The Glory of Rest

Every time you turn around there are reports of how overworked and overtired Americans are. A recent study concluded that Americans have no more leisure time today than they had in 1900 [Harper’s, June 2007, p. 13]. I think back to the 1950s when, inspired by the space race, scientists and sociologists were spending an inordinate amount of time gazing raptly into the ideal future, a future overflowing with outrageous labor-saving devices—everything from personalized jet packs to get us to work faster by allowing us to zoom above earthbound traffic tie-ups to robots that freed dear old Mom from onerous household chores such as cleaning out the greasy deep dish in which she had made the Wednesday night meatloaf.

There was talk of a whole new industrial complex arising that would do nothing but invent and implement swell things we could do with the mass of leisure time that would benevolently befall us.

As it turned out, nothing much came of all the daydreaming of futures filled with fun and leisure. If you want leisure time, you’ve got to move to Europe, where they get five weeks off at a time (usually the same five weeks in the middle of summer) and all go to the same beaches to relax like fleas on a poodle.

For most Americans, a 40-hour workweek just doesn’t get it done. And whether you’re a salaried employee or self-employed, you get to work just as many hours as you can stand. It’s no wonder that there are dozens of sleepaid ads in magazines and on television. It’s no wonder people are turning their cars into mobile offices.

The experts contend that you are overtired if it takes less than three minutes to fall asleep when you finally drag yourself to bed. (Of course, you don’t want the opposite problem, either: insomnia that prevents you from sleeping, sometimes caused by walking around all day in a semislumber.)

Marching through life in an overtired state isn’t good for a person’s health, and it certainly isn’t good for a person’s equanimity. That may be why so many people try to maintain an even keel by enrolling in everything from aromatherapy to yoga to bookdiscussion clubs to quilting bees. (No joke. The last is making a comeback as a way of relaxing, helping the local community, and socializing with a group of like-minded folks.)

The surrender to a continuous feeling of tiredness splashes over into long-distance running. People who are very serious about their running are frequently not serious enough about

the resting phase of their training. And it’s the resting phase of a training program where the training effect takes place. Dave Costill, the godfather of human-performance studies, puts it very simply in his book Running: The Athlete Within: “Balance work and rest. The purpose of training is to stimulate the runner’s anatomy and physiology to grow stronger during periods of rest and repair. Without adequate rest, the benefits of training cannot be fully realized.”

You can train yourself into the ground, but if you don’t back off and give your body (and mind and spirit) time to recover from the workouts, the “training effect” never has a chance to kick in and the workouts are nothing more than self-flagellation.

Consider the fact that any training you do is a process of breaking down your muscles. Run a hard 10-mile workout, and your muscles are stressed and strained and, to an extent, damaged, which is why you can’t do too many hard workouts too frequently without inviting injury or breakdown. That is why it is educational to keep a running journal. When you suffer an overuse injury, you can then put on your deerstalker cap and clench that pipe firmly in the side of your mouth and get out that magnifying glass. In the guise of Sherlock Holmes, you can peruse the last two or three weeks of your training journal and determine just where you started to hurt yourself.

Overuse injuries don’t happen overnight. Traumatic injuries occur

suddenly, as when you trip on the curb of the sidewalk and fall down.

Overuse injuries are like the mist on the windshield of a car. When enough mist falls, the droplets begin to run one into another, in the process forming ever-larger drops that slide down the windshield, encounter other drops, clot together, and make still-bigger drops. That’s how an overuse injury happens: little tears joining other little tears to finally come together to make big tears—and big tears are overuse injuries.

Stop the misting process, and eventually the droplets evaporate and you’re no worse for the wear you’ve laid on your muscles.

The way to stop the misting process is to rest.

Rest doesn’t have to be total inactivity that makes you feel as though you’ve encased yourself in a complete body cast.

Gentle physical activity (taking a stroll, puttering in the garden, enjoying lively discussion in a book-discussion group) can be a form of active rest. The object is to stay away from more running for a period of time so that your body can undergo the training effect so that your muscles are at an increased level and ready for whatever workout is scheduled next.

