Date: Sun, 08 Dec 2013 11:05:39 -0800
From: Marcia Rasmussen
To: Ultra List
Subject: Rasmussen Report: Weight Loss and Running
Apparently it's true. Losing weight does indeed make you a faster runner. It also allows you to run more miles without your legs falling off. And it would appear that running more miles is another thing that makes you run faster. Thus, we have the results of my own personal Rasmussen Report.
I have spent a lifetime (at least, the part I've lived so far) wrestling with fat. Anytime I let down my guard, it sneaks up on me during the night. Seriously. I've weighed myself at night. And in the morning, I'm mysteriously two pounds heavier. How does that work, exactly? John says it's variations in the earth's gravitational field. I'm not so sure.
Anyway, Vol-State 2013 gave me time--9.2 days, to be exact--to take a long, hard, gut-wrenching look at the issue. I was 140 pounds at the time (I am 5'4") and it was obvious to me that the extra weight made a difference in my running and seriously increased the impact on my legs and feet. High mileage has a way of making these things incredibly obvious! I came home from Vol-State with a serious, tunnel-vision resolve to lose about 15 pounds.
So that's what I did. Five months later, I'm hovering around 125. I have not been this small since before I began ultra running. I guess I'm bragging; I feel really good about this. But what I really want to communicate here is not so much a (yet another) long discourse about myself, but an observations of the changes at weight loss has made on my running.
I decided to do the RED FAM thing for December. I thought that would help motivate me to reach my intended goal of 2000 miles for the year. In order to do that, I would need to average about 11 miles a day for the month of December. After the first week, I'm thinking, "Holy moley! I can run FAST again!" (When I say "fast," I just mean something like a 10-minute mile. But it's faster than I've been able to run in the past decade or so.)
In any case, it seems to me that running 10+ miles, day after day, can give a serious jump-start to your running ability.It also seems to me that getting down to "fighting weight" not only allows you to run faster, but it cuts down on so much of the impact-related stress that it allows you to run significantly more mileage. And the mileage, in turn, makes you able to run FASTER AND FARTHER.
Not that this is anything new. It's just that I am surprised at the extent of the change. It's like getting a glimpse at being a YOUNG RUNNER. That's pretty cool, since I never really was a young runner. I'm seriously hoping that this is enough motivation to keep me from gaining back the 15 pounds when all the Christmas goodies appear.
Bah! Humbug!
Marcia Rasmussen
Monday, December 9, 2013
Monday, October 28, 2013
Nick Marshall on Ron Bentley and early 1970s ultrarunning
As the folks out in Oklahoma try to slog on through the night in our 24-hour national championship, it seems appropriate to hearken back to an earlier landmark event of this type.
So gather 'round children, and I'll tell you a tale of ancient history . . . .
Toward the bottom of this message is a link to a short 4-minute video on Ron Bentley, filmed in January 1974.
I doubt if the name Ron Bentley rings a bell with even 1% of the readers on this UltraList. However, when I first became interested in ultras, he was a giant in the sport. In the past I'd only read about Bentley and seen a few photos of him, so I was delighted when England's Andy Milroy informed me a few days ago of the existence of this video, showing Ron being interviewed soon after his greatest race, a 24-hour which unfolded 40 years ago.
To place things in context, we need to go back decades, long before most readers here were ever active in the sport.
At age 65, I am far from being the oldest member of the UL. However, I'm pretty sure that in terms of when we all began running organized ultramarathons, no one else here has a personal resume dating further back than mine.
My first ultra was in 1974, and the running world was vastly different then. The opportunity for people to try races longer than 26.2 miles was extremely limited. According to my records, there were only 13 ultras held in the United States in all of 1974, and four of them were shorter than 50 miles. Of the other ultradistance competitions to choose from, there were seven 50-milers and a pair of 100-Ks. That was it. One of the 100Ks had an option to continue on as a stage event for a 3-day 300-K (which future Ultra Hall of Famer Park Barner and racewalker extraordinaire Alan Price did), but the longest continuous distance offered in America that year was only 62.1 miles. There had been a couple 100-milers held in the past, but there wasn't a single 100 put on anywhere in the U.S. in 1974.
