Yes You Can

All of us are challenged to change at one time or another - to run faster or longer, lift a heavier weight, eat better, lose weight, learn something new, or perform better at work.

In the past week, this issue of ability to change seemed to come up again and again. In one case, it was someone struggling to lose weight. In another, it was someone trying, but failing, to stick to an exercise program. For these folks, not being able to change had no dire implications, at least not yet, because they are both young.

But in the third case, lack of ability to change resulted in a person's death. I was talking to a doc who seemed a little down and asked her what was the matter. She said one of her patients had died - a 35 year old woman, 3 kids, husband, obese, smoker, drank a six pack a day of pop, on pain medications because of a car accident a few years ago. She had gone to bed after a couple of glasses of wine and never woke up. The doctor, frustrated and sad, said how hard and repeatedly she had tried to get the woman to change her lifestyle, but couldn't.

What is it that enables some people to change and others not? You'll find some of the answers in the most recent issue of Runner's World, in which there's a story about a guy named Ben Davis, a 25 year old who lost 120 pounds by taking up running. He made an inspiring short video about his journey that's well worth watching.

Reading his story, there are revealing clues as to how he was able to drop from 365 pounds.  As always, it started with his own strong desire, but there were other key elements which helped him succeed:

• He did not let early failures get in his way. The first time he tried to run, he didn't last 8 minutes. But he kept running.
• He started slowly, running a little, then more. A 5K, then a 10K, then a marathon. Small steps.
• He had a social network of family members and friends that supported his efforts, and participated with him.
• He started to hang out with runners from whom he could learn to model a new behavior - how to live like a runner.

Ben is a textbook case of self-efficacy, the magic key to motivation that has been studied and described so well by psychologist Albert Bandura. 

And his story has powerful lessons that we can all learn from, whether fit or fat.

Right Run, Wrong Shoes

A running shoe is just like a tool - you need the right one for the job. Today, quite by chance, I ran in a shoe that didn't match the job. Now my feet and ankles are a little sore. But it's not the shoe's fault because I ran on them in conditions for which they weren't designed.

Where I live, it's the mud season. The last of the snow is just melting off my favorite mountain trail which is a few miles from our house. Sometimes when the snow or mud is too deep, I'll run with my wife on the asphalt road in the valley where the trail takes off. There's a parking area. I head up the trail, she runs up the valley on the asphalt.

Today I figured it would be that kind of day because it snowed and rained last night. The trail was bound to be super muddy, so I laced on a pair of Saucony Pro Grids, a good shoe for asphalt because of its cushioning. But when we got to the parking area at the base of the trail, the road up looked not too bad. The warm air and a slight breeze had dried some of the mud. I couldn't resist the call of the trail and headed up.

The first stretch wasn't bad because it climbs and faces slightly south. It had dried pretty well for the first eighth of a mile and some ATVers had packed a couple of ruts, but when I got to the first flat stretch there was mud and the ruts deepened. I tried to run at the edge were the dirt was drier, but in many places the mud was unavoidable.

Two thirds of the way up the trail, the trail becomes more rocky. There was still patches of snow and the Saucony's would slip there, too. I recalled winter runs on my Vasques which are stiff and have big lugs on the soles. Some might consider them clunky, but in snow, which is all I use them for, they are very sure-footed. They grip and hold my foot level, even when on the side on an incline, just like the edge of a ski.

And on the rocks, the Saccony's, slipped, twisting my feet, and I could feel their hard edges of the rocks stabbing into the bottoms of my feet. I had to laugh because the trail was beating the hell out of me.

I thought about some of the shoe ads I just had been reading in Runner's World, just before I went on this run. Ever since the huge success of McDougall's Born to Run, which launched the bare-foot running craze, the shoe manufacturers have been madly engineering a new breed of "minimalist" (their word) shoes. They tout that they are lighter and the heel is closer to the ground so you can "feel" it. I guess this is what they have identified are the key features of the huaraches the great native trail runners in Copper Canyon down in Mexico run on.

Looking at those ads, my Sauconys don't look that much different. The hot new shoes look flashy, but too skimpy for running in the Rocky Mountains. Sometime I'll give a pair a try. A TOJ needs to be open minded. I think within a year or two, there will be lots of clearance sales for these minimalist designs.

Meantime, the run was still awesome. There's nothing like sun, mud, and melting snow. I'll wash up my Sauconys so they are ready to go on the asphalt where they belong.

TOJs, Runner's World and Glamour Girls

I've read "Runner's World" for a long time. I've read it so often that with each new issue my brain sees a predictable pattern in the content. I probably started reading it for the same reason that a pudgy young woman reads in a glamour magazine - that someday I can be like the person on the cover. But that was then and this is now.

I'm convinced the same late twenties/early thirties man or woman body is featured on the cover of every issue. They just Photoshop on a different face, stick it on a different background. Every month you can expect that skinny, lanky runner's body, originally shot by a photographer who was crouched down and shooting slightly up to make the body seem longer and larger than life.

That cover photo is not by accident. It's the perfect runner's body described in the book Runner's World Runner's Body: How the Latest Science Can Help You Run Stronger, Longer and Faster by Ross Tucker, Jonathan Dugas and Matt Fitzgerald. Of course, almost everyone who runs will never look like the people who grace the covers because, as the book points out, elite runners look like that largely because of genetic factors that influence both their shape and the mix of slow and fast twitch fibers in their muscles.

