Flashes of Panic

Gina Kolata, a fairly well-respected science writer, has an article in today’s NYT which extensively quotes a particular scientist about why some people run easily and others, well, struggle. I’ll leave aside the bait in the article (the word “jogger” is so ’70s) and just discuss substance.

Discussing the Olympic marathon course (a bit less than two weeks until the women run it!):

Your everyday, normal sort of runner, like me, will be breathless just watching. But many of the Olympic runners will make it look easy.

I can run up that mountain only in my dreams, no matter how hard I work. The difference between me and them is so great that I find myself consumed with curiosity over exactly how much of running fast and far is innate, and how much can be attributed to training, motivation and technique.

Kolata goes on to tell about her son, who ran well in high school and college but recognized a difference between himself and the national-champion class. Then she brings in an exercise physiologist from Marquette who explains the various differences in stride between your average “adult-onset” runner (my phrase) and those of us who have been doing it since we got cut from the 8th grade soccer team:

“Most people don’t know these things just because they start to run,” he said “Somebody has to tell you. But most people at these road races are very inefficient. They never were taught at all.”

Actually, I think you can learn some of them simply by running so much your body is forced to become efficient, but I’m an experiment of one. Not a great sample size. Still, I agree with the basic premise. Really good runners generally come to the sport as kids. They have to learn to take their natural energy and speed and spread it evenly over the distance of a race. They have no trouble running fast, but they need to learn to run long.

Adults who are new to running come at it from the other direction. Their speed has atrophied from years at desks, and their bodies don’t remember that boundless energy. They train to cover the distance: “How much do I need to run to finish five kilometers?” They conquer longer and longer distances, but it seldom occurs to them to seek out that missing speed and see, once they’ve completed the distance, how quickly they can cover the distance. They never do any work that would develop their speed, and developing speed is how you develop form.

(The exception to this, I think, is the class of people who didn’t run because they were playing soccer, or ultimate, or a similar sport that requires you to haul around a big field. A good soccer midfielder will cover between seven and eleven miles in a game, quite a lot of it at a dead sprint; the Germans call midfielders “the lawnmower” because they cover the whole field in a game.)

The article continues by citing a few other well-known (to some) metrics of running ability: running economy, which is a rough measure of stride efficiency and can, I think, be changed to a limited degree, and max VO₂, which I understand is fixed for each individual but varies between them.

The basic message, though, seems to be, “Don’t feel bad about not being an Olympian, you probably wouldn’t have been even if you’d tried.” And I’m not really a fan of that message. I’m not going to deny that there are things that will always separate me from Alan Culpepper, no matter how hard I work. His heart, his lungs, his experience, his wife. (Just kidding.) There are form quirks I will never shed, like the left-arm hook I share with my brother (don’t pass us on the inside,) or the long “miler’s” stride I got from running the lactate-junkie races in school, which doesn’t help me much in a marathon.

But there’s still a benefit to me going out as often as I can (when I’m uninjured, of course) and training as well as I can, to see what I can do with what I have. I’d need to drop forty-eight minutes from my marathon PR to even qualify to run the Olympic Trials, so I’m not going to delude myself about my potential, but I’ve had three coaches with (between them) seven Trials appearances, finishing as high as fourth, and they never acted like they were wasting their time with me.

I guess I don’t see any point in being disappointed in what I’ll never be, when I can still improve what I am.

Now playing: The Trade from ‘Mousse by The Nields