At least the few races we had back then were not all concentrated in the same place, although they were almost all clustered on the east or west coast. The 13 ultras were held in 9 different states: there were 3 in Maryland; 2 each in California and New York; and one apiece in Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
My ultra debut was in the C-&-O Canal 100-K. It started at the base of the Washington Monument in D.C., and headed to where the C-&-O Canal towpath begins in Georgetown; and then followed the towpath along the Maryland side of the Potomac River for 60 miles, to a point opposite Harpers Ferry, W.Va. Seven men entered the race, and six completed the 100 kms. I finished in 2nd place, behind Park Barner (a clubmate of mine from the little Harrisburg Area Road Runners Club), who won in 7:52:43.
If present-day ultrarunners feel as though they occupy a small pond, compared to an ocean of runners doing shorter events, back then the entire running population was merely a pond, and with ultras forming no more than a tiny puddle. Of the 13 ultras held in 1974, the JFK 50-Mile was the only event with over 40 starters.
It was almost an entirely male preserve, too. That whole year, only 5 females finished any race longer than a marathon. In Santa Monica, California, Eileen Waters became the first woman to ever break 7 hours for 50 miles, smashing her world record for the distance with a 6:55:27. In the same race, Donna Gookin also came in under the old mark, at 7:12:51. At JFK, Nancy Keplinger persisted through a horrendous ice storm to finish that 50-miler in 13:48:05.
(In its first 12 years, JFK was held in March. That is, until the hyperthermic conditions of 1974 wreaked havoc on the race, with 84% of its field dropping out due to a daylong deluge of wintry sleet and freezing rain. After that weather disaster, race founder Buzz Sawyer switched its annual date to November.)
Oddly, while I noted that only 5 American females finished an ultra in 1974, Waters, Gookin and Keplinger were the only women to do so. That's because the only other representatives of their gender in this tiny group were a couple little girls, as sisters Linda and Suzanne Bottlik, ages 11 and 9, trotted through the Southern Pacific AAU 50-K in California in 5:32 and 5:38, respectively, shepherded along by their father!
Lest people get a mistaken impression of the toughness of ultrarunners back then ("Gee, we all run lots of 100-milers nowadays, and that's way beyond what those oldtimers used to do. . ."), it needs to be pointed out that although the sport was in its infancy here, its pioneers were primarily men in their 20s and 30s who were serious athletes. They came out of a roadracing tradition, and the competition in these "short" ultras was frequently both fierce and fast. Quality, not quantity. It was only for a lack of opportunity that this small band wasn't doing 100-milers, too.
The most dramatic example of this fact is evident from that year's national championship 50-mile. Held on a relatively hilly loop in New York's Central Park, only 12 men finished the race. However, 7 of those 12 runners broke 6 hours, with the great Max White winning in 5:28:15 and Park Barner taking second. In other words, the race was open to anyone in the whole country who was an AAU member and wanted to run . . . but if you showed up and took 6 and a half hours to cover the 50 miles, you were going to find yourself in the back of the pack! (Similarly, when I ran the National 50 in Central Park in 1976, the race that time had only 17 finishers, but my 5:51:38 was only good for 5th place, and nine men in all broke 6 hours.)
Meanwhile, despite the paucity of available ultras here, the U.S. was still more advanced than all but one country in the the rest of the world. Continental Europe had some annual mass 100-Ks, but these were mostly hiking treks which a few runners would also do. Japan was dormant. South Africa had its enormous Comrades 56-miler, but its national apartheid policy kept that a segregated, whites-only event which was shunned by all but a few foreign runners.
It was only in the British Isles that ultras had flourished. The 52.5-mile London-to-Brighton was the most hotly-contested ultra in the world, and during the 1960s Ted Corbitt ("The Father of American Ultrarunning") had travelled to England five times to do that premiere event, as did some other Americans who lacked many ultra options in our country.
Most British ultras were in the 35- to 50-mile range, but every couple years the British RRC would host a special longer race. In 1969, it was a 100-miler, and John Tarrant ran the second fastest time in history, a 12:31:10, which trailed only the world record of 12:20:28 set in 1953 by South African Wally Hayward. Meanwhile, the 50-year-old Ted Corbitt placed 3rd with a U.S. 100-mile record of 13:33:06.
In 1971, the British RRC held another top quality 100-mile, and this is when Ron Bentley rose to great prominence in the ultra world. He won it in 12:37:55, the third fastest time in history, beating John Tarrant (12:51:38) in the process, while his brother Gordon Bentley claimed the third spot in 13:14:17.
This long-winded intro brings us up to Nov. 3-4, 1973, when the British RRC held their next big extra-long ultra, a race in which Ron Bentley broke Wally Hayward's world record for 24 hours.
