A Real-World Course—and Race

Everyone at this late date knows the outcome of the U.S. men’s Olympic Marathon Trials in New York City’s Central Park over ING NYC Marathon weekend, from Ryan Hall’s magnificent sub-2:10 performance on a course that demands the description “challenging” to the tragic loss of Ryan Shay, arunner who the Romantics from 200 years ago would have declared was cut down in the prime of his life and his talent.

The day was one of decidedly mixed emotions: from astonishment at the energy and exuberance of one Ryan who appeared that he had the steam left to run another five miles at the same speed he was going during the final miles to another Ryan who left a gigantic black hole of a vacuum in the emotional pool of everyone who followed the race either live a mere three feet from the runners or through an at-times cranky video presentation on TV.

Every one of the participants is to be congratulated on dedicating a large part of the last few years to make it to New York City to stand on the starting line for a chance to go after one of the three tickets to the Beijing Olympics or to just be part of a very special race, arguably one of the best ever held in this country. Let’s face it: there are some sports where overhyped “athletes” get overpaid for underperforming, and

then there are genuine athletes pure of intention and unburdened by pretension who overperform purely for the love of the sport and the exhilaration of the competition.

On top of that are the course and the time of year when some 10 dozen of this country’s finest runners met to winnow their numbers down to a mere three.

Too many major marathon courses are made too flat and too easy … and in the process are made boring. When Pheidippides ran from the plains of Marathon to the gates of Athens on that September day in 490 B.C., he didn’t run on a course so unchallenging that the bubble in the middle of a carpenter’s level never wavered from dead center. He ran on a course that made “undulate” sound like a dirty word. For the Olympic Games of 1896 and 2004, that same course was used, and as aresult, the race was made more interesting than it would have been had it been run on what approximates a ballroom floor.

The course in New York City’s Central Park was as close to the real marathon course as the men’s Trials has enjoyed in its 40-year existence. It was essentially a paved cross-country course, which sounds like an oxymoron but in our modern, overpaved world, isn’t.

Back in the ’60s, when I ran crosscountry for Bloomsburg State College in central Pennsylvania, our course was the only one in the conference that was entirely asphalt; it also happened to be the shortest (less than five miles) and one of the toughest (it had a gigantic

ill within the last mile that would have better been approached wearing crampons than running flats). The Central Park course reminded me of that: very rolling, lots of turns, chilly autumn air, plenty of wind (at one stretch in the face, at another a tailwind), trees turning into painters’ palettes, and a smattering of fans, some of whom hoofed it from one section of the course to another, then back again. The course offered fans a chance to see the action 10 times if

they were willing to do the half-mile jog back and forth.

The fans who were there were enthusiastic. A quartet of Brian Sell fans did the bare-chested billboard act, smearing paint on their chests that spelled out S-E-L-L if they managed to stand in correct order, which they mostly did. There was also a contingent of Bucknell (Pennsylvania) University fans, no doubt members of that school’s cross-country team. And crunched within the Bucknell ranks on one loop was Jonathan Beverly, editor of Running Times. We were on opposite sides of the road but managed to catch up a little bit by yelling back and forth. Like him, I had decided to eschew the official press bennies in favor of being down on the

ground close enough to the action to catch a few drops of sweat as some of the runners went by very, very close.

In spite of all the effort the New York Road Runners Club put into promoting the Trials and the regular-issue marathon the next day—the club had a wonderful poster design featuring the Olympic torch next to the Statue of Liberty’s torch that turned up in plenty of subway stops—most of the New Yorkers walking their dogs in the park seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the onceevery-four-years U.S. men’s Olympic Marathon Trials was happening right there in front of them. One dog nearly got hit by a special drinks bottle tossed off the course by one of the runners, and the dog’s owner regarded the offending plastic bottle as though it were a piece of heat shield fallen from a UFO.

Since all the runners knew the kind of course they would be facing, they could train specifically for it. What they couldn’t train for were the supercharged engine and the overdrive gear Ryan Hall had in reserve.