That is why most professional runners don’t have regular jobs. Part of their job is taking a high-quality nap in the afternoon between the morning and the late-afternoon workout. Part of their job is getting regular massages to expedite the recovery process from

both the quality and the quantity of their training. Part of their job is also to psychologically rest so they can recuperate from recent races and moredemanding strength-training workouts, such as hill work.

For most of us who are stitching our training in around the quilt work of real life, getting in the necessary rest periods can be difficult. But if we are to perform well in races and if we are to continue training without incurring injury, we definitely need to accommodate the body’s need for restorative rest.

But, of course, there is also a flip side these days.

Some runners expect to run well on more rest than training.

Runners who train little but expect decent results have spent too much time in the modern school system where everyone who shows up gets a gold star. Or if you show up late but not quite as late as last week, you are also praised and rewarded. Or if you merely exist, you expect praise.

There is a lot of hand-wringing and righteous sarcasm these days about the need of younger workers to be praised constantly for the slightest thing they do… like showing up for work. Some companies have workers who do nothing but heap praise on needy employees on a regular basis, sort of like the marine-life rescue workers who must constantly wet down a beached whale so it doesn’t die . . . while they try to think of ways to lure it back into the sea, but get no help from the whale.

Ofcourse, everyone who has worked hard for decades with little or no praise

finds this both ridiculous and somewhat hysterical: to be praised for existing or lauded not for doing anything exceptional, but rather for doing something as mundane as showing up for work on time three out of five days.

Of course, real life doesn’t work like that.

And certainly, long-distance running doesn’t.

Long-distance running rewards hard work. There are no shortcuts, no matter how many claims you hear that this or that food will knock five minutes off your next 10K.

The rewards of long-distance running are earned the hard way: one step at a time. The successful long-distance runner is a master of pacing, hard work, and appropriate rest.

You don’t need to run 120 miles a week to get a decent marathon time— especially if you are already working full-time or more.

You can run a marathon you can be proud of on 55 to 75 miles a week. The 120-mile-per-week load is for the national- and international-class runners.

But you won’t run a decent marathon on 25 to 35 miles a week—unless you’ ve been at it a long time and your legs have a lot of muscle-memory miles on them. Memory miles are those long, hard weeks of training over a decade or more that hard wire your legs to know what is required of them when you pin on a number. But that seemingly magical phenomenon can be tapped only so many times.

For the good runner, hard work is a must—as is hard rest.

As a nation built on guilt, and on which guilt is often heaped (sometimes even by ourselves), it is sometimes difficult to feel comfortable taking that well-earned, strategic rest period without feeling guilty—and there’s nothing that interrupts a perfectly good nap more effectively than a rash of guilt generated because you’re taking the nap.

If you train hard, race often, and pace yourself wisely, give yourself a break.

It isn’t easy for most Americans, but try a little tenderness by giving yourself permission to rest on occasion. The long-term benefits are well worth the wrestling match with guilt.

Eo * *

There are two kinds of marathon runners: the quiet racer and the event participator. The latter runner longs for the lights and action of amegamarathon where there is a great deal of stimulation and the more hype the better. The race is more of an “event” (or, in 1960’s lingo, a “happening”) than a pure race.

Quiet racers look for races that offer a fast course and a minimum of frills.

This is my personal preference: a quiet, out-of-the-way race where you can come to the start quietly, jog off for a few warm-up miles without having to run an obstacle course, quietly reflect on what is to come, line up at a reasonable place in the field, get off cleanly, and get into a rhythm within the first few yards.

The last half-marathon I ran was just the opposite. Before the start, a spandex-clad aerobics fitness instructor

bounded around on a stage with blaring disco music while directing hundreds of like-minded runners in front of the stage through a brace of kinetic exercises that would have given a physiologist a heart attack. All I could think of was the stress the poor joints, ligaments, and muscles were suffering in the chilly morning before the body had had time to warm up. Ugh. Ouch.

Not that there isn’t a place for hyperkinetic people to get up and lead the mob in exercises that are good for them but that also seem like fun to do. Hell, I grew up watching Jack LaLanne on TV, never realizing then that I would end up writing five books with his wife, Elaine.

Jack was—and still is—a nuclear power plant of energy. Pumped. Encouraging. Inspiring. A madman on a mission.

