Seize the Day!

Hi, Fellow Runners:

Carpe Diem! – a phrase familiar to most of us as Seize the Day! – were the words used by the poet Horace to inspire participants in the Secular games of Rome in 17 B.C., and they resonate for us more than 2,000 years later.  Whether the next race you run will be your first or another of many, you can and should try to make it a memorable event in your sporting life by preparing for it properly in the last few days before you toe the starting line.

In the Final Week before the Race:

n  Adjust your sleep patterns to reflect the ungodly time you will probably have to get up on Race Day morning.  Bear in mind that most races begin very early in the day (usually between 7:00 and 8:30 a.m.), and that you should be at the race location an hour beforehand.  So turn in a little earlier each evening during the week to assure yourself of at least seven hours of sound sleep every night prior to the race itself.

n  Consciously work at raising to about 65% the portion of your total caloric intake that comes from carbohydrates.  Two vegetables should be part of both your mid-day and evening meals, and fruit should be one of your staples at snack time in the morning and afternoon.

n  On a daily basis, drink a quantity of water that is the equal, in ounces, to half your weight in pounds.  (Thus, a 120-pound woman needs 60 ounces of these liquids each day.)  Check your urine color.  Lemonade is what you’re aiming for.  Apple juice means you’re not hydrating  

On the Night before the Race:

n  Consume a meal at around 6 or 7 p.m.  Chicken with brown rice or whole-wheat pasta would be ideal.  And, of course, avoid alcoholic beverages.  

n  Check the weather forecast and decide what you’re going to wear on Race Day.  Pin your bib and chip on your outer garment. then lay out all your clothes and gear in a corner of a spare room.  Don’t overdress!  Remember, once you start the race, you will warm up quickly and the temperature will feel as if it’s about 3 or 5 degrees higher than it actually is.

On Race Day Itself:

n  Wake up in a positive frame of mind.  Your initial attitude upon opening your eyes is critical.  Before you get up, replay in your mind a recent successful training run.  Assume an attitude that says:  “I’m in control and, come hell or high water, I’m going to nail the finishing time I’ve set as a goal for myself in today’s race”.

n  Eat a good, carbohydrate-rich breakfast, but make sure it’s something your body is accustomed to.   Think either oatmeal, pancakes, whole-grain cereal with banana, brown toast with peanut butter, or yogurt and fresh fruit.  Caffeine before a race is good, so drink at least your usual quantity of coffee or tea.

n  When you arrive at the race site, find a quiet place where you’re able to relax.  Then warm up with some easy stretching and light jogging.  And be sure to visit the Porta-Toilet in the half hour before the race starts.

n  Keep in mind a quote by Jack Daniels, one of North America’s pre-eminent coaches and the gentleman who certified me as a running coach: “Most mistakes in a race are made in the first two minutes, perhaps in the very first minute.”  As you stand at the starting line, don’t be intimidated by the crowds.  Make sure you’re serene and confident when the horn sounds.   Don’t go out too fast.  Start easy instead, then gradually pick up the pace.      

n  During the race, check your form regularly.  Distract yourself when you begin to feel the discomfort brought on by exertion.  Use self-talk to remain positive and to keep negative thoughts at bay.  And all the while, visualize yourself crossing the finish line and seeing the clock recording the finishing time that you may have projected for yourself.

Once it’s over, you can revel in the knowledge that you accomplished something that you may have considered beyond your reach not too long ago.  And in so doing, you will have learned much that is good about yourself.  After all, nobody take on the challenge of competitive road racing without a certain degree of physical and mental toughness that rises above the ordinary.

Coach Stephen

The Meaning of the Marathon

Hi, Fellow Runners:

A while back, in Running Times magazine, a college coach named Adrienne Wald wrote that it was a ‘joke” to run a marathon by walking every other mile or by finishing in six, seven or eight hours. “It used to be that running a marathon was worth something – there used to be a pride in saying that you ran a marathon, but not anymore,” she added.  “Now it’s, ‘How low is the bar?”

That comment raised a firestorm of protest from the magazine’s readers.  Here a sampling of responses:  “Ms. Wald wants to know how low the bar is.  The ‘bar’ will be trampled under the feet of the marathon walkers and joggers, and Adrienne Wald can suck it!”...  “Let’s get rid of the exclusionary lingo and invite more into the sport” ...  “The quote by A. Wald was rude and stuck up.”  And, finally, there came this disclaimer from the editor:  “...we were surprised by the number of readers who took offense at the quote, and agreed with many of the points made.  In hindsight, we should not have run the quote without a larger context.”

