Fear: The Ultimate Performance Drug

I've been hearing a lot of fear lately in relatives and friends. It's not about global warming, the economy, or terrorism. It's about how they are going to perform in a race.

It started when a relative rattled off a laundry list of why he might not participate in this year's Bolder-Boulder 10K - a recurring pain in his leg, not enough time to train, the hassle of finding a parking space, not liking the wave he might be placed in because he doesn't have a qualifying time. But his real reason, he divulged, is he fears that he won't run under a time he picked out of thin air.

Then my wife said she was worried that she hasn't gotten enough running milage in to run the Bolder-Boulder as fast as last yearbecause of the rough winter. So she is picking up her milage with six weeks to go before the race, easier with the days getting longer and the weather warmer. Actually, she ran a lot this winter (once at 8 above) and worked out hard with weights and an elliptical on most days she didn't run.

Then my daughter, a nurse with two young kids and a challenging work schedule and who was preparing to run a 30K trail race, said she was worried that she might "bonk" because she wasn't getting in enough mileage. I was immediately skeptical about that because I'd gone on a couple of trail runs (one which goes straight uphill for the first three miles) with her two months ago and she flew away from me like I was standing still. (No surprise, she ran the race last week and did great.)

Then a work colleague, who is going to walk the Bolder-Boulder, said she was worried she's be forced off the course for not finishing in the allotted time, like she was a few years earlier, which was humilitating and discouraging. I asked a couple of questions and learned she has been walking more than ever for several months becasue she had moved from the snowbound mountains onto the plains where there were some great trails, and might be in the best shape she's been in for a long time.

I know their fear. With six weeks to the Bolder-Boulder, I'm trying to lose a couple of pounds and put in more time road running, less on trails and doing stength training. My knees feel the miles on the asphalt. I worry: Can I get my pace figured out so I don't start out too fast? Can I beat last year's time?

What's ironic (and sort of funny) is that we reach goals by fearing we won't. Maybe we don't always reach them, but fear get us closer to them. Fear of failure motivates us to train harder, or start training earlier and more systematically, or sacrifice a desert or beer or two, or raise our pain threshold a little.

Like any performance enhancing drug, fear must be used in moderation. Too much can lead to injury because you try to go too fast or too long before you're physically ready. And it can create counter-productive performance anxiety, like that which elite runner Kara Goucher describes so honestly in "Mind Gains" in March 2010 Runner's World.

But fear is really our friend. When you to step up to the starting line, the nervousness and anticipation you feel are the miraculous alchemy of your fear turning into adrenaline as the fight or flight response kicks in. When you hear the starting gun fire and take that first step, you have chosen to fight, and the adrenaline will help you perform the best you could that day.

Closing the Gaps

Yesterday was the first day of spring. Mud season. The snow is melting fast, and the Colorado River is rising, first sign at the coming runoff. I slopped through the mud on my trail run, laughing much of the time at the slipping and sliding as my Montrails sunk into the ooze.

But today I switched gears shoes for a brisk, timed five mile run on the asphalt in my hot new Nike road shoes. The Bolder Boulder 10K is only 70 days away. It's time to close the gaps between what I'd likely run the race if it were today versus what I hope to run it in on Memorial Day, between my present per mile time and target race pace, and my present weight and anticipated race day weight.

Nowadays I only run one race per year so the Bolder Boulder's special. I'm very happy running trails most of the year, but the Bolder Boulder is so much fun -- the hoopla, the bands, the crowd, the exhibits and free goodies, the stadium finish, the elite runners -- that it calls my name. And it's a good opportunity to calibrate my running fitness from year to year. For me, it's a rite of spring.

It's not like I'm doing a crash training program because I run year around, but trail runs put much different stresses on the body than a relatively flat road race at a steady pace. This year was snowy, making my trail accessible only on snow shoes for much of the winter, so I was forced to run more on the roads, but slowly because they were snow-packed and icy. However, the past two years I have also done much more strength training than just running. I've added more muscle weight to my upper body, which is of marginal value to a pure runner, like those you see on the cover of Runner's World (actually I think they use just one skinny male body and one slim female body, then Photoshop on different smiling heads).

In preparation for the Bolder Boulder, my tried and true strategy has been to drop my per mile time by dropping a few pounds (mainly less beer per week, more veggies), go for longer runs on the weekends, and simply run more miles (steady pace and intervals). Each year as I age, it gets a little harder to pick up the pace, but I think it will still work.

