What? Dark clouds over all that giddiness in London--even to the point where stiff-upper-lip Brits were cheering their heads off? (And I don't mean in the manner of their former king Henry the Eighth!)
I know this is politically incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention in China, Jamaica, and Ethiopia, but dark clouds there are. Since the mainstream media were far too lazy and impressionable to do serious reporting or even acknowledging that those clouds exist, I'd better explain myself. Before I get to a little bright silver, let me first discuss some very tarnished and sometimes-false gold.
When I was a kid, the Olympics were to me what the Holy Grail might have been to a Medieval knight. I was 13 when Roger Bannister ran the first 4-minute mile, and soon after that galvanizing event I was one of the 100 million people worldwide who listened to the radio broadcast of Bannister's epic duel with John Landy (the second sub-4 guy), in the British Empire Games of 1954 (see my article "Moments" in the September Running Times magazine). That was the year I began running myself, and the notion of going to the Olympics was for me like what the idea of playing for the Yankees or Brooklyn Dodgers might have been for some of my playmates in those halcyon days.
In my coming-of-age imagination, going to the Olympics was the ultimate daydream. It was no doubt affected by the Olympic ideal, originating in the ancient Games of Athens, of the uncompromised amateur athlete. Those naked Greek runners did not have apparel endorsement contracts. In those years of my youth, long-distance running was under the aegis of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and a runner could be banned for life if he accepted any sort of financial compensation. When I took a job as a high school teacher and cross-country coach in 1963, the school offered to pay me $300 for the coaching, but I asked them to please just increase my annual salary for the classroom teaching by that amount, and not pay me for the coaching, so I wouldn't be banned from running for the rest of my life!
Of course, this being America, it didn't take too long for that idea to be scuttled, and some guy named Bolt can now be paid more for 10 seconds of competition than the world's best long-distance runners of the 1950s or '60s were paid for a thousand hours of competition over their entire lives. But while this dream of a beautiful ideal still lingered, I at least won an AAU national-championship medal (bronze) and patch, which still occupy a place of honor on my bookshelf. (The AAU was a badly run organization, but I didn't really know how relatively OK it was until later, when it was succeeded by the Athletics Congress (TAC), which was even more hapless, and which was itself replaced by USA Track & Field (USATF), which is little more than a money-processing buraucracy that as far as I can see does nothing for 99.9 percent of the country's track and long-distance runners, other than try to sell them stuff on its online store.)
Whatever the reasons for my youthful dreams about the Olympics, they were destined to be ruined not just by my own failure to qualify for the Olympic Trials (that's another story, for another day), but also by a series of commercial, geopolitical, and terrorist events that in my lifetime has turned the Olympics from an erstwhile Holy Grail to something more like the mortgage debacle of 2008, or Bernie Madoff's brobdingnagian heist. In brief, some of the dark clouds as they gathered:
1968, Mexico City: As quickly suspected and later confirmed, East Germany, with a population about the size of today's Mexico City, doped its athletes with drugs--and wins 9 gold medals.
1972, Berlin: Terrorists murder Israeli athletes in the Olympic village. This time, East German athletes win 20 drug-juiced golds.
1976, Montreal: As U.S. athletes win individual events, American spectators shout "We're Number One! We're Number One!" I have to wonder how an athlete from a small country, who had performed just as well, feel about that. The U.S. spectators contribute nothing to the U.S. athletes' success (and largely ignore them for the four years between Games), but don't hesitate to claim national hegemony when an American wins. And oh yes, this time the East German's take 40 golds. And the drug-doping business seems to have expanded to other events. The defending marathon champion Frank Shorter is handed a silver medal, when there is good reason to believe he'd actually won the gold. And Don Kardong, who finished a bittersweet fourth, seems to have been denied a rightly earned bronze.
1980, Moscow: The United States government decides to boycott the Moscow Olympics, forbidding its citizens to participate--even though America is advertised as a "free country" and the Olympics are supposedly about individuals competing, not nation-states. And the reason for the boycott? The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, to fight bad guys there, and America does not condone invasions. Do I need to put an explanation point after that last sentence, or invoke that handy word "irony"?
1984, Los Angeles: An eye foir an eye, the Soviet Union reciprocates with a boycott of its own. The people most hurt are the Soviets' own citizens. Sorry, Russian gymnasts: Your arch-enemy Hitler is long dead, but the soup Nazis of the world still rule: No medals for you!
. . . And so on, through the years: the Games get even bigger, more costly, and more prized by national governments as trophies, the way the heads of mooses or bears might be prized by the owners of upscale hunting lodges. In much of the media, the Olympics become a "medals race," not unlike the "arms race" of the Cold War years. And as the Games become ever larger spectacles, corporate sponsorship and control (and, more to the point, profiteering) continues to expand. If I might invoke that handy word "irony" just one more time, what do you think of all those athletes of enviably lean and fit physique being paraded around by two of the world's largest junk-food traffickers?
