Run Like a Pro (Even If You're Slow)

1

Follow the Leaders

Running is a uniquely democratic sport. When you line up at the start of, say, the New York City Marathon as a middle-of-the-pack runner, you are standing on the same bridge (the Verrazzano-Narrows) as the professionals, feeling the same nervous tension they feel and hoping to reach the same finish line in Central Park. Such inclusiveness may also be found at events like the USATF Cross Country Championships, where elite and recreational runners alike have the opportunity to test their fitness on the host course. Even made-for-TV competitions such as the Millrose Games feature races for pros, high school athletes, and club runners of all ages. In running, we're all in it together in ways that professional and amateur athletes in other sports are not.

Away from the racecourse, however, the sport of running is oddly divided. In their training methods, eating habits, recovery methods, and other practices, elite and nonelite runners could scarcely be less alike. The pros do most of their running at low intensity, whereas nonelite runners do most of theirs at moderate intensity. The pros perform functional strength workouts designed especially to meet the specific needs of runners, whereas nonelite runners are more likely to eschew strength training altogether or do it in forms like CrossFit or yoga that were not developed with runners in mind. The pros typically maintain a balanced, well-rounded, inclusive, and shtick-free diet based on natural foods of all kinds, whereas nonelite runners more often go for elimination-type diets (like keto, plant-based, or Paleo) that are all about exclusion.

You get the idea. It almost seems as if nonelite runners are deliberately doing the opposite of everything the elites do, though the reality is that, for reasons Coach Ben and I will get into later, most aren't even aware of how the pros balance their intensities, strength train, eat, and so forth. As that rare runner who, in a sense, has a foot in both worlds, elite and nonelite, I am keenly aware of this rift. An amateur runner myself, I coach fellow amateurs, but I also interact with the pros through my writing and can use what I learn from them to help my runners and myself improve.

It's a role I was practically born to fulfill. When I was eleven years old, I became both a runner and a fan of professional running in a single moment. That moment occurred during the 1983 Boston Marathon, when I watched my father complete his first 26.2-miler and saw Joan Benoit record a world-best marathon time for women. My dad's achievement inspired me to follow in his footsteps and run, while Joan's admittedly much greater feat moved me to become an active follower of professional running, beginning with local heroes Lynn Jennings, a three-time world champion in cross country, and Cathy Schiro, a national high school cross country champion and Olympian, both of whom lived minutes away from my family's home in New Hampshire's seacoast region.

It so happened that the coach of the girls' cross country team at the high school I attended was Jeff Johnson, who held the distinction of having been Nike's first employee and who'd formerly rubbed elbows with the likes of Steve Prefontaine and the legendary University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman. As a member of the boys' team, I was never directly coached by Jeff, but he did mentor me to some degree, instilling in me a better understanding of state-of-the-art training principles than most runners my age possessed.

If Jeff Johnson wasn't your typical high school cross country coach, neither was Tom Donnelly your typical Division III running coach. An All-American performer at Villanova University in the 1960s, Tom went on to become the men's cross country and track coach at tiny Haverford College in Pennsylvania. There, he developed a reputation for turning B-level high school runners like me into collegiate All-Americans while as a side gig also coaching elite runners including Ireland's Marcus O'Sullivan, a three-time world champion at 1500 meters. Unfortunately, I didn't actually run at Haverford, having temporarily burned out on the sport, so Tom's influence on me, like Jeff's, was mostly indirect.

After graduating in 1993, I took my English degree to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I found a job writing for a newly launched endurance sports magazine. Being immersed in this environment drew me back into running and at the same time afforded me a chance to learn directly from world-class endurance athletes and elite-level coaches. Tour de France cyclist Bob Roll, world champion runner Regina Jacobs (later busted for doping, alas), mountain biker Marla Streb, and triathlon coach Phil Maffetone are just a few of the many luminaries I interviewed and wrote about during this period, and I eagerly applied much of the knowledge I acquired to my own training, racing, and overall lifestyle.

