AFRAID TO COMMIT?

Back in those “halcyon” days of the mid-’60s, we had a guy on our college cross-country team who liked to say things like, “If you’re going to screw things up, make sure to screw them up spectacularly. At least then people will remember you.”

Fortunately for us, his pronouncements—all of them spectacular and calculated to shock—were never practiced.

Behind the scenes, the guy was the personification of dedication. He tried to act flippant, but several times we found him doing double workouts, and he was never late with a term paper.

The younger guys on the team looked up to him as a James Dean–style rebel, and they often came to him for advice on how to screw up spectacularly. He always told them that they hadn’t yet reached the level of nirvana where they could do it spectacularly, so they had better do things right until they were qualified to do them profoundly wrong. The team took second in the Pennsylvania state meet that year.

I hadn’t thought about that approach to life for decades, but lately, while going through a stack of letters and e-mails inquiring about this or that aspect of the three-part marathon training series we carried in the first three issues of this year, it became apparent that the questions could be divided into two categories:

1. I wanna do this right. Could you give me more details on this or that aspect of the sub-3:00 program so that I don’t screw it up?
2. Can I skip this or that workout and still come in under 3:00?

The training programs we’re talking about aren’t new. Like most of us who came to long-distance running in the ’60s and ’70s, our training was—and still is—based on the teachings of our guru, New Zealand’s Arthur Lydiard. Our programs might be massaged a bit here and there and modified or customized a mite on one aspect or the other, but they are all evolutions of Arthur’s basic programs.

The program for breaking 3:00 (M&B May/June 2002) goes back to the March 1981 issue of Runner’s World, where I did the story as the second in a three-part series. (Bill Squires and Amby Burfoot wrote the training program for “Running Your First Marathon,” in the February issue, and Benji Durden wrote “Running Your Best Marathon,” in the April issue.) To that point in Runner’s World‘s history, the three-part series received more mail than anything else we had ever done.

I repeated the sub-3:00 program in my 1992 book Making the Marathon Your Event (Random House, still in print).

Over the years literally thousands of runners have used the program successfully. Is the program tough? You betcha. Especially in the latter stages. The program is designed essentially to overtrain would-be sub-3:00 marathoners so that they go into the race with all the necessary tools and some left over. No marathon performance is guaranteed since a thousand things can go wrong and the runner can make a thousand mistakes leading up to and running through the 26.2 miles, while there is only one thing the runner can do to make it work. But the program, if followed closely, delivers the runner to the starting line with every chance of success.

Over the 20-plus years that the program has been out there, I have also received letters and phone calls and eye-to-eye complaints that the program failed. That’s when I get to ask questions:

• Did you do the key track workouts every week?
• How about the second-to-the-last and third-to-the-last long runs?
• What was your time on each?
• Did you follow the tapering precisely?

Invariably, the failures were linked to skipping key workouts or “I decided to run how I felt” or “I felt good, so I threw in a fast half-marathon the weekend before.” At the occasional marathon weekend, when bumping into other people who have written marathon-training programs (Jeff Galloway, Joe Henderson, and Hal Higdon, to name a few), this topic of your-training-program-failed-me comes up at casual bull sessions.

The same way race directors love to swap stories of outrageous demands and requests from new marathoners (“You started the race on time. I wasn’t ready. Nobody starts a race on time. You should have checked with the runners to see if we were all ready.”), hoary old running writers enjoy swapping their “best” and “worst” you-failed-me stories.

Every old-line marathoner laments that there is no longer the commitment to the long, hard training that was the hallmark of the ’60s and ’70s and early ’80s. Marathoning, they will state, is one of the truly measurable things in life where you can see, on the stopwatch [Remember, these are gnarly old vets who used to race against the stopwatch before there were chronographs.] the direct results of what you put into it.

There is no argument but that they are correct.

And the argument can be made that the deterioration of American marathoning came about when a large and influential group of scientists and coaches, starting in the mid-’80s, propagated the idea that “quantity” should be sacrificed for “quality.” They totally ignored the concept that “quantity” and “quality” could be combined and weren’t mutually exclusive. The old-line marathoners ran a lot of quantity to build a base, yes, but once they picked up their training they dialed in quality with the strong base of quantity. There is no way a high-quality marathon can be run on minimum mileage. The concept goes against the very definition of a marathon, that is, “an endurance contest.”

For America, Arthur Lydiard went into eclipse, and with him went America as a dominant force on the world marathon scene.

But it’s not all gloom and doom.

One of the uplifting sides to the barrage of letters and e-mails from today’s runners about the three-part marathon-training series is that most of them wanted more detailed, hard information about how to follow the programs correctly so that they could be more assured of reaching their goals.

Sure, there were some “Do I really have to do those back-to-back hard workouts?” questions. But for the most part, the curious runners very obviously had fall marathons scheduled for which they had very precise time goals set, and now they wanted to make the commitment to get the job done.

No, the programs aren’t easy. No realistic marathon-training program is easy—not if a time goal is involved. And in this age of give-everybody-a-gold-star-so-we-don’t-bruise-anybody’s-self-esteem, that realistic attitude of setting a goal and working hard to reach it goes against the grain.

Gee. That would be a novel approach to training. —Rich Benyo