My Track Record

There are times when I can admit that I might benefit from having a running coach/adviser. And then there are other times, such as this week, when I feel so self-aware, so in tune with my mental and physical needs, that consulting anyone else would seem like a waste of time.

I returned to Seattle on Monday after two weeks in Argentina (for work related to the website TDRtargets.org) and South Carolina (for my grandmother's 90th birthday). It was a trip full of the usual challenges of eating and running in unfamiliar places while preoccupied with other activities. For example, although there were a few nice running options within a mile or two of my Buenos Aires hotel room, only the Puerto Madero restaurant loop was a reasonable choice after dark, when I did most of my runs. Another example: being a picky eater and not having easy access to my usual fare, I consumed more meat and fewer fruits and vegetables than usual.

And so I came home feeling fat and slow. But I recognized this as a feeling that didn't necessarily reflect reality. I decided that I needed to rebuild my confidence as soon as possible, if I could, by completing a workout equivalent to those I had done before my trip. A hard tempo run would be best for morale-building purposes, since it resembles a 100K race somewhat more than a short interval workout does.

When my run into work on Tuesday morning felt smooth and quick, I decided to test myself that afternoon. I ran home via Capitol Hill so that I could do a 3.7-mile "urban jungle time trial" from East Roanoke Street & 10th Avenue East to 14th Avenue South & 15th Avenue South. As always, I ran with a light backpack (Deuter Race X Air) and stopped the watch at street crossings when necessary.

My time was 20:51, a personal record for this course. Self-confidence climbed as worries declined in after-hours trading. My trip hadn't hurt my fitness after all.

In thinking about how disruptions to training can sometimes yield unexpected benefits, I was reminded of how Roger Bannister (another self-coached runner, by the way) described the buildup to his famous feat:

In December 1953 we started a new intensive course of training and ran several times a week a series of ten consecutive quarter-miles, each in 66 seconds. Through January and February we gradually speeded them up, keeping to an interval of two minutes between each. By April we could manage them in 61 seconds, but however hard we tried it did not seem possible to reach our target of 60 seconds. We were stuck, or as Chris Brasher expressed it -- "bogged down"....

Chris Brasher and I drove up to Scotland overnight for a few days' climbing.... The weekend was a complete mental and physical change. It probably did us more harm than good physically. We climbed hard for the four days we were there, using the wrong muscles in slow and jerking movements....

After three days our minds turned to running again.... We had slept little, our meals had been irregular. But when we tried to run those quarter-miles again, the time came down to 59 seconds!

Of course, if I had returned from my trip and run a bunch of 59-second quarters, it would have been a physiological miracle, to say the least.

Posted by crowther at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in August, I fielded a query about high-altitude racing from fellow Seattle runner Henry Wigglesworth. Now Henry has another inquiry -- a "question for the ages," as he refers to it in an email. He writes:

If you had to quantify the various components of a runner's performance on a given day (and assume for the purposes of this query that you must), what value, expressed as a percentage, would you assign to each of the following? (1) natural ability; (2) training (a.k.a. "unnatural or acquired ability"); (3) lifestyle issues (does runner have an infant at home, work a highly stressful job, or is otherwise limited by non-running activities); (4) X factor (usually described as "I just felt good/bad that day, dunno why"). I realize that these categories overlap a bit (especially #2 and #3), and the question is not susceptible to the same scientific rigor that usually distinguishes your analysis, but I am curious nonetheless about what you think.

Henry, as much as I'd like to give you a set of percentages that add up to 100%, I can't. These percentages depend on so many factors (listed below) that any guess at "average" values would not be especially meaningful, in my opinion.

