the morning shakeout | issue 524
Preserving bandwidth, training as a hopeful act, the physical consequences of psychological overload, and a lot more.
Good morning! In the spirit of the season, I just want to say thank you for spending a little time with me here every week. I’m grateful for the continued interest, support, and dialogue. I wish you and your families health, happiness, and a bit of peace in the days ahead, whether it’s a holiday for you or not.
OK, let’s get right to it.
Quick Splits
— I didn’t watch the live stream of the NCAA Cross Country Championships on Saturday but luckily for me and everyone else the full replays of both the women’s and men’s races were posted to YouTube within a few hours of everyone crossing the finish line. You can watch them here and here, respectively. If you’ve never run a cross-country race, or just need a refresher on why it’s the most exciting discipline in running, please take some time to check out both of these races. Watch how hard both fields go out in the first K in an effort to establish position. Appreciate the pack tactics playing out lap after lap as teams keep tabs on one another. Admire the strain on everyone’s faces as the race starts to break apart. Notice how the race gets stretched out like an accordion. Be impressed and/or inspired by the decisiveness of the winning moves made by Doris Lemngole and Habtom Samuel. Respect how gassed everyone is upon crossing the finish line. Now tell me why this sport shouldn’t be in the Olympics?
+ Wake Forest’s Rocky Hansen finished second in the men’s race, a 98-place improvement from a year ago, but it’s the young man’s maturity that continues to impress me most. (I first highlighted the 21-year-old Hansen’s wise-beyond-his-year’s perspective in Issue 390 when he was still in high school and broke 4 minutes in the mile for the first time.) “I never take any of this for granted anymore,” he said in a remarkably coherent interview just minutes after his runner-up finish. “And I know that there are so many guys who are watching this race right now from home, watching this on the sidelines, and they’re just dying for the opportunity, dying for the chance to come out and run a race like this, and to be healthy enough and to be fit enough to come out and race in a championship race like this, because it really wears on the mind, especially in those phases where maybe you’re coming back from a stress injury and it feels like it’s almost getting worse as you’re coming back and it hurts more and it starts this mental cycle downhill. It’s not fun and I’ve been there. So to those people who are experiencing that right now, stay the course. Keep working hard. It’s not going to be linear. It’s going to be roller coasters of emotions or some days it’ll feel amazing and the next day it’ll feel like it’s regressed. But you can come back. You’re really strong. I suggest to look at this as something that happened for a reason, something with purpose. It’s meant to sharpen your mind, meant to teach you something, and to propel you forward to better things in the future.”
— Last month 30-year-old Will Murray ran away from everyone to win the Javelina Jundred in a course record 12 hours, 10 minutes, and 12 seconds, securing his spot on the start line of next year’s Western States Endurance Run. It was an impressive race by every measurable metric for the former math teacher, but it’s stuff you can’t quantify about his performance that stood out most to me. “Will’s training – and his mindset – are built to preserve bandwidth,” Cliff Pittman wrote in this recent profile of Murray for Ultrarunning magazine. “When he describes his race strategy, it’s never about splits or tactics. It’s about clearing interference. ‘Pain and discomfort are things that can distract me from focusing on what I need to do physically,’ [Murray] said. ‘Recently, I’ve worked on getting better at clearing away those distractions so that the focus dominates.’ This is where his mathematical and artistic sides merge: precision through simplicity. The signal must be clean. The equation must balance. The art is knowing when to let go.”
— It’s been a sporadic year for the morning shakeout podcast but I just published my final quarterly conversation of 2025 with my good friend and frequent guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind. In this one, we discuss when to push hard and when to pull back in running, business, and life. It’s our hope that it will resonate with you on some level and you’ll leave with a practical takeaway or two. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts (just search for “the morning shakeout podcast”), or at this handy link. An excerpt from this exchange can be found in Issue #47 of LtW, which comes out soon. (You can buy a copy or subscribe here.)
— Reigning Olympic triathlon champion Alex Yee of Great Britain has been dabbling in some running-only races this year and next month he’ll line up for his second marathon of 2025 in Valencia. Yee, who ran 2:11:08 in London in April, will hop on the back of the high-speed train that is the deepest elite field in marathoning today to see how fast he can go. He recently ran 61:29 for the half-marathon in Valencia and is documenting the process on his YouTube channel. In the latest installment of his “Vamos” series, Yee provides a behind-the-scenes look at various aspects of his preparation, including how and why he incorporates running drills into his routine, utilizing physical therapy to prevent injuries rather than just treat them, and how his identity and background as a triathlete has informed he and his coach’s approach to marathon training. Yee has a quiet confidence about him that reflects both his maturity as an athlete and the intentionality behind the work he’s doing day in and day out. But perhaps the most insightful and impactful part of the video is toward the end when Yee’s Mum, Emma, is speaking about her son, and vice versa. The admiration and pride they share for one another is pretty special and choked me up a bit. “My Mum’s quite quiet in a way, but I’m sure if it came to it she could fight,” he explains. “But she’s never made herself the biggest person in the room, always thought about others before herself, and I think you probably only realize those amazing traits about your parents now when you look back on it. As a child you probably just kind of go through life and not realize how many sacrifices someone like my Mum has made.”
