Ageless Advice

(January 2003 RW)

This is my year to turn 60. Sixty? If I don't look too hard into the mirror or too long at the stopwatch, I can imagine I'm turning 20 for the 40th time.

I'd learned my most important running lessons by 20 and continue to live them as well as teach them. Today's young students in my running classes, average age of 20, still hear these old lessons because they aren't ancient history gleaned from an aging writer's fading memory.

My memories have remained clear because I've refreshed them repeatedly for more than 40 years. Approaches and attitudes that work don't go out of date, but keep working at all ages and stages of a runner's life.

These lessons began to work for me very early, starting my first day (and almost last) day as a racer. Without them, I wouldn't be here to pass any of this along.

In my first mile race I tried to beat everyone who ran that day -- and only managed to beat myself. I started with the leaders and dropped out exhausted after one lap -- out of the race and, for all I cared, out of the sport. My coach wouldn't let me quit but made me promise to start slower next time and to finish what I'd started -- even if it meant finishing last.

Lesson 1: Run your own race. The other runners are there to help you run better than you could alone. You compete against yourself, the distance, the conditions and your previous times.

Once I posted a mile time, it became the one to beat. The personal record fell again and again, by a full minute within the first year. While I took care of the times, ever-higher placings took care of themselves.

Lesson 2: Race for PRs. These records are your truest standard of success. They give you a chance (but no guarantee) to win every time, no matter how you place.

Early experience taught me that times improved quickest by spreading effort evenly over the full distance. I adopted a style that went against the grain of high school racing: resist the starting stampede, then begin pushing the pace as other runners slow theirs.

Lesson 3: Pace yourself evenly. This means working against your natural urges to surge when you're fresh and to slow when you're tired. Hold back early, and hold on later.

We did little else but race at my school. When not running actual meets my first season, we raced half-miles among ourselves. All this racing improved my "half" time by 25 seconds and landed me in the state meet as a freshman.

Lesson 4: Use races as training. You get better at racing BY racing. No form of "speedwork" is more effective than a race itself, so race often -- and sometimes longer and shorter than your main distance.

Half-mile racing became "underdistance training" for the mile in my second season, when I placed in that event at the state meet. The mile was the longest race for high schoolers back then, but my time-trials of two and three miles served the "overdistance" purpose.

Lesson 5: Run overs-and-unders. Train for your race distance by going a little longer but at a slower pace. Train for your race speed by going a little faster but at a shorter distance.

Our school took the hard-easy system to the extreme, as we either raced or rested. My written records don't reach back to the first year, but I'm guessing that the resting days outnumbered the racing days in my first track season.

Lesson 6: Train hard-easy. Some hard days are a must, because racing is tough, but you can't run hard all the time. More days of the week must be easy than hard.

Seeing no future as a five-foot-five basketball player, I quit that sport in midseason of my sophomore year to become a year-round runner. That first winter's training didn't amount to much, but anything was better than the nothing I would have done while riding the basketball bench.

Lesson 7: Run regularly. You get back from this sport almost exactly what you put into it. If you run most days each week (even easily much of the time), and you run most weeks each year, you get better at it. If you don't, you don't.

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