(I'm Still a) Road Runner, honey...
Tips For the Tarmac, #5-10, from someone who learned them the hard way.
Picking right on up where the previous post left off - which, in case you missed it, is here:
5. RUN HILLS
There is a saying in running: “Hills are speed work in disguise.” I used to think this was metaphorical. It’s not. It’s literal. The best way to engage in proper speed work is to attend a session hosted by a local running club where someone else can tell you what to do, rather than trying yourself and either under or over-doing it. (See a later confession.) Such groups abound and I join them both in Kingston and in Beverley on midweek evenings when and where I can.
The alternative removes the diary commitment. Find a local hill, one that isn’t too steep (a gradient of 3-5% makes sense.) Run relatively hard up it, jog or walk back down, rest a minute, repeat. Do it a few times over (4-6 is a decent number), enjoy the sensation and not only will the variety help prevent injury, but I can almost guarantee you will find yourself running faster in the future as a result
6. EMBRACE THE PAIN
This may sound like I am reverting back to that other, more universal saying that I only just argued against: no pain, no gain. Not so. We’ve already agreed that 80% of any cardiovascular exercise should be easy, after all. But that other 20%? That can be hard.
Racing can be even harder. And I am never quite certain which is the hardest road/track distance of them all. Is it the competitive mile, for its relentless pushing-to-the-max controlled sprint that can literally feel like your body is about to explode? Or is it the competitive 26.2 mile marathon, where your legs will almost inevitably tire and your mind will try and convince you to stop, and if it can’t, it will introduce pain and fatigue and sometimes even cramp to try and win its case?
Fighting this particular threshold/lactic acid pain is futile. Award such pain the honor of being your enemy and it will emerge victorious every time; you’ll find yourself walking to those finish lines with a slump and a grimace instead of with a sprint and a smile. Welcome it on board as an ally instead. Chat to it, like, “Hey, it’s you! You’re going to keep me company through the end of the race? Nice to have you on board, just move to the back a little and let me lead.” For, as Matt Fitzgerald addresses through case examples in another of his many excellent books, How Bad Do You Want It?, so much of this is about mentality. A positive mindset is everything.
7. DON’T RUN
The pain of going hard or going the distance is very different from the pain of an emerging or prospective injury, which you should respect and indeed bow down to. And this one I know all too well from experience. There have been so many times when I have failed to heed the warning signs, to remember that us weekend warriors, us everyday runners, us diehard amateurs, need to occasionally get off the plan, abandon the streak, listen to our bodies and stay home.
There was 2002. Leading up to my first marathon, I followed the truly classic trajectory of going ever longer distances in training without sufficiently dialing it back in-between. (Most first-time marathon plans will only have you increasing your weekend long run distance every three weeks.) When I felt a pang in my left knee, I ignored it. It got worse but I found I could run through it, and the pain would disappear after a few miles. Then it would come back harder afterwards, until one day, only a month before the marathon, I found I couldn’t walk. I had followed the archetypal path to runner’s knee.
A friend hooked me up with a sports massage therapist – on a purely professional basis I hasten to add, given that clients are usually wearing their birthday suit when massaged – and it helped. Up to a point. Not running helped a hell of a lot more. I was out of commission until about ten days before the marathon, and understandably nervous as hell about my prospects on the day. As it turned out, I had an incredible debut NYC Marathon, and though the knee was sore again for a week or two afterwards, it turned out that the period of rest had done me a lot of good. But it would have been easier and cheaper and less stressful all around if I hadn’t overrun in the first place.
There was 2010. I’d had a great season, running my first Boston Marathon and to my incredible surprise given that I barely slept the night before, requalifying for Boston in the process. I was loving my new Vibrams, which I’d been wearing all year (I may have worn them at Boston in fact), placing high and even winning my age group in a number of local races. But as autumn came around and the running season peaked, I felt a pain at the top of my left foot. After all, the road to injury is paved. And I had been doing a lot of road running that year.
