“Mr. Swift, how many miles do you run each day?”
“It depends on the day, William.”
“Okay, well like today, how much will you run?”
“Let me see...I got in six miles before school this morning, and then --”
“You ran before school?!” Albert chimed in. “What time did you have to get up?”
“Five.”
“And how long did it take to run six miles?”
“About 40 minutes.”
“You’re crazy, Mr. Swift.”
“Oh, but I’m not finished yet.” At this point, I was enjoying blowing their minds. What can I say, they weren’t this engaged in class. “After school, I’ve got a ten-miler on the schedule.”
“Wait, so you’re going to run 16 miles today?!”
“Good math, William. You should be in honors.”
“That’s farther than I drive to and from school every day!”
“Maybe you should rethink your transportation options.”
Now I was on a roll. The three students who cornered me after the bell were going to be tardy to their next class, but I could always just write them a pass. I geek out talking about running, and the students were only just opening to me.
“Six in the morning, ten in the afternoon is an average day for me. I might do more on a workout day -- not today -- and long run day.”
“Okay, so how long is your long run?”
“That one I run by time instead of mileage. So I just go out for two to two-and-a-half hours every Sunday morning. Typically it’s somewhere between 20 and 22 miles. I only run once that day.”
“So what’s the furthest you’ve ever run at once?”
“Well I’ve finished one marathon, so 27 miles? I added a couple minutes warming up before the race.”
“What’s your fastest mile time?” Katharine added.
“Well that was certainly a non-sequitur, Katharine. That’s actually a tougher one to answer, because in college you run the 1500m, which is 109 meters shorter than a mile. I barely broke 4:00 in the 1500m, which converts to about a 4:15. So I guess you could say my mile PR is 4:15.”
The three students looked at each other in awe. It’s funny how a mediocre mile time is more astonishing than the sheer lunacy of consistent, patient 110+ mile weeks of training. But everyone runs the mile at some point in gym class, and these three were on the high school cross and track team, so they race the mile fairly frequently. It’s an easier reference point for most people.
The bell rang, and the three students were tardy.
“Here,” I said, scribbling on a post-it note. “Tell your next teacher I kept you late. Say you learned something.”
“Thanks Mr. S, see you at practice!”
Running out the door, they almost barrelled into Amelia walking in the room.
“No running in the halls!” She chided good-naturedly. She was their coach, after all. “Save it for practice!”
The she turned to me. “Did they corner you about running?”
“Yeah they did, but I enjoy it.”
“I may have turned them your way. Dropped a subtle hint about some of your workouts the other day, so I figure they’d make their way over here.”
“So it’s your fault!”
“I confess.” She held up her hands to feign surrender. “But it’s good that they talk to you about running. Flint Hills is a bubble, and they don’t really comprehend much beyond that. I can tell them about the NCAA and professional runners and all that stuff, but at a certain point they tune me out. It’s good that they really get to experience it with you.”
“I don’t know if I’d really lump myself into that level, though. I never made it to NCAA Champs, I’m not being paid to run…”
“But I’ve seen the training you’re putting in. You’re racing Boston, right? I think you’re going to surprise a lot of people out there. Including yourself. And hell,” she looked out the windows to the flurries falling, “the worse the weather is on Boylston, the better it is for you. That’s your equalizer.”
Unlike some years, there aren’t any flurries in eastern Massachusetts today. No snowflakes, no raindrops, no precipitation; not even a cloud. It’s a perfect day for everything except a marathon.
It’s fucking hot.
And the longer we go, what little shade on course disappears more and more.
You spend all winter training for the race, through the worst of the crap weather. And then, come race day, you get hit with the first heat wave of the year. Just fantastic.
My best workout of this build-up was during one of those early March, last-gasp-of-winter days. I had been subbing at the high school, and looking out the windows I could see the weather slowly deteriorating as the day progressed.The morning started off as a cold but bearable 30 degrees and sunny, but by the time school let off it was a glorious 18 degrees with 20 mph arctic gusts coming out of the north. And in the flats of Kansas, there isn’t much topography to block the wind.
My motivation for the scheduled workout dropped with the temperature. But when it comes to training, consistency is key and sometimes you just have to sack up and get on with it. The more you think about training, the less likely you are to actually do it.
So the plan was a ten-mile alternation: after a few minutes of warmup, go into ten continuous miles alternating between one mile fast and one mile ‘slow’ -- or, rather, slightly less fast. The goal was to average marathon pace for the whole thing, but to never actually do any running at marathon pace. One mile faster than pace, one mile proportionally slower; repeat five times.