Here's a link to the short video about it:
http://www.macearchive.org/
This brief look at Ron Bentley was filmed two months after his 24-hour world record. The mark he had to beat at the time was the 159.3 miles Hayward had run in England twenty years earlier.
Bentley's 50 and 100-mile splits were 6:08:11 and 13:09:52. He passed Hayward's record at 22:59:38. At that point, he stopped running, and switched to a slow and painful walk, covering only 2 more miles in the final hour.
In the video, Bentley seems like a fine chap, and a bull of a man. I'd read before that he was built like a fighter. He looks the part, yet the shots of him on the move show an impressive running form. He'd be a fairly intimidating competitor to race against, with his powerful physique. Most runners don't have his upper body!
The food intake cited in the video is questionable, to my mind. I suspect the filmmakers may have asked him to set up everything he possibly could have had available at trackside during the race, not what he actually consumed:
3.5 gallons of a kind of glucose drink
3 jars of honey
4 pounds of solid glucose
a loaf of bread
5 tins of soup
2 jellies & a custard
12 chocolate bars
4 pints of tea
1 tin of pears
½ a tin of oranges
He does comment that he lost 14 pounds in the course of the event. That's a slight exaggeration, but not far off, as he dropped 8% of his body weight over 24 hours. Beforehand, he was weighed in at 156.5 pounds, and afterward he weighed 143.8, for a total loss of 12.7 pounds. So it's hard to believe he lost that much weight, if he also ate as much as the list above contains.
The race was on a cinder track (tough surface for an event lasting so long!) but had mild temps for a race in November in Britain, with a low of 52 and a high of 61. But, it was also damp and had a chilling wind at times (6 PM start); but what had to make it very tough was that there was a cold downpour at Hour 19 of the event, and part of the track was 2" deep in water for several hours after that.
Of particular U.S. interest is that this same race gave Ted Corbitt the only opportunity in his career to attempt a 24-hour event. Ted entered the race with a goal of 150 miles. For any other 54-year-old runner that would seem preposterous, but in Ted's case 150 miles sounded reasonable. He'd run 13:33 in his only 100-miler just four years earlier, and then done 5:34:01 for 50 miles at age 51, and 5:35:03 at age 52.
Unfortunately, while Ron Bentley triumphed that day, the result for the American was a disappointing performance. Ted hit 50 miles in 6:50:41, but struggled from there. He passed 100 miles in 15:22, but deteriorated more the rest of the way, eventually settling for 134.4 miles for his 24 hours' work. Our national record at the time was very soft (since hardly any Amercans had ever done a 24-hour), so Corbitt's distance actually established a new U.S. record, but he was nonetheless disappointed with the outcome, as it fell so far short of his goal for the day.
(Sadly, unbeknownst to Ted, at this point he was approaching the end of his elite competitive career. He ran a couple quality ultras after the 24-hour in England, including doing a 5:53:09 for 50 miles at age 55 in November, 1974. That was his last hurrah, however, as he subsequently developed breathing difficulties which reduced him to only very slow jogging or walking, although he continued to walk occasional ultras into his 80s.)
Incidentally, in the film it appears Bentley is wearing Tiger Boston shoes (originally named Tiger Joggers; later the same model was renamed the Tiger Nairobi). They were among the first shoes with nylon uppers, but were racing/training flats that were lightweight and had very little of the "support" that you find in modern shoes. They were mostly just a flat sole with hardly any heel lift, attached to an almost-all nylon upper, except for thin, flimsy leather strips at the heel counter and toe box. Although I doubt my old legs could tolerate them now, back in 1973-1979 (until they went out of production) the Tiger Jogger/Boston/Nairobi was my favorite all-purpose shoe. I added a lightweight Spenco insole to them to provide a little more cushioning, and wore them both for training and racing. I'd rank them as one of only 3 shoe models (of the many I've tried in the past 40 years) that I actually liked (the others being the Nike Terra TC in the early-to-mid '80s, and the Nike Air Zoom in the late '90s).
Finally, IF ANYONE WANTS TO READ A LOT MORE ABOUT RON BENTLEY AND HIS HISTORIC 24-HOUR, SEND ME AN EMAIL REQUEST AND I'LL SEND YOU A LARGE PDF FILE OF A GREAT ARTICLE ON THE SUBJECT. It was written by Chris Holloway of England. Chris just finished it a couple weeks ago, and wrote it to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Bentley's world record, coming up next week.
