A Running Analogy: The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

The following is not intended to be taken 100% seriously. Try 70%.

Picking a college is kind of like running competitively in high school. 

On the one hand, you could do lots of hard interval workouts. You could run really intense, race-specific repeats that get you into excellent racing shape and allow you to run great times in high school.

Staying Motivated Through Setbacks

If you love running, you don't need help staying motivated most of the time. But what about during an extended period of failure and discouragement?

This past winter was my best season ever - I set PRs all over the place. Training was amazingly fun. I almost always felt good and I was fiercely motivated, so the whole thing seemed effortless.

The last few months, training has been horrible. I won't go into too much detail about this - the important points are that my legs constantly feel weak and unresponsive, and there is no clear end in sight because I don't know what's causing it.

23 Things I Learned from The Science of Running by Steve Magness

Picture from
http://www.9run.ca/2014/03/book-review-science-of-running-by-steve.html

This is the best training book I've ever read. Part One was dedicated to understanding the science, while Part Two was showing how to apply it to training. Some of the physiology was a bit of a grind to get through, and certainly some parts were hard to understand. But I was never completely lost, and I felt it was applied in a very sound and logical way. And if there wasn't enough research to come to a conclusion about something, Magness said so - he didn't fudge data to fit in with his philosophy. That is a really underrated attribute for a modern scientist to have.

Anyway, here they are:


1. Fatigue is located in the brain. When you exercise hard, it places a significant stress on your body and homeostasis becomes threatened. Your brain is programmed to not let you go until you are actually exhausted - it forces you to slow down at a certain point on a subconscious level. Without this defense mechanism, pushing your heart and lungs to the limit in a race would be catastrophic and result in something like myocardial ischemia, which is when your heart does not receive sufficient blood. The fact that your brain intervenes to slow you down is a recently-discovered phenomenon and is crucial to several areas of exercise physiology.

2. Kicking is possible because of the way the brain regulates exercise. Throughout a race, your brain is collecting feedback about all sorts of factors to determine how fast it is safe to go. Most of the factors are internal and have to do with how tired you are, but one external factor it considers is how much distance is left in the race. When the finish line becomes near, it loosens its grasp a little bit and allows you to push a bit harder because the probability of sustaining damage in such a short time is low.

3. The brain anticipates fatigue in hot conditions - When running in hot weather, your core temperature is higher, so running the same pace is more stressful than it would be in cooler weather. But running in the heat feels harder from the start - before your core temperature gets a chance to rise. That's because the brain is anticipating that "danger" will be reached sooner than usual.

4. The benefits of heat training - It does more than prepare the body to be ready for hot weather. In hot conditions, the muscles have less blood to use because the skin needs extra blood for cooling. Similar to training at altitude, this can cause the body to increase the volume of blood flow.

5. The multi-faceted base - A lot of people focus almost exclusively on endurance during the base phase, as this is what Arthur Lydiard did. But Magness (and some others, like Renato Canova) advocate approaching your target race pace from both ends - so the base phase should build general endurance (easy mileage, marathon pace etc.), as well as general speed (hill sprints, flat sprints). Then throughout the season, you gradually bring each end closer so that by the end, you are doing a lot of specific work.

The Talent of Trainability: Is There Any Hope for Low-responders?

This past summer, David Epstein, who ran for Columbia in college and used to write for Sports Illustrated, made a big splash in the running world with the release of his first book. It's called The Sports Gene and, inspired by Epstein's own curiosity, it explores the role of genetics in elite athletic achievement. The chapter that I'm going to focus on in this post is called 'The Talent of Trainability.' The chapter opens with a superbly-written anecdote of Jim Ryun's rapid ascension from high school wannabe to teenage world record holder. Epstein then transitions over to science, in particular the HERITAGE study, which produced a couple of stunning revelations:

1) There is a lot of variation in how much different people improve even while doing the same training.
2) There is much less variation in how much relatives improve while doing the same training.

In other words, improvement is, partially, a talent. Some people respond really well to training - their body is very good at handling, and adapting to, the stress of training. These are 'high-responders,' Jim Ryun having been one of them, obviously.  Athletes who see relatively little improvement from training are called 'low-responders.'

I had a vague sort of knowledge of this phenomenon in the past but, since reading The Sports Gene, I have paid more attention to it. In particular, two of my high-school teammates stand out to me as being pretty far on opposite ends of the trainability spectrum.

One of them - let's call him Lenny - had a running age of three years entering the summer preceding the 2013 cross country season, his last one. Lenny was never one of the better runners on even the JV team but he came to practice regularly and enjoyed running a few miles with his friends. He didn't have an overly-competitive mindset; he just liked how running felt. His 5k PR was run during his sophomore year but he wanted to be sure to lower it in his senior season so he committed to building his best aerobic base ever. Lenny put in a full summer of mileage, making his way up to 40 miles per week, which was a lot for him. He even tried the occasional tempo run or strides. He was sure to make a big jump this season, I remember thinking.