March 3, 1986
Fitness
BEYOND THE MARATHON: ULTRADISTANCE RACING
If you’re looking for a combination of art and science in running, form following function, the 1960s nod would go to Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila (marathon Olympic gold 1960 and 1964), the 1970s to America’s Frank Shorter (Olympic marathon gold in 1972, silver in 1976).
Both runners were beautiful to watch as they worked their sport, their bodies biomechanically honed to a perfection at once primitive and ultramodern.
Out in the nether reaches beyond the marathon, there is little loveliness, little art. The ultradistances are the working-man’s (and working-woman’s) realm, where the biomechanics of least resistance is worth its weight in gold, where strategy is silver, where guts are platinum, and where finesse is a drag.
The accomplishments of the ultradistance competitors are seldom chronicled in the popular press. There is too much of a nightmare quality to ultradistance running, fed by those times when the legs seem mired in not-quite-dry cement.
One of the most challenging and confounding events in ultradistance competition is the 24-hour track race. It is such an arcane event that even veterans of the Western States 100-Mile Trail Run admit they don’t understand why runners would circle a quarter-mile (or 400-meter) track incessantly for 24 hours just to see how many miles they can accumulate.
It takes a special individual to do the mental/psychological gymnastics required to shift gears sideways in such a way as to be comfortable circling the same track while the planet Earth makes one complete orbit. The only people in the world who are more steadfast in their goals are runners’ spouses and friends, who work as pit crews and who do the scoring and keep up the spirits of their runner.
One of the world’s best-organized, classiest 24-hour runs is held each year in the Bay Area, at the Santa Rosa Junior College track. It is run as a charity event, benefitting the American Cancer Society.
Runners dun their friends and relatives to sign up to sponsor them, a certain amount of money for each mile they turn in. This year the event is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. on March 2. Under the untiring guidance of Carol Witwer, the event has grown at a marvelous pace.
The first event was run over St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 1984; there were 22 runners and the affair raised $25,000. Last year’s effort featured 31 runners and brought in $35,000.
This year’s round-and-round extravaganza features 42 runners (just about the maximum logistically feasible for such an event), 11 of them women. Although Witwer doesn’t want to stick her neck out, she’s hoping to raise $50,000.
Any 24-hour event can use volunteers to spell pit crew personnel whose eyes are getting crossed from keeping track of their runners’ laps, especially in the wee hours of the night. If you’re up to helping a runner through a truly unforgettable experience, give Witwer a call at 707-538-4650.
March 10, 1986
Fitness
A $500,000 RACE FOR AMATEURS
It’s probably because I spent nearly five years back in the 1970s covering autosports that analogies between auto racing and foot racing keep coming to mind.
The oval tracks of stock car (Daytona) and Indy car (Indianapolis) racing equate with many of the classic European quarter-mile and 400-meter tracks, as does the money paid the winners and the media coverage they garner.
Then there are the road courses (LeMans, Watkins Glen, Laguna Seca) in auto racing, and the road courses (Boston, New York, San Francisco) in foot racing.
For the strictly amateur, there has always been street racing, both straight-line drag racing or through-the-country loop road racing. My GTO against your ‘Stang, for the pink slip.
In foot racing, it’s called, modestly enough, Super Run II, which is a street racing kind of 10-kilometer race series open to amateurs, with a national championship worth $500,000 to the male winner and $500,000 to the female winner. The event is in its second edition. You may have caught the finals late in 1984 on ESPN; the winners were Lynae Larson of Brookings, S.D., and Mike Duran of Weston, Colo.
This year’s final will be held at Lake Tahoe on May 24 and will be broadcast on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Between now and May 24, each of the 50 states in the country will hold a qualifying 10K event, the male and female winner going to the finale.
[Sorry about the confusion on this column. Obviously, it was originally a lot longer—and hopefully made more sense—before the editors had to significantly cut it down to fit the space available on this particular day.]
March 17, 1986
Fitness
THE VERY PRIVATE GRETE WAITZ GOES PUBLIC
One of the most private and introspective of all world-class distance runners is Grete Waitz of Norway, the former schoolteacher and teenage track sensation who burst onto the burgeoning distance-racing scene in October 1978, when she ran her first marathon (at New York) and set a world’s best of 2:32:30.
The shy and retiring runner’s timing couldn’t have been better (for the women’s running movement) or worse (for her jealously guarded privacy).
Although she’d competed in the Olympic Games media arena while a teenager, Grete had never experienced the personalized attention her first marathon win brought her. She and her husband, Jack, went back to Norway, stunned. What had begun as a lark gradually turned into a sometimes reluctant career as a figurehead for the rights of women to compete at longer distances on a world level.
Throughout it all (seven New York City Marathon wins, five IAAF world cross-country championships, an Olympic silver medal in the marathon), Grete and Jack remained private and reserved. They avoided the cocktail scene, routinely went to bed at 9:30, and were out the door on their morning run at 5:30.
This past October, however, Grete emerged in a new and uncharacteristic role: video star.
“I can’t begin to count the number of people who’ve come up to us at clinics with training questions,” Grete said recently on a promotional visit to San Francisco. “’I’ve been running about two years and run 20 miles a week,’ they’ll say, ‘and my 10K time is still the same as it was two years ago. What am I doing wrong?’ Then we talk and I learn that they run four or five miles a day on the same course, day after day, with no variety, and their training pace is never faster than their race pace. If they want to run a seven-minute pace in a race, they have to do some of their training at seven-minute pace and faster. They need to get off the plateau.”