To be blunt about it, there’s a reason many people prefer offroad running, and that’s because repetitive stress injuries are always going to be a concern if you take up distance road running: there is, after all, very little variety in the movement of the body over the course of a well-run marathon or even half-marathon, other than the occasional hill. Still, all I had to do was get through the Mohawk Hudson Marathon in October, a race I was using to qualify for Boston 2012, and I was ready to hang up those Vibrams for a few weeks.
Running hard that October Sunday morning, running fast, doing my best to ignore that lingering top-foot pain, I got about 15-16 miles in when I felt something crack. I could and should have come off the course, but, per my intro, I didn’t want to post a DNF. So, like an idiot I ran through to the finish line (and qualified for Boston in the process)... At which I found, as soon as I stopped, that I couldn’t walk. I had to limp to the car, get myself on a crutch, and abandon all hope of running before the New Year. It was a fractured metatarsal, and the only cure was rest and then a very slow reentry into the running orbit come January. (There’s a side-conversation to this which I’ll relegate to a footnote to keep the tips coming.1)
Then there is 2024 and proof that I still haven’t learned my lesson. In early March, after I had committed to the May 26 marathon, I competed in an indoor triathlon at our Kingston YMCA. Though I’ve done a couple of shorter distance outdoor triathlons, this was my first time doing this particular event, which is merely 15 minutes swimming, 20 mins on an Aerodyne bike, and 20 minutes running laps on the very short elevated track; results are measured by total distance. My cross-training had gone great, my running speed was finally coming back after the fractured patella of December 2022 (a non-running accident), and I turned in a highly respectable debut result, especially with the running. But all three events required real stretching and movement and pumping from my arms (the bike has a push-pull handlebar) and when I tacked on an aggressive hill repeat work-out just a few days later to continue my marathon training, my back went all funny, as if in addition to my functioning bones, my body was carrying around an extra sack of broken ones.
As ever, I should have listened to that weird new pain, remembered that speed work is best conducted with a coach on hand, reminded myself that the marathon was far enough away, and taken some rest after that hard indoor tri. Instead, I completed the hill work - I had a program in place for my spring marathon, after all – and then my long weekend runs for the next two weeks until I got to England, at which I found I wasn’t capable of any running without that backpack-of-broken-bones feel. A pre-trip massage didn’t work, a Yoga class in London didn’t help, and it was only when I booked another massage in London that the masseur heard my story and immediately identified that I’d damaged the tendons on my back, which take longer to heal than muscles. Massage could only do so much; rest was required. I was forced to stop running entirely for a couple of weeks in the UK and abandon all hope of running a Boston Qualifier at my recent May marathon, as had been my goal.
So: Do as I say, not as I do! Sometimes you can run out a minor pain, but sometimes you need rest, and sometimes you need medical attention. It’s better to err on the side of caution.
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8. PACE YOURSELF
Let me take you back to that first marathon. I was set to run it with a friend from literally across my street: he was younger than me, had run in high school, and though we didn’t train together, he was certain he could help get me through my goal of breaking four hours. And then, in the holding area on Staten Island that very cold November morning, lo and behold if he didn’t come across one of his high school friends. He went to high school in South Africa, I should add: the chances of this happening were remote to begin with, additionally so given that said friend had been given someone else’s bib at 7am in a Manhattan bar the previous morning, and was already regretting his drunken decision. (This is illegal and immoral, FYI, and in a more digital age, he wouldn’t have got away with it.)
We all set off together and even allowing for the packed crowd in our corral, our first mile was a perambulatory 13-minute pace. The second, not much better. The third was still way above the 9-minute miles I needed to average, and which would now need to come down to something significantly faster to make up the early loss. Disappointed at my friend’s decision to run slow, I had no choice but to pick up my own pace. As the miles ticked by and the field gradually thinned out, my own miles gradually got faster. I was having a blast, enjoying the crowd, accepting the encouragement, feeling good, the worry of the runner’s knee temporarily behind me, but as we entered Central Park around mile 23, the calculator in my head said I could not make a sub 4:00 time unless I put in solid 8-minute miles. And that felt beyond me.