The headers on the cover tease with the same false promises you find in a glamour magazine, too. That inside you will find the secrets of how you can do lots of things faster - run, lose weight, train in less time. You will be able do lots of things more easily and with less pain - train for a marathon, strengthen your core, run your personal best. But, what any athlete knows, there is no quick and easy way to do anything. Real progress takes a long time time, constant discipline and some discomfort. No way to escape it! And, after all that work, you still may not ever break 2 hours in the half marathon.

"Runners World," like all magazines, is formulaic. There are always the magic tips - "7 Ways to Avoid Indigestion as You Run" or "12 Tips to Beat That Lazy Slacker in Your Mind." The diet advice is always the same: eat carbs, proteins, and fats, with very minor proportion changes before, during, and after running. I'm pretty certain for years I've seen the same same recipe for skinless chicken breasts with the only change being one is sprinkled with basil and the other with curry. To their credit, they find some variety with all the different places you can go to race and the stories of people who run.

I guess I continue to read it because it sometimes has an inspiring story or tidbit of information, but "Runner's World" seems less and less pertinent to my interests as time goes by. You don't see many TOJ's in its pages or articles about the challenges of aging runners. Plus there's a lopsided emphasis on race performance versus the sheer joy of running.

Most importantly, more and more evidence from exercise science points away from distance running as the gold standard of a healthy lifestyle. To this TOJ, distance running is just another aerobic option to be included in a well-rounded approach to exercise and fitness. Contrary to a recent best-selling book, we weren't born just to run, which is why most of us don't look like skinny distance runners any more than we do sumo wrestlers.

Don't Judge a TOJ by the Size of His/Her Shorts

On the Fourth of July over thirty years ago, I was at the start of a five mile race on a then-dirt road that runs along Horsetooth Reservoir, just outside Ft. Collins, Colorado. I had lined up in the second row behind the really fast people wearing singlets and skimpy dayglo shorts. Although I was in good shape and expected run the hilly course in pretty good time, I wasn't a serious racer with any expectation of placing, especially with some of very competitive local runners I recognized in front of me, including one who would soon be one of the top 10K road runners in the U.S.

One guy caught my eye when he took up a position almost right in front of me because he looked like he didn't belong there. He was large, with tent-like baggy shorts and ridge of fat bulging from under a x-large T-shirt. I wondered if he was arrogant or just plain ignorant lining up where everyone most of the field would have to run around him in the first hundred yards.

But when the starting gun fired, he pulled away from most of us and quickly disappeared over the first hill, with the lead pack, in a cloud of dust. By the time I crossed the finish line, he was relaxing with some other early finishers, laughing and drinking a beer. Later when they announced the results, I found out he had finished fifth. He had come within a minute of the winner, the guy who would go on to national fame and a contract with Nike. The heavy mystery runner had come from somewhere up in Wyoming. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.

I thought of him when I picked up a book called Shape Up with the Slow Fat Triathlete by Jayne Williams, a large athlete who has weighed upwards of 240 lbs. and has also completed over twenty triathlons, among her other athletic accomplishments. I enjoyed her book for lots of reasons. Although it talks most directly to women, the book is full of useful facts and suggestions on training, attitude, competition, clothing, nutrition, and health. With humor and light heartedness, she addresses everything from Lycra and energy gels to hydration and the color of healthy urine. Her words have the authentic ring of experience; when she describes a greasy concoction to help avoid rubbing your butt raw on a bike seat during a long ride, you know she has been there, done that. The core information is pertinent to athletes of all ages and genders, including TOJs.

But it's not the facts that drew me to her book. It was because she conveys such a deep and abiding love for exercise that is shared by every TOJ. Reading her insights, you realize she has fought personal and physical battles to be athletic, starting with being a heavy woman in an body image-obsessed culture and rising to the real challenge of moving that body with skill in one of the toughest endurance competitions. The simple laws of physics dictate that a heavier runner will expend more energy and effort to cover the same distance as a flyweight. And the heavier runner will endure exponentially higher forces on his or her joints, especially the knees.

"Heavyset" and "endurance sports" seem to be concepts that are at odds, but Jayne proves that is just conventional (and wrong) wisdom. Exercise is fun and good for everyone. People of all shapes and sizes love it and have a right to participate in any pursuit they choose. Much of what she has to say about heavy athletes is true for TOJs as well. Until very recently, it was an unspoken rule that as we age, we become less active, as if all there is to do when your hair turns grey is to voluntarily resign yourself to a sedentary life of checkers, knitting and television. The cultural signals are all around us. When you pick up a copy of Runners World, you will never see a heavy runner, nor will you ever see a TOJ.

Jayne Williams gets it -- you pursue your physical passions for your own reasons, whether it's a race or a jog in the park. You will likely never win anything. You may never look sleek or strong. Physical effort might be hard for you and sometimes you might get injured. Other times you will become tired and lazy. Sometimes you train like a Spartan and watch what you eat, other times you eat like a pig. The athletic life is dynamic because your body, the weather, the terrain, skills, techniques, equipment, everything is constantly changing. It's what you have chosen to do, despite all odds. It's how you fill your time, like a Zen master sits on a cushion and stares at a wall.

And after all is said and done, Williams, like a TOJ, feels a great sense of joy, humility, and gratitude. In a book with many memorable lines, my favorite reads: "Simply being able to move your body around is something that should make you feel awed and grateful every day." To that, this TOJ would only add: Amen.