I live. But they came close, and the Internet weather pages regularly reported things like “feels like 104.” So I was out the door at about 1 pm each day.

I didn’t go far or fast on any of these runs, but I at least sampled the conditions, collected a nice layer of sweat, and stood for a long time in a cold shower afterwards. And then went back to staring at the computer screen in my air-conditioned office.

At 95 F, I wouldn’t feel compelled to run. But when the mercury climbs up to 100, I figure I gotta get out the door just to luxuriate in the absurdness of it all. I enjoy absurdity. I embrace it whenever it can. In books, in movies, in other arts, in my running. Something there is that pulls me in the direction of activities far from the norm.

That might have been one of running’s earliest appeals. In the mid 1960s, when I switched over from baseball to cross-country running, we were just a hidden handful of clearly oddball characters. We traveled great distances on weekends just to be able to see each other at the various New England road races. You could post a notice for a Wednesday night interval workout on the local high-school track, if you wanted, but there wouldn’t be any sense to that strategy. No one else would read your notice. No one else would show up to run the mile repeats. You’d be timing yourself with your $8 sweep-second Timex.

I fully appreciate the popularity that running has attained these days. I enjoy the frequent, big races, and the large, social crowds drawn to them. I like the cool gear we get to run in, and especially my chronograph, with all its interval-timing functions. Still, there are times when something deep inside me calls out and says, “Go the other way. Run when and where you’re not supposed to.”

So, I scan the weather reports, hoping for blizzards and sizzling midday temps. When they arrive, I’m ready for them. And those runs, often alone, often with people pointing and laughing at me and shaking a head in dismay (just as they did in the 1960s), are usually my most memorable. I feel great afterwards. I look forward to the next.

I might not be running free. But I tend to giggle and smile and cavort a lot on these extreme runs, and I figure that’s a good thing.

The Hall of Shame Gets Bigger

2006-07-30T15:32:00.000-04:00

So now the Sprint King has joined the Endurance King in the Hall of Shame in the biggest Doping Double the sports world has ever known. First Tour de France winner Floyd Landis was told that he had failed a testosterone test. Now Olympic 100-meter champ Justin Gatlin has revealed that he too failed a testosterone test, with the result that he could be banned for life, since he has previously failed a stimulant test.

What can we possibly make of this? Only one thing: That despite increased drug testing, some elite athletes still feel compelled to mess with their biochemistries to reach the top rung in their sport. Since they pass the vast majority of their doping tests, we must assume that they have gotten pretty good at beating the system. And we must assume that others are doing the same.

Since they sometimes fail a test, we can also assume that either: (A) the testing is getting better; (B) it’s possible to “slip up” and make a mistake in your doping regimen; or (C) both of the above.

And that’s the good news. The doping kingpins know that they don’t have to catch everyone to level the playing field. They only have to catch enough to scare the red blood cells out of everyone. And “enough” isn’t many. If you’re an endurance cyclist or 100-meter sprinter, you’re going to think long and hard right now about your approach to your sport, because Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin are the biggest catches since Ben Johnson. And Ben was a long time ago, 1988.

This is 2006, and the noose is getting tighter.

Landis is the Tour winner; no Tour winner has ever been banned. Gatlin has strands of Olympic medal dangling around his neck, and is also co-holder of the world-record in the 100 meters. No track athlete of his stature has been dinged before.

This is serious stuff. It means the doping officials aren’t afraid to go after the biggest stars. It means that we can be a little optimistic about the future of sports, even as some are ringing the death knell.

Not too optimistic, mind you. History has proven that the athletes and the chemists on their teams are often ahead of the Pee Police. And we can’t let pretty “stories” cloud our judgment. Landis comes from the land of Mennonites; he would never use drugs. Gatlin campaigns vigorously against drugs, and answers lots of emails from budding track runners. Surely this proves that he’s the real deal.

Sadly, no, in both instances. The only proof is a doping test. And the fact that you have passed 99 tests doesn’t mean anything if you fail the 100th. The rules are clear: You have to be 100 percent clean 100 percent of the time. Why should we expect any less? This isn’t a geography test, where a 99 percent score deserves an “A” or even an “A+.” It’s a pass/fail test, and if you don’t pass, you fail.