On the very positive side, unlike Trials of years past, which were run way too near to the actual Olympics, such an early elimination process allows the three who are going (and the alternatives) to recuperate from the Trials and then rebuild over time for the Games next September. Never have the Chosen Three had the luxury of nearly ayear to make their preparations, which thanks to China’s notorious foul air will involve running long workouts behind

a diesel-powered bus that hasn’t been serviced in a decade.

Speaking of decades, it has been decades since America’s marathon fortunes have been as rich as they are this year. At least a dozen runners, on paper, could have made the team. The fact that all three who did make it are from three distinctly different training programs nicely balances the team and validates the current state of the efforts made by the various intense training programs scattered across the country.

If there was one major shortcoming for the Trials, it is that more of the 37,000-plus runners who were in town torun the ING New York City Marathon didn’t take the time to go to the park to witness some of the best damned marathon running the United States has ever seen on its soil. The spectators were similar in number to those at a state cross-country meet. But what they lacked in numbers, they certainly made up for in enthusiasm and support.

Congratulations to the Chosen Three: Ryan Hall, Dathan Ritzenhein, and Brian Sell. All the hard work paid off. Good luck in Beijing. And further congratulations to everyone involved in the 2008 men’s Trials, from the remainder of the field of runners to the volunteers who kept the course under control and from the organizers from the New York Road Runners Club to the sponsors. It was a great day for American marathoning, if one sobered by Ryan Shay’s death.

—Rich Benyo

ON the ROAD WITH DON KARDONG

Weight! Weight! Don’t Tell Me

Thavean uncanny knack for maintaining weight. & I’m not talking about

putting on weight—that

“| happens in spurts, and

c I’ll get to that in a minute. I’m talking about staying at a certain

weight for long periods of time without giving it much thought.

lL used to think this was simply the result of dedicated training. In college, even as some of my teammates would religiously, even obsessively, weigh in periodically and make adjustments to caloric intake for the next few days to lose a pound or two, I would skip all that and just do my running and enjoy my meals—the good, the bad, and the ugly. In my experience, if you ran at a high level and didn’t waver in your dedication, your weight would behave, no matter what you ate. That seemed natural to me, and the repeated trips to the scale lsaw my teammates taking seemed unnecessary, compulsive, and silly.

During any given year, I didn’t weigh myself more than a handful of times. When I did, the number would invariably be within a pound or two of what it had been the last time I had checked, months earlier. In between, I would have run twice a day almost every day, eating and drinking anything and everything.

No worries. If you run as you should, your weight will be what it should. Or so I thought.

This was before anorexia nervosa became widely recognized as an affliction that haunted distance runners, especially female distance runners. In fact, this was before female distance runners, or at least before there were enough of them to overturn a banquet table. As eating disorders became better known, I assumed every runner who obsessed about weight must be suffering from anorexia or bulimia. If you ran, you could eat what you wanted, and you should. Runners who tried to lose weight often became dangerously thin. Coaches who had their runners weigh in frequently could precipitate eating disorders. Young women were, and are, especially vulnerable.

But not me. In those glorious days, I was a happy nutritional heretic. I espoused Froot Loops and Ding Dongs. I told the crowd at running clinics that a balanced diet was important, which was why I ate at a different ethnic restaurant every night—Mexican, Chinese, Italian. Someone once wrote a letter to the editor in response to my reported diet, claiming that no top runner could survive on such fare. Clearly, he wrote, [had been kidding. The thing is, I wasn’t.

BELIEVE IT OR DON’T: RUNNING BURNS CALORIES

I once appeared on the cover of The Runner magazine eating a hot fudge sundae, with the headline “The Eat More and Run Better Diet.” Not long after that I gota call from a reporter who was writing a story about anorexia and bulimia in distance runners. After an hour on the phone with him, I figured out that he assumed I must be one of the rarities—a male runner suffering from an eating disorder. He was digging for dirt, and when I failed to confess the illness I was supposedly concealing, he finally hung up. I’m not sure why it was so difficult to believe that I was simply burning off a ton of calories by running twice a day, every day.

I’m periodically reminded of things I said or wrote in those days:

¢ Avoid any diet that discourages the use of hot fudge. ° If you eat foods that are half as

nutritious as they should be, eat twice as much.