By 2001, I felt confident enough in my experience and expertise to start coaching runners and triathletes. Only then did I discover that what seemed obvious to me-that any athlete seeking to get better should take their cues from the champions-wasn't obvious to everyone. Having been taught early on that athletes at all levels should emulate the pros, I hadn't realized that most athletes are not so fortunate, hence know little about the methods they use to prepare for races, much less actually practice these methods. For example, whereas professional runners do lengthy, multimodal warm-ups that include activation exercises, jogging, drills, and strides (short, relaxed sprints) prior to their workouts and races, nonelite runners, by and large, warm up with a bit of jogging and nothing more.

In observing such discrepancies, the sociologist in me (I minored in the subject at Haverford) couldn't help but wonder why amateur runners do just about everything differently from professional runners. The conclusion I've arrived at is that, rather than one big reason, there are many small ones. All of them are surmountable, thankfully, and the first step toward doing so and beginning to run like a pro is understanding these reasons. Let's take that step together now.

Reason #1:

Most Recreational Runners

Are Late Starters

In 1983, when my father completed his first Boston Marathon, running was a very different sport than it is today-a lot smaller and a lot more competitive. Back then there were only a few dozen marathons to choose from in the United States, and although Boston was alone in maintaining strict qualifying standards, self-selection ensured that serious racers were the dominant type at all of them. Indeed, to this day the 1983 Boston Marathon remains the fastest marathon ever staged on American soil, with 316 runners finishing the race in less than two hours and thirty minutes.

Among those runners was Ben Beach, who finished 236th with a time of 2:27:43. Ben was typical of the runners of his day. A Maryland native, he started running competitively in high school in the late 1960s, when the first major "running boom" was just getting started. Had he been born a few years earlier, Ben probably would have done what most youth runners did after receiving their diploma, which was to quit the sport. Instead, when Ben moved north to Boston to study medicine at Harvard, he got caught up in the thriving local running culture and chose to continue training and competing, racing his first Boston Marathon as a college freshman in 1968 (and every Boston Marathon since then).

If the first running boom served mainly to turn former high school and college runners into adult road racers, the second running boom, which began in the mid 1990s, cast a much wider net, bringing men and women from all sport and fitness backgrounds-and with no background whatsoever-into the fold. Oprah Winfrey's successful completion of the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon was a watershed moment, opening the door to competitive running to all-comers.

This welcome explosion in popularity did not come without a downside, however. Folks who discover running as adults are vulnerable to bad influences in a way that younger starters often are not. It's worth noting that the man who coached Oprah to her first (and last) marathon finish, Bob Greene, was a personal trainer who specialized in conditioning for downhill skiing and had no expertise in distance running. Oprah got lucky in choosing a technically unqualified coach who nevertheless did a good job in preparing her for Marine Corps, but all too many adult beginners, not knowing any better, seek guidance from questionable sources that steer them in the wrong direction.

The nub of the problem is running's deceptive simplicity, which leads many people to the mistaken belief that anyone who knows a thing or two about fitness can coach running effectively. If you doubt me, try the following test: Walk into your local CrossFit box and ask the head instructor if he or she can help you train for a marathon. The answer will very likely be yes, and if you follow through on the offer (please don't), you'll end up on a program that's heavy on burpees and light on long runs, which will set you up for an ugly encounter with "the wall" on race day.

Those who get an early start in running are far less likely to fall victim to poor guidance. The better middle and high school track programs are, more often than not, coached by men and women who understand that burpees only get you so far as a distance runner. I myself was all of fifteen years old when Jeff Johnson turned me on to Arthur Lydiard, the legendary New Zealand coach who revolutionized the training of distance runners in the 1950s and whose principles still form the foundation of elite training today. At the college level, coaching standards are even higher, such that it's almost impossible to run competitively through college and graduate not knowing enough to coach yourself, if you so choose.