The article is very long, and I don't recall ever seeing a more comprehensive account of a single ultra. Holloway tracked down a bunch of people who were either in the race, or helped officiate at it, etc., and who can still recall the day well. There's an hour-by-hour retelling of the event, plus charts breaking down its statistics, all augmented with some wonderful old photos from the race. There are individual shots of most of the competitors, including a couple nice pictures of Ted Corbitt and a neat photo of the winner slogging through the water on the track after the downpour.
Also, the piece begins with a biography of Ron Bentley, showing his childhood was a very hardscrabble one. Born on Oct. 10, 1930, he grew up during the Depression era in a home without electricity, in a family of 11 children, etc. That's quite a different background from most of us!
Charmingly, though, at the end of the article there's a current photo of Bentley in his track suit, smiling broadly and looking very hale and hearty, at age 83.
---Best,
Nick Marshall
Camp Hill, PA
So gather 'round children, and I'll tell you a tale of ancient history . . . .
Toward the bottom of this message is a link to a short 4-minute video on Ron Bentley, filmed in January 1974.
I doubt if the name Ron Bentley rings a bell with even 1% of the readers on this UltraList. However, when I first became interested in ultras, he was a giant in the sport. In the past I'd only read about Bentley and seen a few photos of him, so I was delighted when England's Andy Milroy informed me a few days ago of the existence of this video, showing Ron being interviewed soon after his greatest race, a 24-hour which unfolded 40 years ago.
To place things in context, we need to go back decades, long before most readers here were ever active in the sport.
At age 65, I am far from being the oldest member of the UL. However, I'm pretty sure that in terms of when we all began running organized ultramarathons, no one else here has a personal resume dating further back than mine.
My first ultra was in 1974, and the running world was vastly different then. The opportunity for people to try races longer than 26.2 miles was extremely limited. According to my records, there were only 13 ultras held in the United States in all of 1974, and four of them were shorter than 50 miles. Of the other ultradistance competitions to choose from, there were seven 50-milers and a pair of 100-Ks. That was it. One of the 100Ks had an option to continue on as a stage event for a 3-day 300-K (which future Ultra Hall of Famer Park Barner and racewalker extraordinaire Alan Price did), but the longest continuous distance offered in America that year was only 62.1 miles. There had been a couple 100-milers held in the past, but there wasn't a single 100 put on anywhere in the U.S. in 1974.
At least the few races we had back then were not all concentrated in the same place, although they were almost all clustered on the east or west coast. The 13 ultras were held in 9 different states: there were 3 in Maryland; 2 each in California and New York; and one apiece in Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
My ultra debut was in the C-&-O Canal 100-K. It started at the base of the Washington Monument in D.C., and headed to where the C-&-O Canal towpath begins in Georgetown; and then followed the towpath along the Maryland side of the Potomac River for 60 miles, to a point opposite Harpers Ferry, W.Va. Seven men entered the race, and six completed the 100 kms. I finished in 2nd place, behind Park Barner (a clubmate of mine from the little Harrisburg Area Road Runners Club), who won in 7:52:43.
If present-day ultrarunners feel as though they occupy a small pond, compared to an ocean of runners doing shorter events, back then the entire running population was merely a pond, and with ultras forming no more than a tiny puddle. Of the 13 ultras held in 1974, the JFK 50-Mile was the only event with over 40 starters.
It was almost an entirely male preserve, too. That whole year, only 5 females finished any race longer than a marathon. In Santa Monica, California, Eileen Waters became the first woman to ever break 7 hours for 50 miles, smashing her world record for the distance with a 6:55:27. In the same race, Donna Gookin also came in under the old mark, at 7:12:51. At JFK, Nancy Keplinger persisted through a horrendous ice storm to finish that 50-miler in 13:48:05.
(In its first 12 years, JFK was held in March. That is, until the hyperthermic conditions of 1974 wreaked havoc on the race, with 84% of its field dropping out due to a daylong deluge of wintry sleet and freezing rain. After that weather disaster, race founder Buzz Sawyer switched its annual date to November.)
Oddly, while I noted that only 5 American females finished an ultra in 1974, Waters, Gookin and Keplinger were the only women to do so. That's because the only other representatives of their gender in this tiny group were a couple little girls, as sisters Linda and Suzanne Bottlik, ages 11 and 9, trotted through the Southern Pacific AAU 50-K in California in 5:32 and 5:38, respectively, shepherded along by their father!
