When More Is Actually More A theory in long-distance running that was popular in the 1970s has reemerged as a mantra of successful world-class runners today: to become a better runner, run as much mileage as your body can stand for as long as is practical, and then rest from your labors before restarting the cycle. This sounds so eminently logical and practical that it hardly seems necessary to say it. Yet in the same way we have cycles in the seasons and cycles in a running career (think of Lasse Viren peaking every four years in time for the Olympics), we periodically need to state and then restate the obvious lest it be lost in the cacophony of scientific certainty and general-interest know-it-all-ism. What I mean by that is that logic doesn’t always rest with the experts. In fact, on a fairly regular basis, the experts (in whatever field) bulldoze logic under a landfill of statistics and Swiss cheese research. Let’s look at a short history of running long in order to run best. In the first half of the 20th century, there was a fellow in New England named Clarence DeMar. He won the famed Boston Marathon seven times and might have won it at least two or three more times if, at the height of his prowess, doctors hadn’t warned him to

take time off from running in order to protect his enlarged heart—enlarged, as it turned out, by lots of aerobic exercise. Clarence, a reticent and often truculent man, used twice-a-day workouts to his advantage. He wasn’t a scientist who after long and thorough study came to the conclusion that twice-a-day workouts were the way to become a better marathoner. He was a printer who ran to and from work each day, a clean, dry shirt tucked under his arm. He found that twice-a-day workouts fit well into his workday world; on weekends he ran long. The mix allowed him to charge up a tremendous battery of strength and endurance, which served him well when he raced. It also allowed him to commute to and from work without having to pay for carfare. It would not be reaching to say that along with everything else, Clarence DeMar was a skinflint; he grew up poor, worked at a boys’ home, and never learned to waste his money. Other runners against whom Clarence competed began to take note of his racing success and began to adapt some of his training methods. Among those were John A. Kelley and John J. Kelley. John A. won Boston in 1935 and 1945 and earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic marathon team three times;

John J. Kelley (no relation) won Boston in 1957, was an Olympic marathoner, and won the AAU marathon championships at Yonkers an incredible eight years in a row. Between the two Kelleys, Emil Zatopek, the legendary Czech distance runner, set new standards for the volume of distance he trained per week in order to compete on the world stage. Zatopek remains the only runner in history to win the Olympic 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, and the marathon in the same Olympic Games: 1952 at Helsinki. In the 1960s, Arthur Lydiard, the New Zealand coach, codified the theory of long, slow distance as a base preparatory to specific strength and speed training not in a laboratory but in the Olympic record books by placing his neighborhood runners on the medals platform at the 1960 Olympic Games: Peter Snell won gold in the 800 meters, Murray Halberg won gold in the 5,000, and Barry Magee took the bronze in the marathon. By the time the 1970s arrived, American postcollegiate distance runners had concluded that a combination of heavy mileage, occasional speed training at the track, and a regular regimen of racing were essential to marathon success. At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the American marathon team placed first (Frank Shorter), fourth (Kenny Moore), and ninth (Jack Bachelor). No other national team before or since has ever placed so well in the Olympic marathon, not even the East Africans (Kenya and Ethiopia) in the modern era. It was a golden age

for American long-distance racing. In the previous Olympics, the American team (Moore, George Young, and Ron Daws) also would have taken the team title; and in the next Olympics after the 1972 extravaganza, Americans placed second (Shorter) and fourth (Don Kardong) and would have been first and third had winner Waldemar Cierpinski been disqualified for his use of performance-enhancing drugs. It was an intoxicating era for American distance running and extended into the early 1980s when Americans Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley staged their historic “Duel in the Sun” at Boston in 1982, the top three places in Boston 1983 were taken by Americans (Greg Meyer, Ron Tabb, and Benji Durden), and Joanie Benoit won the first women’s Olympic marathon in 1984 in Los Angeles. But after that, American distance running fell apart, in large part because of the scientific community stepping in to assert that marathoners needed no more than 75 miles of training a week to perform at a world-class level. The extravagance of previous decades, where marathoners were training regularly at 120 miles a week with experimental forays into 150 miles and even 200 miles a week, was belittled and denigrated by the scientists who studied running. Marathon running (and winning) was no longer to be an art form restricted to creative coaches such as Arthur Lydiard, Ernst van Aaken, Bob Sevene, and Bill Squires. It was to be dictated to by slide-rules and heart monitors.