The answer depends on one's definitions of "natural ability," "training," etc. You correctly note the overlap of training and lifestyle issues, but distinguishing between training and natural talent is just as hard. Not only do our genes influence how fast we can run without any training, they also affect how much exercise we choose to get (Frederiksen & Christensen, Scand J Med Sci Sports 13: 9, 2003) and how our body responds to it (Gagnon et al., Med Sci Sports Exerc 29: 1448, 1997; Larsen et al., Scand J Med Sci Sports 15: 48, 2005). If a person's genes give him/her greater-than-normal enjoyment of and improvement from training, that advantage represents both talent and training -- training-related talent, if you will -- confounding any attempts to separate the two.

The answer depends on the type of race. I haven't seen any definitive data on this point, but personal experience and intuition suggest that performances in longer races are less dependent on raw talent. Similarly, talent should matter somewhat less in events where technique is important, like the steeplechase and technical trail races.

The answer depends on the population of concern. When we talk about race performance, we're often most interested in individual differences. The reasons for those differences depend on which people are being compared. Consider the example of two longtime friends who've worked out together every day for years. Since both are essentially doing the same training, differences in performance could be attributed largely to differences in talent. At the opposite extreme, identical twins presumably have the same amount of talent, so differences in their performance should be due entirely to training and other non-genetic factors.

Given all of the above considerations, it's not surprising that different studies offer different estimates of the extent to which genes (i.e., talent) affect performance. A review by Rupert (Comp Biochem Physiol A Mol Integr Physiol 136: 191, 2003) shows that the percentage of variation in aerobic performance has been reported to be as low as 35% and as high as 87%, with a rough average of around 50%.

A few attempts have also been made to estimate the percentage of performance variation explained by training experience, frequency, volume, and pace. These estimates probably overestimate the influence of training per se because of the difficulty of disentangling training from talent. (For example, apart from the comments above, training pace depends partly on talent.) In any case, these estimates range from less than 25% to over 80% (Bale et al., Br J Sports Med 20: 170, 1986; Karp, International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance 2: 72, 2007). In one of these studies, training mileage and years of training predicted about 45% of the variation in the marathon PRs of female U.S. Olympic Trials qualifiers, but no significant fraction of the variation in the males' PRs (Karp, 2007).

The answer depends upon the individual. The percentages cited above are for variations in performance within a population. This isn't quite the same thing as explaining the performance of any one particular person. Since variables like maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) tend to improve least with training in people whose VO2max is already naturally high (Saltin et al., Circulation 39: VII1, 1968; Wenger & Macnab, J Sports Med Phys Fitness 15:199, 1975), we can assume that some runners are fast "mostly" due to natural talent. On the other hand, there are those who are extremely slow if remaining sedentary, but extremely responsive to training; in them, the influence of talent alone would appear to be much smaller.

The answer depends on the day. Most of this essay has focused on talent and training because, in general, those are the two most important determinants of performance. The impact of a lifetime of training is quite large, for example, compared to the 1-6% improvement that one can get from an optimal taper (Mujika & Padilla, Med Sci Sports Exerc 35: 1182, 2003). But here too there are exceptions. If you stubbornly insist on starting a race despite being sick enough to belong in a hospital bed, your performance that day might reflect the severity of your illness more than anything else, talent and training included.

Thus the short answer to the original question is: it depends. I'm sorry the truth is so complicated, Henry.

Posted by crowther at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

4. Posters for the movie 10,000 B.C. give the title as "10.000 A.C."

3. Every time I go out for a run, I wind up in some dead-end alley amongst free-roaming dogs and boys playing soccer.

2. If you dine out and order a main course of beef, the waiter brings you a giant plate of it ... followed by another giant plate of it.

1. Some bathrooms have soap dispensers like the one shown here. (Image copied from picasaweb.google.com/leahrimkus/BuenosAiresArgentina.)

Getting soap out of this dispenser was not easy. I tried everything: pushing it toward the wall, pulling it away from the wall, moving it left and right, moving it up and down, pressing on the white base.... After about a minute of this, I realized that my hands were getting kind of slippery. The yellow "soap dispenser" was made of soap.