The conflicting viewpoints became a subject of discussion at a marathon clinic I was coaching at the time, and the consensus opinion of the 40 members in attendance was decidedly opposed to Ms. Wald’s comment.   This, as it happened, scared the hell out of me.  You see, I had agreed wholeheartedly with Ms. Wald and had intended to track her down and tell her so.  But the reasoned observations of the clinic members gave me pause.   Could it be that, after 35 years of competition, I was falling out of touch with the running world in which I grew up?   Should I even be teaching young people whose thinking on marathons seemed so different from mine?

It took a while and some lost sleep, but  I finally figured out that any disagreement between Ms. Wald and her critics, and therefore any difference between my clinic members and me, was more apparent than real.  That’s because the discussion in the magazine and in the clinic had focused on the numbers – the six, seven or eight hours it took some people to finish a marathon.  But the issue is not time; it’s motivation.   It’s not the what; it’s the why.

Consider the following individuals, all of whom took more than six hours to finish their last marathon, but who had decidedly different reasons for doing so:

A young man in the early stages of Lou Gehrig ’s disease, who ran to show his body that he’s still the boss....., An ex-athlete who made a barroom bet that he could finish the distance and ran slower than he could have because he didn’t want to look too beat up when he collected his winnings later that night ..... A cancer survivor who ran to celebrate her second chance at life..... A twenty-something whose only running goal this season is to collect more finishing medals than her sister.....  A husband and father who told his doctor and promised his family that he’d get off the couch, stop smoking and work himself back into shape. ..... A tourist who stopped a dozen or more times on her marathon route to photograph the host city’s famous landmarks...... Another tourist, this one at Disney World, who ran his marathon on the same week-end he also ran a 5K and a Half-Marathon.     

The list could go on, but I think you get the point.  The right to consider yourself a marathoner is defined by why and how you ran the 42.2 kilometres, not by the number of hours it took you to cross the finish line.  Only your willingness to push through pain, your commitment to be the best you could be on that particular day, allows you to become part of a stream of history that dates back 2,400 years.

The lineage of today's marathoners began, of course, with Philippides and his three-hour run from the Plains of Marathon to the city of Athens in 390 B.C.  It’s a lineage based not on blood but on a shared experience that gives them insight into how Alberto Salazar must have felt when he collapsed and was hospitalized after beating Dick Beardsley by two seconds in the 1982 Boston Marathon that famously became known thereafter as the “Duel in the Sun.”  And they are uniquely able to share the anger and frustration of a Katherine Switzer as she resisted the physical assault of an irate race director dead-set on throwing her off the course simply because she was trying to complete a Boston Marathon that until then (1967) had been closed to women.  And, finally, they can understand the drive of a Jerome Drayton, Canada’s greatest marathon runner, who had a serious leg discrepancy (one leg shorter than the other) and so ran every race in chronic pain.

That’s the heritage of marathoners like myself.  So come and run our race in six, seven, eight hours or more, but do it with respect – always with respect.

Coach Stephen

Pre- and Post-Workout Fueling

Hi, Friends & Fellow Runners:

Next to the commitment you bring to whatever training you may be engaged in, nutrition is the most important factor in determining your ongoing  and ultimate success as a runner at any distance.  The simple truth is that you must eat right to run strong.

Your concerns should be not only what you eat but when you eat it.  An hour or two before the start of a run you should make sure you ingest some food rich in carbohydrates, and 30 to 45 minutes after a run you should look for a healthy shot of protein.  Think carbohydrates for energy and protein for recovery.  And remember, the best carbs come from fruits, vegetables and whole-grain breads, cereals, rice and pasta, while good protein sources include dairy products (low-fat milk and yogurt, as well as eggs and cheese); lean beef, chicken and fish.

Prior to your morning runs, consider a breakfast that includes one or another of these choices: steel-cut oatmeal, pancakes, a bagel or brown toast with peanut butter, whole-grain cereal with bananas, or two scoops of All-Greens powder blended with skim milk and real fruit.  And before your evening runs, when time is often short and convenience a concern, consider a snack consisting of either instant oatmeal, two pieces of fruit, an energy bar, three or four fig Newton’s, or a granola bar.  Obviously, the quantity of food you eat should be commensurate with the distance and pace of your intended run.

Once your workout is over, it’s important that you kick-start the process of effectively and quickly repairing muscle tissue and replacing damaged cells.  Here the recovery options include Gatorade Recovery drink, Clif Builder’s Protein Bar, Branched Chain Amino Acid powder, or a protein shake such as Muscle Milk.  On a par with these products is the most prosaic recovery drink of all – plain old chocolate milk.  Eight to 12 ounces of it are what you’d need.  And if you blended in with it a scoop of whey protein powder and a banana, you’d have the equivalent of“chocolate milk on steroids.”  Afterward, the ideal conclusion to the post-run recovery effort would be a meal featuring either eggs, chicken, fish or lean beef.

