the morning shakeout | issue 471

Giving your best, Meb's words of wisdom, Casey Neistat's masterpiece, and a lot more.

"Oh, I love cross country all right. I also like being flayed alive with a rusty straight razor." Quote from Once a Runner, photo by the wonderful and talented Annie Ragusa.

Good morning! I raced the Pacific Association Cross Country Championships in San Francisco on Sunday and it was anything but a walk in Golden Gate Park. But that’s the point. No one’s there to take in the scenery. It’s a competition that’s meant to test your mettle. And that’s one of the main reasons I’m still doing it 26 years after I first started: to put myself into what I know is going to be a tough situation so I can practice making the best of it. 

The last few months of training and racing haven’t been all that great but I was looking forward to lining up for this one with my West Valley Track Club teammates and contributing to the cause. Warming up, my stomach was a mess and my attitude just generally kind of sucked, if I’m being honest. I contemplated telling my wife that I was going to sit this one out but I knew she wouldn’t have any of it. So, I just kept my mouth shut and began the process of pulling my head out of my ass while I laced up my racing shoes. By the time I made my way over to the start line my head was in a better place. My stomach, however, was not, and I still felt bloated when the starter announced that it was two minutes until the gun. I just focused on what I could control and tried to get in a few deep breaths to relax my system. And wouldn’t you know it, about 30 seconds before we took off I was able to let out a giant burp and all was right with the world. 

As we took off across the grass field and made our way onto a dirt path I settled into a small pack. I really wanted to be in the group ahead of us but I knew that I had no business being up there on this day. It was the right decision to stay put. I ended up spending most of the 5-mile race trading blows with Jaime Heilpern, who is 12 years my senior and the reigning 50+ national champion. We didn’t speak a word to one another the entire time but it was kind of an “I go, OK now you go” type of situation. It was great fun. Going into the final loop I thought we might catch a couple of the guys ahead of us but it turns out 20 or so seconds is a hell of a lot of ground to make up over 2 miles. Jaime pulled away from me a bit the last mile and I held my spot to finish 11th overall. It was the first time in the past three years that I didn’t finish in the top-10 at this race, or score for our team, but I’m not that mad about it. I’m more proud of how I showed up on a day when I really wanted to get back in my car and go home, and was reminded of a lesson this sport has taught me more times than I care to count over the years: you don’t have to be at your best to give your best. 

OK, that’s enough racing babble from me. Let’s get right to it. 

Quick Splits

— I’ve been re-reading Meb Keflezighi’s “26 Marathons” and wanted to share one of the many pearls of training and racing wisdom contained therein: “Chicago built my confidence that if I stayed relaxed and did solid work week after week after week, great things would be possible,” he writes in Chapter 2. “I’ve trained with people who ran amazing workouts but were seldom able to run races at the same level of quality. After Chicago, I was never again someone who tried to get a gold medal for workouts. Always pushing as hard as you can is more likely to lead to injury or being overtrained than to peak performance. The repeated right efforts are what bring results and confidence. When I’m asked the secret to my success, I often say that there is no secret, but the key is consistency. If I regularly got in my key workouts of long runs, tempo runs, and intervals at a good-but-not-amazing level, I felt like I could compete with anyone in the world.” (These “good-but-not-amazing level” sessions are what coach Mark Coogan calls “B+ workouts,” which he and I spoke about at length in Episode 165 of the podcast.)

— There are few people who can tell a story like Casey Neistat, no matter the medium. This 12-½ minute recap of his race at the New York City Marathon, where he finally achieved his elusive goal of breaking 3 hours, is a masterpiece. (All of it achieved without a personal cameraman riding alongside him and disrupting the race, I might add.) “The thing about hard things, especially the hard things that you don’t have to do but choose to do,” he explains, “is that you can just bail any time. That’s when you start to question this. What even is this? Does it really matter? And this was my decision point. My hard thing was to break 3 hours and that is a hard thing I could win, or I could lose.” 

— I enjoyed this piece from Edith Zimmerman in Vogue about quitting drinking, taking up running, and wondering if she just ended up trading one addiction for another. “I remember the first time I ran twice around the park, I thought, I can just keep going. I don’t ever have to stop,” she writes. “And running is good. I don’t have to lie about it or hide it. It makes me happy, and it makes my life better. There are little parallels between running and drinking, though: I feel antsy, for instance, on days when I can’t run (that itch!). And I backpedal on the days I plan to rest—I’ll just go for a quick one right now and take tomorrow off instead. And I don’t understand the people—my friends—who run only once or twice a week. Why not more? Wouldn’t you want to do it every day?” Zimmerman’s main takeaway—that running is healthy, yes, but our relationship to it might not always be—is an important one that we should confront more often. How is this pursuit of running fitting into your life? Is it occupying a healthy space amongst everything else that’s important to you? If not, can you change your relationship to it?