I always have a target finish time and pretend it makes a difference, though it really doesn't. It's good to have a goal. Puts a little drama in your life. Makes you work harder and hurt a little. Losing a few pounds and watching what, and how much, you eat is good for your health. I'll strap on the heart rate monitor a couple times a week and see what my cruise range is.

Each year I have to figure out and practice a sustainable pace. Today at daybreak was chilly. I ran the first mile too fast, even though I felt really good. If you run too fast too soon, your time falls off later in the race because the lactic acid builds too fast; you may gain 15 seconds in the first mile, but you lose 30 seconds in each of the last two miles fast. I was a sprinter in high school and never have been great a pacing because my instinct is to go fast and over stride. The excitement you feel when your wave goes off in the Bolder Boulder makes you prone to start too fast, which I've done many times in past years.

70 days is plenty of time to close the gaps. Trying to close the gaps is half the fun. As the poet Robert Bronwing said, "Ah, a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?" Come Memorial Day, a few pounds lighter, I'll float like a butterfly. With the discipline of a Zen Master, I'll start slower, even though I've got fast shoes. I hope.

You Gotta Have Heart

A heart rate monitor is to a TOJ what a telescope was to Galileo. It provides another insight beyond speed, reps, weight, or distance to measure exercise intensity.

While elite athletes use heart rate monitors as a precision instrument with which to train their bodies the the their max, this TOJ uses one because it is fun to explore how heart rate correlates to the spectrum of sensations experienced between exertion and exhaustion during intense or prolonged exercise.

I've made some interesting discoveries with my Polar heart rate monitor. I was surprised to find that when trudging up a mountainside my heart rate rises, but rarely gets as high has it does on the flats. Even more surprising was the tremendous drop in heart rate coming down. Though my thighs throb, my heart rate drops into a zone where it's not clear there's much training effect, at least according to the conventional calculations for the so-called aerobic zone. My heart also beats slightly harder on a bicycle going uphill than when I run.

Whenever I do intervals where my heart beats close to its maximum rate, I watch to see if it drops a minimum of 30 beats within a minute after completion of the interval. That's a reliable indicator of a good fitness level, and when it doesn't drop that fast after an interval, I'm nearing exhaustion. Sometimes when I workout hard several days in a row, I leave the monitor on after the workout to see how long it takes for my resting rate to return close to normal. If it doesn't return to normal within an hour or so, from my experience, that means I've not recovering between workouts, and that can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system, making me more susceptible to colds and flu.

Typically heart rate monitors are used to determine some number, based on age, close to maximum heart rate and then the aerobic and fat-burning range between 65% and 80% of maximum heart rate. Truth be told, determining optimum aerobic zones is an inexact science.

For years, dogma was that your maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age, but the calculation has become more elaborate than that. In fact, it's difficult to determine exactly what your max heart rate is, although if you sprint to the point of exhaustion and capture the highest value on your heart rate monitor, you'll be close enough. (Note: Make sure your doctor has cleared you to exercise at that level of intensity, especially if you're a TOJ.)

Online you'll find a plethora of heart rate/aerobic zone calculators. One included a factor that differentiated between the rates for men and women. Here are three good examples: the Mayo Clinic, a fitness site, and a gear (like heart rate monitors) site. I found the gear site correlated the best with mine. Yours may be different.

Using a heart rate monitor during any kind of exercise will make you think about all kinds of things. Recently the NY Times had a good article that raised questions about whether it's best to train in the morning or in the afternoon. The author had discovered a pattern: according to her heart rate monitor, her heart rated tended to be lower in the morning and higher in the afternoon when doing the identical exercise. Some chrono-biologists chimed in that the body may be more primed for hard exercise in the afternoon.

By itself, heart rate is not very useful because it is affected by age, temperature and humidity, how rested your muscles are, what you've been eating, among many other factors. But I've found if you frequently wear one, you develop a sense of how all these are related and reflected in that number. WebMD has an informative summary of the myths and facts regarding heart rate, including the fact that your maximum heart rate declines 7 beats per decade of life. If you really want to learn a lot about it, check out Joe Friel's Total Heart Rate Training.

If you've been a good TOJ this year, ask Santa for one. It's a perfect recession gift -- good for your health and cheaper than a new pair of running shoes.

Merry Christmas!

Running, Shakespeare and Zen

Shakespeare wrote several hundred sonnets, a kind of poem composed of three quatrains (four lines) and a couplet (two lines). One of his most famous and revered is Sonnet 73. It's a sad poem about mortality. No surprise, I usually remember it around my birthday, a date when we all realize time is going by and we get a reminder of our own mortality. Sonnet 73 starts with:

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those bows that shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang.

