Flashes of Panic

It’s nice to see Steve Cram praising Kara Goucher, but the ultimate conclusion of his article—which seems to boil down to, “Goucher runs well because of altitude training”—is problematic. The problem is that, like so many other how-they-do-it articles, it grasps at a single element of a larger training program and points at that one thing as the source of success.

Cram’s not inherently wrong, but the conclusion he reaches is faulty. If all it took to run like Goucher was an altitude tent (or training at altitude, etc.) the Universities of Arkansas or Wisconsin would never beat Colorado and BYU at the NCAA cross country championships. Paula Radcliffe spends as much time (or more) at altitude and in her hypoxic tent as Goucher, and yet that didn’t carry her to victory last Sunday.

The desire to reduce a winning program to a single element is understandable, because the fact is that top-level training is complicated. If you want to be world class, not only do you have to have some talent to start with, you need to do it all. You need to train hard, recover well, tend your injuries (and Goucher cites the availability of therapists of all kinds as one reason she and her husband Adam chose Salazar’s program in Portland over the excellent training group in Madison, Wisconsin,) eat right, etc. etc. etc. And Alan Webb’s Osaka experience shows how narrow the margin of error is at that level. Keeping all that stuff up is complicated. It requires good coaching and support. It’s nearly impossible to do it by yourself.

But we hang on to the romantic image of the lone, noble amateur who bases a program on one magic element which allows them to triumph. If you’re sufficiently patient, you can list off some former champions and go one-to-one with their “secret weapon”: Frank Shorter and high mileage. Lasse Viren and “reindeer milk” (or, if you’re more cynical, blood doping.) Prefontaine and his willingness to hurt. Halberg and Snell and their phenomenal aerobic base. Miruts Yifter and his speed. Any number of athletes and their incredible coach, though I actually think that’s closer to the reality of things than the other magic elements, though in not in the direction you’d expect.

But every one of those athletes was as good as they were because they got all the pieces—or at least, as many as were available at the time—right. No silver bullet. If I move to Boulder, I won’t become a Trials qualifier. If I do 120-mile weeks, I won’t run a 1:05 half-marathon. If I quit my job, slept 10-11 hours a day, ran doubles and filled the rest of my time with massage appointments, active release therapy, weight training, yoga, etc. while living above 10,000’ and training below 5,000’… well, maybe I could pop a fast time or two.

Goucher is doing all that. Plus, she’s training as hard as (or, as my coach observed when he visited their training camp this summer, harder than) the very talented men in her training group.

It’s not just altitude. It’s making it a full-time job, and then doing it all right.

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