Visiting the LaLannes for work sessions with Elaine, I saw another side of Jack: a quiet, contemplative guy bent, during his downtime, on absorbing as muchas he could about what was going on in the world by watching cable news shows hour after hour while quietly snuggled under a blanket. Of course, he had been up since 3:00 a.m., when he had done an hour of gym exercises followed by an hour of pool exercises. He was quiet, funny, a perfect host, and prepared at the drop of the right word to give a lecture on the benefits of quick-frozen vegetables over fresh produce.

But put him in front of an audience and he lit up like an overheated nuclear reactor.

Sean Burch strikes me as similar to Jack: contemplative about his own life’s goals and ambitions; nearly maniacal in his ability to concentrate and focus on a goal until he reaches—and often surpasses—it; and capable of a deep, rich vein of free-flow energy.

Like many people who have conquered a certain portion of the world, Sean Burch had to change his life—and especially his personal focus—to do it. And to do it, he had to make sacrifices. Inspired by the hardiness of his grandfather and feeling adrift after the wizened old man died, Sean reexamined his life, compared his current life to the stuff of dreams he had harbored for years, and decided, with the support of his elementary-schoolteacher wife, to chuck his $100,000 executive job and reset his life.

He had wanted to climb Everest. He went and did it. He wanted to run up Mount Kilimanjaro. And he did it—in record time. He’s one of the top extreme-adventure practitioners in the world.

And he has put together a 12-week program for “conquering your inner Everest,” which he calls Hyperfitness (Avery Books). It’s his multilevel fitness course presented ina… well… hyperkinetic way, in a thorough but Jack LaLanne-like cheerleading style. He breaks his followers down into one of three levels based on Everest seekers: trekker, climber, and Sherpa. He renames some of the standard areas of concern for those who would be fit: “hyperstrength,” “hyperfare (food),” and “hypermind.” He recommends that

you maintain a “hyperfitness journal” and that you set short- and long-term goals. Most if not all of this is a repackaging of what Jack LaLanne has been preaching for decades—not unlike the marathon-training programs that drag umbilical cords from Arthur Lydiard’s programs from the 1960s.

What is most interesting about the program—and this will be a bonanza for gadget freaks—is the array of exercises performed with the entire spectrum of gym equipment, from dumbbells to stationary gym equipment that looks as though it could settle the space shuttle into its launching pad. My favorite is what he calls a barbell but that looks more like a long, straight, oversize fencing foil with an enormous hand guard; it looks like something that could put your eye out.

The names of the exercises are totally descriptive. He wastes no time naming them something fancy or cute. Try the “Triceps Push-Up on Medicine Ball to Jump Medicine Ball Daffies, to Jump With Medicine Ball Overhead.” Phew. Just saying it burns calories.

Although Sean divides potential practitioners into the three categories, anyone who embarks on this program had best be serious about fitness. It’s truly ambitious. But if you can survive the 12 weeks of interacting with all sorts of gym machines, you’re bound to come out a more-hyped version of what you used to be—as long as you can maintain Sean’s boundless enthusiasm for the task. And considering the energy you’ ve expended getting there, I would wager you’ ll experience something you

haven’t enjoyed in years: a certain precious and rare equanimity.

Eo * *

One of the most colorful characters ever to pin on a Boston Marathon number was Ellison “Tarzan” Brown, a Narragansett Indian who won the famed race twice: in 1936 and 1939.

Many myths surround Tarzan Brown. One of the prevailing myths is that he trained haphazardly if at all, that he ran as he felt, and that he had no discipline in either his training or his racing. The myth comes to us compliments of the prevailing racist view of Indians at the time: that they were fairly lazy and that they were wild and not easily trained or civilized.

As Michael Ward shows us in his excellent (and exhausting) biography, Ellison “Tarzan” Brown (McFarland & Company), nothing could be further from the truth. Before his first win at Boston, Tarzan and his manager/trainer Jack Farrington removed themselves to a remote location so that Tarzan could train in seclusion, away from the nosy sportswriters and fans. Tarzan’s training was extensive and intense. He even had

anutritionist, Dr. Edward F. Dougherty, living with him at the training camp and advising him on every aspect of his diet.

Tarzan came into the 1936 Boston Marathon with a number of significant road race wins under his belt, and he was mentally prepared for the race. He wasn’t in the habit of taking a race field out recklessly; his strategy was usually to hold back and see what happened up front before making his move.