The importance of protein in muscle repair does not detract from the fact that complex carbohydrates are the foundation of an runner’s diet.  They should become about 60% of the nutrients you consume while in training, up from 50 to 55%, where they probably are now.  Just try to avoid refined grains like the plague.  Here we mean everything from white rice to Wheaties.  And know that perhaps the best you can say about Wonder Bread is that it has more nutritional value than the plastic it comes wrapped in.

Finally, for heaven’s sake, keep yourself properly hydrated at all times.  A rule of thumb is to consume daily a quantity of water that is the equivalent, in ounces, of half your body weight in pounds.  Thus, if you weigh 120 pounds, you should drink 60 ounces of the clear liquid that some people, with poetic license, have called “the champagne of life.”  It sounds like a lot, but as with so much else, it’s one thing your body can quickly get used to.

Coach Stephen

Why I Run

Hi, Fellow Runners:

When a man exceeds his Biblical allotment of three score and ten years, he tends to become ever more introspective, especially around the time of each succeeding birthday.  I celebrated my 78^th year on this planet several months ago and, among other things, gave some deep thought to the question of why I run, why I have run for the past thirty-five years and why I intend to run for at least the next 15.

As it happens, the sport has helped me physically.  That's almost a given.  I am still running marathons and expect to be the oldest person ever to qualify for and finish both the New York and Boston marathons in consecutive years (2012 & 2013).  Above and beyond that, running has also made me mentally stronger and has pointed me in the direction of precepts, values and skills that are extremely important to me.  That’s why I would argue that if you stick with running -- consistently rather than sporadically and for years instead of months -- it will help you become a more caring spouse and parent, a more effective business manager or professional, and generally a better person to be around.   

But let's backtrack for a moment and first consider the physical benefits.  Serious runners eat better than most Canadians.  They work at getting at least seven hours of sleep a night.  They drink less than most, smoke not at all – and they decided a long time ago that a jog in the park was a better way to ease stress than a couple of pills from a Prozac bottle.

It’s habits like these, much more than simply placing one foot in front of another, that  enable runners, among other things, to dramatically reduce excess body fat – which, truth be told, is far more important than simply shedding pounds.  According to author Matt Fitzgerald, in his new book called Racing Weight, an elite distance runner has average body fat equal to 7.3% of total weight if he’s a male, and 12.4% if she’s a female.  The comparable numbers for the general population are at least twice as high -- 19.0% and 23.1%, respectively.

This is an important consideration in a society like ours, where for the first time in history, obesity has become responsible for more deaths than malnutrition.

Then, too, the lifestyle of a runner, not just the number of kilometers she runs, has also put running front and center in the battle against ageing.  A Stanford University study, conducted over a period of 25 years and involving about a thousand people who were in their mid-fifties when it began in 1984, reported that the death rate among the approximately 500 runners in the study was less than half that of the non-runners (15% vs. 35%).  Perhaps even more important, because it speaks so eloquently to the quality of life, was the study’s finding that the onset of disabilities among runners trailed that of non-runners by fully 16 years.  Think about that for a moment: more than a decade and a half of living without a cane, a walker, a wheel chair or that most abominable of contraptions, a motorized scooter.  Awesome!

Only the close-minded would still claim, as many in the medical profession did in the eighties and a few still do today, that running’s impact on the body would create a host of physical problems for older runners, in the form of hip and knee replacements, back surgeries and the like.  The Stanford researchers found no discernible difference in the number of such medical procedures between runners and non-runners during the 25-year period covered by the study.

As significant as the physical benefits of running is the unique place it occupies as a metaphor for life. 

Please appreciate, for starters, that the single most fundamental tenet of exercise physiology is the principle of stress and adaptation.   Hard workouts break down muscle cells and tissue as a prelude to a recovery process during which the body mends itself and grows stronger.   Thus we become better runners only when we push beyond our comfort level and confront the pain involved in such an effort.  So too in life.  We grow as human beings only when we move outside our comfort zone.  If we insist on staying within it, if we are content to lead a limited-risk, limited-reward existence, we will rarely do anything special as we make our way in the world.   

Also, in running we compete only against ourselves.   Each time we race, we look to do better than we did the last time.  It’s as simple as that.  Beating other runners is rarely a consideration.   We simply don’t think in terms of getting ahead at the expense of others.    Our motivation comes from the personal progress that we track from week to week, month to month.  This conscious push from within is rarely found outside of running or other athletic endeavors.  So imagine how exceptional we become when we make it an integral part of the person we are in everything we do.

And finally, veteran runners learn early on to say goodbye to giving up.  We enter a race to finish it.  Barring injury, nothing less is acceptable.  In life, then, running teaches us to finish what we start – to set tough goals and achieve them, then set tougher goals and achieve them as well.  At the end of the day, isn’t that what success is all about?  Is it not true that a life without meaningful goals is a life hardly worth living?

Coach Stephen