It is only within the past decade that coaches such as Bob Larsen, Joe Vigil, Alberto Salazar, and others in regional American distance-training enclaves have reinstituted longer long-distance training as a route to long-distance glory. The results were obvious in the 2004 Olympic Games, where Americans again medaled in both the men’s and women’s Olympic marathons, and the trend seems to continue with the development of outstanding distance runners such as Ryan Hall. But, you say, what do world-class distance runners doing megamileage have to do with me? Excellent question. The answer is that the trend has everything to do with improving both the efficiency of your training and the results of your racing. Except for those on the verge of fatigue from too much mileage, every runner can benefit from a bit more mileage. And in that tried-and-true but frustrating phenomenon, the runner who is already doing less will benefit much more from adding a little, while the runner who is doing most will need to do much more to gain minor advantages. By gradually and carefully adding mileage, the average runner will gain on several fronts. The added mileage will increase the endurance reservoir and thereby increase performance, especially in the later stages of the marathon where mere mortals falter. The added mileage will make the runner more efficient. To do anything

well, we need to do it frequently and at some volume. But once we do, we naturally become more efficient at doing it. Everything from long-distance running to playing chess to playing a musical instrument benefits from increasing the amount of practice we put in. There is another benefit to becoming more efficient at running: the practice of running additional miles doesn’t take as much additional time as we thought because we are typically getting better at it and therefore doing it at a faster pace. Certain parts of our regular runs are fixed in the amount of time they take. Getting ready to run takes a set amount of time. Cleaning up after a run takes a set amount of time. Those two factors don’t change whether you run two miles or 20. When you become more efficient at running and are therefore doing average runs at a faster pace, the additional amount of time the practice takes is minimized. Naturally, if you race regularly, increasing your endurance increases your performance at all distances, but especially at the longer distances where endurance is disproportionately rewarded. The extra mileage simply allows your body to go longer, better. And once you get better at something, you derive more enjoyment from it, which is a motivator to do it better still. We must admit that we live in a society in which, on many fronts, excellence is not only not rewarded but is punished. Teachers don’t want Junior to feel bad about his dismal performance brought on by lack of motivation, so

driven self-aggrandizers who “train” for and survive a marathon just so at the next social gathering they can say they ran one (so they can check “marathon” off their list before moving on to something else), no matter how long it takes them to finish it. It is difficult to justify ascribing the word “run” to a marathon that takes a perfectly healthy 35-year-old more than 6 1/2 hours when you can cover the same 26.2 miles at a brisk walk, at a 15-minute mile. Consider, for example, that on October 28, 2007, in Monterey, California, 61-year-old Bill Penner racewalked a 10K in one hour flat; right behind him came 69-year-old J. Beckett (in 1:00:54), and behind Beckett came 52-year-old Karen Stoyanowski in 1:02:40. They averaged less than 10 minutes per mile.

he is rewarded whether he tries or not. Meanwhile, the student who is motivated and puts in a great effort and excels is slowed down so as not to bruise the poor, beleaguered self-esteem that Junior is stuck with, because after all, it isn’t Junior’s fault that he’s a wholesale waste of protoplasm. Nothing is Junior’s fault. Hence, no games of tag at recess because ultimately somebody is stuck being “It.” Et cetera. In running, some of this crap has slopped over. Indeed, there are runners who want to be rewarded for existing, for doing little. They want to be praised for merely showing up. They want the rules to be stretched to accommodate them when they would fit nicely within the rules if they tried a little harder in their running. Included are the ego-

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On December 2, 2007, at Sacramento, California’s California International Marathon, Helen Klein, 85 years old, won her age group in 5:48:59.* Fortunately, the demographics that characterize most runners are spiked with motivation, ambition, and dedication to purpose. Some runners, especially newer arrivals, quite simply don’t know how to get better or, in some instances, don’t realize that they can get better by making only minor changes to their training regimen. Set aside a six-month season and experiment with adding a bit of extra mileage each week. Don’t add very much. Try adding one extra mile for the first week, two the second week, and three the third week, and then drop back the fourth week to your original weekly mileage in order to give your body a chance to rest. In the second four-week series, add two miles the first week, three the second, and four the third, and for the fourth drop back to your original level. If you started at 30 miles a week, by the sixth month you’ll have topped out at 38 miles per week, which doesn’t sound like a massive increase but which is significant in terms of percentage. Aside from the 38-mile-per-week peak, it is the extra miles between the 30 and the 38 that add up and that make you a better, more efficient, and likely faster runner. Some of the efficiency will come from the simple act of running increased mileage as opposed to “slogging,” which is that inefficient bobbing along.