2012, city of Dickensian waifs who'd be very grateful for a bowl of watery soup, please: Nearly all of the vices are now at their zenith (except the terrorism, fended off by a massive army of soldiers and police, at English taxpayers' expense). The medals race again is rampant, with none of the sports reporters (who are not known for their thinking, in any case) ever questioning whether a nation has legs and lungs and can perform athletic feats. Nations and corporations don't have heartbeats and can't breathe, which may partly explain why they do so little to prevent air pollution. And by now, the "we're number-one" delusion has spread from the Americans to the British. The British singer Morrissey makes a well publicized objection to the "blustering jingoism" of his countryment. And the Denver Post writer Steve Lipshen writes, "This year's Games reflected the most stereotypical traits of Americans: jingoism, cockiness, and hubris, all presented by McDonalds and Coca-Cola."
* * *
So, after all that, how can there be any silver lining? I'll mention three moments out of the thousands spewed across the ether by NBC and the Internet, that lifted my spirits in spite of all that has gone so wrong with my youthful ideal.
1. The last 10 seconds of the men's 10,000 meters: Gaylen Rupp catches up with the East African super-runners who've been outrunning American runners for Rupp's entire life, and passes them with a big smile on his face, to win the silver and come within a half-second of the gold . . .
2. Rupp's training partner and friend, Mo Farah, turns his head the instant he crosses the line first, to see and celebrate his friend's having taken second.
3. And the last 30 seconds or so of the women's 10,000, in whichTirunesh Dibaba smoothly pulled away from her formidable rivals and sailed to the win with a big smile on her face, like a kid on a playground swing.
Thesw three moments (among many, I'm sure) were not about competition between nations, but between individual humans at their best. Significantly, at least for me, Rupp and Farrah weren't teammates on one of the artificial, corporate- and government-funded "teams" that wore the uniforms of their countries (many of which maintain huge military arsentals to war against each other in less sporting ways). Rupp and Farah are citizens of different countries, but in training together became real teammates. The smiles on Rupp's and Dibaba's faces weren't manifestations of national or geopolitcal righteousness, or corporate success, but of the human spirit at its best. Contrary to a recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, a corporation is not a person! Neither corporations nor the governments they largely control have spirits; only the people who form them do.
The Supreme Court, in its blasphemic declaration that corporations have "personhood," reminds me of the old men of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who a few decades ago ruled out any Olympic running events for women longer than 1500 meters, in the belief that women can't safely run for longer than about five minutes. Maybe the troglodyte denizens of these institutions will eventually die off, but in the mean time I get a big kick out of seeing that despite all the corruption the gladiatorial spectacles thrust upon us every four years now embody, the real strength of the Olympics is alive and well in the some of the individual athletes. And I don't care what country they come from or who paid for their shoes.
Josh about to pass his grandpa
Here, at age three, Josh regularly runs a mile or two with me--and I have to work hard to keep up!
Friday, August 24, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Enduring for Life, Part 5: Keep Learning, or It's the End of the Road!
This fall's JFK 50-Mile run will mark the start of my 57th consecutive year of long-distance running competition, and while going to a big race is as exciting now as it ever has been for me, it's also an occasion for sober reflection. Most of the kids I ran with in high school or college, and even most of the hard-core runners I knew during the "golden age" of American road-racing in the 1980s, are no longer around. Why? Some had their knees go bad, decades ago, and had to put away their Waffle Trainers or Olympias. Others were just tired, or burned out. Some were sticken by illness. But after half a century of reading, reflection, and conversation with other runners, I have a strong impression that what too often happens is that as an athlete ages, training begins to feel like the ordeal of Sisyphus--that mythological figure who was condemned to be eternally rolling a large rock up a hill, with the rock eternally rolling back on him (or so I recall it). Or if you're not into Greek mythology, just think of the ordeal of Bill Murray in the movie "Groundhog Day." When things don't change, they can have a deadly impact on you--sometimes literally.
So, suppose a 50-year-old runner doggedly repeats the workouts he did with some success at age 45, only now instead of getting better he gets inexorably slower, and the workouts get harder. Maybe he eventually thinks, "What's the poiint?"--and he stops. If you are worried about that happening to you, my suggestion is that whatever worked for you in the past can't possibly keep working if you regard it as a fixed formula. There's always something new to be learned. Part of what's meant by getting "wiser" as we grow older is recognizing that reality. Whether in science or in the art of living, we humans rarely if ever have final answers (except politicians, of course), and as long as we continue to have curiosity and interest in exploration and discovery, the pursuit will feel worthwhile.