…At which I heard a voice behind me shouting, “Come on Tony, we can do it! Follow me!” It was my neighbor, my friend who I’d been cursing out beneath my breath for the last 3 hours; he’d taken off at the half-way mark, had determined to find me among about 30,000 people ahead of him, and though I kept insisting it was too late and I ws hurting, refused to let me quit. We pushed and pushed through those rolling Central Park hills, the lactic acid flaring up in my legs, my head throbbing, my entire body sagging… and finished with the best part of a minute to spare. We had done it. And almost certainly, we had done it only because I had (inadvertently) paced myself.
While my busy young friend decided that marathons were too intensive for his work life, I had caught the bug. I ran NYC the next year, and got cocky, somehow thought I could shave tens of minutes off my time despite the fact I got a late entry and was under-trained. I hit the wall halfway through and beat that previous 3:59 by barely two minutes, walking a lot more of that second half than I recall running. Next year in New York, I got as far as mile 20, the marker for which is inconveniently placed at the entrance to the bridge into the Bronx. It was as if my body didn’t want to leave Manhattan. It slumped to a walk and struggled to pick more than a lazy pained jog from there on in.
The following spring, I figured to try for Boston, on a rainy day on the New Jersey coastline. Again I hit the wall, again I had to walk. Same with marathon number 5 later that year, in Albany for the Hudson Mohawk, where the last few miles went through a park just like NYC, except that unlike NYC, there were no spectators in the park and therefore nobody to discourage you from walking through it…
It was so dispiriting that I took three years off marathon running upon moving upstate later that year, so as to focus on trails where I had to learn the lesson of pacing all over again. I returned to marathon running in 2009, in a new age group where I got a more generous Boston Qualifying time, and was able to meet my goal, finally. Since then, my marathons have been vastly more even, with the notable exception of the heatwave year of Boston 2012, where the temperatures hit the 80s, and I didn’t pace myself sufficiently slower to compensate. Allowing that approx. 1500 people DNF’d and 1000 sought medical treatment, the fact that I finished well under 4hrs, albeit close to fainting, seemed like a victory.
Such pacing mistakes are not confined to marathons. I have seen similar “rookie errors” as the Yanks call them in local 5ks: high-schoolers shooting off like it’s the 400 meters, and me placing bets on myself at what point in the race I will rein them in. There have been a couple of oddball characters in our local running group who always insist on starting fast and always ending up finishing slow, and usually further back down the pack than they needed to. I love being able to finish strong at any race distance, and while doing so may leave a lingering feeling that I could have gone harder, earlier, and therefore posted a faster time, believe me, that little bit of doubt is infinitely preferable to knowing that I went out too fast and slowed down as a result.
9. RUN FOR A GOAL
There are lots of great reasons to enter races. For some, especially in the UK, it’s an opportunity to raise money for a good cause, or perhaps in memory of someone prematurely lost, and these are valid justifications for certain. From a physical perspective, races provide a real-time check on your progress and your pace and, depending on distance, your stamina too. Plus, the satisfaction of upping your heart rate, giving it your best, and in all but the worst days finding you were capable of more than you thought you were, should give you a high that will last well after the chemical one wears off. Entering a race well in advance – especially longer distance ones with above-token entry fees - tends to ensure you keep to a schedule and stick to your training. That’s my excuse at any rate.
But a training program alone can provide a goal. And of course you can choose your own goal outside of an organized race. You may want to run every street in your town. (I believe I have done so by now in Kingston, for instance, though the sprawling little city I still call home constantly surprises me with another cul-de-sac or dead end, another little side road or hilltop driveway.) You may be doing Couch to 5k. (Oooh, I have a podcast for you.) You may want to run a 5k every weekend for a year, or run a marathon around a quarter-mile loop in your neighborhood, as one friend did during the pandemic. (As he pointed out, he was never far from a water stop – or a water closet!) You may want to run across America, or the length of Africa, or the length of the Appalachian Trail though be forewarned, you won’t be the first nor the last in any of these cases and most others you can imagine too.