Again, let’s look on the bright side for just a moment. Somewhere a young rider or sprinter is thinking, “If the big guns can get caught, that means there’s hope for me, a clean athlete.” And this kid, this budding dreamer we all want to meet and applaud some day after some great performance, is gonna go out there this week and train hard. Really hard.

Because suddenly he’s got a chance.

Floyd Landis Re-Considered

2006-07-28T10:25:00.000-04:00

A couple of days ago I wrote about Floyd Landis’s amazing comeback victory in the Tour de France, and implied that his Mennonite roots could have contributed to that success. Yesterday’s sad news about Landis’s testosterone test forces a second look.

Sad is the right word. That’s how I felt about the test result and the rejiggered view that it forces us to take of Landis and the Tour. Not shocked, however. The Tour has too long and deep a history of drug problems for a new one to shock anybody.

Here’s how I look at it, from my runner’s perspective. Sprinters are tempted by testosterone derivatives, including steroids, that build power and speed. Marathoners are tempted by blood boosters like EPO that build endurance. Tour riders are doubly tempted: They need power for the time trials, and endurance for those monstrously long and difficult mountain stages. It’s no surprise to me that Tour riders too often succumb to temptation.

In Landis’s case, the circumstantial evidence is extraordinarily damaging. The guy has deteriorating hips, and knows this Tour might be his last. He suffers a damaging blowup on Day 16, falling far behind the leaders. Every Tour expert in the world says that it will be essentially impossible for him to catch up. The next day, he does the impossible. He wins the Stage, and basically catches up to his rivals. Only one problem: Because he has won the Stage, he faces mandatory drug testing. And that test reveals an illegal ratio of epitestosterone to testosterone.

Let’s forget about the biochemistry for a moment. Here’s what you need to know. Normal people don’t fail this test. Abnormal people don’t fail this test. Only super-abnormal people fail, and that’s why doping authorities go after them. Your epi to testosterone levels don’t go skyhigh, with very, very few exceptions, unless you have manipulated your body chemistry in highly suspicious ways. (Yes, some athletes have beaten the epi test results before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, or other bodies, but these have been on technicalities not relating to the test’s essential power.)

You fail the epi test, and you should get bounced. Sorry, Floyd.

In the court of public opinion, athletes often gain precious points for their “explanations.” Landis has already begun to argue that his tests could have been thrown out of whack by certain hormones and cortisone shots he was taking to lessen the hip-arthritis pain. We’re all partial to the notion that someone should be allowed to take a few pills for their mortal pains.

However, this argument doesn’t hold up in elite sports competition. The rules are very clear. A failed test is a failed test. No explanations can change this. Got bad arthritis? Sorry to hear it, but you have only two options: Don’t ride; or live with the pain.

If you start taking stuff that changes your epi to testosterone ratio, you’ve violated the rules. Just as much as if you had taken human growth hormone laced with nandrolone and steeped in EPO.

There’s no gray area in drug testing in elite sports. If you failed the test, you failed the test. The real and final assessment of Landis’s Mennonite roots will be whether or not he can bring himself to state the truth that simply.

Elephants Are So Cute...And Heavy

2006-07-25T20:41:00.000-04:00

So elephants don’t like to walk uphills. Why am I not surprised? I’ve never in my life met a big runner who liked hills. It simply requires too much extra work to lift the body uphill. And the bigger you are, the harder it is. It’s like the difference between pushing a 100-lb barbell over your head vs a 200-lb barbell.

In northern Kenya, a group of British researchers recently tracked elephant amblings by attaching a GPS system to the elephants. In an area with about 5,400 elephants, not to mention lots of mountainous terrain, the scientists found that the hills weren’t alive with the sound of elephant braying. The pachyderms kept to the lowlands. They did this because an 8,000 pound elephant that wandered uphill even a mere 100 meters would require so much extra energy that he’d have to spend an extra 30 minutes foraging for food. Or lose weight. Neither is a very good alternative. So elephants stick to the flatlands.

That’s what big runners like to do, too. Conversely, when an overweight runner loses a few pounds, he feels the difference first on the hills. They’re so much easier after you’ve slimmed down a bit.

