Flashes of Panic

(I have a column to file on Sunday, and depending on how Saturday goes, I might have to mine this for ideas, but here it is…)

Talk about any aspect of training with more than two runners, and it’s almost dead certain you’ll hear one of two phrases: “It’s an individual thing,” or “This works for me.” (The commercial-disclaimer variant, “Your mileage may vary,” abbreviated to YMMV is another favorite.)

Length of longest training run? Your mileage may vary. Best cross-training while injured? It’s an individual thing. What to eat the night before? This works for me.

This isn’t just evasiveness; there are a lot of reasons why most of this does vary between individuals, and I’ve mentioned this before. And it’s not really what I’m thinking about.

I’m thinking about how there’s such a tremendous advantage to training with a team, or even with one training partner. A good team can become more than just the sum of its members, through the shared effort and reward.

And I’m thinking, considering how many things about optimizing training vary between individuals, about how incredibly powerful (and astoundingly difficult) it must be to put together the kind of team where all those individual quirks can fit together. It must be amazingly rare, yet the Kenyans (and, more recently, the Ethiopians) seem to do it annually for the World Cross-Country meet.

Of course, the Kenyan method is rather like sculpture; you start with a big block of runners, and cut away anything that doesn’t look like a winning team. But it’s so much more successful that the American method, which is to put together a group of strong individuals and tell them they’re a team.

Now Playing: MPLS from Dead Man Shake by Grandpaboy