Lest people get a mistaken impression of the toughness of ultrarunners back then ("Gee, we all run lots of 100-milers nowadays, and that's way beyond what those oldtimers used to do. . ."), it needs to be pointed out that although the sport was in its infancy here, its pioneers were primarily men in their 20s and 30s who were serious athletes. They came out of a roadracing tradition, and the competition in these "short" ultras was frequently both fierce and fast. Quality, not quantity. It was only for a lack of opportunity that this small band wasn't doing 100-milers, too.
The most dramatic example of this fact is evident from that year's national championship 50-mile. Held on a relatively hilly loop in New York's Central Park, only 12 men finished the race. However, 7 of those 12 runners broke 6 hours, with the great Max White winning in 5:28:15 and Park Barner taking second. In other words, the race was open to anyone in the whole country who was an AAU member and wanted to run . . . but if you showed up and took 6 and a half hours to cover the 50 miles, you were going to find yourself in the back of the pack! (Similarly, when I ran the National 50 in Central Park in 1976, the race that time had only 17 finishers, but my 5:51:38 was only good for 5th place, and nine men in all broke 6 hours.)
Meanwhile, despite the paucity of available ultras here, the U.S. was still more advanced than all but one country in the the rest of the world. Continental Europe had some annual mass 100-Ks, but these were mostly hiking treks which a few runners would also do. Japan was dormant. South Africa had its enormous Comrades 56-miler, but its national apartheid policy kept that a segregated, whites-only event which was shunned by all but a few foreign runners.
It was only in the British Isles that ultras had flourished. The 52.5-mile London-to-Brighton was the most hotly-contested ultra in the world, and during the 1960s Ted Corbitt ("The Father of American Ultrarunning") had travelled to England five times to do that premiere event, as did some other Americans who lacked many ultra options in our country.
Most British ultras were in the 35- to 50-mile range, but every couple years the British RRC would host a special longer race. In 1969, it was a 100-miler, and John Tarrant ran the second fastest time in history, a 12:31:10, which trailed only the world record of 12:20:28 set in 1953 by South African Wally Hayward. Meanwhile, the 50-year-old Ted Corbitt placed 3rd with a U.S. 100-mile record of 13:33:06.
In 1971, the British RRC held another top quality 100-mile, and this is when Ron Bentley rose to great prominence in the ultra world. He won it in 12:37:55, the third fastest time in history, beating John Tarrant (12:51:38) in the process, while his brother Gordon Bentley claimed the third spot in 13:14:17.
This long-winded intro brings us up to Nov. 3-4, 1973, when the British RRC held their next big extra-long ultra, a race in which Ron Bentley broke Wally Hayward's world record for 24 hours.
Here's a link to the short video about it:
http://www.macearchive.org/
This brief look at Ron Bentley was filmed two months after his 24-hour world record. The mark he had to beat at the time was the 159.3 miles Hayward had run in England twenty years earlier.
Bentley's 50 and 100-mile splits were 6:08:11 and 13:09:52. He passed Hayward's record at 22:59:38. At that point, he stopped running, and switched to a slow and painful walk, covering only 2 more miles in the final hour.
In the video, Bentley seems like a fine chap, and a bull of a man. I'd read before that he was built like a fighter. He looks the part, yet the shots of him on the move show an impressive running form. He'd be a fairly intimidating competitor to race against, with his powerful physique. Most runners don't have his upper body!
The food intake cited in the video is questionable, to my mind. I suspect the filmmakers may have asked him to set up everything he possibly could have had available at trackside during the race, not what he actually consumed:
3.5 gallons of a kind of glucose drink
3 jars of honey
4 pounds of solid glucose
a loaf of bread
5 tins of soup
2 jellies & a custard
12 chocolate bars
4 pints of tea
1 tin of pears
½ a tin of oranges
He does comment that he lost 14 pounds in the course of the event. That's a slight exaggeration, but not far off, as he dropped 8% of his body weight over 24 hours. Beforehand, he was weighed in at 156.5 pounds, and afterward he weighed 143.8, for a total loss of 12.7 pounds. So it's hard to believe he lost that much weight, if he also ate as much as the list above contains.
The race was on a cinder track (tough surface for an event lasting so long!) but had mild temps for a race in November in Britain, with a low of 52 and a high of 61. But, it was also damp and had a chilling wind at times (6 PM start); but what had to make it very tough was that there was a cold downpour at Hour 19 of the event, and part of the track was 2" deep in water for several hours after that.