As a guy who is now running ultramarathons in his 70s, I'm astonished at how much I have learned about running--and life--just in the past few weeks, that I didn't know as a dedicated runner in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s! Our species evolved not just by exploring the earth's forests in which primates first evolved, but by adapting to new environments in an ever-changing world. In practical terms, one way to keep the learning fresh is to keep seeking new places to do training runs, to try races of different distances in different kinds of terrain or climate, and to keep reading the new discoveries about human endurance coming from the fields of evolutionary biology, anatomy, human ecology, biomechanics, neuroscience, nutrition, sports medicine, and the sociology of sport. Read some of those things and then experiment or play with them, and the running will be enjoyable for a long time to come.
What I've discovered, so far, is that there's no fountain of youth or anti-aging pill, but that there's a secret strategy that does work and is free: continuing to learn with an open mind and an unobstructed heart.
These themes are explored in the course of a dramatic narrative about an epic race that took place in the wake of the 9/11 attack on America, as recounted in the book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published October 9. The book now has a page on Amazon, where you can see advance comments about it from Bill Rodgers, Kathrine Switzer, Amby Burfoot, Jacqueline Hansen, Dean Karnazes, and others--and where if you wish you can pre-order a copy to be delivered immediately upon release.
So, suppose a 50-year-old runner doggedly repeats the workouts he did with some success at age 45, only now instead of getting better he gets inexorably slower, and the workouts get harder. Maybe he eventually thinks, "What's the poiint?"--and he stops. If you are worried about that happening to you, my suggestion is that whatever worked for you in the past can't possibly keep working if you regard it as a fixed formula. There's always something new to be learned. Part of what's meant by getting "wiser" as we grow older is recognizing that reality. Whether in science or in the art of living, we humans rarely if ever have final answers (except politicians, of course), and as long as we continue to have curiosity and interest in exploration and discovery, the pursuit will feel worthwhile.
As a guy who is now running ultramarathons in his 70s, I'm astonished at how much I have learned about running--and life--just in the past few weeks, that I didn't know as a dedicated runner in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s! Our species evolved not just by exploring the earth's forests in which primates first evolved, but by adapting to new environments in an ever-changing world. In practical terms, one way to keep the learning fresh is to keep seeking new places to do training runs, to try races of different distances in different kinds of terrain or climate, and to keep reading the new discoveries about human endurance coming from the fields of evolutionary biology, anatomy, human ecology, biomechanics, neuroscience, nutrition, sports medicine, and the sociology of sport. Read some of those things and then experiment or play with them, and the running will be enjoyable for a long time to come.
What I've discovered, so far, is that there's no fountain of youth or anti-aging pill, but that there's a secret strategy that does work and is free: continuing to learn with an open mind and an unobstructed heart.
These themes are explored in the course of a dramatic narrative about an epic race that took place in the wake of the 9/11 attack on America, as recounted in the book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published October 9. The book now has a page on Amazon, where you can see advance comments about it from Bill Rodgers, Kathrine Switzer, Amby Burfoot, Jacqueline Hansen, Dean Karnazes, and others--and where if you wish you can pre-order a copy to be delivered immediately upon release.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Enduring for Life - Part 4: Take nutrition seriously, for life!
For a quick intro to this group of posts, look to the right and click on the first one, then come back to here. OK, I'm a techno-doofus and don't know how to properly design a website, but I can still run like the wind! (Or at least like a gentle breeze....)
4. Take nutrition seriously, for life. I don't think many sports-nutrition experts would disagree with my belief that while race-day fueling is a big factor in an endurance athletic performance, it can't compensate for a poor diet over a lifetime. I've known of great athletes who seemed to thrive on Coke and fries in their 20s, but several decades later were long gone from the scene--some of them burned out, others overtaken by belly fat, and many brought down by cancer or other lifestyle diseases. A pervasive reason is that American life--and its omnipresence of fat-, sugar,- and salt-saturated junk food--is heaily influenced by quick-impression advertising and what I call "sprint culture." It's not just "fast food" that has afflicted our country with obesity and heart disease, but an expectation of quick satisfactions in all things. Fad diets come and go like fashions. But the best nutrition for humans developed over several million years of our evolution as nomadic hunter-gatherers. The diets most conducive to high fitness and health are those which most closely replicate what we ate in the wild, for hundreds of millennia--what we now call "natural," or minimally processed, foods.
When I was 13 years old, in 1954, I decided I wanted to be a long-distance runner, and toward that end I decided to give up all foods containing highly refined sugars, starches, hydrogenated fats such as Crisco or margarine, and chemical additives. That was also the year Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4 minute mile, and I was galvanized. I've stuck with that diet ever since, and am now in my 55th consecutive year of long-distance competition. Along the way, I've won four national age-group championships (at 50k and 50 miles), and I'm still going strong. This summer I'm planning to run two mountain-trail 50ks, then in November run the JFK 50-Mile--now in the 70-79 age division. I'm way, way slower than when I was a young man of 50, or a mere kid of 30 or 40, but the important thing is that I'm healthy and full of what JFK liked to call "vigah," and I think a big part of that is lifelong attention to good diet. Over a week or a month, the effects of good nutrition may be hardly noticeable, but over the decades they are cumulative, and by the time you reach old age they can make a world of difference.
