Six: Be smarter dummy

Somewhere in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, I did the Pearl Street Mile.  I placed something like 12th or 13th, running a time in the mid 4:30s.  I had no expectation to win this race, as it drew some serious competition.  But I recall looking at the results and thinking, “all those guys ahead of me worked harder than me to run faster than me.”

This thought bubbled to specifically combat the “talent” argument.  “Talent” is that so called variable that you have no control over.  You are born with it.  It makes some of us grow to 7’1” and NBA bound, and others with sub 50 400m speed with no training. 

I chose not to worry too much about talent.  I have no control over it.  You can’t measure it.   I have what I have; it is really about maximizing it from there.  As I ran more it became clearer to me that worrying about talent was worry wasted.  This doctrine was cemented by the fact that that apparently everyone I knew who ran claimed to have no talent and was instead a product of hard work (side note, dontcha just love when someone says to you how natural a runner you are?  What the heck is natural about running in excess of a hundred miles a week and at speeds often where your eyes feel like they are bleeding?).

So I chose to ignore talent.  This means that there are two other categories of runners:  those who work harder than me, and those who don’t.  Except there was evidence for something else.  Those who ran smarter than me.

There was of course the obvious manifestation of this:  race execution.  I could train harder and smarter than someone but if I ran stupid on race day (translation, went out too fast), I could be looking at the rear of guys (and gals) that I should have by my “harder” calculation should have beat.  As stinging as such losses were, the opposite was incredibly sweet.  I came away the victor over a 4:05 mile one time in a 1500 meter indoor race when the kid took the pace out well under 60.  Slipping by this “harder” worker because of his less than “smart” execution made for a nice win.

But beyond race execution, there was the less obvious.  There were those who I obviously trained much harder than, and I was perhaps even more “talented” than (if I chose to consider that unconsiderable attribute), but I could not seem to challenge.   They put in less miles, they did not do as many hard workouts, they were less likely to do the extra credit warm up and cool down, and they cross trained.  And they also ended up making it to the finish line before me. 

W.T.F!

So, as you have already guessed, they trained smarter.   They made their easy days easy.  They made their hard days ridiculously hard.  They recovered well.  They could listen to the subtle sounds of their body as to how to eek the most out of it – including when to stop and do something else, or stop altogether.

I am going to use an example here:  UROY 2011 winner Dave Mackey.  A couple of years ago, Dave, Footfeathers, JV and I went out for a run on the Flatiron Vista trail.  We all agreed it was going to be easy.  And it was.  We could all hit miles sub six, and maybe sub five if we wanted to but we were content to float 9 and 10 minute miles on the trails. 

And we had to stop and keep waiting for Dave.  Dave was way the hell back. Waaaay back.   I recall wondering “what the hell is wrong with him?  Is he hurt?  Is he okay?”  I had the audacity to ask him in some form and he, in his soft spoken way, stated he was fine and just relaxing.  Even with our easy running, we dropped him a on the downhill (Dave is super human on downhills) back to the lot, where I made Footfeathers do an extra quarter mile to assure that I got 10 miles to read on my wrist bitch GPS.

The next weekend, Dave collected another one of his kabizillion victories.  So much for me working harder the week before.  There are, of course, countless other examples that I can think of.  Lucho’s 50 mile a week approach to his 2010 Leadville comes to mind.  This is not to say that hard work is not necessary, or that it is not a huge key to getting the most out of the talent you were born with.  It is but it ain’t the only element. 

I have worked hard but then looked at myself and often said, “meh, you suck.  You need to work harder.”  It is a good attitude, but it is often one that leads down a path of destruction and less than optimal results.  And again, as one gets older, the room to make this error gets smaller and smaller.  I can work smarter.  The first step is recognizing when I am digging myself into that hole.  The second step is putting down the shovel and climbing out.