the morning shakeout | issue 483

"Distance Thunder" in 2025, recovering from the data overload epidemic, Devin Kelly on "repetitive stress," and a lot more.

Sunday funday this past weekend with my teammates from the West Valley Track Club Masters squad. (​Shot on my iPhone​)

Good morning! Whether it’s an indoor track race, a mid-winter half-marathon, or an early season ultra, at the top of the sport you’ve apparently gotta be ready to rip at all times these days or risk getting blown out the back. This is not a new revelation—things have been trending this way over the past decade—but in the past month alone we’ve seen two American records fall in the half marathon at Houston; high school, collegiate, American, and even world records go down on the indoor oval in Boston and New York; and already impressive course records get absolutely shattered at the Black Canyon 100K in Arizona. As a fan, it makes for a lot of excitement, and for the athletes it forces everyone to level up their games, which, on the whole, I think are positive trends for the sport. What’s happening now from a performance perspective across all disciples of competitive running made me think of a 1998 Sports Illustrated article by Tim Layden entitled, “Distance Thunder,” which I first read in high school (and pulled out to reference for this issue of the newsletter). That piece was about the progression of the men’s 5000m world record, which fell by a whopping 16 seconds from 1994-1998. (Note: This was at the height of the doping era and, at the time, there was no reliable test for EPO, which Layden acknowledged in the piece, so make of that what you will.) Anyway, the point I’m trying to make in sharing this is not that I believe every record-breaking time was or is due to doping (because I don’t!), but to resurface the lines that Layden closed that piece with—a sentiment I do believe still holds just as true today (on the track, road, and trails). “Somewhere a young [kid] is hearing of this and training for [their] own future,” he wrote. “In Kenya. Or in Ethiopia. Or perhaps even in the United States. The message should be clear: Whatever you are doing, do more. However fast you are running, run faster.”

Recovering from the Data Overload Epidemic

I really appreciated this mini rant from Marco Altini, an expert in the world of wearable technology and data insight, about how wearables have become tools of distraction, not insight. “In a way, [the wearable technology companies] achieved their goal: reaching a massive, ever-growing user base and making more money,” writes Altini, who is also the founder of HRV4Training, an app that measures HRV and provides simple, accurate, and useable insights for athletes and coaches. “But this success has come at a cost. The early adopters — athletes, coaches, scientists, and high performers — are leaving. These are the people who truly understood the value of a few accurate metrics over a flood of meaningless data.”

One of my biggest frustrations as a coach in recent years has to do with the proliferation of various types of wearables, which has led to an epidemic of data overload amongst athletes and coaches alike. All too (and increasingly more) often, I see athletes and coaches: 1. Trying to track too many things while also not understanding what to do with any (or much) of that data; 2. Gamifying/optimizing the experience of training and racing by aiming to hit a specific metric without ever really giving thought to what that value, output, or “score” actually means, how they felt, or what adjustments they may or may not need to make moving forward.

Whether it’s via your watch, a ring, a wrist band, foot pod, heart-rate strap, or some random piece of clothing, there’s so much you can measure now, from distance, time, and pace, to heart-rate, power, and VO2max, to HRV and blood oxygen levels, to ground contact time, vertical oscillation, cadence, and stride length, to HRV, strain, recovery time, and a myriad of other mostly made-up/meaningless/often inaccurate metrics that do little more than serve as a distraction and try to convince you that making good training decisions is more complicated than it needs to be. As I’ve written and shared here a few times before, “Identify a few key metrics to use as points of reference, monitor trends, identify discrepancies, etc., but learn to rely on your own internal gauge of effort and trust yourself to make adjustments when necessary.”

In my own coaching practice, here’s what I look at when analyzing my athletes’ races/workouts/runs (and their training log on the whole): 1. Their subjective perception of a given effort. (This is the first thing I look at and the most useful information I gather, honestly.) 2. How does that effort, duration, distance, pacing, and/or heart rate line up with what was assigned or expected? 3. Terrain, elevation, weather conditions, or any other external variable(s) that help provide additional context. 4. How did the effort, duration, distance, and pacing, and/or HR compare to past races/workouts/runs they’ve done in the same vein? 5. At the end of the week I ask for a high-level overview on sleep and sleep quality, mood, stress, day-to-day energy levels, and diet quality, as well as a 7-day average for HRV and/or resting heart rate. (Keeping an eye on how these things are trending over time tells us a lot.)

