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.