The program Grete outlines in “Running Great With Grete Waitz” ($39.95) is relatively basic, but for good reason. “I’m reluctant to give specifics about speed and distance without actually knowing the runner personally,” she said, “because too many runners, when given a program, tend to look at the paper and follow it exactly, without ever listening to their bodies, and that can be dangerous.
“I have the feeling that many people who are experts tend to make running complicated. I’ve never had a professional coach. My preparations and training have been very much amateur, and I’ve been very successful. So I want to show people that it is not that complicated. But you have to be dedicated, you have to know what you want, and follow your program. You must use common sense and be very realistic about yourself.”
Waitz’s video program tends to place nearly as much emphasis on warm-up and cool-down routines as it does on the actual running, with the strict training schedules situated in an appendix-like segment at the end of the 60-minute tape. She feels the warm-up and cool-down are necessary to help avoid injuries associated with making major commitments to increase mileage and intensity.
March 24, 1986
Fitness
HOW TO KEEP YOUR PROGRAM ON THE LEVEL
One hallmark of an effective fitness program is regularity—important both to develop a sense of continuity and to maintain an acceptable level of fitness.
Interrupt the regular deposit of aerobic points into your fitness bank, and you are liable for a stiff penalty. From a dead start to a modicum of fitness takes about 45 days, but it takes only 15 days’ layoff to lose well over half of your fitness.
For the person with a great deal of regularity in his schedule, keeping an acceptable fitness level may be relatively easy. For the person who is on the road a great deal, maintaining a regular fitness routine can be a great challenge. This face is never pounded home more forcefully than when I take a three-day weekend to go skiing.
Although equipped with the best of intentions (including running shorts and shoes), I find that little can be gained aerobically while at altitude. Any run at altitude above 4000 feet had best be downhill, or else it’s guaranteed to go downhill fast.
The temperature has little to do with it. Even though I may have done a quality 24-mile workout at sea level last weekend with few overt bad effects, climbing Spring Street in Truckee in February is an anaerobic workout. And the hardest marathon I ever ran was a 10K road race at Tahoe Trails Running Camp at Squaw Valley one August.
Eventually the human body begins its adaptation to the thinner air, but the process takes nearly two weeks (the same amount of time it takes an altitude-trained runner to lose his edge when coming down off the mountain to join the lowlanders). That’s not much consolation for the weekend skier or for the runner who visits the Tahoe basin during the summer and is tempted to enter a 10K race. The results can be too humbling to contemplate.
Much the same applies to going to the mountains for several days of cross-country skiing. It is best to cross-country ski only with people who have made the trip with you from way down there at sea level. At least you’re starting on roughly the same footing as they are, instead of trying to keep up with someone who lives at 7000 feet all year.
There’s no scientific way around the wimpy feeling one endures when temporarily at altitude. There are a few things you can do to make yourself feel less miserable:
# Drink plenty of fluids (excluding alcohol) to counter the dehydration effect that altitude has on the body.
# Don’t eat heavy meals that tend to make you even more physically sluggish.
# When you become sleepy, go with it instead of trying to fight it.
# Modify exercise to pay homage to the thinner air. That means if you’re used to a six-mile run on Saturday afternoon, cut it in half when temporarily subsisting above 5000 feet.
One other admonition: Don’t let the local landscape fool you. Just because you’re way down in a valley and there are towering mountains on all sides, doesn’t mean you’re not at altitude.
March 31, 1986
Fitness
DON’T TURN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE INTO A WAR
Recent research has uncovered evidence of a genetic link to fatness. Science has finally noticed that overfat people tend to produce overfat children.
Grade school students noticed that decades ago. And they weren’t above pointing it out.
“Ah, Rudy, you’re almost as far as your old man.”
The genetic-link-to-fatness research indicates many overfat people can blame their genes for growing into bigger clothes. But although the Twiggy decade is over, a great deal of prejudice remains toward the individual who is portly, round, heavy—fat.
Nancy Roberts (sister of actor Tony Roberts) has written a book titled Breaking All the Rules (Viking, $17.95, 220 pp.), which is a morale-builder for those chronically unable to lose weight.
The tale of her own battle with the bulge is insightful and touching. She relates how she compulsively ate whenever she traveled by automobile, tracing the cause back to a family weekend ritual of packing up and rushing from their Manhattan apartment to the Fire Island ferry. The tension between her parents—their mother dragging her feet and her father driving as though it were the Indy 500 to make up lost time—became maddening. It was one in a long line of situations that led to compulsive eating as a form of self-defense.
Chapters on ineffective diets chronicle the yo-yo effect: one session of failed weight-loss followed by more weight gain before starting the next fad diet. It’s a vicious cycle.
The crux of the message is that nothing is gained—and certainly no fat is lost—by blaming yourself for being fat. Guilt breeds more eating binges. The binges stop when you change your attitude about food, which happens when you change your attitude about yourself.
“It is assumed that big people are unfit,” Roberts writes. “If this is true, if we are unfit, then surely it is because we have been too ashamed, too self-conscious, to participate in the kind of activities that promote fitness.”
The problem for fat people is not what others think of you, but in what you think of yourself.