He slips that first metaphor in like the master he was -- he's not talking about the fall season, but himself. He continues in the next two quatrains to compare himself to the onset of nightfall, then to a fading fire. With each new metaphor, you descend an emotional staircase with him, and with each step down, the mood becomes darker and starker -- we live and die and must separate from everything we love.

However, though the poem is beautifully written (so well the words have stuck with me for decades, ever since a nun made me memorize it in high schooI), maybe Bill sat too long hunkered over his desk, brooding too much on the Big Topics like life, love, and death. I wonder what his mood and writing would have been like if he had been a runner and got out a few times a week to pound the cobblestones under London's gloomy grey sky.

Many people who run continuously for more than 30 minutes have experienced the runner's high, a feeling of calm and well-being that is a pleasant side effect of aerobic exercise. It is a well-understood physical phenomenon that neurologists attribute it to the release of endorphins in the brain. When its there, you are very cognizant that you feel good, and the feeling can linger for hours after you finish a run.

If you want to read an interesting scientific explanation of the neuroscience of the runners high,, pick up a copy of Christoper Bergland's The Athlete's Way: Sweat and the Biology of Bliss (a fine book that deserves a wider audience). In fact, the exercise-induced high is so predictable that John Ratey, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, believes that aerobic exercise can be considered an effective treatment for a range of mental and emotional disorders.



I get a runners high on many runs, sometimes more intensely than others. I've no doubt that this endorphin rush is addictive, and the reason Runner's World has so many subscribers and so many people of all sizes and shapes toe the starting line for races 10K and longer.

But every once in a while when I'm deep into a run, something very different occurs that is beyond a runners high. It has only happened a few times and is hard to describe in words, but suddenly you as a thinker goes away, and you are just running. There is no sense of time. The color of every bush, rock, and cloud is thrilling and vivid. There are breathing sounds and leg pains, but they don't belong to anybody. It's more than a high, it's an ecstatic absorption in the moment. It's short, intense, and very cool.

What I'm trying to describe is better said in an ancient story from Zen Buddhism. In the story, a man is dangling over a cliff, desperately clinging to a vine. Above him, two mice are chewing through the vine. Below, two tigers are circling, looking up, waiting for him to fall. As the man ponders his difficult situation, he looks right in front of him and sees a wild strawberry plant growing from a crack in the rocks. He reaches out, plucks the deep red fruit, and takes a bite. How sweet it tastes!

If I'd been around London in the early 1600's, this TOJ would have dropped by Shakespeare's place. I would have said, "Bill, put down the quill. You need to get off your butt and sweat a little. Let's go for a run. If we're lucky, maybe we'll find some strawberries."

The visit might have changed the entire course of English literature by taking the edge off all the drama and trauma in human events about which he obsessed so much. He might have stopped after the first quatrain of Sonnet 73 once he laced up his Sauconys and run along the Thames for a few miles because his melancholy would have vanished. The world's loss would have been his gain.

--This blog is dedicated to Tom Wayman, my favorite foreign poet

Exercising on the Edge

A couple weeks ago a strange and terrible thing happened: three runners died in the Detroit Half Marathon. The men, 26, 36, and 65, all died within sixteen minutes of each other. News of the tragedy gave pause (hopefully a short one) to endurance athletes everywhere.

In wake of the tragedy, the Internet buzzed with speculation as to what happened. One blogger was convinced that a demented person had poisoned the water at one of the rest stops. It will be interesting to see what the pathologists conclude, if made public.

Facts regarding each of the men's health and medical history are few. They were probably in pretty good shape based on what I've read. The death of the 65 year old was no great a surprise because, as every TOJ knows, odds of sudden death during exercise rise steadily as a function of age, and he reputedly had some lung problems. When young men die during exercise, it is usually attributed to an electrical conduction or other hidden heart defect.

The weekend after the Detroit event I received an email from Dr. Al Sears (http://www.alsearsmd.com/), who runs a wellness and longevity center in Florida, and is a strong opponent of aerobic training, especially running marathons. His email claims this type of exercise "shrinks your lungs and downsizes your heart's output." Further, studies have shown that blood samples taken from people who have completed marathons have exhibited the same enzymes that are present during a heart attack. Dr. Sears sells an program that is based on progressively short anaerobic bursts of exercise, which be believes are safer and help you live longer.

I forwarded his email to another TOJ who is a distance runner (had just finished the Humboldt County Marathon in California) and a physician. His reaction was illuminating. He said it might be true you live longer if you exclusively follow a short interval program like Dr. Sears, but there is no scientific evidence that it does. Furthermore, most distance runners use a variety of exercise, including intense progressive intervals.

