And talking of style.....

It doesn't get better than this....
in full flight down the finishing straight of the 1972 Olynmpic 1500 final, eventual winner Pekka Vasala of Finland and the legendary Kip Keino of Kenya, the race favourite.

Toledos: keep in touch

A special message for my former team-mates in Toledo Runners:

dudes, I have been "struck off" the email list so will miss your race reports, tales of injuries :) and invitations to have ice cream...

never fear, when I have something staggering to tell you I'll email you all privately -- feel free to do the same!

Calling all Magical Milers

A spin-off from the hunt for a coach is the formation of the Magical Milers Club.

This came about when I consulted Coach to the Champions Sir Bobby McGee for his opinions on coaches. We rapidly got side-tracked, as we both share a fascination with fast miling. Bobby declared himself interested in my own Mile Project and started cooking up ways he could help. At his suggestoion I've started gathering together a group of 4 or 5 runners -- probably all Masters -- who want to do a Very Fast Mile. Right now that means breaking the 5-minute "barrier".

Yes, never mind the 4-minute mile, we're past all that. But for men around 45 onwards and women in their 40s, getting under 5 minutes for one mile is special. What we're intending to do is target the Pearl Street Mile and track events around the same time -- that's August 2007. If we have to, we'll organise our own Invitational track meet with the specific intention of getting everybody in the group under 5 minutes.

Preparing for a mile is tough. But the good news is that you can prepare "as if" for a 5k until the last few weeks, then add very specific training.

I'm happy to say that the first person I approached about the Magical Milers, marathon great Benji Durden, immediately said he was "in" and is putting the word out. We've got a very fast woman interested, too. This is going to be fun!

Wanted: coach, must have experience and gsoh

It's ironic that a few days after wondering on this Blog, "Is the magic in the coach, the schedule, or the runner?", I find myself with no coach, no schedule and not running.

Gabino decided it was time for me to "graduate" from his group, having taken me as far as he could. So far that although I was in a group, I had been running most of my workouts on my own because of the pace I needed to hit. He gave me two leaving presents: the promise of an expenses-paid invitation from the organisers of the Carlsbad 5000, the world-class 5k road race held every year in April in California; and a referral to Steve Jones, the former world record-holder in the marathon, and one of Gabino's own coaches.

Living in Boulder you'd think that finding a coach would be easy enough. Not so. Even assuming I can get hold of Jonesie for a chat, his group may be way too fast for me. And although Boulder is swimming in coaches, most of them are ex-elite athletes who know what worked for them and work that system. They are almost all marathon-orientated. Those that have the know-how to tune in the speed for a super-fast 5k don't know anything about preparing for the mile. Those who do, don't have groups.

So meanwhile, no schedule. I've been corresponding with Tony Benson, the "Run with the Best" coach in Australia (see links) who runs a mentoring and long-distance coaching scheme. The problem there is that he wants me to provide my year-long program so that he can offer advice and tweak as the year goes on. A year's schedule? I've been working week to week. I had a funny exchange with Dwight about that. We have such different motivational styles -- me being an "options" type, and he being "procedural". Dwight likes to see the whole year laid out so he knows exactly what he's doing day by day: it adds detail to the vision and makes it more real to him. Me -- it fills me with dread and stifles me. I want to keep my options open.

I do like to have very clearly defined goals, then an overview of how I am going to get them (the big picture). I deal with the details in smaller chunks. If I know I am going to be doing a phase of highly-specific pre-race training in, say, March 2007, I really don't need to know right now what specific workout I am going to be running on March 12.

The not-running is Bobby's fault. I was complaining at Drills last week that my groin and adductors felt completely seized up. Well, I should have mentioned it earlier, shouldn't I? The mystery, niggling, not-quite-an-injury that has been bothering me for months -- Mr McGee diagnosed the cause in two minutes flat and immediately recommended time off to let it heal -- the groin being a tricky area to deal with.

So. No coach. No schedule. No running. Yes, at some level it feels liberating. But I am finding the less I do, the more tired I feel. As for finding a coach, well it doesn't feel urgent any more. What's going to be more important is finding people to run with through a winter of base-building.

So, who's got the best style?

In the lead: Australian Craig Mottram -- the "jolly green giant" of middle-distance racing compared to the little, fast-striding Africans he habitually finds himself up against.