Again, for adult starters, it's much different. Best practices, like the 80/20 rule of intensity balance (which we'll discuss at length in chapter 4), are not intuitive, and therefore they must be learned by each individual beginner, regardless of age. It took many generations for elite runners themselves to discover such methods through collective trial and error. A good example is tapering, or training lighter before races. As commonsensical as it may seem, this method wasn't widely practiced until the great Czech runner Emil Z‡topek won the 1950 European Championships 5000 meters and 10,000 meters after being hospitalized for food poisoning, hence forced to abandon his normal routine of training hard right up until the eve of racing, as was the norm back then.

When I started running as a preteen, I made up my own training program. It entailed running six miles every other day and trying to beat my previous time every time. I lasted about a week and a half before I hit a dead end and had to rethink my approach. Sure, you can blame my fraught start on youthful naivete, but in truth, new runners of any age do pretty much everything wrong in training if they follow the wrong counsel (including their own).

The solution? We'll talk solutions at the end of the chapter. First, though, we need to continue looking at the reasons amateur runners don't run like the pros.

Reason #2:

Running Fitness Is Invisible

The next time you find yourself at a newsstand, pick up and skim through a bodybuilding magazine. What you'll notice is that most of the training and nutrition articles have a well-known professional bodybuilder as the focal point. For example, you might see a feature on the reigning Mr. Olympia's biceps workout or a write-up about a past Arnold Classic winner's weight-cutting plan. It doesn't matter which particular issue of which magazine you select-they're all the same.

The point I'm making is that in some other sports, such as bodybuilding, recreational participants do consciously emulate the methods used by the professionals, which I think has to do with a natural human bias toward visual proof-the seeing-is-believing factor. The top professional bodybuilders all have gigantic muscles. What more proof does anybody need that their training methods and dietary practices (and, yes, the steroids that many use) are effective?

Not so with running. When a pro runner goes from out-of-shape by his standards (perhaps due to illness) to peak shape by implementing elite best practices, he probably doesn't look much different at the end of the process than at the beginning. Physiological testing would likely show significant improvements in factors such as VO2max (a measure of the maximum rate at which an athlete is able to consume oxygen during exercise, also known as aerobic capacity-the higher the better) and running economy (the rate at which a runner consumes oxygen at a given speed-the lower the better). Alas, this type of proof doesn't pack the same punch as Charles Atlas-style before and after pictures. The effectiveness of elite methods and practices just isn't that obvious to the average nonelite runner.

Reason #3:

Peer Group Conformity /

The Is-It-Worth-It? Principle

In 2017, the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine published a study by researchers from the Cambridge Centre for Sport and Exercise Science comparing training patterns in slower and faster marathon runners. Ninety-seven recreational marathoners completed questionnaires asking for detailed information about their training habits and running history. In addition, all ninety-seven runners underwent physiological testing. To the surprise of no one, the researchers found that faster runners trained a lot more than slower ones. The following table summarizes their findings.

Marathon

Time      2.5-3

Hours    3-3.5

Hours    3.5-4

Hours    4-4.5

Hours    4.5-5

Hours

Average Runs

per Week            5.7          5.0          4.1          4.9          4.4

Average Miles

per Week            56.9        50.5        38.7        34.8        27.2

There are two ways to interpret this data. On the one hand, it could indicate that training more produces faster marathon times. On the other hand, the same data might suggest that naturally faster marathoners simply choose to train more. As ho-hum as the study's findings themselves may be, they leave open the question of which comes first: more training or faster marathons? My personal belief is that both interpretations are true to a certain degree.

Here's something that might surprise you: there is virtually zero scientific research showing that training more results in better running performance. Now, I'm not suggesting that training more doesn't result in better performance. However, executing a study that properly addresses this question is next to impossible. It would require the recruitment of previously untrained individuals into one of two training programs with different amounts of running. Sounds easy enough, right? But here's the rub: beginning runners with low levels of fitness can't tolerate large volumes of running right off the bat, so the two programs would have to start in the same place and slowly diverge in volume over many months, and there isn't an exercise-science department in the world with a budget big enough to incentivize currently unfit individuals to make a long-term commitment to a running program that culminates in huge amounts of running. To my knowledge, such an experiment has never been attempted, and therefore we must rely on real-world evidence to assess the effect of running volume on performance.