All in all, this isn’t a lot of data—duration, distance, pace, HR, HRV—but it’s enough (and, not unimportantly, consistently reliable enough) that paired with solid subjective feedback helps to drive the discussions that guide our training decisions.

Quick Splits

— There were so many great races that took place over the weekend that it would take an entire newsletter to highlight them all, so for simplicity’s sake I’ll stick to the American men that took down world records at the Millrose Games in New York City on Saturday. Watch here as Yared Naguse leads eight (yes, 8!) men under 3:50 in the Wanamaker Mile. Nuguse, who took bronze in the 1500m last summer in Paris, ran 3:46.63 to edge out Hobbs Kessler (3:46.90) as both men slipped under Yomif Kejelcha’s indoor world-record of 3:47.01. Nuguse, sitting patiently behind pacemaker Abe Alvarado for the first 1000m, took the wheel with three laps to go and drove it home without relinquishing control for so much as a stride. Kessler, who has really matured as a racer over the past year or so, wasn’t able to get a move in edgewise, but he more than held his own against a strong field. (A field, for what it’s worth, that was missing 2023 1500m world champion and two-time Olympic medalist Josh Kerr, who was scheduled to compete but scratched due to illness.) Behind them, national records and personal bests went down en masse, and Gary Martin of the University of Virginia became the second collegian in a week to run under 3:49. (n.b. His 3:48.82 was only good enough for fifth!) As fast and deep as that contest was, however, the men’s 3000m was a much better race. Grant Fisher and Cole Hocker put on a show, running 7:22.91 and 7:23.14, respectively, to dip under Lamecha Girma’s previous world-record of 7:23.81. Fisher, as everyone expected, took the lead with six laps to go after the pacemaker stepped off the track. He continued to hammer over the next three laps as Hocker, unshaken, sat right on his shoulder, seemingly content to try and hang on long enough to use his lethal kick as late as possible. And that’s when things got interesting. With three laps to go Hocker went around Fisher to take the lead, and Fisher, calm and composed as ever, just tucked in right behind him. Hocker was still in front at the bell as Fisher made his bid on the backstretch, only to be denied. Coming off the final turn Fisher went wide once more, pumping his arms furiously to get around Hocker, beating the reigning Olympic 1500m gold medalist at his own game with a scintillating 27.5-second final circuit. It was a great race at an in-between distance for both men—Hocker moving up, Fisher coming down—and testament to the type of magic that can happen when the gloves come off and two fierce competitors just focus on racing one another instead of the clock.

— Related to the above salvo on the epidemic of data overload, here’s a great episode of the Fast Talk podcast about how to train perceived exertion. The hosts, Trevor Connor and Grant Holicky, drive an enlightening discussion with sports psychologist Dr. Scott Frey and mental performance coach, retired professional cyclist, and Olympian Brent Bookwalter, about the role our brains play in calculating how hard our effort is and whether or not we can hold it for a given period of time. They also get into the differences between perceived exertion and perceived effort, as well as the effect of cognitive load (and fatigue) and stress on perception and performance (spoiler: It’s not insignificant!), how motivation factors into all this, and a lot more. This one is super helpful for anyone who struggles with trying to figure out how to calibrate just how hard to go for a given effort—as well as what might affect how you perceive that effort on a given day. “The brain is a trainable system, and we need to take that seriously and not just be focusing on our legs and our lungs, but developing the mental side of things,” Frey explains, “and an important component of that is really developing our sense of perceived exertion and also taking seriously things like reducing mental fatigue or training the systems that are involved in the creation of perceived exertion in order to get ourselves a bit closer to what the physiological limits are on our capacity at whatever point in life we may be pursuing these sports.”