Consider two factors: any vertical movement when you run requires energy. The higher you move at each step, the more energy it requires. Watch world-class road racers from the side. You could set a glass of water on their heads, and it wouldn’t spill. This perfection in smooth, efficient forward motion is very apparent when you watch coverage of a race such as the New York City Marathon when a camera is trained on the side of the Queensborough Bridge. The bridge railing is tall enough that it obscures the runner’s body except for the head. The runner’s head is just above the railing, and it moves along the railing as smoothly as a bowling ball rolls down an alley. If your head rises one inch per stride, and if you take 2,500 strides per mile (measuring each stride at a little more than 2 feet), a marathon would require 65,500 strides, and you would have “climbed” 5,458 feet into the air in addition to running 26.2 miles horizontally. How much energy does it take to climb 5,458 feet? Run more miles to teach your body to run more efficiently and you’ll have 5,458 climbing feet of energy to apply to your marathon. By the same token, slogging involves short steps, while running involves a longer stride. Consider the increase in performance if you could add 1 inch to each stride. What would that translate to? Again, let’s take the marathon. Those 65,500 strides translated to 65,500 inches or 5,458 feet (a bit more than a mile) means that your running self would be finished with

novels I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. And another fair warning: it is not a running book, although it is written by a runner. Timothy Martin has long been a friend of this magazine, one of its first—and best—scribblers. He won the RRCA award for best writer in a club newsletter several years ago and he is the author of There’s Nothing Funny About Running and Why Run If No One Is Chasing You? He once won the now-defunct Russian River Marathon but was never able to explain how he managed to do that. He’s a retired engineer (not the kind that gets to drive a locomotive) and has written a half-dozen screenplays, several of which are being considered by Hollywood producers.

the marathon while your slogging self would still be more than a mile from the finish line. In a sport like long-distance running, inches translate to miles. Run more miles. Allow your body to increase its efficiency and speed, and the rewards can be enormous. *National Masters News, January 2008, pages 26 and 30 respectively.

* * * Hear, ye! Hear, ye! All ye of sensitive bent, I urge you to read no further. In fact, I command you to turn to Don Kardong’s column so that you might avoid heart palpitations, skyrocketing blood pressure, and the urge to fire off a nasty letter of complaint. What follows is a book review of one of the crudest—and funniest—

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But it seems that Tim had some time on his hands now that he’s writing fulltime since retiring from having a real job, and we all know that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The book is The Culverts of Humboldt County (PublishAmerica, 2007) and any similarity to The Bridges of Madison County is purely intentional. The little novel is both an indictment of and a celebration of wicked love (or more likely lust) among the redneck elements running around loose in far-northern California. You know the type: beer-drinkin’, pickup-trucktinkerin’, gun-totin’, mouth-breathin’, cigarette-smokin’, God-fearin’, deodorant-averse, constantly sweatin’, single-wide trailer-trash, CAT-hatwearin’, salt-of-the-earth maniacs. There is little good that I can say about the book other than it’s one of

the most hilarious novels I’ve ever read, and trust me on this, even in this kids-can’t-read environment, over the years, I’ve read enough books to fill a two-story double-wide . . . if there is such a thing. The book should come with one of those “sanitary toilet” paper belts they put around the john at the Motel 6, warning that “This Book Should Be Enjoyed Only by Terminally Politically Incorrect Cretins.” The plot is entirely simple(ton): Earl Perkins works for the California Department of Transportation inspecting and repairing roadway culverts. He leaves his wife, heads out on a job, runs into Charlene Bickle (a very unhappy wife stuck in a very unfulfilling marriage), and sparks begin to fly—and they ain’t from his Bic cigarette lighter. ’Nuff said. If you like Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy, this book makes

them look like Rhodes scholars. We anxiously await Tim’s next sociological tome, in which we anticipate that he will take on the far-northern California college professors and their 60-year-old leftover hippie students

who have made a career out of going to school while living inside culverts next to their marijuana groves. Ya ever notice how “culverts” rhymes with “perverts”? Tim hasn’t either. Get it. Read it. Put it into a plain

brown envelope, and burn it before the kids or the police get hold of it. I normally am dead set against the burning of books, but I can see how I would have to make an exception in this case.

—Rich Benyo