the morning shakeout | issue 512
Surrounding yourself with a solid crew, Jim Walmsley on trying hard, a few words on good writing, and a lot more.
Good morning! It’s been a couple of months since I’ve put out a new episode of the podcast, but my good friend Simon Freeman of Like the Wind Magazine and I recently had an engaging chat about the importance of teamwork and having a good support crew around you in running, business, and life that I’m excited to share. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at this handy link.
There’s an oft-quoted African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.” That line has stuck with me for years because it applies whether you’re chasing a big running goal, building a business, or simply navigating the ups and downs of life. As Simon and I talked about in the podcast, none of us achieves anything of lasting significance on our own. We all need a “crew,” i.e., loved ones, friends, training partners, business partners, coaches, colleagues, therapists, mentors, and countless others, to help us out along the way.
In the episode, Simon and I each share about some of the members that make up our respective crews (spoiler: we’re both fortunate to have badass wives keeping us on course!), and we’d love to hear about who helps keep you going in running, your career, and/or some other area of your life. Reply to this email or give them a shoutout in the comments below this post.
Quick Splits
— On the subject of having a strong support system around you, I appreciated what Jakob Ingebrigtsen had to say about the people who helped him navigate the “injury cellar” this spring and summer so that he can line up at the world championships in Tokyo a little less than two weeks from now. “I have taken the trip down to the injury cellar several times this spring. It has been pitch dark there,” he told World Athletics. “Fortunately, I have received very good help from Henrik, Filip and many good physiotherapists, teammates and people in the support system of the national team. I am very grateful for that help, and I am not sure if I would have made it to this championship without them…Now we'll see how this goes. I'm really just happy that I made it. But of course I'm not participating just for the sake of participating.”
— Jim Walmsley will undoubtedly go down as one of ultrarunning’s all-time greats and this interview with Freetrail’s Dylan Bowman after his most recent victory at the OCC in Chamonix is evidence why. Listen in as he talks about keeping his cool through a few tense moments in the race: throwing up around mile 31, losing the lead, and resigning himself to second before something inside him flipped. With just over a mile to go, Walmsley surged back to the front and held off Italy’s Cristian Minoggio to win by 20 seconds. “I mean you still have 30 miles there and it's like, ‘Well you can't just phone it in and jog it,’” he explains. “And it doesn't lessen any pain so you might as well try, and only you know inside how much you do try.” That theme of trying is one Walmsley stayed on for a little while, not just while reflecting on his experience at CCC, but throughout his ultrarunning career and being unafraid to step outside his specialty to compete in everything from road races to VKs, ski-mo to shorter ultras. “It's fun,” he says about lining up at a wide variety of distances and disciplines. “It gives you the competition vibes and I think the more I've done it, the more I'm liking it and I really have grown on this. All I can do is just try my hardest and luckily for me that at this moment I can be really competitive and I'm winning things, but I also know that's not forever and it's short-term. I want to be a lifelong runner, but how do I keep motivation? And it just goes to like, well, just try your hardest and who cares?”
— Paul Graham on “good writing,” is, ah, exactly that. Give it a read. “When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good rhythm,” he writes. “But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.”
— This is, I believe, the third rendition of Men at Work’s “Down Under” that I’ve shared here over the years and it very well might be my favorite. Nick Cunningham absolutely slayed it in his performance a couple years back on The Voice Australia, slowing the tempo way down, finger-picking and slapping at the guitar that sat on his lap, and generally mesmerizing anyone listening (myself included). To quote one of the judges midway through: “Beautiful. Wow. That’s pretty.”
— From the archives (Issue 408, 2 years ago this week): I often tell my athletes to “set it and forget it” in regard to the big and exciting end goals everyone likes to obsess over and focus instead on consistently checking off the less sexy process goals that will put them in the best possible position to achieve continued success. It’s all about committing to the long game. Along these lines, the writer James Clear outlines three reasons to focus on systems instead of goals that are worth digesting and putting into practice. “I’ve found that goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress,” he writes. “Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually a well-designed system will always win.”
— I’ve used Final Surge to run the coaching side of my business since 2017. It’s been a game-changer for how I plan training, analyze data, and communicate with my athletes. One of the additional benefits of my partnership with them has been getting a front-row seat to watching the platform develop and mature over the past 8 years. Case in point: FS recently rolled out customizable workout types and colors, plus new sorting and filtering tools for the workout library, all of which make it easier to organize and find sessions. I’ve been using them for the past couple of weeks, and they’ve further smoothed out my weekly workflow. Fellow coaches: whether you work with a high school or college team, a club, or a roster of individual athletes, head over to finalsurge.com to check out the full slate of features and start a free 14-day coaching trial today. Use code MORNINGSHAKEOUT at checkout to take 10% off your first purchase. Questions? Just reply to this email and send ’em my way.
I’m not racing a marathon this fall, but if I were I’d be doing it in the new FuelCell SuperComp Elite v5 from New Balance, their latest carbon-plated super shoe that’s engineered specifically for racing fast on the roads. They sent me a pair earlier this year and it was love at first stride. I took them out the door for a tempo run in early spring and just wow. This is the best-fitting, best-feeling super shoe I’ve ever worn. There’s enough protection underfoot to hold up to longer efforts without making it feel you’re running with a marshmallow on your feet, and a punch of pop that I appreciate when I’m ripping laps on the track or running fast on the roads. In short: It’s versatile! The FuelCell SuperComp v5 is now available at your favorite running speciality retail store and on newbalance.com (men’s sizes here, women’s sizes here).
Workout of the Week: Tempo Plus
If you look at the training schedules of top runners throughout recent history it’s more likely than not that you’ll find regular bouts of tempo running in there. Why? Quite simply: It works. Tempo runs, which involve maintaining a steady effort for a prolonged period of time (e.g. 4-8 miles at 1/2 marathon effort or 6-14 miles at marathon effort), give you a lot of bang for your aerobic buck. It’s hard, but not too hard, running that helps build aerobic strength, improve efficiency, and/or practice running race pace. The Tempo Plus workout is the leveling up of a standard tempo run by pairing it with a short set of faster intervals afterward. Here are the details.
The bottom line.
“That's the beauty of this sport: it’s barely about running at all. It's more about the journey I take with myself, my mind, and the people around me.”
— Mathilde G., who trains with my Wednesday night track crew as a member of the Golden Gate Triathlon Club, ahead of tackling UTMB this past weekend.
That’s it for Issue 512. If you’d like to support the shakeout, please forward this email to someone who might enjoy it or post the web link in your little corner of the internet where others can check it out. (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