4. Take nutrition seriously, for life. I don't think many sports-nutrition experts would disagree with my belief that while race-day fueling is a big factor in an endurance athletic performance, it can't compensate for a poor diet over a lifetime. I've known of great athletes who seemed to thrive on Coke and fries in their 20s, but several decades later were long gone from the scene--some of them burned out, others overtaken by belly fat, and many brought down by cancer or other lifestyle diseases. A pervasive reason is that American life--and its omnipresence of fat-, sugar,- and salt-saturated junk food--is heaily influenced by quick-impression advertising and what I call "sprint culture." It's not just "fast food" that has afflicted our country with obesity and heart disease, but an expectation of quick satisfactions in all things. Fad diets come and go like fashions. But the best nutrition for humans developed over several million years of our evolution as nomadic hunter-gatherers. The diets most conducive to high fitness and health are those which most closely replicate what we ate in the wild, for hundreds of millennia--what we now call "natural," or minimally processed, foods.
When I was 13 years old, in 1954, I decided I wanted to be a long-distance runner, and toward that end I decided to give up all foods containing highly refined sugars, starches, hydrogenated fats such as Crisco or margarine, and chemical additives. That was also the year Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4 minute mile, and I was galvanized. I've stuck with that diet ever since, and am now in my 55th consecutive year of long-distance competition. Along the way, I've won four national age-group championships (at 50k and 50 miles), and I'm still going strong. This summer I'm planning to run two mountain-trail 50ks, then in November run the JFK 50-Mile--now in the 70-79 age division. I'm way, way slower than when I was a young man of 50, or a mere kid of 30 or 40, but the important thing is that I'm healthy and full of what JFK liked to call "vigah," and I think a big part of that is lifelong attention to good diet. Over a week or a month, the effects of good nutrition may be hardly noticeable, but over the decades they are cumulative, and by the time you reach old age they can make a world of difference.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Enduring for Life: Will the Mojo Fade? - Part 3
To read the Intro to this 5-part series on athletic longevity, click on the title of the first installment, to the right.
3. Practice Patience! The great ultrarunner Yiannis Kouros (arguably the most amazing ultrarunner the world has seen) has commented that without patience, you can't have endurance. "Practice patience" is one of those many platitudes that millions of people say they respect, but very few seriously observe. We live in a "sprint culture," and are poorly prepared for the long run. For an endurance athlete, though, learning the art of patience is as critical as doing the miles or eating the right foods. It's critical in both training and racing. Here's my thought on how it relates to athletic longevity:
As you grow older, it gets easier to learn patience--and more necessary. Youth is famously fraught with impatience and impulsiveness, and for the young that isn't necessarily bad. But experience brings new perceptions about time. In my forthcoming book The Longest Race (out in October)*, I have a chapter titled "Learning from Quarterbacks," which examines one of the most fascinating phenomena in all of sports--the concept of "slowing the game." Football is a game of rocket reflexes, and one of the most important skills of a successful football player is not just to be fast in his own movement, but to slow down his opponents' movement in his perception--to see them in slo-mo, so he can more astutely and accurately direct his play. As the sports journalist Roy S. Johnson has said, "Great athletes . . . say the game 'slows down' for them, particularly at critical moments. That's why a baseball player or tennis player can read the spin of a bseball or tennis ball when it looks like a blur to the rest of us . . . . The fastest way to your goal isn't always fast." After Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers led the Packers to their Super Bowl championship in 2011, for example, coach Mike Miller commented, "He is at the point in this game that the game has slowed down for him."
And how does this apply to a slow-twitch sport like long-distance running or bicycle racing? Your need as an endurance athlete isn't so much to slow down a blur of motion around you as to slow down any sense of urgency or anxiety in your gut. Internal turbulence can be as disruptive and energy-sapping to a distance-runner's performance as chaoitic external forces like blitzing defensive linemen can be to a quarterback's. It's not just a matter of good pacing, but of finding the kind of inner calm that allows the highest possible level of both physical and emotional energy efficiency.
Part 4 follows in a few days . . .
*The full title of the book is The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance. It has had enthusiastic pre-publication endorsements from Bill Rodgers, Michael Wardian, Jacqueline Hansen and a score of other prominent endurance athletes, and will be released in October. It can also be pre-ordered now from Barnes & Noble and other booksellers' online stores.