Thanks to Super-Coach Bobby McGee for sharing this one. He was sent the picture by an Australian coach -- Down Under they all think Mottram has a superb style. Bobby's comment: never mind Mottram, the guy behind him is a MUCH better model!

Check out the Australian's upper body. He looks as if he is so knackered that as he ties up he has gone past upright to the point where he is almost leaning backwards. And as I have certain "issues" with my arms, Bobby wanted particularly for me to clock what Mottram is doing with his. Let's just say they are not where they should be.

Compare and contrast with the great Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopa, world record-holder at 5,000 and 10,000m. Balanced, compact, forward-leaning, great flexibility.

Mottram has not beaten Bekele in three years...except ironically in this race where, running as team captain, he pushed himself to a PR of 7:32.19 to became the first Oceania athlete to defend a World Cup title.

Henry's Quote of the Week

"I have to hold-back my horses. you are right! Strong head can ruin the knees for sure."

Henry Rono.

'Scrawl it on the inside of your eyelids...'

Is the magic in the coach, the schedule, or the runner?

I'm beginning to think that the greatest gift a coach can bring to the table is the ability to encourage people to train consistently over time.

Yes, there is the technical aspect of knowing/feeling numbers and quality of reps and intervals and hills, but the most important thing is to keep people at it. That's where "the schedule" comes in. You get it once a week and know roughly what you'll be doing when... it makes it easier to find the time and to motivate yourelf knowing that there is a purpose to it AND a group of people waiting for you at 5pm!

In the group I have been training with, the schedule calls for 40-50 miles a week covered in 7 days (no rest day). But I've averaged 33 miles a week for the last year and don't know anyone else who has totally followed the program. Yet we've all improved.

Thanks Emilie, for the comments that helped me get clear about this. It follows on from Kevin Beck's words from the last post. Please follow the link in that post (below) and read his article... if you are a runner it'll do you so much good. Here's another snippet to encourage you (the emphases are his):

"Patience, trust, resilience, and the ability to learn from past experience are the greatest psychological determinants of success in long-distance running, just as they are in other realms. The greatest physical determinants are, regardless of your event, an aerobic base developed through years of accumulated mileage and - just as important - consistency (a by-product of resilience, both physical and psycho-emotional). Believe this philosophy, scrawl it on the inside of your eyelids, live it, and regardless of your inherent abilities, you'll look around one day and be pleasantly astonished at your own improvement and achievements.

Pared down to the essentials, then, hard work and confidence are all a distance runner truly needs. I have found that regardless of whatever permutation of miles, intervals, tempo runs, hill workouts, and long runs I settle on for any given stretch of training, the thing that matters most is nudging your total time spent training ever higher until you find your personal "sweet spot" and only then, when you're ready to attack a period of racing, become truly concerned with intensity."

All you need to know about training

"Run as much as you can as often as possible and run like hell when moved to do so."

Thanks to distance runner and coach Kevin Beck for this piece of essential wisdom -- included in his great article, "The secret you've been looking for..."

This training business is not all that complicated, now is it?

Running as ceremony

They ran to make rain, to honour the dead, to generate healing. They ran to send news and get reinforcements. They ran for power and for prayer.
Yep, the American Indians knew a thing or two about running, as I've just discovered after finding an out-of-print book on the subject.
One of the bits I liked most was this Navajo chant (a "Leg Song") that their runners used, that just about sums it all up:

"The mountain,
I become part of it...
The herbs, the fir tree,
I become part of it.
The morning mists,
The clouds, the gathering waters,
I become part of it.
The rain that sweeps across the earth,
I become part of it.
The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen...
I become part of it."

* From "Indian Running: Native American history and tradition" by Peter Nabokov (Ancient City Press, New Mexico 1981).

Outbreaks of good sportsmanship

Colorado is the first place where I've lined up for a race -- a championship race at that -- and had someone next to me in the front row shake my hand and wish me a good race.
So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at another outbreak of good sportsmanship at the Blockbuster 5k last week.
With about half a mile to go I'd just caught the guy in second place and we'd both been joined by another runner. In the confusion of trading pl;aces I led everyone slightly off course. In the process of getting bac k on course, the runner who had been third ended up 25 yards in front of me. To my astonishment he slowed down and waited for me. "Go on", I said, "you were catching me anyway". "No, no", he said "you were in front".
What then followed was a bizarre routine of "no, I insist, after you..." all conducted at speed, with one eye on the fast-approaching finishing line. We agreed to run in together... but at the line he pushed me in front.
He disappeared after the finish, but at least I can recognise him "officially" here: so thank you Paul Reich of Telluride - you are a gentleman!

