There Are Very Good Physiological Reasons Why Going Long and Slow Pays Off.

t’s an idea that refuses to die—and little wonder. It has won the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, set a women’s world marathon record, and made marathoners of millions.

Known by varied names—long, slow distance, run-walk-run, jogging—it has been passionately despised, blamed for any number of ills. Yet the notion of training slowly to run has almost mystical endurance.

Can slow running actually make you faster? The short answer—you know it—is yes and no. Certainly, slow running can improve your speed, but only if you’re running high mileage (it may take 70 to 100-plus miles per week). It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll get faster if you’re just jogging 30 miles a week.

In her book, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata describes a study on trainability in elderly subjects, conducted by exercise scientist Claude Bouchard at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Bouchard found that 10 percent of his subjects had bodies that were extremely trainable, while 80 percent responded across a spectrum of average trainability, and 10 percent had bodies that, in his view, weren’t trainable at all.

Assuming the results are valid for other ages and that you’re among the blessed top 10 percent—gifted with awesome speed and exceptional VO,max and biodynamics—you may that find slow-paced, low-mileage training brings rapid gains. But that’s because you were born to run, not because of the way you’re training.

You’ve probably met people like that—those top-10-percenters who can run spectacular times on virtually no training, and who, once they take up the running in earnest, thrive on high mileage.

Try not to hate them.

WHAT ABOUT MY SPEED POTENTIAL?

Where do speed and endurance come from? It’s a shame, but basic speed is inherited. If you’re unhappy with your VO,max and biodynamics, blame your parents. Training hard may help you make the most of your natural gifts, but it won’t turn you into an Olympian. Great runners are born.

Science has yet to explain why large volumes of slow running help make us faster. Some researchers, including Olympic 800- and 1,500-meter gold medalist Peter Snell, now an exercise researcher at the University of Texas, speculate that long, slow runs may exhaust the slow-twitch muscle fibers, forcing the trainable Type II fast-twitch fibers to take over part of the load, with the result that we acquire more of these fibers and get faster.

When Snell joined legendary coach Arthur Lydiard’s training group and went for his first 22-mile long run with the team, he became tired after 15 miles and confided in Murray Halberg that he was thinking of dropping out. But Halberg, who would win the 5,000 at the 1960 Rome Olympics, urged him to continue. “Do that and you’ll totally waste the workout,” he said. “The value begins at 15 miles.”

After months of doing only long, slow runs, Snell was surprised to find that he could run a mile in close to 4:00 without having done any speedwork at all. Snell reports that he seldom ran more than 70 miles a week, though he set his first mile record of 3:54.4 while training 100-plus miles per week. Thus, it seems likely that relatively high mileage, plus the weekly 22-miler, were the main stimuli to endurance and speed. Snell reports that during the aerobic build-up phase, the long runs were done at “medium pace”: 7:00 at the start of the 12-week slow buildup phase, and 6:00 toward the end—dquite easy for runners capable of running 10K in 28 minutes (4:30 pace).

Former women’s marathon record holder Ingrid Kristiansen (2:21:06) holds different views on why long, slow runs improve speed and endurance. Kristiansen believes slow running increases the aerobic enzymes in a runner’s muscles, and that aerobic metabolism plays an important role in fast running. On her Web site (www.ingrid-kristiansen.com), she cites a 2001 study showing that aerobic metabolism is much more important at distances all the way down to 400 meters than the exercise physiologists had previously realized.!

The increased-enzymes theory appears to be supported by the experience of runners who train mainly at aerobic pace, but seldom go longer than 15 to 18 miles, yet race well at the marathon distance and beyond. Kristiansen, for example, seldom ran longer than two hours—about 16 to 18 miles. Bruce Fordyce, the legendary South African ultramarathoner, seldom trained longer than 20 to 22 miles. And another ultrarunner who achieved notable results while rarely going past 22 miles is Ray Krolewicz, of whom we’ll hear more later on. (Major caveat: “RayK” occasionally ran 20 miles two or three times in the same day.)

HOW TO COMBINE SPEED WITH ENDURANCE

All of these runners did speedwork in one form or another. There are five classic ways to combine slow running and speedwork.