Of particular U.S. interest is that this same race gave Ted Corbitt the only opportunity in his career to attempt a 24-hour event. Ted entered the race with a goal of 150 miles. For any other 54-year-old runner that would seem preposterous, but in Ted's case 150 miles sounded reasonable. He'd run 13:33 in his only 100-miler just four years earlier, and then done 5:34:01 for 50 miles at age 51, and 5:35:03 at age 52.
Unfortunately, while Ron Bentley triumphed that day, the result for the American was a disappointing performance. Ted hit 50 miles in 6:50:41, but struggled from there. He passed 100 miles in 15:22, but deteriorated more the rest of the way, eventually settling for 134.4 miles for his 24 hours' work. Our national record at the time was very soft (since hardly any Amercans had ever done a 24-hour), so Corbitt's distance actually established a new U.S. record, but he was nonetheless disappointed with the outcome, as it fell so far short of his goal for the day.
(Sadly, unbeknownst to Ted, at this point he was approaching the end of his elite competitive career. He ran a couple quality ultras after the 24-hour in England, including doing a 5:53:09 for 50 miles at age 55 in November, 1974. That was his last hurrah, however, as he subsequently developed breathing difficulties which reduced him to only very slow jogging or walking, although he continued to walk occasional ultras into his 80s.)
Incidentally, in the film it appears Bentley is wearing Tiger Boston shoes (originally named Tiger Joggers; later the same model was renamed the Tiger Nairobi). They were among the first shoes with nylon uppers, but were racing/training flats that were lightweight and had very little of the "support" that you find in modern shoes. They were mostly just a flat sole with hardly any heel lift, attached to an almost-all nylon upper, except for thin, flimsy leather strips at the heel counter and toe box. Although I doubt my old legs could tolerate them now, back in 1973-1979 (until they went out of production) the Tiger Jogger/Boston/Nairobi was my favorite all-purpose shoe. I added a lightweight Spenco insole to them to provide a little more cushioning, and wore them both for training and racing. I'd rank them as one of only 3 shoe models (of the many I've tried in the past 40 years) that I actually liked (the others being the Nike Terra TC in the early-to-mid '80s, and the Nike Air Zoom in the late '90s).
Finally, IF ANYONE WANTS TO READ A LOT MORE ABOUT RON BENTLEY AND HIS HISTORIC 24-HOUR, SEND ME AN EMAIL REQUEST AND I'LL SEND YOU A LARGE PDF FILE OF A GREAT ARTICLE ON THE SUBJECT. It was written by Chris Holloway of England. Chris just finished it a couple weeks ago, and wrote it to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Bentley's world record, coming up next week.
The article is very long, and I don't recall ever seeing a more comprehensive account of a single ultra. Holloway tracked down a bunch of people who were either in the race, or helped officiate at it, etc., and who can still recall the day well. There's an hour-by-hour retelling of the event, plus charts breaking down its statistics, all augmented with some wonderful old photos from the race. There are individual shots of most of the competitors, including a couple nice pictures of Ted Corbitt and a neat photo of the winner slogging through the water on the track after the downpour.
Also, the piece begins with a biography of Ron Bentley, showing his childhood was a very hardscrabble one. Born on Oct. 10, 1930, he grew up during the Depression era in a home without electricity, in a family of 11 children, etc. That's quite a different background from most of us!
Charmingly, though, at the end of the article there's a current photo of Bentley in his track suit, smiling broadly and looking very hale and hearty, at age 83.
---Best,
Nick Marshall
Camp Hill, PA
Thursday, October 17, 2013
it is just running for cripes sake by LL
From: lazarus lake
Subject: FW: running mythology
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 13:10:33 +0000
it is just running for cripes sake.
it is what we are designed to do.
we have been doing it for something between 3 and 6 million years....
MILLION.
100 years after the popularization of the automobile
we have come to treat running as an almost supernatural accomplishment.
we actually fear running.
starting up a cross country team has been at times maddening.
before we even reached the total of 3 miles a day in a practice we had parents fearing that running "such distances"
would permanently...
PERMANENTLY
injure their children.
we lost runners whose parents will always believe they narrowly averted crippling injuries.
thank god that all the girls quit.
everyone knows distance running will make a woman's uterus fall out.
it would have been awful having our track littered with all those uteri.
the latest fear is "dead legs"
i am not sure what "dead legs" is but we have parents convinced that running will cause it.