Running with the moon

This month's full moon -- the Harvest Moon -- is a humdinger. It's close to the Earth and looking huge.
No wonder I have been able to stick in a few extra miles.
For a while now, I've been experimenting with co-ordinating my training with the moon's phases. I got the idea from the vascular surgeon Dr Irving Dardik. A founding chairman of the US Olympic Sports Medicine Council, Dardik was at one time banned from practising medicine because his peers thought his ideas on biological rhythms were too outlandish. But they make a lot of sense to me.
Dr Dardik designed an exercise programme that realigned patients with the natural cycles of the environment. With carefully timed periods of exercise, Dardik found he could nudge people's onboard biological computers back into synch and actually recreate a healthy system; he got some amazing results in people with chronic diseases.
Dardik's big idea is that life is a wave, not a straight line. Everything occurs in cycles. One week we're up, one week we're down. Birth rates, death rates, accident rates. Heart rates, even. Plot them on a graph, you'll see waves.
When I looked back at my training diaries I saw the same cyclic pattern.
This natural phenomenon is one of the reasons we have coffee breaks. Within the 24-hour sleep/wake cycle, there is an ultradian rhythm that produces natural peaks of activity and rest every 90-120 minutes. Waves within waves. We're healthier when we respect the ebb and flow of our energy.
One of the ways to "ride the wave" of biological rhythms, Dardik said, is to tune exercise to the phases of the moon. Full moon is a high energy time. New moon is a low energy time. Join the dots. After the new moon, you may find your energy starts to pick up, building to a peak of activity around full moon, when it starts falling off again towards the "trough" of new moon.
So...do your highest-mileage weeks (and races, if possible) leading up to, or at, full moon. Have your easy week around new moon. When we're heading into new moon, I don't push myself in training and I am hyper-vigilant for signs of impending injury.

* Information on Dr Dardik is hard to find. His Institute's website has been passive for more than a year. There is one book, by science writer Roger Lewin, that tells the full story: "Making Waves: Irving Dardik and his Superwave Principle" (Rodale, 2005) and that's it.

Doing what it takes

"There are always far more athletes who wish to be the best than there are athletes who are willing to do whatever it takes to get there".

So says Tony Benson, a Lydiard and Cerutty-inspired Australian coach, author of a great "how to train" book called "Run with the Best".

My friends Dwight and Kari Cornwell introduced me to Tony's work. I find myself reading bits of his book avery day; the last time I did that was with Arthur Lydiard's "bible" back in the '80s. Yet Tony's system strikes terror in my heart, as he is definitely a believer in high mileage. I averaged 33 miles a week in the last year which, according to Tony, pretty much means I am still in the "training to train" phase!

Tony bemoans the fact that Australian runners are no longer at the top. And he blames the Kenyans for it. Well, not the Kenyans, exactly, but people's fear of the Kenyans, Ethiopians and Moroccans and the limiting belief that these runners have special genetic gifts or training secrets that means that we can't get near them. The truth of it is -- they train harder!

Tony quotes British champion Bruce Tulloh, who after spending a year in Kenya in the 1970s, said that the Keyans were doing about half the training that Americans or Europeans were doing. Tulloh predicted that when they got disease and malnutrition under control, and were able to train properly, the Kenyans would dominate. Of course, he was proved right.

Tony tells us: "Kip Keino, acknowledged by all the Kenyans I spoke to as their all-time great...might not make the Kenyan top 100 any more. He trained 6-8 times a week. Modern Kenyans train 12-18 times per week." Yes, they are prepared to do what it takes.

As someone raised in the land that produced the likes of W.G.George, Alf Shrubb, Bannister, Pirie, Foster, Ovett, Coe, Cram and all, I am bit embarrassed that the only British runner I look up to these days is Paula Radcliffe. Is there something about our modern lifestyle that means Australian, British and American runners just aren't prepared to do what it takes any more? Or do we blame modern coaches?

Hmm. I am asking myself why I'm only prepared to do 30-40 miles a week. This has got to change.

* Quotes from "Australian Middle and Long Distance Running into the 21st Century", an article on Tony Benson's website. The full article (pdf) is here.