November 3, 1986
Fitness
FOR THE 100TH TIME, HE’S GOING THE ULTRADISTANCE
The first time I recall noticing Dick Collins was at a race at Woodside. Several of us had gone by to gawk at Don Choy’s revival of the six-day races that were famous around the turn of the century. (In a six-day race, contestants circle a track to see which of them will have the most mileage built up by the end of six days.)
By the time we arrived, the race was into its second day. Billed as the Spirit ’80 Six-Day, the race was being run through the Fourth of July week. I noticed Collins because there was only a handful of entrants; he ran in good spirits and chatted regularly with his running partner and conferred periodically with his wife, who was counting laps for him.
What I didn’t know at that point was that Collins, president of Alta Mechanical Company in San Francisco and then 46 years old, was already a veteran of 15 ultradistance events, including two Western States 100s—the second of them less than a week before.
What I learned this year is that this weekend, Nov. 8-9, at the Sri Chimnoy 24-Hour Race in Oakland, Collins will be competing in his 100th ultradistance event. (An ultradistance event is anything beyond the standard 26-mile marathon; he has also run well over 100 marathons.)
That’s pretty fantastic. But what’s even more fantastic is that Collins has never dropped out of an ultradistance race, finishing every one of the 99 he started.
Collins is gregarious but soft-spoken. Anyone meeting him in his civilian clothes would not take him for a practicing student of the long-long-distance arts. He is 5-foot-11 and weighs 180 pounds, and looks more like he spent his boyhood as a baseball catcher. But to those who are familiar with the typical ultradistance runner, Collins’ build is functional and economical.
At one time he weighted 240 and smoked. “I was in the same stage a lot of people went through,” Collins said. “Not in very good condition and heavy. The unhealthy aspects were getting to me. My doctor wanted to start giving me EKGs just to have a baseline because he figured down the line I’d be having a heart attack. He started me thinking a little bit.
“I started running before I stopped smoking, and then I went on a diet. The diet and the running kind of went together, then the weight came off pretty easy… It’s just a matter of losing the weight and getting into something I enjoyed doing.”
Although admittedly not very fast, Dick is consistent—and consistency pays off. On July 21, 1984, at the Gator 24-Hour Race in San Francisco, Collins finished first among 21 contestants, turning in a distance of 116 miles. And last March, at the Redwood Empire 24-Hour Race in Santa Rosa, he set an American record for 52-year-olds by amassing 111½ miles.
Many might assume that to continue performing so consistently, Collins must run a prodigious amount of mileage each week. But actually, he does most of his mileage in races.
“I run between 2500 and 3000 miles a year,” Collins said. “I average between 50 and 55 miles a week. And I’ve been doing that level for many years, so I’m not running a whole lot more than other people. But I am running a lot of races, so most of my running comes on weekends.”
This weekend he’ll likely add more than 100 miles to his running log. And he’ll reach a milestone in his running career that is as rare as no-cal ice cream.
November 10, 1986
Fitness
NOTE TO WEEKEND SKIERS: STAY FIT DURING WEEK
Dr. Richard Steadman has a mission in life: He wants to see the Ski Patrol bored out of its collective boots.
Every year the Ski Patrol spends an inordinate amount of time doing what it’s there to do: rescue skiers from the end results of their dreams of skiing better than they’re able. Every Alpine skier has seen the Ski Patrol at work guiding an injured skier down the slopes in a rescue sled.
Steadman, prominent in at least a half-dozen aspects of the U.S. Alpine Ski Team, including being team physician at the 1984 Winter Olympics, is doing his best to save skiers from that trip down the mountain. An orthopedic surgeon practicing in South Lake Tahoe, he has been using his extensive first-hand knowledge of world-class skiing to instigate preventive programs at many ski resorts.
“Surprisingly,” he said, “Alpine skiers end up hurting themselves well into the skiing season. You’d think it would be just the opposite. But we’ve seen this with competitive, world-class skiers and we’ve seen it with recreational skiers.”
The reason, Steadman has found, is that the serious Alpine skier is frequently quite active—and therefore quite fit—throughout most of the year. When there is no snow, the serious skier participates in other sports: running, bicycling, triathlons, aerobics. He comes to the new ski season in relatively good condition: good stamina, well-toned muscles, good flexibility.
However, the serious skier then tends to almost exclusively become involved in skiing, and many of the other conditioning disciplines are forgotten.
“This is noticeable among the U.S. Ski Team,” Steadman said. “Everyone begins the season in terrific condition, but with all the racing and all the traveling, the conditioning of the offseason vanishes. That’s when we begin to become concerned about injuries.”
For weekend skiers, Steadman advises that a regular weekday fitness program be maintained. The program should consist of aerobic exercising as well as strength-building and flexibility-promoting exercises.
After spending hours each week working out on the lowlands, Steadman sees one prime mistake made when skiers hit the mountains first thing in the morning. Many of them do no warm-up exercises; instead they jump right onto the lift taking them to the highest point on the mountain and then expect their muscles to function at peak performance. However, the muscles are often stiff and tight, the legs do not flex well because they are still cold, and the all-important quadriceps scream for mercy.
“I recommend not only warming up and loosening up the leg muscles before getting onto the lift first thing in the morning,” Steadman said. “I also recommend going through the same stretches and warmup exercises first thing in the afternoon, after you’ve stopped to have lunch. That half-hour or hour break at lunch is often just enough to tighten the muscles all over again.”