"distance days"
which are really almost days off
strike terror in the hearts of our parents.
the kids are equally terrrified
(they learn it at home)
none the less we had worked them up to slow 5-milers.
last week we did a 6-miler.
and we are not talking about a hard 6-miler.
times ranged from 50-61 minutes.
one kid's dad held him out of practice that day.
running 6 miles he feared would give the kid "dead legs"
and ruin his basketball and baseball seasons.
i decided it was better not to tell the guy
that during most of our practices we covered anything from 4.5 to 5.5 miles much of it at fast speeds
(which is much more difficult than running 6 miles slowly)
it is just broken down into smaller pieces.
apparently almost no one can do math.
i do try to explain that exercise as counterintuitive as it might seem makes you stronger not weaker.
you are laughing at these people aren't you?
let me point out that last week.
last week i saw the hundred thousandth post asking for advice on what to eat during an ultra.
and we are not talking about a multiday.
this time it was 50 miles.
the next time it will probably be 50k.
the sane advice is "if you happen to get hungry you can eat something to make your stomach feel better.
it is not necessary to constantly fuel your body to run."
the advice that caught my eye said "eat the SAME THING YOU EAT DURING TRAINING."
eat during training?
what for so you don't get "dead legs?"
between 1836 and 1869 about 400 00 people
traveled 2 00 miles from missoura to oregon.
most of them walked.
they had no idea that they must eat every 45 minutes.
they had no concept of bonk.
they had no gu.
it is just running.
we have been doing it for millions of years.
MILLIONS.
laz
Subject: FW: running mythology
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 13:10:33 +0000
it is just running for cripes sake.
it is what we are designed to do.
we have been doing it for something between 3 and 6 million years....
MILLION.
100 years after the popularization of the automobile
we have come to treat running as an almost supernatural accomplishment.
we actually fear running.
starting up a cross country team has been at times maddening.
before we even reached the total of 3 miles a day in a practice we had parents fearing that running "such distances"
would permanently...
PERMANENTLY
injure their children.
we lost runners whose parents will always believe they narrowly averted crippling injuries.
thank god that all the girls quit.
everyone knows distance running will make a woman's uterus fall out.
it would have been awful having our track littered with all those uteri.
the latest fear is "dead legs"
i am not sure what "dead legs" is but we have parents convinced that running will cause it.
"distance days"
which are really almost days off
strike terror in the hearts of our parents.
the kids are equally terrrified
(they learn it at home)
none the less we had worked them up to slow 5-milers.
last week we did a 6-miler.
and we are not talking about a hard 6-miler.
times ranged from 50-61 minutes.
one kid's dad held him out of practice that day.
running 6 miles he feared would give the kid "dead legs"
and ruin his basketball and baseball seasons.
i decided it was better not to tell the guy
that during most of our practices we covered anything from 4.5 to 5.5 miles much of it at fast speeds
(which is much more difficult than running 6 miles slowly)
it is just broken down into smaller pieces.
apparently almost no one can do math.
i do try to explain that exercise as counterintuitive as it might seem makes you stronger not weaker.
you are laughing at these people aren't you?
let me point out that last week.
last week i saw the hundred thousandth post asking for advice on what to eat during an ultra.
and we are not talking about a multiday.
this time it was 50 miles.
the next time it will probably be 50k.
the sane advice is "if you happen to get hungry you can eat something to make your stomach feel better.
it is not necessary to constantly fuel your body to run."
the advice that caught my eye said "eat the SAME THING YOU EAT DURING TRAINING."
eat during training?
what for so you don't get "dead legs?"
between 1836 and 1869 about 400 00 people
traveled 2 00 miles from missoura to oregon.
most of them walked.
they had no idea that they must eat every 45 minutes.
they had no concept of bonk.
they had no gu.
it is just running.
we have been doing it for millions of years.
MILLIONS.
laz
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Back of the Pack Story by Patrick McHenry
Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 9:54 AM
I first saw her on the out-and-back section - around 34 miles for me, 16 for her, as she was running in the 50K. I was on the way out and she was on the way back, about a mile ahead of me on the course. She was one of those runners in an ultra that you can’t help but wonder at and be inspired by at the same time.
Very heavy. Looked nothing like a runner. Not yet, anyway. You wondered how she was ever going to make it, but at the same time marveled at the heart that got her out there. You know something of that kind of determination yourself - maybe.
Or maybe not.
It took me about four miles to catch her. It was on Bare Hill - the last huge climb on the course. I saw her plodding up the steep pitch ahead of me and slowly, but inexorably closed the gap (plodding not much more impressively myself at that point). As I approached she turned around and started walking backward up the hill.
