the morning shakeout | issue 487

Hand-written running logs, decisions versus choices, thinking like a biologist, and a lot more.

Some daylight worth saving yesterday morning on my backyard trails.

Good morning! I’m going to kick things off by posing a question I spent some time thinking about over the weekend: What’s exciting you about the sport, the industry, the culture, and/or your own running right now? I’ll start: As many people as there are finding running in some form for the first time and making it a part of their life(style)—which is, of course, awesome—I love seeing more and more folks sticking with the sport and training hard into their 40s and beyond, as well as others who are coming back to running—for health, social, and/or competitive reasons—after an extended time away. No matter your age, experience level, goals, or interests, there’s more available to people who run than ever before. Interest in running is coming from all angles at the moment and helping to evolve the culture in a diverse and healthy way.

How about you? Let me know what’s got you excited about running in 2025 by replying to this email or leaving a comment below this post.

OK, let’s get right to it.

Quick Splits

— Auteur Sportif put out this 20-minute uncut film of Anton Krupicka reflecting on 30 years of keeping a running journal and it was fun to be a fly on the wall while he went through his old logs from the late 90s and early 2000s. It made me nostalgic for a time not too long ago when scribbling daily reflections into a notebook or store-bought training log was your sole means of keeping records of your runs, workouts, and races. I kept hand-written training logs from 1998 through 2008, at which point I started putting my runs on Athleticore (which Anton mentions in the video!), eventually I moved over to Running Ahead, then I used Excel spreadsheets for a time, and have relied almost exclusively on Strava since 2014. I’ve had a few fits and starts with a hand-written log in recent years and for a variety of reasons haven’t been able to maintain one consistently, which eats at me a bit if I’m being honest. Strava is super convenient in this GPS-forward age we live in, and while I do share a few details and some short reflections with every run I upload, it doesn’t quite have the same effect as staring at a blank notebook page with pen in hand knowing that you can’t bullsh*t your way around a crappy workout. Anyway, whether you’ve ever kept a paper training log or not, I think you’ll find these reflections from Anton enjoyable, and perhaps relatable.

+ Related reading:

Sam Robinson

of footnotes on keeping a running log. “Handwriting forces a reflective moment in the gap between your mind and the movement of pen between fingers,” he writes. “Quality of penmanship matters little. My own handwriting is a horror: I grip a pen awkwardly, my fingers clasp clumsily around the cylinder. But the sensation of writing—the heft of metal, the scratch against paper, the blur of wet ink smudging against the palm—there’s nothing quite like it. Unlike the seamless funneling of digital data, the friction between pen nib and pulped woodmatter creates space for the mind to move and dwell. As ink meanders across the page, you become less vulnerable to the inputs of social media, notifications, and the attention economy.”

— This is a great little post from Seth Godin on decisions and choices that provides a helpful framework for differentiating between the two. “Decisions are easy,” he writes, “choices are hard.”

— I’ve written here previously about the trap of certainty that I believe paralyzes many athletes and coaches, perhaps more so now than ever before. We live in an age of precision, optimization, and a need to know exactly what’s coming, as if we’re trying to engineer our lives toward some unscathed ideal. This, of course, spills into running and training, where athletes and coaches are more obsessed than ever with trying to make sure everything is neat and linear and predictable. Test, track, test some more, take the guesswork out of it. More often than not, this approach just ends up driving people crazy. Why? Because that’s not how training and coaching works. Heck, it’s not how life works. Yes, we need useful information so that we can make the best decisions possible in a situation. But guess what? Even if you have mounds of data and optimize your approach to the gills, it still might not work out. And that’s where good coaching and having the ability to zoom out and take a non-mechanical view of training and racing comes into play, as world-class sprint coach and previous podcast guest Stu McMillan explains in a recent issue of How We Move. “Much of modern sports science—and medicine—has been shaped by an outdated model. It comes from Newtonian mechanics: the idea that the body is a machine, adaptation is predictable, and if we just manipulate the right variables, we can engineer perfect performance outcomes,” he writes. “But biological systems don’t work that way. Theodosius Dobzhansky, an evolutionary biologist, said it best: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ If we want to understand adaptation, we need to stop thinking like engineers and start thinking like biologists.” So what does it mean to think like a biologist in this context? In short, it’s about taking a flexible approach, based on a recognition that we, as human beings, are complex organisms, and not programmable robots, as I like to say. When we’re thinking about training, it can’t just be about writing the perfect workout(s) with precise paces and optimal lactate levels and heart rates and carbohydrate targets and recovery scores and so on and so forth. Yes, those are all details that may need to be considered at some point, but a few of the more important questions to ask first are: How does this session fit into the greater scheme of the week or of the season? Is the athlete’s sleep, nutrition, and mental state in a good enough place to handle what you’re throwing at them right now? If not, why, and how do you adapt? How has the athlete responded to this kind of work in the past and what adjustments might we have to make based on that information? (And the list goes on.) Taking a purely mechanical view of training will miss the forest for the trees, so to speak. As Stu writes, “if we don’t consider adaptation as a dynamic, system-wide process—then training is just a collection of exercises, not a meaningful intervention.”