1. First, there’s speedwork of the most traditional kind. Go to the track one to three times a week, year-round, and do intervals or repeats. Frank Shorter followed this plan. In his prime, Shorter ran 140 miles per week, of which roughly 7 percent, or 10 miles, was speedwork. Most of his 130 weekly miles of slower running was at 7:00 pace, which, for him, was quite easy. In the last miles of his weekly 20-miler, Shorter would accelerate to 6:30, then 5:00 pace. Shorter’s marathon PR of 2:10:30 translates to 4:59 pace, thus those five-minute training miles were definitely aerobic—they were by no means tempo or anaerobic-threshold running, which translates roughly to half-marathon pace.

John L. Parker Jr., a teammate of Shorter’s during his peak competitive years, describes their training:

The early Florida Track Club boasted a number of runners who could easily run right around 5:00 per mile in training runs, but Jack Bacheler, the Olympian who was our mentor, insisted that many of our training miles be run in the 7:00- 8:00 min/mile range. He simply felt that you needed to run that slow in order to truly recover from the hard intervals and AT runs that made up the rest of the program. He also maintained that it was the only way to safely amass the kind of total weekly mileage he felt we should aim for: 100 or more per week. And Bacheler was on two U.S. Olympic teams and was the best U.S. runner at several distances for several years in the late 60s and early ’70s…

The interesting thing about Bacheler’s approach to training was that Florida Track Clubbers could tell other runners about the program in great detail, or writers could describe it fully to their readers, but until runners actually came to Gainesville to run with the group, no one could fully appreciate it. They simply couldn’t believe that world-class runners would spend so much of their time running so slowly.”

Ultramarathoner Ray Krolewicz’s training sets him apart from ordinary mortals. In a fairly average month, Ray ran 87 times, totaling 623 miles, or 154-plus miles per week. Ray has always done the bulk of his training at a slow pace, yet he races breathtakingly fast. Recalling one of his many 100K (62.2-mile) races, he reports:

I wanted the psychological boost of breaking 2:40 [for the marathon distance] en route to 100K [62.2 mi]. I did in fact run 2:37:20, exactly six-minute pace, off of 10-minute-mile average training pace. I continued

to a 3:09:51 50K, 5:35 50-mile, and 7:12 100K. I ran many 2:41-2:50 marathons, both in marathons and en route to ultra distances.

CAPITALIZING ON THE TALENTS HE HAD

High mileage helped Ray make the best of his natural gifts, which include an amazing and almost certainly inherited ability to handle extremely high mileage, year-round, plus excellent, though not world-class speed. Ray reports:

My 400-meter PR in high school was 56.4. Iran many [400m’s] between 58 and 60, including consecutively. Most recently, I’ve run 60 to 65 pretty much at will, including 64 twice on final laps of 100-mile races. I even did a 70 once for the last lap of a six-day race, which would have been faster, but I was catching Don Choi, who was winning the race, and I did not want to pass him right before his finish and steal any of his moment, so I slowed to finish several seconds after he crossed the line (probably a 65 to 67 effort).

Krolewicz is—obviously—a high-mileage, slow-pace believer. But he isn’t averse to speedwork:

It is all about the mileage. “Quality” leads to injuries, breakdowns, and general fatigue; 200 miles a week [of slow training] actually works well for [racing] 100 miles. When I ran 150-ish for a number of weeks, I was able to run pretty fast for 100 miles a few times, and in a large number of 100Ks.

On my forays into 200-mile-a-week territory, I grew so strong that I was dangerous. My PR five-miler of 27:31 (5:30-ish per mile) was the Saturday morning after completing a 212-mile training week the night before. Average pace for the week was about 11:20, but 10 percent speedwork (yeah, 21 miles) was all done in 400s and 800s between 70 and 90 seconds per lap.

Many midpack marathoners can’t run 60 to 70 miles per week without breaking down. Three-time Western States 100 winner Jim King seldom trained more than 70 miles per week. RayK is simply awesome.

2. The second category of classic speedwork is Lydiard-style periodization. After at least three months of 100 percent aerobic running (the endurance phase), do several weeks of hill work (the strengthening phase), then spend six to eight weeks doing one to three hard speed sessions per week (the sharpening phase) in preparation for a target race.