November 17, 1986
Fitness
GOING FOR THE BURN: IT’S DANGEROUS, STUPID
To be “in” within any group, you’ve got to know the jargon and use it properly.
For decades, the term “world class” was used to designate an athlete who had risen high enough in his or her profession to be ranked among the world’s best, and to be regularly competing among the best. Within the past few years, world class has become an “in” term—and therefore an overused term and one diminished in potency—used for everything from automobiles to yogurt.
Another insider’s term that has been hung out with the public wash is “the burn” or “going for the burn.”
The term has evolved from the weight-room set into more or less common use among athletes and would-be athletes. Although technically a repetition of a movement in the mid-portion of the exercise range until nerve overstimulation causes a burning sensation, the term has come to mean repetitively exercising the same muscle or muscle group until the pain surpasses the person’s pain threshold.
The burn is the nirvana of the “no pain, no gain” school of exercise. It is being pushed as a world class technique by some fitness instructors, and is being bandied about as though it’s the enlightened way to quick fitness.
Actually, going for the burn is a dangerous, stupid way to foreshorten a potentially lifelong involvement in fitness. By pushing a muscle or muscle group to exhaustion and pain, instead of strengthening it, you tend to do two things, both of which are bad.
# An exhausted muscle takes much longer to recover than a muscle treated with humanely in a progressively increased hard/easy workload. An exhausted muscle can take as long as two weeks just to come back to the point it was on the day it was worked to exhaustion. And during that two weeks, the muscle is unable to work efficiently, thereby undermining quality workouts that would further develop it during that period.
# Pushing a repetitive exercise to and beyond the pain threshold very often causes injury. Pain is the body’s way of telling us that we are being hurt. Pushing into and beyond the pain threshold either causes immediate injury, builds toward an injury, or sets the exerciser up for an injury.
But don’t take my word for it.
Lee Haney is a 255-pound bodybuilder who has won the sport’s most prestigious contest, the Mr. Olympia, twice, in 1984 and ’85. In a recent speech at a fitness trainer seminar, Haney was asked about the concept of “going for the burn.”
“As far as ‘going for the burn’ or other ‘no pain, no gain’ theory of training goes,” Haney said, “I don’t like to hurt myself. If there’s pain, there’s something wrong.”
There is nothing wrong with occasionally pushing into the area of slight discomfort, but unless there are tremendously important reasons for pushing through the pain threshold—such as the Olympic gold medal in the 1500 meters—and into muscle and never exhaustion, forget it. Who needs it?
November 24, 1986
Fitness
HOW ARTHRITIS CHANGED ONE LIFE FOR THE BETTER
At age 56, Dvera Berson began suffering from arthritis. By 60 she had gotten progressively worse. “I wore a neck brace and a back support, slept in a hospital bed, did traction three times a day, had deformed fingers, and was in constant pain,” she recalled.
Berson was on her way to becoming a cripple racked with pain. In an attempt to alleviate the pain, she made the rounds of doctors, religiously took the drugs they prescribed, and at one point considered surgery. As with arthritis sufferers before her, she anticipated a rapidly deteriorating lifestyle.
Today, however, Berson, at 73 years of age, is energetic, pain-free, and able to swim for more than an hour at a time. The deterioration of her bones continues, but the arthritis has not crippled her and she even claims that it has changed her life for the better. She looks good, feels good, swims five days a week, has excellent cardiovascular fitness, and has an inordinate amount of energy.
Berson credits a regular pool exercise program for her ability to cope with arthritis. Her discovery of the program came about quite by accident.
As many arthritics will relate, they find it easy to predict the weather. Cold and dampness cause the swollen and distended joints to act up painfully. Living in Brooklyn, N.Y., Berson dreaded winters: overcast, cold, dreary, and painful.
One of Berson’s friends suggested that she take a winter vacation to Florida. She decided to take that advice. She packed all her medical supply appliances—and she also packed a bathing suit. “To this day I’m still not certain what caused me to pack a bathing suit,” she said. “But I did.”
“After a few days there, we had a day that was simply beastly. It was hot and humid and I decided to go into the pool to cool off. I found that by moving gently both with and against the water, I could exercise with some degree of comfort. That first day I stayed in only about 10 minutes.
“I had two main thoughts when I started. One was the hope of doing a little something to improve my condition. The other was the fear of doing something to hurt myself badly.”
While in Florida, Berson went to the pool and exercised every day. She gradually increased the time she spent exercising. The fact that the exercising in the water was the answer came to her graphically when she returned to New York and stopped the routine. The improvements she had enjoyed in Florida rapidly ebbed away.
She joined a health club in New York, and within two weeks Berson was back to the level where she had been in Florida. Through consistent work on her problem, Berson put together an easy-to-follow program that does not cure arthritis but makes it pain-free. And that frees the arthritic patient to lead a normal life.
The cornerstone of the program is consistency. One must do the pool exercises as outlined in the book, and on a regular basis. The book’s impact has been heart-warming to Berson; thousands of other arthritis sufferers have been able to duplicate her success.
“Before I developed arthritis,” Berson said, “I was not physical at all. It’s a strange way to look at it, but I can thank my arthritis for completely changing my life.
The book is titled “Pain-Free Arthritis” and is available only by mail order ($15.95, S&J Books, P.O. Box 31, Gravesend Station, Brooklyn, NY 11223).