¢ If you run 100 miles a week, you can eat anything you want, because you’ ll burn all the calories you consume, you deserve it, and you’ll be injured soon and back ona restricted diet anyway.

¢ Without ice cream, there would be chaos and darkness.

Icouldn’t claim I was eating healthily, and even now I imagine grabbing my chest during a training run, collapsing to the ground, and muttering my last words: “Damn, I guess running can’t undo a lifetime of transfats.” Secretly, though, I thought it could. Or at least that running could yield a fair bit of nutritional forgiveness.

Mostly, though, in those heady days of twice-a-day workouts, I was simply pleased that, unlike so many Americans, I didn’t have to diet. Ever.

Ever, though, didn’t last forever. The days of nutritional agnosticism are gone. I am now about six weeks into the first official diet of my life, a dreary regimen that involves liquid-protein drinks for breakfast and lunch. And

man, does this suck. But I’m sticking with it, because this is the final frontier of my recovery.

Ah yes, my recovery. It’s been over three years since I had meniscus surgery on both knees. The surgery was arthroscopic and therefore less invasive than it might have been, but the whole process—from the pain that brought my running to a halt, all the way to the first jogging steps I took after the second surgery—added up to seven months. That was the longest layoff of my four-decade running career, and I knew it wouldn’t be easy to rebound. But I figured there were two basic steps involved. One, recover from surgery. Two, reconstruct my fitness.

What I hadn’t counted on was step three: lose the extra weight.

RUNNING REALLY DOES BURN CALORIES—DOESN’T IT?

That’s not quite true. I knew I would have to lose it, but I thought—based on how easily I had been able to maintain an ideal weight in the past—that pounds would disappear automatically, almost magically. Get the running back to preinjury levels and the weight would melt away like snow in April. I had shot up 20 pounds during the layoff, but I fully expected to drop 20 pounds when my running was back to normal.

Imagine my surprise.

My weight did fall slightly at first, buta year after my final surgery, with my mileage close to presurgery levels, I was still carrying most of the weight I had

gained. Two years after the surgery, even as I was adding 16- and 18-mile training runs to my weekly routine, I was still 10 pounds heavy. And from there, my weight simply wouldn’t budge. In fact, leven regressed a couple of pounds.

And by the way, 10 pounds over wasn’t 10 pounds over the racing weight of my glory years. The weight I had once maintained had acquired new heft with the passage of time. In my post-elite years, I wasn’t simply maintaining weight. My weight was, as my doctor put it during an annual visit, “trending upwards.” That trend was about a pounda year, which doesn’t seem much until you multiply it by a few decades. I had become more or less comfortable with the trend, but I wasn’t about to accept 10 additional pounds. In truth, I didn’t care much for the trend either.

Whether I cared or not, though, my weight wouldn’t budge. My mileage increased, but my weight didn’t decrease. I was doing better training than Thad before my layoff, but I couldn’t seem to shed those extra pounds. I was, once again, displaying an uncanny knack for maintaining weight. This time, though, I wasn’t maintaining that slim, road-warrior weight of my youth. I was maintaining the additional weight I had gained, by trend and by recent layoff.

Did it matter?

Well, yes. My wife, Bridgid, once tossed me a 5-pound sack of sugar and said, “Anyone who thinks an additional 5 pounds isn’t important should carry this around for a while.” This was just

idle conversation, not directed at me. Or … Wait a minute. I think I just figured something out.

In any case, I hadn’t worried much about that 1-pound-per-year trend, because by the time I realized it was happening, I was past worrying, at least much, about my performance. I could still run long, still run reasonably fast, and [had plenty of empty space to store the extra pounds. I was significantly above my college weight when I attended my 30-year reunion, and several of my female friends informed me that I looked better than I had in college.

“You were way too skinny back then,” they said. This isn’t the sort of report from the opposite sex that leads to dieting.

SO WEIGHT CAN MAKE YOU LOOK BETTER? REALLY?

I guess what I’m saying is that I had learned to accept weight gain that seemed as slow and steady as the creation of sedimentary rock. The accumulation of pounds was just a part of aging, right? And no one was telling me I looked overweight.