3. Third, do all your training runs at slow speed, but use frequent short races as speedwork. Some highly successful runners have trained this way, including

Ingrid Kristiansen, whose marathon record (2:21:06) stood for almost 13 years (1985-98). Other standouts who used short races to hone their speed include former U.S. 50-mile champion and sixth-place Boston finisher Bob Deines, and senior phenomenon Ed Whitlock.

Joe Henderson, the Runner’s World founding editor, now a columnist for Marathon & Beyond, is a great admirer of Whitlock. In his online column, “Running Commentary” (www,joehenderson.com), Joe writes:

This amazing Canadian runner ran a 2:54 marathon—at age 73. Whitlock’s training is irreducibly simple—he runs two hours a day, in a single run, at nine-minute pace, and he races often at varied distances. Before the record marathon, he trained “a little faster” for 16 weeks, running two hours per day for three days and three hours a day for four. He says, “The more training one does, the better—if one can avoid injury, and I was fortunate in that regard. Simple LSD [long, slow distance] works for me—no fancy training routines.”

SENIOR SUCCESS STORIES Herb Phillips and John Keston train a lot like Whitlock. Henderson writes:

Phillips ran a 2:47 marathon at age 64. His training? “My plan is to alternate days of 10 and 15 miles. That’s the goal, but I rarely meet it.”

In the three months before Royal Victoria, he ran 25 miles six times (plus five more 21s). His pace was as relaxed as 8:35 per mile and only twice dipped under eight. This for a runner who averaged 6: 17s at Royal Victoria.

“T think you’d be surprised at how slow I train,” said Herb. “Eightminute pace is fine with me, and 9:30 per mile is OK too.” The slowness lets him go long, often, without hurting himself.

Where did that speed come from? His races—four of them during September alone (before the early-October marathon), none longer than 10K, none slower than six-minute pace.

Herb Phillips ended with a warning that Ed Whitlock probably would echo: “This is not a recommended plan. It works for me; it won’t necessarily work for anyone else. It definitely won’t work for an inexperienced or an elite runner.”

John Keston is yet another slow-training veteran. Joe Henderson reports:

John Keston uses a variation of Whitlock’s plan. He runs for about two hours every third day and walks for similar time on the in-between days.

Yet John can go much farther on race day. Last fall [2000] he became the oldest marathoner to break 3 1/2 hours, running 3:23 at age 76. A year older, he recently ran 3:34 at Napa Valley—on a slightly sprained ankle.

There are two more classic approaches to speedwork.

4. Do some speedwork during every run, after a long, slow warm-up—but only if your body gives you a clear and unambiguous go-ahead. Limit fast running to the times when your body, speaking through heart rate, morning pulse, breathing, and intuition, tells you it’s safe to run hard.

This is similar to the approach that John Douillard suggests in his book, Body, Mind, and Sport. Douillard recommends monitoring the body’s needs by checking heart rate, breathing, and feelings of comfort. (More on Douillard later.)

OR YOU CAN TRAIN LIKE ZATOPEK

5. Finally, you can train like Emil Zatopek, the only runner ever to win the 5,000, 10,000, and marathon in the same Olympics (1952). In his excellent book,

Running with the Legends, Michael Sandrock describes “Zato’s” training:

He was constantly pushing himself in workouts and always thinking of new ways to train. According to Fred Wilt in How They Train, his main workout in 1951 was 20 X 200 meters, followed by 40 X 400 meters, then another 20 X 200 meters, all with 200-meter jog intervals. It is hard to know exactly how fast Zatopek was running his intervals, because he never timed them. Zatopek’s philosophy of training, says Wilt, was to work as hard as possible so that a race seemed comparatively easy. He felt that strength and energy only increase through continual testing. Zatopek had no fear of becoming burned out. He had such unbelievable willpower that he could impose any burden of training he preferred upon himself… . Before Zatopek, nobody realized it was humanly possible to train this hard.

Probably not everyone’s cup of tea. What’s clear, though, is that some speedwork is required for a runner, whether world class or midpack, to extract the last measure of performance from his body. Philip Maffetone, coach of triathlon superstar Mark Allen, believes the kind of speedwork makes little difference; the results are roughly the same from intervals, threshold runs, fartlek, repeats, or short races. But research doesn’t support this view. Studies clearly show that intervals produce greater improvements in 5K and 10K times than tempo runs do.