Posted by crowther at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Since December I've been working on a long, gradual training buildup in preparation for my next big ultramarathon. It's been a nice change from last year's crazy sequence of recovering from one race, training hard for a couple of weeks, and then tapering for the next one. And it seems to be working. For example, my times for a standard 3x1600m track workout (with 400m jogs in between) have finally returned to the 4:55 range after being stuck at around 5:00 for months.

But that's still a far cry from the 4:51s that I did in January 2007, six days after the Bridle Trails 50K.

The rest of my training data tell a similar story. There are many indications of progress, and just as many reminders that my fitness is not what it once was. Another good example is last Saturday's long run at Seward Park. My rule of thumb is that, if I want to average a certain pace in a 100K, I should be able to run 5 seconds per mile faster than that in a 36-mile solo training run over race-like terrain when somewhat (but not fully) rested. The race pace I had in mind was 6:30, so I tried for 6:25s over the course of alternating flat and hilly loops. I had to settle for 6:33s.

On the other hand, my legs felt less trashed than they usually do after a workout like this.

So what does that mean, exactly? That my Mad City race will be slow but will hurt less than usual? I guess I'll find out in a few weeks. In the meantime, I'm trying to find satisfaction in my incremental improvements, trying not to get frustrated.

It seems that 100Ks are all about patience. Who knew?

Posted by crowther at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

It's always fun to discover new activities that appeal to a small child. This past weekend offered two good examples.

Activity #1 was WWE-style wrestling. My wife lay on the floor, and Phil walked over to her and belly-flopped onto her stomach. He did that about ten times in a row before she conceded the match.

Activity #2 was breathing through a long mirth-inducing apparatus -- a cardboard cylinder taken from a used-up roll of paper towels. Phil and I passed it back and forth, taking turns holding it up to our face, blowing into it, and laughing at the echoes.

Then we got hungry and broke for lunch.

Posted by crowther at 4:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If I had a nickel for every time someone minimized a race performance with the phrase "It was just a training run," the sport of running would seem a lot more lucrative.

This oft-repeated excuse used to bother me. When I showed up at a race, I was there to RACE. What could be simpler? Why couldn't everyone else be like me?

In recent years, though, I've become more accepting of the races-as-training-runs approach. One reason is philosophical: every runner has the right to decide what his/her own goals should be, even if those goals seem silly to others. But there are also practical considerations. Sometimes it's just nice to do a training run where an interesting route has been carefully measured, clearly marked, and stocked with refreshments. And sometimes it's nice to have company.

Last week's training plan called for me to run seven laps of the unpaved 3.22-mile outer loop at Green Lake on Saturday. It's a workout I've done many times before, and it's about as exciting as it sounds.

Then I heard that Saturday was also the day of a three-hour race at Des Moines Creek Park in SeaTac -- a chance to do a similar workout, but at a slightly more exotic venue, with other runners and an aid station and maybe even some prizes. So off I went. I chatted with acquaintances (including fellow bloggers Alison, Devon, and Laura), ate Girl Scout cookies, and covered about 42 kilometers on the flat but turny course. It was a good effort, I thought ... considering that it was just a training run.

Posted by crowther at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I often run home from the University of Washington to Beacon Hill along 23rd Avenue. Just after crossing East Yesler Way, I pass the Randolph Carter Family and Learning Center, where there is a message board which, as often as not, says, "For anger management classes call 328-5952."

Whenever I see this message, a voice inside my head goes: "I DON'T NEED ANY F****** ANGER MANAGEMENT CLASSES! AND I RESENT THE IMPLICATION THAT I DO!!!"

Perhaps this imagined retort was worth a brief chuckle when it first occurred to me. The problem is that it automatically comes to mind every single time I pass the message board, day after day. I'm totally sick of it. But how do you suppress a thought that only takes a second to escape? It's like trying to stop a sneeze.

Posted by crowther at 5:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)