— Training is a hopeful act, Sabrina Little writes in her latest column for iRunFar. It’s not wishful thinking, blind confidence, or naïve enthusiasm, but a steady belief that the work you’re doing today can shape who you might become down the road (or trail). Hope, she argues, is an active process that requires staying grounded in reality. “Due to imprudence (or maybe greed), I rarely adjust my racing goals to accommodate my lower level of fitness,” she writes. “I set out at paces suitable to the memory of myself — the well-prepared, sharpened-pencil ghost of my past. I try to run her races. I hope that I can hang on, and I never can. Strictly speaking, this is not hope; it is optimism. And, while we often elide hope with optimism in popular discourse, they are not the same thing. Optimism is unanchored positivity. It is not grounded in the reality of the situation. Neither is pessimism. Michael Lamb describes hope as a virtue that ‘finds a middle way between the vices of presumption and despair.’ Presuming too much of your capabilities and attempting to race beyond your means is not excellent. It is not hope, and it will probably have costs for your capacity to perform at a level commensurate with your abilities.”
— The description of NPR’s recent Tiny Desk concert featuring the Goo Goo Dolls says that the band’s songs “stick around, but never wear out their welcome,” which, as someone who’s been listening to them for over 30 years now, I’d agree with wholeheartedly. (As evidenced by the band and/or John Rzeznik being featured in this newsletter four times in the past 30 weeks.) As I’ve written here previously, Rzeznik still sounds incredible and I have no doubt the band’s body of work will continue to endure. Anyway, I really enjoyed this short set. The highlight for me was “Slide” as the opener, mostly because the final chorus didn’t get cut off by early applause from the audience like it did for “Iris” at the very end. (To Rzeznik’s credit, he handled the awkward outro with grace. “That is what’s known as quitting while you’re ahead,” he said before thanking everyone in attendance.)
— From the archives (Issue 472, 1 year ago this week): “Psychological overload has physical consequences because there’s no separation between the two,” Rob Wilson writes in the most recent post for his excellent newsletter, Check Engine Light. “The line between psychology and physiology is fictional; they exist on a continuum within one connected system. To embody true performance longevity, we must understand and embrace this interconnectedness.” This post made me think about my most recent cross-country race, which I wrote about in last week’s issue. Prior to the start my mind was spinning out of control. My stomach wasn’t happy. I was tense from head to toe. Not exactly where you want to be minutes before you need to perform. But being able to recognize this and get in a few deep breaths prior to the start helped me to air out the “dirty laundry” in my body/mind, which allowed me to do what I needed to do when the gun went off. Rob does a great job in this post explaining how developing better emotional awareness can save you energy while also offering up some strategies for getting in touch with your stress response.
Along those lines, some food for thought: If you’re struggling with maintaining consistency in your training, take a look at the rest of your life. How are your stress levels? How about the quality of your sleep? Is your day-to-day nutrition pretty dialed? How stable are your relationships? If these things are all over the place, chances are your training probably is too. It’s hard to train consistently if the rest of your life is constantly in chaos. Work on getting everything else under your control and it’s likely that your training will follow suit.
This newsletter is made possible with support from a few select partners, all of which have missions I believe in and products that I trust and use myself on a regular basis. One of the best ways to support my work is by patronizing the brands that help keep the shakeout going week in and week out. Here are some special offers worth taking advantage of this week:
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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.
The bottom line.
“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
— Oliver Sacks in one of the four essays he wrote for The New York Times in 2015 upon learning he had terminal cancer. Those essays were compiled into a book entitled Gratitude, which was published after his death.
That’s it for Issue 524. If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to a likeminded friend and encourage them to subscribe at this link so the next issue goes straight to their inbox.
Thanks for reading,
Mario
That's a beautiful pic of Tahoe! I never was an XC runner but wow, that women's race. Mike McMonagle (@shitinthewoods) has some great pics of that phenom Jane Hedengren of BYU on his Instagram.