It’s good to remember that slow is relative. David L. Costill, Ph.D., a groundbreaking sports physiologist, once tested former marathon world record holder Derek Clayton (2:08:33) in his lab. Costill describes the experiment in his book, Running: The Athlete Within (page 16):

When asked to run 10 kilometers on the treadmill at a pace that equaled his best marathon pace (4:53 per mile), he [Clayton] was able to do it with apparent ease, carrying on a conversation with everyone in the laboratory. Nearing the end of the run, we asked him if he could continue the run at that pace. He responded by saying, “Yeah, I can run another hour if you want me to.” Of course we thought he might be putting on a show for the other runners in the room, so we drew a blood sample from his arm immediately after the run to determine his lactate level, an indication of running effort. To our surprise, his blood lactate level was only 1.8 mmol/liter, a value one might expect to find in someone who had not been exercising. Nevertheless, when we calculated his oxygen use during the run it averaged over 85 percent of his VO,max teas

This ability to exercise at a high percentage of your VO,max for long periods without accumulating lactic acid is not fully understood, though it appears that this quality is a function of the muscular adaptations during training.

Aside from the fact that the lactic acid theory of fatigue has been scientifically discredited, Clayton’s ability to hold a relaxed conversation at 4:53 pace is amazing. This is a guy you would not want to invite to “go for a jog.”

Parenthetically, it’s interesting that Clayton was large for a marathoner. When he ran 2:08:33, he weighed 162 pounds. Compare this figure to today’s worldclass Africans, who average 118 pounds. If Clayton had weighed 40 pounds less, it seems likely that the Africans would still be chasing his dust.

THE ELITES AREN’T LIKE YOU AND ME

Costill notes, “Some of the best runners we have tested were able to run at 75 to 85 percent of VO,max during a marathon. [Alberto] Salazar, [Bill] Rodgers, and [Grete] Waitz were able to run rather comfortably for up to 30 minutes at 86 to 90 percent of their VO,max values. So champion runners might have a higher capacity for tolerating high levels of stress than those of us who run in the middle or back of the pack.”

Here are the most successful slow, slower, and slowest training systems that I’m aware of:

1. “Slow.” Because Joe Henderson was among the first advocates of slow training, he has been unfairly blamed for a broad range of ills in U.S. running, ranging from the decline in American performance at the Olympic level to the newly respectable status of the four-hour marathon. These charges are ridiculous. In over 45 years of writing about running, Henderson has never recommended that runners train only at LSD pace, except for basic fitness.

What Joe actually said, in his classic 1969 book, Long, Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train, is that gifted, competitive runners cannot hope to realize

their full potential without speedwork. But Joe also suggested, quite reasonably, that it might not make sense for a midpack marathoner to log 100-mile weeks and do twice-weekly speedwork to lower his PR from 3:20 to 2:59. Most adults have obligations that make running 15 to 20 hours a week a questionable proposition.

Frank Shorter said that if a talented runner will do two hard interval sessions and a long run weekly, and fill in with slow running for a total of 100 miles, and if he will stick to the plan for two or three years, he will “get good.” That’s the training Joe Henderson recommended in Long, Slow Distance for gifted runners. (Joe has graciously posted the complete text of this long-out-of-print book on his Web site: www. joehenderson.com.)

Here’s how Joe defines long, slow distance:

My definition of LSD pace, from the time I first wrote about it more than 30 years ago, has been runs of one or more minutes per mile slower than current racing ability for the same distance. Refining that now, I’d say that adding one minute puts you at the dividing line between a moderate and a hard pace. Adding two minutes takes you to the line between moderate and easy.

During easy runs, Henderson recommends going “comfortably, not too fast or too slow.” Based on his experience coaching hundreds of beginning runners

in his University of Oregon fitness classes, Joe says most people tend to settle in at about | 1/2 minutes per mile slower than top speed. (As mentioned earlier, Frank Shorter did most of his slow training at 7:00 pace, yet he ran the marathon at 4:55 pace—a difference of 2:05 per mile.)