The point is that - regardless of race or route, training program or charitable fund-raising - just as in our creative, personal and financial lives, goals are good. They give us something to work towards, to strive for; they offer a target, necessitate training and hard work, and keep us focused on improving ourselves as individuals, which I believe is instinctive anyway but has been largely buried by the modern consumerist society. By at least approximately adhering to steps 1-8 (allowing for the fact that we’re all amateurs out here and we f**k up accordingly) Number 9 becomes a goal in itself. Achieving those goals then becomes a regular reward to look forward to, and that brings us to the most importance guiding rule of all:
10. RUN FOR FUN
Remember what I said about how we’d run around as little kids? Weren’t we laughing as we did so? Weren’t we running because it was fun? Of course we were, because that’s who we are. Running is not always enjoyable: that’s why Brendan Leonard crafted a book called I Hate Running and You Can Too, full of his idiosyncratic little drawings and graphs. But he only claims to hate it; I know and he knows that he secretly loves it and wants you to actually love running too.
To repeat from points 1-9, a certain amount of pain, frustration, fatigue and annoyance is going to appear along the way to discourage you. But it’s all part of the process of having fun. We run not just because we can, and not just because we know it’s good for us. We run because we enjoy it.
I hope you have enjoyed these amateur tips in turn. Have fun out there. Don’t forget to thank your volunteers. And always remember to smile as you cross the finish line, because… You did it!
Some people in my running community saw this as confirmation that we aren’t meant to run barefoot, or in toe-gloves, and that Vibram Five Fingers were a dangerous fad. It’s fair to say that I do not plan to do a marathon in them again. And it is certainly true that people who made a drastic switch at the time, as a result of the book Born To Run endorsing minimal running in general and the Five Fingers in particular, were risking injury, because when you make that transition, your calf muscle literally needs to expand its stretching capability to make up for the millimeters you’ve stacked previously onto your heel (which can be as much as 12mm in some shoes) and can only pull of that monumental feat gradually.
However, that was less my own problem than that I had just put into too many damn miles and not heeded the warning signs. Besides, I have seen many of my friends develop plantar fasciitis from running in high-heeled sneakers and at least one of them never came back from it – and he was the fastest runner in the Catskills at the time. So rather than let the anti-minimalists have their victory dance, I decided to take a page out of ultra-runner and vegan convert Scott Jurek’s excellent first book Eat and Run, in which he detailed how after going vegetarian seemed to backfire on him, then before he reverted to the carnivore diet with which he had grown up in a hunting family, he decided to go all the way and try vegan. If you know anything about Scott Jurek’s achievements over the years, you will know that the rest is history.
I therefore decided that before I conceded defeat on minimalist footwear, I’d try going yet further and run barefoot. At the Kingston YMCA I took to the circular track up above a gym and went fully barefoot as I finally dared run again. I felt my foot strengthen, my form improve and my fitness and ability slowly come back. Finally, when I got outside again for some proper miles, that form fitted into whatever footwear I used. See my tip No. 4: Run Naked.
the maximalist-minimalist debate goes on, and the unarguable conclusion is that it's nice to have choices. reporting out from the minimalist side (N=1), I'm stuck right now at 23 marathons/ultra's barefoot, as I'm letting my irritated meniscus recover (as per one of your important tips). hoping to run the YMCA 5k this coming Sunday for barefoot race #99. btw, i'm amazed they let you run barefoot at the Kingston YMCA. at Middletown YMCA, they are anti-barefoot and I've not been able to sway them or engage in substantive discussion. the problem is conformism. it's time for us to bring back some non-conformist Hippie Spirit, imho
This is inspiring, Tony. You should do a book. As someone very new to running, but slightly averse to joining clubs etc, it’s hard to get decent advice, despite what my Facebook algorithm thinks.