3. Practice Patience! The great ultrarunner Yiannis Kouros (arguably the most amazing ultrarunner the world has seen) has commented that without patience, you can't have endurance. "Practice patience" is one of those many platitudes that millions of people say they respect, but very few seriously observe. We live in a "sprint culture," and are poorly prepared for the long run. For an endurance athlete, though, learning the art of patience is as critical as doing the miles or eating the right foods. It's critical in both training and racing. Here's my thought on how it relates to athletic longevity:
As you grow older, it gets easier to learn patience--and more necessary. Youth is famously fraught with impatience and impulsiveness, and for the young that isn't necessarily bad. But experience brings new perceptions about time. In my forthcoming book The Longest Race (out in October)*, I have a chapter titled "Learning from Quarterbacks," which examines one of the most fascinating phenomena in all of sports--the concept of "slowing the game." Football is a game of rocket reflexes, and one of the most important skills of a successful football player is not just to be fast in his own movement, but to slow down his opponents' movement in his perception--to see them in slo-mo, so he can more astutely and accurately direct his play. As the sports journalist Roy S. Johnson has said, "Great athletes . . . say the game 'slows down' for them, particularly at critical moments. That's why a baseball player or tennis player can read the spin of a bseball or tennis ball when it looks like a blur to the rest of us . . . . The fastest way to your goal isn't always fast." After Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers led the Packers to their Super Bowl championship in 2011, for example, coach Mike Miller commented, "He is at the point in this game that the game has slowed down for him."
And how does this apply to a slow-twitch sport like long-distance running or bicycle racing? Your need as an endurance athlete isn't so much to slow down a blur of motion around you as to slow down any sense of urgency or anxiety in your gut. Internal turbulence can be as disruptive and energy-sapping to a distance-runner's performance as chaoitic external forces like blitzing defensive linemen can be to a quarterback's. It's not just a matter of good pacing, but of finding the kind of inner calm that allows the highest possible level of both physical and emotional energy efficiency.
Part 4 follows in a few days . . .
*The full title of the book is The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance. It has had enthusiastic pre-publication endorsements from Bill Rodgers, Michael Wardian, Jacqueline Hansen and a score of other prominent endurance athletes, and will be released in October. It can also be pre-ordered now from Barnes & Noble and other booksellers' online stores.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Enduring for Life: Will the Mojo Fade? --Part 2
To read the quick intro this "Enduring for Life" series, scroll down to the previous post. (I'm such a techno-doofus that my blog works like one of those dial-with-your-finger telephones we used to have, but at least, thank God, I can still run!) Now, to continue:
2. Keep recovery time in synch with performance time.
With the passing years, as your body slows in running tempo, it also slows in recovery and regeneration time. A lot of athletes overlook this; they know they can't run or ride as fast as when they were in their 20s or 30s, but they still try to maintain the same seven-day-a-week training schedules they had then. I made that mistake for decades before I woke up to the fact that after a hard workout or race, my muscles and blood needed more time to bounce back than they did once. That posed a problem, because if I now needed--let's say--a third more regeneration time, it wasn't practical to just shift from working out every 24 hours to doing it every 32 hours; I'd be wrecking my normal sleep and work cycles. But I did find that a fairly productive solution was to simply take days off more often,. So, for example, I might run two consecutive days, take off one, then run three and take off one, then repeat that seven-day cycle for a while to see how running 5 of every 7 days worked for me. Total weekly mileage dropped, but amazingly, so did performance times!
That's a fairly simple observation, but the booming sciences of human performance suggest that "Slowing" is not just what happens to tempo and recovery time as you grow older. It's more complex, and multifarious, than that. Physiological slowing also plays a role in the performances of young people who have not yet reached their athletic peak. As a runner improves in cardiovascular efficiency, his resting heart rate slows. An average young adult migh have a heart rate around 75 bpm, but the pulse of a well-conditioned endurance runner, regardless of age, is likely to be much slower--often around 50 bpm or even lower. In effect, the heart is taking a longer rest between contractions in a runner than it does in the chest of a couch potato.
So, again (recalling the point of the previous post), slowing the recovery between exertions, whether in the hours between workouts or the one second between heart beats, is not a symptom of decline but a measure of efficiency. As we grow older, we have less time left to live. So, paradoxically, we can most appreciate the time we have left by taking more of it to do what we enjoy most.
2. Keep recovery time in synch with performance time.
With the passing years, as your body slows in running tempo, it also slows in recovery and regeneration time. A lot of athletes overlook this; they know they can't run or ride as fast as when they were in their 20s or 30s, but they still try to maintain the same seven-day-a-week training schedules they had then. I made that mistake for decades before I woke up to the fact that after a hard workout or race, my muscles and blood needed more time to bounce back than they did once. That posed a problem, because if I now needed--let's say--a third more regeneration time, it wasn't practical to just shift from working out every 24 hours to doing it every 32 hours; I'd be wrecking my normal sleep and work cycles. But I did find that a fairly productive solution was to simply take days off more often,. So, for example, I might run two consecutive days, take off one, then run three and take off one, then repeat that seven-day cycle for a while to see how running 5 of every 7 days worked for me. Total weekly mileage dropped, but amazingly, so did performance times!