2. “Slower.” In his book Training for Endurance, Philip Maffetone recommends running most of the time at “180-minus pace.” Subtract your age from 180. If you’ve been exercising at least four times a week for two years or more, use this figure as your maximum aerobic training heart rate. If you’ve been training regularly and competing for at least two years, add five beats. If you’re 65 or older, you can add up to 10 beats. If you’re 16 or under, Maffetone recommends training at a maximum heart rate of 165. These figures shouldn’t be rigidly adhered to; Maffetone suggests finding a comfortable pace near the 180-minus figure where your gait feels relaxed, natural, and smooth.

Maffetone recommends spending many months training no faster than the slow, 180-minus pace, followed by five to eight weeks of intense speedwork and racing before an important goal event. Over the weeks and months of slow running, your speed at the 180-minus heart rate should gradually get a little faster.

WHO USES THE 180-MINUS PACE?

Many successful athletes have used Maffetone’s system, including six-time Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon winner Mark Allen, short-course triathlon world champion Mike Pigg, and Priscilla Welch, the world women’s masters marathon record holder (2:26:51 at age 41; Welch also won the New York City marathon at age 42).

3. “Slowest.” When John Douillard’s career as a professional triathlete stalled on traditional high-stress, pain-is-gain training, he sought the advice of an expert in the ancient Indian healing art of Ayurveda. After reducing his mileage, changing his diet, getting more sleep, and spending time meditating, Douillard began finishing his races in the top three. He later came across an ancient text that recommended that most exercise be done at 50 percent of the body’s maximum capacity. Douillard translated this figure to 50 percent of maximum heart rate by the Karvonen formula.’

Because age-based formulas for maximum heart rate are notoriously inaccurate, Douillard recommends using the 50 percent “optimum training heart rate” as a starting figure; the important thing is to exercise slightly below the level where the first, subtle feelings of discomfort begin. Douillard’s system relies on heart rate, breathing, and inner feelings of comfort to judge the body’s needs.

In a Douillard-style run, you begin by walking for a specified time (no longer than five to 10 minutes) that depends on your ayurvedic body type, then you

exercise at the 50 percent rate while breathing through the nose and making a “Darth Vader” sound on exhalation. (Comparable to saying “Aah!” as if blowing out a candle, while exhaling through the nose.)

After running at the 50 percent pace for a time also determined by your body type, you speed up tentatively and check your breathing and the sensation of comfort or discomfort. If you can run faster with complete comfort, while breathing slowly with a natural, unforced pause at the end of the out-breath, you can run as fast and as far as your legs will carry you—until your breathing becomes labored again. Douillard cautions runners not to try this kind of training until basic fitness is achieved, using the methods described in his book.

Several other coaches have espoused slow training, including Ernst van Aaken, M.D., coach of former world 2,000-meter record holder and Olympic 5,000-meter silver medalist Harald Norpoth of Germany. Van Aaken’s book, The Van Aaken Method, was translated and published by Runner’s World in the mid-1970s. It enjoyed considerable success, thanks in part to the endorsement of Joan Ullyot, M.D., a prominent road and trail runner in San Francisco at the time—but also because van Aaken was an uncompromising advocate for women’s running. He sponsored the world’s first all-women’s marathon, held in his home town of Waldniel, Germany, in October 1973.

CONCLUSIONS

It’s clear that slow training contributes to endurance and speed, but that it won’t make you faster unless you’re running high mileage. And even if you’re running 100 miles per week, you’ll need speedwork to extract the last measure of your potential.

The question remains: what kind of slow (and fast) running is best?

Philip Maffetone claims that any kind of fast running is OK, because all forms of speedwork accomplish basically the same result. From our brief review of slow running, it may be equally valid to assume that any kind of slow running works about as well as another, as long as we’re doing enough of it and not just slogging along. Frank Shorter did 80 to 86 percent of his training at roughly 7:00 pace, which for him was quite easy. Noureddine Morceli, arguably the greatest middledistance runner of all time, did plenty of slow running, and—incredibly—he did much of it at 10-minute pace. Ultramarathoner Ray Krolewicz raced the 100K distance (62.2 miles) at close to 6:00 pace, yet he ran all of his slow miles as “10s or 11s.”