This is a workout that Renato Canova, the Italian coach of Kenyan runners and a legend on internet message boards, has made famous (although they alternate kilometers instead of miles), but in reality this type of workout has been done by generations of runners. Alberto Salazar used to regularly do almost this exact mile alternating workout before he ran himself into the ground. Staying in Oregon, Bill Dellinger’s athletes used to do 30/40s, made famous of Steve Prefontaine. That workout is simple: alternating 200s, continuous, one at 30 seconds and the ‘rest’ one at 40 seconds, until you can’t hit the splits anymore. I believe Pre’s record was 18 laps of that.
Of course, historically it wasn’t just Americans doing this stuff. Australians of the Rob de Castella era had a famous Quarters workout: eight x 400m at or faster than 5k pace, with continuous 200m ‘rest’ intervals at half-to-full marathon pace. Arthur Lydiard even used to prescribe an alternation-style workout for his runners. At the end of the season, as a taper session, they’d do up to two miles of 50m sprinting and 50m ‘floating’, or steady continuous running. Lydiard regarded that particular workout as the keystone of his training pyramid -- it brought all the elements of fitness together and sharpened the athlete for the intensity of a race.
Needless to say, I’m a firm believer in the use of alternations in training. With the caveat that you’re fit enough to successfully complete the workout, I don’t believe there’s anything else you can do to make you more race ready.
The problem that day was the weather. How can you get in a race-specific workout in freezing temperatures and gale-force winds? Well, it might be like that one race day, so you don’t have any other choice but to get on with it.
I ran mine around a mile loop I had measured through the streets of my neighborhood, which meant that half of the loop was into the wind and half with the wind. Throw on some layers and get cooking.
I flew through the first mile in 4:48 -- I have a bad habit of starting workouts too fast. Oh well, I told myself, that just means you can relax a bit more on this ‘rest’ mile.
That didn’t happen. I rolled though in 5:15 and found a bit of pop in my legs to accelerate into another fast mile. Number three was a slightly more restrained 4:51, but the fourth brought the rest down to 5:12.
This was turning into one of those rare days when you just have it and everything clicks. Another mile in 4:50 and by halfway I was crushing significantly faster than the plan. Decision time: back off the pace and save it for race day, or embrace the wings and fly. If I chose the latter I’d either end up as a Wright brother or Icarus.
It was no decision: these days come so rarely that you have to take advantage of them when they do. I was dialed in.
A sixth rest mile in 5:12, and I was actually overheating. I unzipped my top a little bit and tossed my gloves into someone’s side yard. I could always pick them up during the cooldown.
By mile seven the sun was starting to set and a crimson twilight hung in the air. The temperature continued to drop with the coming night, but for a small time period the wind relented. Street lamps clicked on as the occasional pair of headlights illuminated the road in front of me. Press on. 4:49. Three more miles, only one of which is fast. You got this.
During the eighth mile I had the loop fairly well memorized. Left at the third intersection, sidestep the pothole after the fire hydrant, glance to the right to make sure there’s not an oncoming car… And if there was a car, it’s not like I was actually going to do anything about it. I’m out here freezing my balls off, and you’re in your nice climate controlled vehicle; you can yield to me. 5:10.
One more hard mile. Press on press on. I’m not entirely sure if it was the sunset or the exertion, but I was seeing stars. I was also sweating through my layers. Too late to slow and shed any more though. I kept repeating the mantra, last mile fast mile, last mile fast mile over and over. I knew I had one more steady mile after this, but I could at least trick myself into the final effort.
It worked. The ninth mile was the best one yet -- 4:47 -- and it felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders for the final one. I could cruise through it since I crushed this workout. Even then, momentum carried me below 5:10.
For ten miles, I averaged five-minute-per-mile pace, which was a solid 10-15 seconds faster than I had thought I’d maintain. Is it time to rethink what you’re capable of come race day?
***
That day my sweat re-froze to my clothes during the cooldown. I couldn’t untie my shoes since the laces were frozen together. Back in Boston, I’m sweating more, but it is beading off and bouncing through the pack. The pack remains intact and my position the same as we split the tenth mile in 5:06.
Thinking back to that early-March workout, I can’t help but wonder: how in the world am I going to continue this for 16 more miles? I had a great workout that day, but it wrecked me for the next four days. I could only shuffle 30 minutes each day in an attempt to recover.
The toughest competitor of them all shows his hand. Do I have sixteen more in me?
**********
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