Michael Ward, a musician by trade, has mined every possible source of information on Ellison Brown—to the point that no subsequent book on the subject need ever be written.

Maintaining strict objectivity, Michael examines numerous accounts of specific races, lays out the accounts, and discusses, with great logic, any discrepancies in them. One of the best chapters is Michael’s exhaustive examination of the legendary tap on the shoulder—or lower, depending on the account you read—that John A. Kelley gave Tarzan when he caught him on what was to become known as Heartbreak Hill. Michael hauls out every

account of the incident and compares and contrasts every last one, running from Tarzan’s shoulder all the way down to his butt, as various journalists of the day saw it. In the next chapter, he examines the legend that Boston Globe sportswriter Jerry Nason gave the famed hill its name, and by digging through every newspaper he could find from the time, he learns that the hill was already known as Heart Break Hill—at least according to an account in the Westerly Sun.

If his subject were not so interesting, Michael’s thoroughness might be a burden. But it gives the reader a feeling of comfort that this is as accurate an account as you are likely to ever read.

Like Kenny Moore’s recent book on Bill Bowerman, this is probably more

than we really need to know about the subject’s life. But better to put everything in that can be found than leave something out that may have played a role in defining who Tarzan Brown was. He was much more nuanced than a dumb Indian who happened to have some running talent. Michael Ward is fascinated by his subject and greatly respects him, and that comes shining through on nearly every page. Tarzan’s life, his accomplishments, and his death are thoroughly and lovingly examined in 433 pages.

Now if we can get Michael to turn his talents toward examining the life and times of Boston great Frank Zuna, all will be well with the running world.

—Rich Benyo

ON the ROAD WITH DON KARDONG

Where Has Depletion Gone?

In the last issue of

Marathon & Beyond,

; I wrote about my first

marathon, which was

t was in great shape at

the time, so a marathon the morning

after a hard indoor two-mile track race

didn’t seem like a bad idea. In fact,

things went so well that day that I won,

running 2:18:05.6 and qualifying for

the 1972 Olympic Trials. All in all, it felt remarkably easy.

What didn’t feel easy about it, though, were the final four or five miles. I don’t remember if anyone had mentioned “hitting The Wall” to me beforehand, but I got an acute lesson that day. Iran out of energy before I ran out of marathon, and the combination of empty legs and plummeting spirits made those final miles a special kind of challenge—mental, physical, and spiritual. This was an all-encompassing fatigue I had never felt before.

Clearly, I learned, the marathon had a unique brand of torture up its sleeve. You could be traveling along feeling relatively comfortable, on pace for a good time, when… gulp… you could almost hear that last bit of fuel go gurgling down the fuel line. The tank, suddenly, was empty. You, suddenly, were struggling for each step. The finish line, suddenly, was way too far in the distance.

Thad my second lesson about hitting The Wall later that year, when my friend Steve ran his first marathon. What I remember watching was his wobbly slog over the final miles of a marathon near Birch Bay, acrescent-shaped body of water near the Canadian border in the state of Washington. What I saw was a struggle, but Steve’s telling later gave a better insight into what hitting The Wall could be like from inside the marathoner’s skull.

In Steve’s telling, when he reached 20 miles he could see the finish line in the distance, but he was so drained that he doubted he had enough energy left to reach it. He would have to cover the looping arc around the bay to get to his destination, but he was so tired and running so slowly that he thought he might never get there.

BREAKING IT INTO EVER-SMALLER SEGMENTS

As a ploy to boost his confidence, Steve decided to break up the remaining distance into smaller segments. He would pick an object a few hundred meters ahead, and then look down at the road in front of him, running with great determination until he reached the object. This way, the rational portion of his mind knew he was making progress.

To begin with, he picked a large fir tree up ahead, looked down, keptrunning

for afew minutes, and eventually passed it. Next he spotted a car parked along the road and did the same. In a minute, he passed it. Little by little, he knew he was getting nearer the finish.

Finally, Steve looked up ahead and spotted someone walking along the road.

“IT may be running really slowly,” Steve thought, “but I must be going faster than a walker.”