That's a fairly simple observation, but the booming sciences of human performance suggest that "Slowing" is not just what happens to tempo and recovery time as you grow older. It's more complex, and multifarious, than that. Physiological slowing also plays a role in the performances of young people who have not yet reached their athletic peak. As a runner improves in cardiovascular efficiency, his resting heart rate slows. An average young adult migh have a heart rate around 75 bpm, but the pulse of a well-conditioned endurance runner, regardless of age, is likely to be much slower--often around 50 bpm or even lower. In effect, the heart is taking a longer rest between contractions in a runner than it does in the chest of a couch potato.
So, again (recalling the point of the previous post), slowing the recovery between exertions, whether in the hours between workouts or the one second between heart beats, is not a symptom of decline but a measure of efficiency. As we grow older, we have less time left to live. So, paradoxically, we can most appreciate the time we have left by taking more of it to do what we enjoy most.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Enduring for Life: Will the Mojo Fade?
Most endurance athletes get quite focused on how well they'll perform in the coming days, and the performances will be measured by clock, not calendar. Endurance records are written in minutes and hours, not years or decades.
But what if you perform well by those relentless clock standards in your 20s, 30s, and even 40s, only to burn out or have to give it up due to injury or illness by the time you're 50? That's what has happened to millions of men and women (including many I know personally), and it's heartbreaking. In a country where most people now live into their 80s or 90s, having to give up the sport you love for your last quarter of a century on this planet can be one of life's most ravaging disappointments. Yet, for many and maybe even most of us, that doesn't have to happen.
Over the years, I've discovered some of the secrets of endurance-sport longevity, and have put them to the ultimate test--my own ability to keep competing at a high level long after most people my age have had to hang up their shoes. Now in my seventh decade of competition (1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s...), I'm still going strong--and have high hopes of continuing for years to come--and I'd like to help others be able to do so too. This summer I'm running a couple of mountain-trail 50ks, and in November I'll be running in America's largest ultra, the JFK 50-Mile. And although the 1,500 entrants in the JFK (which was filled in May) are all experienced marathoners or ultrarunners, and most are 20 to 40 years younger, I have good reason to think I'll be able to keep pace with a majority of them. How?
In the next few posts, I want to share some of the secrets of athletic longevity I've learned. Here's the first:
1. Aging isn't the same as decline!
At some point in your late 30s or early 40s, performance times for endurance events inevitably begin to slow, but it's important to understand that your middle-age performances are not inferior to those you achieved in your peak years. Thinking you've started to "lose it" is a spirit-killer, and is even biologically incorrect. Rather, look at it this way: An older athlete is a different animal than a younger one, The 50- or 60-year old is slower, but (if he's trained his mind as well as his body) is probably a wiser and more savvy survivor. Different animals can't be compared by the same measures. A bulldog can't run as fast as a greyhound, but that doesn't make it an inferior breed of dog--only a different one with different capabilities.
Before rushing on to the next observation, take a little time to meditate on this. I'll post #2 shortly.
But what if you perform well by those relentless clock standards in your 20s, 30s, and even 40s, only to burn out or have to give it up due to injury or illness by the time you're 50? That's what has happened to millions of men and women (including many I know personally), and it's heartbreaking. In a country where most people now live into their 80s or 90s, having to give up the sport you love for your last quarter of a century on this planet can be one of life's most ravaging disappointments. Yet, for many and maybe even most of us, that doesn't have to happen.
Over the years, I've discovered some of the secrets of endurance-sport longevity, and have put them to the ultimate test--my own ability to keep competing at a high level long after most people my age have had to hang up their shoes. Now in my seventh decade of competition (1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s...), I'm still going strong--and have high hopes of continuing for years to come--and I'd like to help others be able to do so too. This summer I'm running a couple of mountain-trail 50ks, and in November I'll be running in America's largest ultra, the JFK 50-Mile. And although the 1,500 entrants in the JFK (which was filled in May) are all experienced marathoners or ultrarunners, and most are 20 to 40 years younger, I have good reason to think I'll be able to keep pace with a majority of them. How?
In the next few posts, I want to share some of the secrets of athletic longevity I've learned. Here's the first:
1. Aging isn't the same as decline!
At some point in your late 30s or early 40s, performance times for endurance events inevitably begin to slow, but it's important to understand that your middle-age performances are not inferior to those you achieved in your peak years. Thinking you've started to "lose it" is a spirit-killer, and is even biologically incorrect. Rather, look at it this way: An older athlete is a different animal than a younger one, The 50- or 60-year old is slower, but (if he's trained his mind as well as his body) is probably a wiser and more savvy survivor. Different animals can't be compared by the same measures. A bulldog can't run as fast as a greyhound, but that doesn't make it an inferior breed of dog--only a different one with different capabilities.