How slow should you go? How fast? How far?

It’s good to remember that training has two parts: we “push our edges”—make the body do a little more than it’s used to—then we give it a chance to rest and recover. The body grows stronger when we rest, not while we’re running. And

because each body is unique, it’s up to you to figure out the speed, distance, and rest that will make your own, individual body grow strong without tearing it down. To do that, you’ll need to “nudge your edges” and continually check how you feel during your runs, and after.

“Feeling-based training” has honorable precedents. Bob Kennedy, the only American to dip under 13 minutes for 5,000 meters, said, “You have to really pay attention to your body, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally.” [Italics mine.] Nobuya “Nobby” Hashizume, cofounder of the Lydiard Foundation, observed:

Lydiard said something like “You should not be alarmed by temporary exhaustion; but you should watch out for permanent fatigue . . . .”’ Something like that. In order to identify the differences, you need to rely, more than anything else, on your own feeling. When we got together with Frank Shorter in regard to his support for the Lydiard Foundation, two things he emphasized most with Lydiard principles were high-mileage training and feeling-based training.

Day by day, week by week, you must fine-tune your training until you reach a point where you deeply know how your own, individual body likes to run—the kind of running your body thrives on. How will you know? When you’re training appropriately for your God-given talents and current fitness, you’ll finish all your runs feeling, as Arthur Lydiard put it, “pleasantly tired,” but never wholly spent. Training that results in deep, prison-camp fatigue is your enemy.

The most important key to training well is discovering that balance— knowing how far and how fast you can train safely and how much rest your body needs. That’s why it’s extremely helpful to keep a training diary and why it’s important to increase your training in small, regular increments. Without the steadying influence of the diary, the mind can all too easily rationalize those spontaneous urges to run too fast or far.

Take a tip from two of the greatest endurance athletes of all time, eight-time Comrades Marathon winner Bruce Fordyce and six-time Hawaiian Ironman winner Mark Allen. Both of these superathletes were extremely careful when it came to planning their training and racing.

Fordyce believed in being cautious “to the point of paranoia”:

My training advice is going to be different . . . because I place my emphasis on rest and recovery. I do believe in hard training, but there is only so much hard training that the body can take, and the timing and duration of any hard training phase is very important. During the hard training phase, never be afraid to take a day off. If your legs are feeling unduly stiff and sore, rest; if you are at all sluggish, rest; in fact, if you doubt, rest.*

Like Fordyce, Mark Allen believed that easy running played a key role in his success.

In a discussion I [Dr. Tim Noakes] had with him in Pajulahti, Finland, Allen added that the key to his longevity was the three months of gentle aerobic training in the Patience Phase. His belief is that once you begin speed training, the body enters a hyped-up state that wears you down, as you are unable to sleep properly and recover adequately during this period. Thus, in his opinion, intensive training produces a cumulative fatiguing effect, which is not due solely to the actual training performed but also to a residual effect that acts during the recovery period between training sessions.*

When Noakes asked Allen why more triathletes hadn’t adopted the methods that brought him so much success, “Allen answered that many athletes are too egodriven. They can’t wait to perform well and will not accept anyone else’s ideas.”

Writer/runner Scott Douglas spent time training with the top Kenyan runners. He reports:

One day I joined 12:52 5K man Isaac Songok and world junior crosscountry champ Augustine Choge for their morning run. We did a roughly 10K loop in 49 minutes. For their next run, Songok and Choge covered the same loop in just under 31 minutes—about three minutes per mile faster!

This great disparity in intensity level from run to run is common. To Kenyans, every run has a specific purpose, usually expressed in terms of “easy,” “average,” or “high” speed. When it’s time to go easy, such as the run before or after a “high” session, Kenyans have no qualms about doing nothing more than a glorified trot. This low-intensity, active recovery allows them to still get in volume while leaving them ready to really nail the next hard workout. Most recreational runners, in contrast, run too hard on their easy days and carry around too much residual fatigue to hit the times they’re capable of in quality sessions. To reach your racing potential, follow the Kenyans—easy runs easier, harder runs faster.

The body changes slowly. It takes roughly two weeks to synthesize proteins and build new tissue in response to a single hard workout. Runners who attempt to force their bodies to change faster succeed only in overloading the natural regenerative processes, with the result that they become overtrained and must take time off, further delaying their improvement.