Convinced that even a really slow runner would eventually catch a walker, he put the strategy he had been using to work. He put his head down, ran for a while, and looked up. Incredibly, he didn’t seem to have made much progress. He put his head down again, concentrated on the road right ahead of him for as long as he could, and looked up again. Amazing. He still hadn’t made up much distance on the walker.

“T can’t believe it!” he thought. “Is it really possible someone is walking faster than I’m running?”

With great determination, Steve looked down one final time and concentrated as hard as he could for as long as he could. At last, finally, he caught the walker—and discovered that the man had been walking toward him the whole time.

Steve eventually reached the finish, but he didn’t run another marathon for a long, long time.

THE GREAT MARATHON CONUNDRUM

So, like most marathoners, I learned early about The Wall. And once you’ ve hit it, it’s easy to become obsessed with

avoiding it next time. Plenty of energy, start to finish, that’s the goal. And that’s also the conundrum, the puzzle I wrestled with in each subsequent marathon I ran.

Why The Wall? As it was typically described back then, the body is capable of storing enough readily accessible fuel—glycogen—to get the typical marathoner to about 20 miles. After that, energy comes increasingly from fat metabolism, which is dramatically more difficult, and hence the slowdown. Andas energy becomes more painful to acquire, the other hobgoblins that haunt the latter stages of the marathon—dehydration, cramps, lack of focus—start to close in. What starts as a muscle fuel challenge becomes a full-fledged slam of body and mind.

The trick, then, is not to run out of fuel. And over the years, marathoners have developed a variety of strategies to accomplish that. Longer training runs so the body becomes more adept at fat burning and less dependent on glycogen. Moderate pacing in the early stages of the marathon, sparing some energy for later in the race. Regular visits to aid stations along the course, where repeated swallows of sports drinks can fuel a few extra miles. And, of course, the traditional carboloading dinner the night before, where marathoners try to stuff additional calories of energy into the system. After all, if you’ll be requiring more fuel in the morning, all you need to do is add it to the tank the night before, right?

Well, no. In some ways fuel in your body is just like gasoline in your car. You

can’t put more in than the tank will hold. Eat all you want, but the body can still hold only enough to get you to 20 miles. And there’s the rub. And there, also, is the question I’m asking in this column: what happened to the strategy we used to use to trick the body into storing additional glycogen? What happened to the depletion phase of carboloading?

Let me explain. And let me start by confessing that I’m not a physiologist, and I don’t even play one on TV. But I did listen to what physiologists were telling us marathoners back in the late 1970s, and what they told us was that it was possible to trick the body, using a six-day routine of dietary manipulation, to store the extra glycogen you would need to get well past The Wall.

THREE DAYS TO DEPLETE CARBS

It went like this: About a week before race day, you would do a very easy long run, nothing too far, and at a very comfortable pace. Afterward, instead of chowing down a big breakfast rich in carbohydrates, you would do the opposite. Eat a meal rich in protein and as low in carbs as you could make it. Thus began the first of three days of depletion. On each of those days you would do your normal running but avoid carbohydrates as much as possible in all meals.

If you’ re fairly new to marathoning, this may strike you as physiologically suspect or just plain weird. If you were marathoning in the 1970s and early 1980s, though, your reaction is more likely a certain desperate hollowness in your gut as you recall what torture three days of low carbohydrate intake could be.

The point of depletion was, in layman’s terms, to make the muscles desperate for carbohydrates. Those three days of famine were followed by a virtual hog wallow in carbs, a threeday pig fest for the ages. According to the theory, the body was so desperate for fuel after three days of carbohydrate starvation that, once carbs were reintroduced, this technique would allow the muscles to be overfilled with glycogen, above and beyond what

was possible with carboloading alone. Plenty of energy for those final miles. No Wall at 20.

For a few years, this process was almost de rigueur for anyone hoping to run a personal best. And it wasn’t just for elite runners. Everyone had the same challenge with that blasted Wall, and this depletion-loading protocol, everyone hoped, might be the solution. Perhaps it was. But no perhaps about it, those three days of depletion were acutely painful. The body was drained, and the mind was in a real pissy mood.

A friend of mine back then related the story of being in the grocery store with her marathoning husband when he was “Moping around, acting very strange, sort of hostile.” Suddenly she clicked. “Are you on that weird diet again?” she accused. He was and was extremely agitated about being surrounded by aisles of cereal, pasta, and junk food but carrying instead a couple of bunches of celery to fill the pit in his stomach. Stay away during depletion, that was the rule every marathoner’s partner learned, usually the hard way.