Elephants in the wild don’t have weight problems, but those in captivity occasionally need to attend Weight Watchers. In 2004, the Anchorage Alaska zoo made some news when it announced that it was going to buy a treadmill for Maggie the Elephant, because she was tipping the scales at 9,120 pounds. Maggie’s zookeepers wanted her to lose 1,000 pounds, and they figured a treadmill would help. After all, exercise is important to healthy weight control, right?

Somebody forgot to tell Maggie. The Zoo ordered up its treadmill, for something over $100,000, and it arrived last September. Next they only had to get Maggie onto it. The zookeepers tried all her favorite snacks—apples, carrots, peanuts—but none worked. If she were in Kenya, Maggie wouldn’t be walking the hills. In Anchorage, she ain’t getting on no damn treadmill. “We have to be patient,” a zoo employee said. “The treadmill didn’t come with an instructional video.”
More on Maggie, the overweight but recalcitrant elephant

Floyd Landis, Man Of Simple Ways

2006-07-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis hails from Farmersville PA, just 58 miles from where I live in the Allentown area, so it wasn't surprising that the Allentown Morning Call had a feature story on Landis and Farmersville this morning in the Sunday paper. The quality of the story was surprising, however; it's a simple but great and emotional "read."

The writer, Brian Callaway, got himself down to Farmersville Saturday morning to watch the all-important final Time Trial on TV with Landis's parents and their community members. Farmersville is a real community, a Mennonite "hamlet of a couple of hundred people in Lancaster county," according to Callaway. Paul Landis (Floyd's father) and his family don't even own a TV, so they had to hoof it over to some friends' home to watch the Tour. TV is not a life essential to Paul Landis. "You see things on there that you think you have to have, that you can't afford, so that you can impress people you don't like," he said.

That's a killer quote, my friends! From a man who's thought long and deep about the role of TV in modern life.

Of course, when your son is winning the Tour de France, you've gotta cheer him on somehow.
"This is your mom, pedal harder," Arlene Landis implored Floyd through the TV screen. "Drink more water. Listen to your mother."

When things started looking good for Floyd, the heavy celebratin' began. Everyone started chugging "Farmersville champagne," otherwise known as lemonade.

The owner of the local bike retailer remembered the day Floyd, then an early teen, dragged his dad into the shop to buy him a bike. "His dad was not happy. It was an expensive bike, about $300." In his first races, Floyd wore long sweat pants, following the Mennonite custom of covering up pretty good.

The story of Floyd's eventual push into bigtime cycling, which forced a major change from his Mennonite ways, has been well covered by the media. There was a time when youngster and parents didn't see eye-to-eye. That was many years ago. These days, they're all fans of each other's choices.

That's why I was a little surprised by Paul Landis's final quote in this article. "I'm proud of his accomplishments," he said. "But I think someday what we taught him will come back."

As I watched Floyd Landis ride the Tour, with all its ups and downs and endless days and incredible pressures, with his arthritic hip and his disastrous bonk, I saw nothing if not his Mennonite background. Call them what you will, I don't think any endurance athlete can succeed without a simple approach and unswerving dedication to the most basic values.

Full
story

What's The Point Of Pain?

2006-07-20T12:37:00.000-04:00

I spent 3 hours in my dentist’s office this morning, not my idea of fun, or probably anyone else’s. At least he gave me several novocaine shots to numb the pain of his drilling, as he fashioned two new crowns for me.

I started wondering: Is there anything that can numb the pain of racing hard? Like when you’re at the 2-mile mark in an all-out 5000 meters, and you really wonder if you can keep it going. It would be nice to have some distraction, or something to cover up the pain.

Caffeine is supposed to work a little. It reduces the “relative perceived effort” of your race, meaning that you feel somewhat better than you would without the caffeine. I’ll take that. And I know many running psychologists who claim we can do much with various “visualizations.” I’ve never been able to get these to work, unfortunately. I’d like to pretend that I’m dangling my feet in a cool mountain lake, but I just can’t tear my thoughts away from that last mile.