A long, slow run nurtures joys of one kind. Fast running delivers joys of a different order—the exhilaration of bathing body, heart, will, mind, and soul in a rippling stream of healthful high energy. It takes both to make a complete runner—the healing rhythms of long, slow distance, and the stimulus of kicking up our heels.

Walk-Run?

Non-elite ultramarathoners have always walked during their training runs and races. Even elite runners do some walking during ultras. No controversy there. At Western States, failing to walk at least part of the initial climb out of Squaw Valley can have ominous consequences, even for the front-runners.

At shorter distances, walking is controversial. Jeff Galloway, a 1972 U.S. Olympian, has helped hundreds of thousands of first-time marathoners complete 26.2 miles by inserting walking breaks. There are, inevitably, those who wish the marathon-walkers would just go away.

Nevertheless, it does work—though Galloway, whose marathon PR is 2:16, tends to overstate the case for walking, claiming that top marathoners could race faster if they occasionally took a few walking steps to let their bodies recover. Hard to imagine Haile Gebrselassie improving his 2:04:26 world record by killing his momentum for a few steps, then getting back up to speed. Two hours of running isn’t that long. Is it possible that the extra effort of slowing down and accelerating would pay off?

Apples and oranges. Marathoners’ bodies are extremely different—as worldfamous running physiologist Jack Daniels noted, a six-hour finisher is, quite literally, a different physiological specimen than a Haile Gebrselassie. Thus, Galloway’s walk-run-walk scheme may help some runners set a personal best, but probably not others.

| have no research to back up my thoughts about this. My views are based on simple common sense. The marathon is a race of variables—thousands—that contribute to a person’s ability to handle the distance. A runner who has logged 120 to 140 miles per week for 10 years is obviously better prepared to handle the distance without walking breaks. And—again, obvious—running is faster than walking. But a runner who is trying to break four hours, or even three, may gain time by letting the body recover briefly at regular intervals. Which is best, walking breaks or running every step of 26.2 miles? The key principle is: It All Depends. What it depends on is whether the individual body has actually mastered the distance—that is, if it can cover the distance at top racing speed.

Gebrselassie’s marathon pace is just under 4:45 per mile. Could he do 4:43 by slowing for a few steps every mile? Doubtful. But the stories of slower runners who have set PRs by run-walking are legion. They’re people for whom the marathon is a huge stretch, a tremendous personal challenge, given their native abilities and training. Their bodies are, in fact, so drastically underprepared

for racing an all-out marathon that they must give their bodies a brief walking break to have any hope of setting a PR. They haven’t mastered the distance.

An ultrarunner acquaintance of mine had a 50-mile PR of about 10 hours, set at the American River 50. The following year, he decided to walk/run at a ratio of 5:1 (five minutes running, one minute walking). He set a PR by more than 1 1/2 hours.

Are the slower runners’ run-walk successes extensible to the experience of the elites? While it would be nice to think so—it’s again very unlikely. It’s doubtful that ultrarunning superstars and AR 50 winners such as Ann Trason, Tom Johnson, or Tim Twietmeyer would have set faster PRs if they had spent more time walking at the 50-mile distances. For them, 50 miles was a training run. Trason ran 140 miles per week, and Johnson did his 25-mile training runs at 6:30-6:00 pace. Here’s Twietmeyer on his preparation for the Western States 100:

“When I’m training hard for something like WS, I’ll run a 50-mile training run or race every three or four weeks. On average, I’m putting in somewhere between 60 and 80 miles and probably close to half of that mileage on one day on the weekend. My biggest month in my career was a May training for WS, and | put in 350 miles. I’ve never been a really high-mileage guy, but | never get too far out of race shape.”

The marathon is a hard race for anyone, but it’s arguably less hard for the elites.

What about respect? Most elites, when asked, say they do respect the four-, five-, and six-hour finishers. If nothing else, they approvingly note that it’s a heck of a step up from being a couch potato to covering 26.2 miles on one’s own feet, even if you take walk breaks. (Probably, the top runners don’t mind that the slow runners’ entry fees contribute to the prize pot.)