Been a bit under the weather lately. Definitely messed up the Tuesday Sunrise Strider workout. 4 x 1000m with 200m RBI. Started off with a 4:20 and worked down to a 4:02. Significantly slower than a week before when I ran the same workout. Ugh.
Felt decent tonight though. 8.5 miles on the Garden roads, 78 minutes. Hot damn it's getting dark early nowadays.
Picked up the latest Running Times while I was taking a pre-run dump tonight and read the excerpt from the Bill Rodgers book. Rodgers was one of my original running heroes. On his diet: "I ate like a horse, consuming 4,000 calories a day. I stepped up my ritual of raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night, drinking bottles of honey, devouring boxes of Oreo cookies, scooping gobs of peanut butter or mayonaise from the jar and, for the grand finale, submerging them in a bottle of bacon bits." He was running up to 180 miles a week to get ready for his first New York City marathon. And he had a full time job while this was going on.
Can you imagine how this training regimen would go over today? There have been so many "advances" in exercise science and nutrition but what is there to show from it all? Hall and Ritz have some faster times but would anyone ever argue they are really better marathoners than Rodgers (or Shorter or Salazar or any of the top guys from that era). Hall and Ritz have the ability and both have had blank checks, the leading experts in the field, and all the time in the world to train, but they've never been anything but mediocre on the world stage.
I'll stop the rant, just something I was thinking about on my run tonight. I'll go consult my coach now, the letsrun.com message boards, who have discovered the secrets to running faster: grow some balls and run more miles.
5 comments:
I am pretty sure that Bill was not a teacher any longer once he was running those miles and winning.
Nonetheless, they were clearly BETTER marathoners than anyone running for the US today. Sure, their times were slower but they won on the world stage (Boston, NY, Fukokoa, the Olympics) than any of the modern guys. Hall's best finish is the third on any of those stages and now Ritz's is fifth (from Chicago a couple of weeks ago).
Clearly the game has changed, particularly with the Kajelin's now dominating the marathon, but the more telling statistic of how we have moved from the marathon being a speed event to one of completion is covered by your coach here: http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=302461&page=0
...IN the bacon bits! of course!
He was a teacher when he won his first Boston and NYC (and when he stunk it up at the Olympics). Right after he won NYC, his boss came to him and basically said, "your running at lunch is becoming a distraction, either quit running or quit your job."
And remember, neither Hall nor Ritz were competitive in those races where they placed high. Ritz wasn't even to mile 25 when the winner was signing autographs and drinking champagne.
Good book, I read it around Hardrock time.
Bill is the reason I run today...I was 23 in April of 1975 and a bunch of us walked across the bridge over the Charles Rivah to see the Boston finish. We were standing right near the finish line when this hippie looking guy comes flying down the road across the line. To me he was running as fast as any human could run. I was inspired enough to start running the next day and am still going 38 year's later.
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