IF IT WORKED IN PRACTICE

I went through the depletion-loading protocol myself on several occasions in preparation for important marathons, including the 1976 Olympics. I wasn’t totally convinced of the technique’s physiological validity, but I had used it in the Olympic Trials and, veritas or voodoo, it had worked out nicely. I was receptive to whatever trick might give me an edge over the world-class Olympic field, so there I went again,

off on a three-day water, fiber, and protein binge.

Anyone who has tried this protocol remembers the steady, gloomy descent induced by depletion. The first day, hunger. The second day, desperation. The third day, weakness to the core, the only saving grace being the thought of day four, when carbs would flood back into the system.

On that third day of my depletionloading protocol before the Olympic marathon, I went on a nine-mile run with my U.S. teammate Craig Virgin. Within a few years, Craig would show some impressive marathon credentials, but in 1976 he was still a track racer, unfamiliar with the demands or peculiarities of marathon preparation, especially the diet I had embraced. We weren’t running a fast pace on our training run, but in my depletion-induced fatigue, I kept falling behind. The first time this happened, Virgin slowed down to let me catch up, then asked if I was all right. I explained about the diet I was on and that this particular day was the low point of my energy reserves. Craig listened the first time, slowed down to let me catch up a couple of more times, but finally, stunned at how much trouble I was having, couldn’t contain himself.

“Are you sure,” he blurted out, incredulous, “that you’re supposed to feel this bad four days before your race?”

I grinned painfully, told him my energy would start returning the next day, and we continued on, slowly, to finish the run. And sure enough, my energy did start returning, beginning with the next morning’s breakfast, which I recall

was heavy on syrup. Within three days I felt strong again. And on marathon day, Iran the best race of my life.

DID IT BORDER ON WITCHCRAFT?

But did the depletion-loading protocol really play a role in my success? Did I, in fact, trick my body into storing more energy for the latter stages of the marathon? Or was it all just witchcraft? Well, probably not witchcraft, but maybe something else. Knowledgeable coaches of the era suggested that the main benefit of depletion was that it weakened the runner when he might otherwise be training too hard. The final week before a marathon is a time to avoid running too fast or too far, but the temptation for the well-trained runner is to do both, while denying he’s doing either. After months of hard workouts in preparation for a marathon, it’s not easy to persuade yourself to ratchet down the training. Being severely depleted of glycogen forces a slowdown. That, more than anything, might have been why the protocol seemed to work. What I remember, in any case, is that by the early 1980s the conventional wisdom swung dramatically away from doing any kind of depletion. Carboloading, yes, but depletion? No. Or so the pundits were saying. You could get just as much value from loading alone as you could from preceding loading with those three brutal days without carbs. And if the benefit of depletion was simply that it forced you to rest during the final week before the marathon, then, doggone it, rest. And eat normally.

Thus did depletion die a sudden death. Almost instantly no runner, elite or recreational, was doing it.

But to this day, I couldn’t tell you whether abandoning depletion was really based on hard evidence or simply wishful thinking. If you ever slogged through those three days of self-induced exhaustion, you would be ready to grasp at any shred of evidence that told you it wasn’t necessary. If there was a well-researched scientific study showing that depletion wasn’t worth the effort, I don’t remember reading it or reading of it. But when Alberto Salazar said he didn’t do it, that was good enough for all of us.

WHY NOT GIVE IT A TRY?

And yet marathoners today still slam into The Wall. Training, pacing, diligent uptake of sports drinks, and one day of carboloading haven’t reduced The Wall to rubble. It’s still there, as formidable as ever.

Thus, I issue this challenge: Give it a try. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, eat meals with as little carbohydrate as possible. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, fill your tummy to the brim with every carbohydrate you can gather in front of you. (Although on Saturday evening, let your intake go back to normal, or you’ll become way too familiar with the port-a-johns on race day.) And in your Sunday marathon, see if all that dietary folderol helps. Does The Wall crumble?

Definitely, give it a try. Just one request: Don’t call me on Wednesday to tell me how it’s going.