Those 20 almost-instant pounds, though, acquired during the months before, during, and after my knee surgery, were a different story. They shocked me out of my lethargy, because they made me… well, lethargic. As I started running again, I huffed and puffed for no good reason. My pace was pedestrian, but my heart was thumping. Small hills seemed alpine. There was some basic

physics at work here. It takes more energy to propel increased weight, and my body’s energy systems were struggling to move me forward.

Then, too, I could really see those extra pounds. A glance in the mirror at my sideways profile made me cringe. My belly was bloated. My pants size had increased. My vanity was appalled.

But here’s the thing that really got my attention: clearly, the extra weight was an impediment to restoring my knees to health. My menisci were repaired, but I still suffered aches and pains in and around my knees. And why shouldn’t I? Those extra pounds doubled or tripled during running, which meant my knees were suffering about 50 extra pounds of stress with each footfall. In trying to run the weight off, I was simply overstressing my knees. I wanted to get back to doing long runs so I could run another marathon—it had been six years since my last one—but as my long runs reached 16 to 18 miles, my knees would rebel. And no wonder, given the gain. (If I did wonder, I could imagine Bridgid tossing me four sacks of sugar.) If I could shed the weight, the knees might finally heal, fully and without further comment.

In the end, the additional stress I was feeling on my knees tipped the scales, no pun intended. Weight loss, I vowed, would be the final goal of my recovery. So I went after it.

I didn’t start with a diet, though. I had never been on one, and for a long time I stuck to the notion that consistent running might do the trick, slowly but surely. When that failed, I decided to

do something really drastic. I swore off beer.

For an entire month, I didn’t have a single brew. My evening routine of a couple of beers (well, at least two), enjoyed while reading a good book, went by the wayside. I still read, but I drank water instead. Dining out, I stuck to abstinence, and I didn’t waver for a full 30 days. And… my weight didn’t drop a single notch. What’s the sense of being stone-cold sober if you’re still fat?

THOSE SNEAKY NIGHTSTALKING CALORIES MUST GO

Onto plan B. [had read enough about nutrition to be convinced that my problem might have been consuming too many calories late in the evening—snacks in particular. The advice I had read was to eat more early in the day, so Iramped up my caloric intake at breakfast and lunch. Thoped this would squelch the urge for late-night snacking. It might have, at least a little, but not enough to matter. Those extra pounds remained.

And that brought me to plan C, an actual diet. Not just a good, balanced diet, because that would mean I would have to spend hours shopping for, preparing, and carefully consuming just the right combination of nutritionally sanctified foodstuffs. I needed something simple, a diet with manageable logistics, something that took into consideration my basic need to snack and enjoy afew beers at night. And also a diet that was weird and shocking enough to show my metabolism I meant business.

And that brought me to a liquid-protein diet: an 8-ounce drink for breakfast, an 8-ounce drink with a banana for lunch. For dinner, the diet decreed that I “eat normally,” and since it didn’t specify what “normal” meant, I took that to mean, “Eat the way you, Don, normally would.” Ha, a loophole!

But as bad as my normal is, and as much as this diet contradicts everything I’ve ever read about how, when, and what to eat, and as much as I hate missing what have always been very enjoyable lunch hours on the fast-food strip near my office, I have to say this: the doggone thing is working.

After six weeks of this, I’m losing about a pound a week and rapidly closing in on my presurgery weight. I’m up to 18-mile runs again, but this

time, almost 10 pounds lighter than I was the last time I added 18-mile runs to my routine, my knees seem to be handling the distance. I’m lighter; they’re happier. A marathon looms in my future, one I’Il enter with my more knee-friendly body.

So join me in imagining this. I turn back the clock weightwise, before surgery and maybe before a decade of trending upwards as well. My running helps maintain my new weight, as it always used to. I qualify for, run, and finish the Boston Marathon. Afterward, I celebrate with a plate of sausage, eggs, and pancakes, heaped with butter and syrup.

And waiter, while you’re at it, bring me a couple of Boston’s finest ales to help wash down this fine Patriots’ Day breakfast.