Before rushing on to the next observation, take a little time to meditate on this. I'll post #2 shortly.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The War on Science--and the Role Endurance Athletes Need to Play
A lot of us long-distance runners regard our sport as a welcome escape from the stresses of life. We can feel free, independent, and unencumbered on the trail in a way we might not in our workplace or at home. Up on a mountain trail, we can often breathe cleaner air than we can elsewhere, and we might appreciate vistas that more sedentary people rarely see.
But to some degree, that appreciation we runners feel may be an illusion. In evolutionary time, it's an eyeblink of paradise, and it's disappearing fast. The air we breathe as runners is endangered by a growing burden of smoke from coal-burning power plants and heavy industries; the forested vistas we enjoy are increasingly endangered by wildfires and by rapidly spreading diseases that are causing millions of trees to die.
As endurance athletes, we enjoy the wonders of a beautiful planet more than most people ever can. But now, if we want those wonders to be saved, we have a need--even a responsibility--to do more to protect them than most of us have so far. To emphasize how embattled our natural world has become, I only have to recall several times in recent years when major running events had to be cancelled or disrupted by massive forest fires. The epic Badwater run across Death Valley had to be shut down mid-race a few years ago, and runners who'd run all day and all night and were finally nearing the finish on Mt. Whitney were stopped by forest rangers just miles from the finish, out of the race. Then there was the cancellation of the iconic Western States Endurance Run. There was a giant fire in the Angeles National Forest of Southern California, which destroyed the course on which the Mt. Disappointment 50k and 50 mile are run. A year later, the race's T-shirt memorialized the event. And now, this summer, runners in Colorado and Utah are getting hit.
The root of the challenge we face is not a lack of resources to protect our environment, but a lack of adequate awareness and education in our American population--a lack that has been exacerbated by a mostly gutless mainstream media. There's a huge--potentially tragic and catastrophic--disparity, now, between what we hear on the evening news and what the world's scientists are trying to tell us with growing urgency. The media, which get vast amounts of their funding from the advertising of industries that profit from the combustion of fossil fuels, keep our attention focused on entertainment, scandals, crime-shows, juvenile comedy, and other distractions. Meanwhile, the climate and environmental scientists are increasingly frantic. Yet, the scientists are not getting through to us. Thanks to pervasive anti-science campaigns, polls indicate that the percentage of Americans who don't believe in evolution, or who don't think climate change is being driven by human activity, has actually increased in the past twenty years. In effect, a growing part of the American population has retrogressed into pre-scientific, medieval perceptions of the world--the kinds of perceptions we associate with the Inquisition, or burning witches at the stake. If Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma (the one who has declared that global warming is a "hoax") had been born a few centuries earlier, he'd have been one of the Pilgrim fanatics most avidly setting the women of Salem on fire.
And now, there's a guy in North Carolina who joins Inhofe in this anti-science, anti-life crusade. In recent days, when a group of climate scientists and oceanographers forcasted that by 2050 the sea level along the North Carolina coast will have risen by 39 inches as a result of global warming, the state's coastal development interests attacked the scientists for saying something they feared could dstroy their businesses by leading to restrictions on coastal commerce. Instead of expressing concern about what was happening to the atmosphere and ocean, they went to the North Carolina General Assembly and asked that such scientific forecasts be made illegal! Several of the politicians introduced legislation that declared, in effect, that it is against the law for anyone to publicly recognize that sea-level is rising. It was like making it illegal for fire alarms to sound when there's a fire, or for people to call 911 when someone has a heart attack.
I've never lived in North Carolina, but I've run several races there--the N.C. Track Club Marathon in the mid-1970s, where I finished second to Jack Fultz, who a few weeks later won the Boston Marathon, and years later the Frostbite 50K. The people I met in North Carolina were friendly and gracious--the kinds of people I'd enjoy having as neighbors. A few years ago, my wife and I nearly decided to move to Asheville, NC (we ultimately chose Southern California for its sunnier winters). But for runners who live in North Carolina today, whether along the endangered coast or in the mountains (where much of the Smoky Mountain National Park is being ravaged by the aforementioned coal smoke), be aware that at least a few of your legislators must rank among the most ignorant humans ever to reach adulthood without being eaten by other animals. Watch out, North Carolina!
And again, what's the point for us runners (not to mention our families, neighbors, and country)? It's simply that we can't take our trails and wildlands for granted, ever again. If we and others who have an educated perspective don't take strong action to counter the anti-science and exploit-the-land forces soon, we'll lose those trails and wildlands. Economic pressures will cause the federal government to give up its public spaces--national forests, national parks, wilderness preserves--one after another, to corporate interests such as mining, timber, oil drilling, and commercial development. The air will get more polluted, the vistas despoiled. It's already happening (California is shutting down hundreds of state parks), and it's only a matter of time where the places you run may be closed.