— High school running isn’t something that I’ve followed super closely in recent years but when there’s an eye-popping performance somewhere it’s hard not to notice it. Such was the case a few years ago when a young guy named Gary Martin from Pennsylvania ran a 3:57.98 mile in his league championship without the benefit of pacers and, no disrespect to anyone in the Pennsylvania Catholic League, without any real competition. Clearly Martin was a special athlete to do something like that on his own without help or hype. Still, running 3:48.82 to finish fifth against some of the best runners in the world at the Millrose Games last month as a junior at the University of Virginia wasn’t something many observers, myself included, saw coming quite yet. But Martin, along with his coach Vin Lananna, who said Martin is at his best when he’s racing the best, clearly had a different perspective. “For Gary, he has good instincts and is a great competitor,” Lananna told UVA Athletics for this great profile on Martin. “The better the competition, the higher the stakes, the more pressure, the better he performs so as a coach of many years and knowing that sometimes it’s best to get out of the way and let him run, that is exactly what I did.”

— I’m just going to leave this right here: How Hobbs Kessler Won Two U.S. Titles Fueled by Rice Krispies Treats and Country Time Lemonade

— This past week was a solid one on the music front with a new Jason Isbell album (n.b. this recent performance of “Ride to Robert’s” on The Tonight Show is particularly good) and a short set from John Moreland on Western AF, but the winner for me was an unexpected release from the Wu-Tang Clan, Mandingo, which feels like a mid-to-late 90s throwback in just about every way. I didn’t love the official music video but the sound slaps as smoothly as anything off their first few albums. It’s timeless. Wu-Tang, as has been widely reported and never refuted, really is forever.

— From the archives (Issue 174, 6 years ago this week): My Inner Voice: I opened up to InnerVoice recently on a few topics I don't get into much, including the most impactful event of my life—my Mom's sudden passing back in 2008—which I've never talked about publicly until InnerVoice co-founder Travis McKenzie asked me about it. We also discussed the morning shakeout, philosophy, coaching, burnout, competitiveness, and a lot more. It’s by far the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in an interview. Check out the text and photo feature here or listen into the full 80-minute podcast episode.

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A big thank you to my partners at New Balance for their continued support of my work in 2025. The new Fresh Foam X Hierro v9 is out and I’m super excited to take them for a spin on my backyard trails here soon. I’ve long loved the Hierro because they provide incredible grip and protection underfoot to help you navigate the trickiest of terrain, but they’re also light and nimble enough to really let it rip down a smooth patch of dirt. The Fresh Foam X midsole provides the perfect amount of cushioning without sacrificing proprioception and the Vibram outsole with 6mm lungs will provide all the traction you’ll ever need. The Fresh Foam X Hierro v9 is available on newbalance.com (men’s sizes here, women’s sizes here) and at your favorite local run specialty retail store.

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Workout of the Week: Hills and Twos

This is a staple early season session for a number of top high school, collegiate, and professional programs that combines a set of short, hard hill repeats with a set of short, fast intervals. I call it a muscles and mechanics workout: It’s great for building leg strength, improving power, touching on speed, and working on mechanics in the early phases of a training block before the workouts get more race-specific. It’s all about running at a strong effort while maintaining good form and control throughout. I’ve been doing some version of this workout since college, a top pro group has their own take on it, and a couple of Georgetown runners even named their podcast after it a few years ago. Here are the details.

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The bottom line. 

“I’d spent the year thinking about endurance. Trying to understand it as a function of physiology, of lactic acid and capillary networks. Trying to understand it as the ability to fight through the drama of pain. But now I understand it, too, as a kind of elegance, a lightness that could come only from such deep comfort with yourself that you began to forget about yourself. Something from the heart that no monitor would ever measure.”

— Bill McKibben in Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously, reflecting upon the experience of witnessing his father battle a life-threatening illness (I just finished the book, which I read on the recommendation of one of my athletes, and enjoyed it. It’s a nice reflection, and reminder, on what it means to endure, overcome, and make peace with our efforts.)

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That’s it for Issue 487. 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