This distance runner/physician's most important point was that how you exercise really depends on the outcome you seek. If you want to run a marathon, you have to train for it, which is true for any challenging physical endeavor. If your goal is just to live a long time, it might not be necessary to do many of the forms of physical exercise that a TOJ enjoys. Most TOJs exercise hard because it enhances the quality of their lives. Quantity, as measured in years, is just a secondary effect, and subject many other factors like genetics and environment.

My friend speculated that there might be subsets of people for whom distance running is good, and others for whom it is detrimental. But being able to identity who falls into which category waits future study. Right now, to use his words, we are still in the medical dark ages when it comes to long term effects of exercise.

For most of us, any exercise where you ramp up your heart rate -- whether in intense, sub-minute anaerobic bursts that leave leave you breathless or in long aerobic activities where you dwell minutes and hours at at the burning upper end of your aerobic capacity -- presents some risk. You don't know know where you reach a dangerous tipping point, and, luckily most of us never find out.

The men whose lives ended in Detroit did. While it is doubtless a tragedy for their family and friends, this TOJ admires that they were in the race.

Running Over, Around and Through the Recession

Whether you are looking for work, renegotiating your mortgage, reallocating your IRA, haggling with your creditors, or personally okay but worried about your family and friends, find the time to run more and run harder.

One of the worst things about economic chaos is that it makes you feel like you have lost control of your life. Maybe you've lost your job, or your retirement, or your house. Or economic events are going to force you to make difficult business decisions or career decisions you dread. But you own your body, and can still put one foot in front of another. Every step you take is a reminder that you have more control than you realize. Running empowers you.

Economic problems are stressful for you, your family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Running will pump endorphins into your brain and help you chill out. You will sleep better. Your body will produce less cortisol and adrenaline. As you go about your day more relaxed, you will help those around you relax. Your peace will breed peace in those around you. The Buddhists have understood that for over two thousand years. The Old Masters would be runners today.

Running allows you to escape the incessant negativity of television. TV thrives on drama, tragedy and conflict. Unfortunately, pessimism is contagious, and the constant bombardment of the angry talking heads breeds fear in anyone who watches it. Peace and quiet don't work on the tube. It's a puny, square, distorted window on a big, multi-dimensional world that can only hold your attention with loud noise, canned laughter, and extreme views and behaviors. Running puts you in the real world where you listen to your own thoughts and the reality around you.

And while you are away from the TV, you will also escape all the ads telling you that you need to go buy something to overcome a personal shortcoming, satisfy some craving, keep up with the Joneses, and achieve happiness or faux security, whether or not you have the money to do so or it's really in your best interests. During a recession is a good time to take a break from it. TV doesn't know you and cares about you only as a customer.

Running keeps you healthy, thus lowers your healthcare costs. Medical costs are the major cause of personal bankruptcies. During a recession, more and more people are uninsured. If you are behind on your mortgage or out of work, the last thing you need is to pay more money to a healthcare system that already consumes more than any other industrialized country on earth. Plenty of reliable evidence shows that regular, moderate exercise helps prevent numerous chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, cancers and a host of other degenerative conditions. With every step, you protect your health and assets at the same time.

You need to think clearly because you are faced with difficult decisions, irrational fears, and an unstable, shifting economic environment. When you run, your brain will produce brain-derived neurotrophic factor (see Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey's Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain), which actually makes you smarter and more creative. You will be armed with the best weapon a human has to cope with adversity: a high-functioning mind. You are better able to see the Big Picture and find solutions, rather than get stuck in the problems of the moment. Some of your best thinking happens while you are running and not fretting. You are in the present, where problems vanish as you struggle to keep a pace, breathe, and ignore the growing pain in your legs.

Finally, running is cheap. Cheap is good if you are broke or need to hold on to your savings in case you are going to be out of work. All you need a good pair of shoes, you can skimp on everything else. You don't need to spend money on a gym, exercise DVDs, or fancy home equipment or fru fru lycra with dayglo trim. You can just step outside of your door, lace 'em up, and go.

Out on the trail, you will run over, around and through rocks, stumps, downed timber and streams. You'll go up, down, then up again. You see the world is alive and constantly changing, everything is passing by. The recession will pass too.




----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: What is true of running is also true of biking, hiking, swimming, rope jumping, rowing -- whatever you do hard enough to elevate your heartbeat for thirty minutes or more each day. Running is my favorite. Follow your own bliss.