“You got this!” I said. “Just get to the top of this hill and it’s mostly flat or downhill from there.”
“No,” she replied, sounding nearly in tears, “I’m done. My blisters are so bad, and I’m nauseous.”
“Do you have anyone helping you?” (Looking back over my shoulder at her by this time.)
“No.”
“The aid station is just up ahead. Why don’t you see if they can do anything for your feet?”
Part of me really wishes I was a more giving person at this point. Part of me wanted to just say the hell with my race and my selfish goals and really try to help this woman. Instead I kept chugging. I was relieved a few yards later when I saw a runner crew parked along the side of the road getting out of their vehicle and moving to see if they could help her - heard them begin asking her what they could do as I moved on out of earshot.
I went on and finished my race. It was hard. I had done it. I was happy. But even in the rush of another success and even in the exhaustion of recovery part of me kept wondering what had happened to that poor hurting woman on the hill.
Finally last night some of the race photos were posted. I downloaded the ones of me, looked at a bunch of others - then I looked in vain for her among the last of the finish photos. She was not there. I went back and spotted her in the earlier photos from just after the 50K start. In those pictures she is moving with strength and purpose, a smile on her face. Bib #49.
Opening the 50K results, I scrolled down to the end. There it was - last line - bib #49, 9:11:43. She came in just after the 9-hour cut-off, after the finish photographer had already left, or it had just gotten too dark for decent pictures. This was her first ultra.
I almost let out a whoop in the middle of the night in my family room!
I picture her coming through the gate, hurting, spent - few people around, maybe no friends or family to cheer for her - and again, I wonder why I am not a bigger person. Why couldn’t I have waited for her? Maybe gone back down the course to look for her to offer aid and more encouragement?
I just hope that somehow, some way, she reads this and at least knows how much she inspired me.
Pat
I first saw her on the out-and-back section - around 34 miles for me, 16 for her, as she was running in the 50K. I was on the way out and she was on the way back, about a mile ahead of me on the course. She was one of those runners in an ultra that you can’t help but wonder at and be inspired by at the same time.
Very heavy. Looked nothing like a runner. Not yet, anyway. You wondered how she was ever going to make it, but at the same time marveled at the heart that got her out there. You know something of that kind of determination yourself - maybe.
Or maybe not.
It took me about four miles to catch her. It was on Bare Hill - the last huge climb on the course. I saw her plodding up the steep pitch ahead of me and slowly, but inexorably closed the gap (plodding not much more impressively myself at that point). As I approached she turned around and started walking backward up the hill.
“You got this!” I said. “Just get to the top of this hill and it’s mostly flat or downhill from there.”
“No,” she replied, sounding nearly in tears, “I’m done. My blisters are so bad, and I’m nauseous.”
“Do you have anyone helping you?” (Looking back over my shoulder at her by this time.)
“No.”
“The aid station is just up ahead. Why don’t you see if they can do anything for your feet?”
Part of me really wishes I was a more giving person at this point. Part of me wanted to just say the hell with my race and my selfish goals and really try to help this woman. Instead I kept chugging. I was relieved a few yards later when I saw a runner crew parked along the side of the road getting out of their vehicle and moving to see if they could help her - heard them begin asking her what they could do as I moved on out of earshot.
I went on and finished my race. It was hard. I had done it. I was happy. But even in the rush of another success and even in the exhaustion of recovery part of me kept wondering what had happened to that poor hurting woman on the hill.
Finally last night some of the race photos were posted. I downloaded the ones of me, looked at a bunch of others - then I looked in vain for her among the last of the finish photos. She was not there. I went back and spotted her in the earlier photos from just after the 50K start. In those pictures she is moving with strength and purpose, a smile on her face. Bib #49.
Opening the 50K results, I scrolled down to the end. There it was - last line - bib #49, 9:11:43. She came in just after the 9-hour cut-off, after the finish photographer had already left, or it had just gotten too dark for decent pictures. This was her first ultra.
I almost let out a whoop in the middle of the night in my family room!
I picture her coming through the gate, hurting, spent - few people around, maybe no friends or family to cheer for her - and again, I wonder why I am not a bigger person. Why couldn’t I have waited for her? Maybe gone back down the course to look for her to offer aid and more encouragement?
I just hope that somehow, some way, she reads this and at least knows how much she inspired me.
Pat
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