Iron Matron has a shirt that says, "I TRAIN MORE THAN YOU". How cool is that?!
(Reminder: My birthday's coming up!!!)I've been doing a lot of thinking about volume in the past couple of months. If you haven't figured it out yet, I try to do everything in my power to be the baddest assest mofo out there. Since genetics did not grant me the vessel to do this in speed, I try to pull my bragging rights from volume. I try to find the longest, craziest workouts and races possible, so that I'm sure to find myself in the middle of some adventure. That way, once the adventure is finished, I have something to write about, and therefore brag about what about what a badass I am.
And just a quick word on bragging, which has been a theme this week. I am not against ALL kinds of bragging, just the undeserved kind. Unless you are a world class athlete, I believe that you should have to acknowledge that there are better people out there. This can easily be achieved with 2 little words: "
for me". Compare these examples:
~"I did a 2 hour ride on Saturday, that's a really long ride." vs. "I did a 2 hour ride on Saturday, that's a really long ride
for me." The automatic reaction to the former is, "No it's not, there are people who
commute to work on their bikes and log more time than that." The automatic reaction to the second is the desired response, "Wow, that's great!"
~"My last marathon time was really fast. I ran it in 5:00." (Reaction: Even my grandma can run marathons. That's not even fast! What? Did you walk it?) vs. "My last marathon time was really good
for me. I finished! It took me 5 hours, but I did it, and that's enough
, for me." (Reaction: Congratulations! That's awesome!)
The important thing is that you acknowledge that there are people out there that are faster than you, stronger than you, and who train more than you, but your most important competitor is yourself. You never know if the guy you're bragging to about your 3rd place AG in a local olympic race is actually a Kona age group winner. In my experience, the people who really are good tend to keep mum about it.
Okay, that being said, let's go back to talking about volume. I know that pretty much all of the books out there tell you to take a conservative approach to volume, and believe me, I've read them all. "Avoid overtraining at all costs," they say. "The body only gets stronger when you rest," they say. "Train smart, not long," they say.
Run better by not running? I thought.
It sounds kooky, but hey, it's a hell of a lot better than running! So for awhile I trained by not running. I would run like 1 speed session a week, 1 long run every four weeks or so and "rest hard". I did the same with biking and swimming, never doing "junk miles/yards". And I was always injured. Every long workout kicked the shit out of me. And I never got any faster. So I ran less and less, because clearly I was training too much and my body needed to recover more. And I
still never got any better, and I
still hated running. It wasn't till I started ignoring everything they say: running 2 days in a row, doing more than one long run in a week, doing hard sessions EVERY time I ran that I started to actually
like running. I said, "Listen, body. This is what we're doing, and you're going to cut the shit and deal with it because I say so, so just get used to it." And I got better. Well, better
for me.Here's the thing: Dave Scott said in his 1985 book that you don't have to do tons of volume to get fast. He says that he trained less at the end of his career than he did at the beginning,
and he was faster. But here's the thing: Back in the early days Dave Scott, Scott Molina, Scott Tinley and all those fast Scott guys were practically doing an ironman a day. No wonder they stayed fast when they cut their training in half, they were
still training 25-30 hours a week!
The other thing that all the books say is that you should
never run more than 20 miles when training for a marathon. You should never run more than 2.5 hours when training for an ironman. Ever. Or else you'll die. "Running tears your body down too much," they say. "It takes you too long to recover," they say. "The rest of your training will suffer, and it's not worth the trade-off," they say. But what I can't reconcile is that ultrarunners run
way longer than that
all the time! Some Ultrarunners run 50K-50 miles on a weekly basis, and I don't see them languishing in puddles of their own
blahs. Ultrarunners blow me away.
The other thing about ultrarunners is that they never quit. I mean, they do sometimes, but it takes
a lot for an ultrarunner to throw in the towel. In ultramarathons, people wind up in med tents with IVs in their arms and gangrene in their limbs
and then go back out and run some more! I read
Donald's race report for the Miwok 50k this morning. Donald had some stomach issues during the race. Now, what happens to a triathlete when they have stomach issues? Let's look at last year's Ironman Championships. Farris Al Saltan had a stomach bug and didn't start the race. Norman Stadtler was puking all over his bike and pulled out after like 30 miles. Natascha Badmann had a crash, fucked up her bike and her shoulder and dropped out (here I guess she had no choice, but we needed a female example). However, Donald, our average age grouper ultrarunner had stomach issues, just gave himself the two-finger stomach treatment and kept right on running. This is not uncommon in ultra events from what I gather. It is quite common to feel awful at mile 60 of a 100 mile race, puke your brains out, maybe pop some blisters the size of hampsters, and feel fine 15 miles later. I'm not sure what "fine" feels like to an ultrarunner at mile 75, is a deeper misery than any of us triathletes will ever feel in our lives, I'm sure.