Maybe the pain serves a purpose. At the very least, it helps us guide our pacing effort. If we pushed too hard, too soon, things could get really ugly. And pain helps us detect an incipient injury. That’s a good thing. Especially if we listen to the pain and stop running before the injury worsens.

The pain of racing isn’t a sharp, physical pain anyway. It’s more like a gnawing discomfort, and I wouldn’t want it to go away entirely. If it did, a race wouldn’t be the special, unique experience that it is.

Sweating The Details

2006-07-19T12:06:00.000-04:00

I’ve been doing a lot of work this year trying to figure out how much I sweat in different weather conditions, and on occasion I’ve dragooned a few other Runner’s World editors into my “study.” Yesterday, 10 of us ran in 100-degree conditions, and measured our sweat rates.

Here’s the background: Many scientific experts have now decided that runners should drink according to their “thirst.” They acknowledge that this will leave us 1-2-3 percent dehydrated, but say there’s no strong evidence that this modest dehydration has a negative health or performance effect. And it at least will help us avoid overhydration, called hyponatremia. Others advise that we should run for an hour, weigh ourselves, and then figure out how much we need to drink to cover the sweat loss.

My thought is that runners do virtually everything “by the mile,” so we ought to figure our sweat rate per mile. In a recent Runner’s World, I proposed in a Table that many of us sweat a little more than 3 ounces per mile per 100 pounds (hence 6 ounces if you weigh 200 pounds) at 50 degrees, and more than that as the temperature rises. At 100 degrees, I had figured that sweat rates rise by 50 percent over 50 degrees, hence 4.5 ounces per mile if you weigh 100 pounds and 9 ounces/mile if you weigh 200 pounds.

Yesterday, it was 100 degrees and my sweat rate of 8 ounces/mile was the lowest in our group. Others went up to 15 ounces per mile. (We measured our pre- and post-run weight on quite accurate digital scales, good to the nearest .2 lbs.)

I conclude a number of things from this test. First, in 100 degree weather, no runner can possibly replace his sweat. For example, I was running 8mph yesterday, so I would have to drink 64 ounces, a half gallon, every hour to replace my sweat. And others in our group would have had to drink almost twice as much.

Second, it follows from this and lots of other things that running in 100-degree heat is not a good thing to do. At least not for long periods of time. We covered only 4.5 miles in our test run. In the heat, you should run shorter and slower.

Last, it seems that sweat rates climb really steeply at the high temperatures. Running at 80 degrees is tough and uncomfortable. But running at 90 and 90+ degrees is a whole, different, and ugly experience.

Sometimes I'm Too Impulsive

2006-07-18T06:49:00.000-04:00

Last week I decided it was time to shake off the doldrums, and "shock" my training into high (well, slightly higher) gear. Since completing the 54-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa in mid-June, I hadn't been doing much running. And when I did run, I was still shuffling along at ultra-marathon pace. Time for a change, I thought. Time for a little juice.

This was a good idea, I'm pretty sure. It's the way that I decided to "kickstart" my training that could be called into question. But, like I'm said. I tend to be impulsive. Sometimes I wish my middle name were "Moderate." It's not. It's more like "Crash And Burn."

I decided to do a couple of speed-fartlek workouts. I jogged a mile over to our forested, 1500-yard "jogging trail" at Rodale, and then did 5 x 30 seconds pretty fast with 90 seconds of walking after each pickup. It went fine. Two days later, I did the same, only with 6 x 30 seconds. You see the logic? I thought I was being extremely smart.

But a few seconds after my last pickup, I felt something yank tight in my arch, right foot. I thought at first that it was just a misstep, that it would go away in a couple more strides. But it didn't. I had some kind of arch strain. An injury that I've never had before.

So now, a week later, I'm hobbling back into a 4- or 5-mile a day routine, very slow. I've kickstarted nothing. In fact, I've lost more time.

What should I have done differently? Looking back, I think I should have done more moderate tempo-pace runs instead of the pickups. I didn't really need to shock myself. I just needed to ease into a new phase.

And I should have started with a couple of treadmill runs. The treadmill is my friend. I always seem to do well on it.

I like the sound and imagery of impulsive. But it's rarely a great way to run.