Our society has become fragmented, and we endurance athletes happen to be among the constitutents best able to appreciate and defend our diminishing environment. We know, better than many others do, how valuable the wild world is to the long-run vitality of our species, and to the human spirit. Runners and environmentalists have compelling reason to work more closely together.
But to some degree, that appreciation we runners feel may be an illusion. In evolutionary time, it's an eyeblink of paradise, and it's disappearing fast. The air we breathe as runners is endangered by a growing burden of smoke from coal-burning power plants and heavy industries; the forested vistas we enjoy are increasingly endangered by wildfires and by rapidly spreading diseases that are causing millions of trees to die.
As endurance athletes, we enjoy the wonders of a beautiful planet more than most people ever can. But now, if we want those wonders to be saved, we have a need--even a responsibility--to do more to protect them than most of us have so far. To emphasize how embattled our natural world has become, I only have to recall several times in recent years when major running events had to be cancelled or disrupted by massive forest fires. The epic Badwater run across Death Valley had to be shut down mid-race a few years ago, and runners who'd run all day and all night and were finally nearing the finish on Mt. Whitney were stopped by forest rangers just miles from the finish, out of the race. Then there was the cancellation of the iconic Western States Endurance Run. There was a giant fire in the Angeles National Forest of Southern California, which destroyed the course on which the Mt. Disappointment 50k and 50 mile are run. A year later, the race's T-shirt memorialized the event. And now, this summer, runners in Colorado and Utah are getting hit.
The root of the challenge we face is not a lack of resources to protect our environment, but a lack of adequate awareness and education in our American population--a lack that has been exacerbated by a mostly gutless mainstream media. There's a huge--potentially tragic and catastrophic--disparity, now, between what we hear on the evening news and what the world's scientists are trying to tell us with growing urgency. The media, which get vast amounts of their funding from the advertising of industries that profit from the combustion of fossil fuels, keep our attention focused on entertainment, scandals, crime-shows, juvenile comedy, and other distractions. Meanwhile, the climate and environmental scientists are increasingly frantic. Yet, the scientists are not getting through to us. Thanks to pervasive anti-science campaigns, polls indicate that the percentage of Americans who don't believe in evolution, or who don't think climate change is being driven by human activity, has actually increased in the past twenty years. In effect, a growing part of the American population has retrogressed into pre-scientific, medieval perceptions of the world--the kinds of perceptions we associate with the Inquisition, or burning witches at the stake. If Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma (the one who has declared that global warming is a "hoax") had been born a few centuries earlier, he'd have been one of the Pilgrim fanatics most avidly setting the women of Salem on fire.
And now, there's a guy in North Carolina who joins Inhofe in this anti-science, anti-life crusade. In recent days, when a group of climate scientists and oceanographers forcasted that by 2050 the sea level along the North Carolina coast will have risen by 39 inches as a result of global warming, the state's coastal development interests attacked the scientists for saying something they feared could dstroy their businesses by leading to restrictions on coastal commerce. Instead of expressing concern about what was happening to the atmosphere and ocean, they went to the North Carolina General Assembly and asked that such scientific forecasts be made illegal! Several of the politicians introduced legislation that declared, in effect, that it is against the law for anyone to publicly recognize that sea-level is rising. It was like making it illegal for fire alarms to sound when there's a fire, or for people to call 911 when someone has a heart attack.
I've never lived in North Carolina, but I've run several races there--the N.C. Track Club Marathon in the mid-1970s, where I finished second to Jack Fultz, who a few weeks later won the Boston Marathon, and years later the Frostbite 50K. The people I met in North Carolina were friendly and gracious--the kinds of people I'd enjoy having as neighbors. A few years ago, my wife and I nearly decided to move to Asheville, NC (we ultimately chose Southern California for its sunnier winters). But for runners who live in North Carolina today, whether along the endangered coast or in the mountains (where much of the Smoky Mountain National Park is being ravaged by the aforementioned coal smoke), be aware that at least a few of your legislators must rank among the most ignorant humans ever to reach adulthood without being eaten by other animals. Watch out, North Carolina!
And again, what's the point for us runners (not to mention our families, neighbors, and country)? It's simply that we can't take our trails and wildlands for granted, ever again. If we and others who have an educated perspective don't take strong action to counter the anti-science and exploit-the-land forces soon, we'll lose those trails and wildlands. Economic pressures will cause the federal government to give up its public spaces--national forests, national parks, wilderness preserves--one after another, to corporate interests such as mining, timber, oil drilling, and commercial development. The air will get more polluted, the vistas despoiled. It's already happening (California is shutting down hundreds of state parks), and it's only a matter of time where the places you run may be closed.
Our society has become fragmented, and we endurance athletes happen to be among the constitutents best able to appreciate and defend our diminishing environment. We know, better than many others do, how valuable the wild world is to the long-run vitality of our species, and to the human spirit. Runners and environmentalists have compelling reason to work more closely together.
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