May 4, 1987
Fitness
MAKING THE MOST OF THE HAYES STREET HILL
At the Boston Marathon in 1982, Grete Waitz ran into a problem that physically confounded her.
Grete had been running the race at an average of 5 minutes, 30 seconds per mile, looking forward to a 2:24 for her first race on the famed course. With a lead of nearly 3 minutes, however, she walked off the course at 23 miles. “My legs locked up,” she said. “I couldn’t make them mover anymore.”
A few hours later, as she and her husband, Jack, were checking out of their hotel to catch a plane, I bumped into them in the lobby.
Grete explained that she had trained especially hard for the infamous uphills between 15 and 18 miles. What she hadn’t trained for, she said, was running downhill. “You train to run strong uphill,” she said. “Nobody I know trains for running downhill.”
There is a similar attitude concerning the Bay-to-Breakers course. Everyone talks about the Hayes Street Hill. They talk about how tough it is running up the hill. How the runner who breaks away near the top is virtually assured of the win. How good it feels to top out.
It is a rare word heard concerning the sharp downhill that occurs after you go over the top.
However, Bob Prichard of Somax in San Rafael has been running and rerunning the tapes of last year’s Bay-to-Breakers performance of Ed Eyestone.
Eyestone reached the top of Hayes Street and plunged down the other side, suddenly opening a lead that was insurmountable. In watching the tapes with Prichard, I saw Eyestone suddenly go into warp drive.
“When you run downhill,” Prichard says, “gravity becomes a culprit. The runner must expend a great deal of energy fighting to gain control of what amounts to a headlong rush. That control is usually gained by relying on the legs. Unfortunately, the legs are already working very hard. They’re taking quite a pounding. Now the runner is attempting to use them to slow the downhill plunge in order to gain control. The technique puts a great deal of stress on the legs.”
Prichard goes back to the VCR. He backs up the tape and runs it forward at slow speed.
“Ed Eyestone is another matter,” he says. “Watch his arms.” Eyestone’s arms are windmilling in sync with his legs. As each leg approaches impact with the ground, the opposing arm has gone through an arc not unlike lobbing a softball and is reaching its lowest point in the arc. “He’s using his arms to gain control instead of using his legs,” Prichard explains. “The process of windmilling his arms also serves to dissipate some of the impact, which is further adding to his control.”
Sure enough, once he’s again on the level, Eyestone’s arms drop to his sides and he begins pumping in the fashion most often associated with runners.
“When I talked with Ed after the race,” Prichard says, “he wasn’t conscious he was using his arms on the downhills. He feels it’s something that has come naturally from years of running downhills hard.
“Adapting arm motion to the terrain will make you a faster and more efficient runner,” Prichard says.
His advice for learning Eyestone’s technique? Pick a modest downhill a block or two long and after warming up, practice running down it quickly while employing the arms in a windmilling fashion. As the technique becomes more comfortable, graduate to steeper grades.
May 11, 1987
Fitness
THREE BOOKS THAT GET TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Although there has been a decline in death by heart disease due to the population becoming more fit, the disease is still by far the greatest choice of death.
I say “choice” because in most cases, people elect to have heart disease. Rather than adopting a fit and healthy lifestyle, they embrace a fitful and unhealthy deathstyle.
Factors affecting your chance of contracting heart disease come in two categories: those over which you have no control (gender, age, heredity) and those over which you do have control (smoking, diet, sedentary habits).
With the increased interest in heart disease, there has been a marked increase in the number of books on the subject. Within the past year, three excellent books have reached the market, and each covers heart disease from a different angle.
One, titled 14 Days to a Healthy Heart by Dr. Frederick T. Zugibe (Macmillan, $17.95) is a crash course in saving your life. After explaining how the heart functions and how its clock-like workings can be interrupted by the factors contributing to heart disease, Zugibe presents the reader with a half-dozen 14-day programs you can do to save yourself from heart disease.
The programs cover exercise, diet, smoking, blood pressure, stress, and diabetes. The programs are presented simply and graphically; there is nothing mystical or mysterious about them. Instead of taking a two-week vacation at Club Med this year, it might be worthwhile to pick up this book and head for a cabin in the north woods for two weeks. It could save your life.
The Healthy Heart Program by Dr. Terrance Kavanagh (Rodale Press, $12.95), is aimed primarily at people who’ve already met heart disease up close and personal. Kavanagh, medical director of the Toronto Rehabilitation Center, is a pioneer in rehabilitating heart disease sufferers through aerobic exercise. In the past 10 years, Kavanagh has trained more than 5,000 heart disease patients, significantly improving their recovery and longevity through running/endurance exercise programs.
The Healthy Heart Program begins with a short course on the heart and its problems, and from there takes the reader on a step-by-step course of rehabilitation, from the first exercise step to the completion of a marathon.
If a person still wants to feel like a “victim,” though, pretending that heart disease is a fate over which he has no control, an excellent reading assignment is Heart to Heart by Norman V. Richards (Atheneum, $14.95). Richards underwent coronary bypass in 1982 at age 50, one of 200,000 people to do so that year.
Richards, in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic, which developed the operation in 1967, explains how the heart works, what can go wrong, and the process of open heart surgery. He also steps into Kavanagh’s territory: recovery and rehabilitation through lifestyle changes and exercise.
May 25, 1987
Fitness
DON’T LET CHOLESTEROL COUNT UNDERMINE THE PROGRAM
Aerobic athletes who take themselves very seriously often become incredibly self-righteous—especially if they were at one point in their lives woefully unfit.
Besides a tendency to preach excessively, the nouveau fit have a tendency to accept in blind faith that their exercising cures all ills. Fitness becomes, for some, the ultimate mouthwash.
The sin of these evangelistic excesses has long tendrils. And I must admit that one of those tendrils has long been planted in me. That’s the one tickling the notion that says, “Hey, as long as you work out faithfully you can eat anything you want, and as much as you want.”
For years I’ve functioned under the philosophy that if you train enough, you can, with impunity, become a human garbage can.
People would say to me, “Why do you run?” And I’d answer flippantly, “So I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want.”
Sure, because of putting in 40, 50, or 60 miles a week there is a tendency to steer away from red meat and toward more carbohydrates, fresh fruits, and vegetables. But there is also a tendency to eat half of a large pizza and then go looking for an ice cream cone for dessert.
Unfortunately, although the pizza crust is complex carbohydrates, the cheese (that delicious stingy, gooey stuff) is fat. And, like other dairy products, it contains cholesterol. The ice cream cone? More fat and cholesterol.
Aerobic exercise does tend to cut into cholesterol. The primary way to lower cholesterol, of course, is through careful diet. Serious aerobic athletes, although tending toward a more healthful diet, also tend to consume more food than the sedentary person, so the chance of their consuming a greater total cholesterol even in a low-cholesterol diet is greater.
You may be one of those aerobic athletes who can eat anything with impunity. But it would be a shame to have worked diligently to perfect the body only to find that a high cholesterol count is undermining the entire program.
If you take time to keep track of your personal record for the 10-kilometer run or for how long it takes your pulse rate to come back to normal after a hard hour of aerobic dance, it would be worthwhile to do the same with your serum cholesterol count. Low score wins.