Which brings me to my next point: suffering. I'm going to assume that if you're reading this, you've run a marathon. If you haven't, summon from your memory everything you've ever heard about a marathon and pretend that you have. Remember when running 26 miles was impossible? How you weren't sure if you'd finish? It's only impossible until you get your mind around it. When you started running 3 miles seemed like a long way, then you gradually built up to 6 and 3 seemed like nothing. A half marathon seemed like a daunting run, until you started training for the marathon and discovered that the pain only BEGINS in a half marathon. In my experience, a 10k still hurts just as much now as it did in high school. A half marathon makes me just as tired at the end now as it did a few years ago. And the marathon, well miles 20-26.2
never seem to hurt any less.
For me, anyway. But "long" is so arbitrary. A distance is only "long" until you get your mind around it. What's changed is that your mind (or
my mind at any rate) has accepted that 'this is possible and this pain is just something that people deal with'.
Remember the story of the 4-minute mile? How doctors said that it was impossible and that someone would die from the exertion if they tried? And then Roger Banister did it, and suddenly a dozen guys did it in the same year. And the record keeps dropping (the record is now 3:43.13). People just drew a line in the sand at 4:00 and said, "The body can take no more." But your body doesn't know the difference between 4:01 and 3:58. It's the same with distance. Miles and kilometers are
human inventions. 20 miles is just the breaking point because they
say it is. Well who decided that? Your body doesn't know what 20 miles is, other than that it's the distance that you usually say, "okay, enough is enough. You can rest now, body. I won't make you work any harder." You only think 10 miles is long until you start training to run 26. You only think a marathon is long until you hear that people run 100 mile races, and longer. I guess, suddenly, when you know that someone else has done it you can tell yourself, 'It's not going to kill you, so just get over it.'
So if a marathon hurts THAT MUCH for
everyone, what does 50 or 100 miles feel like?! Where do you
go in your head in an event like that?
"Never run more than 20 miles in training"?
Hogwash! You tell an ultrarunner that and they'll laugh in your face. They say you shouldn't run more than 2 marathons in a year, but then there are people like Dean Karnazes who run 50 consecutive marathons in 50 days. By all accounts he should have finished in splinters. Instead, he walked out of his hotel in New York the day after he finished and ran all the way to Missouri. It's like the old saying, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."
I realize that not everyone WANTS to spend every spare minute of their life training. I know that for many, it really just doesn't sound like the most fun thing in the world to push yourself to new levels of suffering every time you get a free weekend. They just want to finish, be proud of themselves, and brag to their friends. That's cool. Thank goodness there are dozens of books out there that tell you exactly how to achieve those goals. But still, you find me the professional that's winning races on 10-12 hours of training a week, and I'll revise my theories.
Then there are people like me (and tens of thousands of others). I was listening to a podcast the other day from a couple of coaches who really nailed it. They said, "We want to get you in shape so that you can do really cool stuff with your fitness." It was the first time I'd heard my philosophy come out of someone else's mouth. It's on iTunes, you can listen to it yourself (although admittedly, it's pretty boring). It's the e-nation episode on epic weekends I believe.
So what am I talking about? I don't know, I kind of forgot. That happens to me a lot. One conclusion I could come to is to say "fuck you" to all the people who make me feel crazy about distance (or the people who make me feel like I'm being put on a pedistal for it – this is only good
for me, there are others out there who are stronger and faster). Maybe I wanted to say that ultramarathoners are the baddest assest motherfuckers out there. They definitely put any ironman to shame with the heights of suffering they go to. But did I really need 2,000 words to say that?
Oh, no, wait, I remember what it was! The pool was closed this morning, and I found myself with nothing to do. I had some coffee, got all jittered up, and couldn't stop writing. THAT's what it was!
If you happen to know my secret (Cranky, Gretchen, Mindy), please don't spill the beans. Thanks.
