Ialways thought scientists were nerds. I should know. After 12 years of multiple university educations, including a year of classes in medical school, I’ve been around many of them. But I decided that, as a graduate student, I was going to be different. I figured that I had to be if I was to stay focused on my real interest: running. Combining running and school isn’t easy. Although my main interests in exercise physiology center on endurance performance and training distance runners, my academic adviser keeps reminding me that I am in the world of academia now, and so instead of writing articles on coaching and training, I should be spending my time writing research articles for scientific journals. However, writing research articles requires doing research, something I would rather save for the real scientists. I would rather be coaching.

And then I met Heather. I started coaching her in October 2001. She was a 3:13 marathoner who was looking for a coach. I was a coach looking for an athlete. A doctoral student herself (in theater and drama), she was the first to tell me she is not a scientist. I smiled.

I trained Heather the only way I know how—by asking myself what the sources of fatigue are for the events she competes in and then training her body to withstand or delay that fatigue. Each phase of Heather’s training, each week, each workout, was designed around a physiological purpose.

I was often taken aback when I saw Heather run fast, not because I doubted her, but because I am continually impressed at how well this physiology stuff works. You can learn a million times in the classroom or from doing research that endurance training increases glycogen storage in skeletal muscles or that . VO2max, which is so often talked about, is actually a rather stable parameter of aerobic fitness, but it is all theoretical until you see it for yourself. The enviable access I have to a human-performance laboratory allowed me to see things about Heather that few coaches get to see. As she ran to exhaustion on the treadmill, biting down on a tube connected to oxygen and carbon dioxide analyzers, I saw that

. her VO2max didn’t change even though her PRs had. I learned at what pace and heart rate her lactate threshold occurred. And I saw how much oxygen she used to maintain a given pace, a measure of her aerobic economy. All of this helped me to train her outside of the lab, when she was running to near exhaustion on the track instead of on the treadmill. .

Heather didn’t like intervals any more than she liked scientific VO2max tests. She simply liked to run. She’s all slow-twitch muscle fibers, which give her exceptional endurance capabilities and allow her to adapt to over 80 miles per week. She may not have had the speed to run under 5:20 for one mile, but she could hold 6:26 pace for 26.2. So I restrained my allure with speed and trained her like an endurance athlete. It worked. Over two years, I watched Heather’s fitness improve from a 19:08 5K, 41:30 10K, 1:31:23 half-marathon, and 3:13:23 marathon to PRs of 18:08, 37:15, 1:21:31, and 2:48:39, respectively. Although I no longer coached Heather after she ran those PRs, she would go on to qualify for and run in the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.

I coach a number of other athletes now, to the chagrin of my adviser, who would rather see me spend my time reading the owner’s manuals to those oxygen . and carbon dioxide analyzers I used to measure Heather’s VO2max. But I learn much more science from coaching than from reading manuals. The root of the word science is sciens, to have knowledge. All the athletes I coach are unique in their physiology, so I must continually acquire knowledge of how to apply the physiology to different athletes, to exploit their strengths while improving their weaknesses. Maybe I am a scientist after all.

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