— This was an interesting read on 2016 Olympic 1500m gold medalist Matthew Centrowitz by Euan Crumley of Athletics Weekly. In the piece Centrowitz mostly talks about the impact that winning Olympic gold had on his life, as well as the challenges that came along with it. He also shares his reflections on reigning Olympic 1500m champion Cole Hocker, who followed in Centro’s golden footsteps last summer at the Paris Games, and praises his fellow Duck alum for being a savvy racer and not just chasing fast times. The two most interesting things to call out from this one, however, are that he believes Hobbs Kessler will win 1500m gold in 2028 (that was the extent of that tidbit, which I wish would have been elaborated on a bit more) and that in a few years “you’ll see a new wave of runners where [racing] becomes tactical again then again [a few years after that] we’ll go back to running from the gun.” I can’t say that I disagree with either of those observations—in fact, I hope he’s right on both.

— I recently discovered a YouTube channel called “The Song” that has a pretty impressive collection of mostly stripped-down performances that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit. It appears to have been active up until a year or so ago, then went quiet for a while, but now it’s churning out new-ish stuff with increased frequency and I am here for it. In all likelihood I’ll be linking to a lot of stuff from “The Song” in the coming months but I’m going to start with Darius Rucker of Hootie in the Blowfish fame performing “Let Her Cry” off Cracked Rear View, one of the first albums/CDs I ever owned. It’s such a beautiful, timeless song (that I've linked to in this newsletter before) that helped me to appreciate good songwriting from a young age. The CD jacket had the lyrics printed inside it and I remember reading along as I listened, connecting the emotion in Rucker’s voice with the words coming out of his mouth, feeling whatever sadness he was feeling when he wrote it. That’s good music in my book.

— From the archives (Issue 274, 4 years ago this week): Devin Kelly’s latest piece for Longreads, “Repetitive Stress,” is powerful, raw, and relatable. The way he relates his experience compensating from overuse injuries to how we compensate for other forms of overuse in our life really punched me in the gut and got me to think about how my own running, much as he describes it for himself, is a form of compensation to cope with the uncertainty of the world I can't control and feelings of non-running related helplessness I can't do anything about. It’s a long one at over 6,000 words but absolutely worth carving out some time for this week. “I know it is wrong to seek comfort in that kind of pain, but I seek comfort in that kind of pain,” he writes. “I don’t know what to do without it. I don’t just compensate when I run; I run as a compensation for my own life. I run because I am scared. I run because sometimes, in the morning, I wake up and don’t know how to live. When I run, at least, I know something about myself, for just a short time.”

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The New Balance ​FuelCell Rebel v4​ is the trainer I rock for nearly every workout I do and yesterday they dropped it in a new colorway: ​hot mango​. As fast and fun as carbon-plated shoes can be, it’s important not to be overly reliant on them for all your track sessions, fartleks, hills, and tempo runs. The Rebel v4s allow your feet to do what they want to do while providing plenty of protection underfoot when you’re putting a lot of extra force into the ground. They offer a responsive ride in a flexible, lightweight package that will fit a variety of foot types (n.b. my wider-than-average forefoot really appreciates them!). The FuelCell Rebel v4 is available at your favorite run specialty store or at newbalance.com (men’s sizes ​here​, women’s sizes ​here​).

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Workout of the Week: A Little Bit of Everything!

Chris Miltenberg, the Director of Track & Field and Cross Country at the University of North Carolina, told me that his teams refer to themselves as S.H.T, which stands for Second Half Team. Regardless of the race, the Tarheels take a tremendous amount of pride in competing well over the second half of any distance. Case in point: Watch here as Ethan Strand competes in the mile at Boston University on February 1, 2025. He’s in fourth place with a few laps to go and is still in third at the bell before he ratchets up the intensity a couple notches. On the last lap, Strand surges to the front and stays there to win the race in 3:48.32, making him the first collegian ever to run under 3:50.

This was not an accident. It’s something Strand and the rest of his Tarheel teammates practice in nearly every workout, including one Miltenberg likes to call “A Little Bit of Everything,” a foundational session for milers and 10K runners alike. It starts at threshold pace and ends down around 1-mile pace. “As we get to these higher intensity paces late in the workout,” he explains, “breaking the reps down enables us to run these goal paces while carrying a lot of the early volume in your legs but not deeply anaerobic for long bouts, which becomes the danger zone.” Here are the details.

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The bottom line. 

"I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."

— Nina Simone, legendary American singer-songwriter and civil rights activist, in this 1968 interview with Down Beat Magazine

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That’s it for Issue 483. If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to a few friends and encourage them to subscribe at this link so that it lands in their inbox next Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Mario