— This was a great read on the evolution (and commodification) of morning routines from the ever-thought provoking Sam Robinson in his excellent newsletter, Footnotes. “I see in social media this same horror of negation, the obliteration of identity beyond one’s market value. Now, however, the psychosis is self-optimization,” he writes. “It may seem we’ve come a long way from Benedict’s early-rising monks, praying in the damp cells of early medieval Europe. Or perhaps we’ve come full circle, back to the total abnegation of self. Except this time the rituals serve not spiritual growth, but the relentless pursuit of self as commodity.”

— Matt Trappe’s been in the running/outdoor media space for a long time as a creative director, film director and photographer, which is how we met, and he recently started a newsletter “discussing the latest brand storytelling and business activities across the sport of running” and it’s quickly become one of my favorites. His latest post, an interview with an anonymous agent/athlete manager in the trail/outdoor space, goes deep into what brands are looking for heading into 2025, how contracts are typically structured, and a lot more. It’s full of super interesting insights like this one about how athletes can work with a brand to help them tell their story. “One of the coolest athletes I've seen out there has a really unique story and a big finish on his resume. He has a stipend in his contract for $20,000 from his main brand partnership to use specifically to make a film and tell his story. The conversation started with, hey, do you have a YouTube channel? And he said, I don't, and he's pretty reserved and quiet guy. It wouldn't make sense for him to do a YouTube channel if he's not comfortable with it. So they were willing to give that money to him for this film. That was his request.”

— Keeping with my rain-inspired music theme for another week since it’s going to pour buckets here tomorrow, here’s Guns N’ Roses performing “November Rain” in Tokyo some 32 years ago. Axel Rose opens it up playing the piano in his boxer shorts and it only gets better from there. You’re welcome.

— Maybe I'm nostalgic for what Twitter once was, maybe I'm optimistic in thinking Bluesky can rekindle some of that magic, or maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that a social media platform can be a civil place to connect with interesting people, exchange ideas, and engage in meaningful dialogue online, but I'm willing to find out. So, please follow me here on Bluesky if you’re so inclined. 

— From the archives (Issue 1, 9 years ago this week!): It should come as no surprise that this article from The Atlantic caught my eye given the melding of my personal and professional interests, and it’s been oddly satisfying for me to think about the parallels between running and writing in my own life. When I started running in high school, I wanted to win races, and in order to do so I knew I had to train hard. Training to race isn’t always fun, but I know it’s a necessary step toward achieving my constantly evolving goals. I approach writing in much the same way these days. In order to become a better writer and produce stuff people enjoy reading (like this newsletter, a magazine article, or my next book), I need to practice regularly or I’ll get rusty. Like training for a race, writing is often a painstaking process that, while rewarding at times, isn’t always exciting. And no different than running, the writing process is perpetual in its very nature. Just as there will always be new races and fresh goals to keep runners excited and motivated, writers are always dreaming about the next article, book or project to pursue. Both running and writing—perhaps two of the most overly romanticized activities on the planet—are hard work. At the end of the day, you have to commit to waking up the next morning and getting it done. As Nick Ripatrazone so accurately puts it in his article, “Writers, like runners, often like the idea of their pursuit more so than the difficult work.”

 — A big thank you to my partners at Tracksmith for supporting my work this month (and throughout 2024). The brand recently released its 2024 holiday gift guide and it's full of ideas for the runner in your life, so check it out. I’ll add a couple of my season favorites to the mix, the Brighton Base Layer and the Varsity Runner’s Cap. I’m wearing one or both of these pieces on the daily right now as morning temperatures have been on the chilly side. I’ll rock the Brighton on its own if it's not too windy but it usually serves as the perfect insulating layer under a lightweight jacket. The Varsity Runner’s Cap is stylish and soft and packs a lot of warmth into a lightweight package. Both pieces are made of Merino, so they’re warm, they wick well, and they don’t stink when you sweat. If you buy anything from Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order (and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me).

Workout of the Week: Hammer Intervals

Most interval sessions are pretty straightforward in their construction: X number of [fill in the blank] intervals @ Y pace with Z recovery between repetitions. There’s nothing wrong with these types of workouts. They’re easy to understand and effective at producing a desired adaptation. Hammer intervals, made popular by coach Scott Simmons, throw a slight twist into the mix: every third or fourth repetition (whatever cadence you choose, really), you “hammer” it (i.e. run it quite a bit harder) before returning to the prescribed pace. The catch? You don’t get any more recovery time after the hammers than you do the other intervals in the session. Here are the details.

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The bottom line. 

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."

— Richard Feynman

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That’s it for Issue 471. Enjoying the shakeout? Please do me a solid and forward this email to someone else who might also appreciate it. (And if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time and want to receive it for yourself first thing every Tuesday morning, you can subscribe right here.)

Thanks for reading, 

Mario