the morning shakeout | issue 529
Paying it forward, choosing love, failing faster, and a lot more.
Good morning! I’m on holiday hiatus until next week, and what follows below is one post per month from July through December that felt worth sharing again. (You can find January through June’s highlight reel right here.) Let’s get right to it.
Quick Splits
July, from Issue 506: Back in 2012 I was at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon, covering the event for Competitor magazine/.com. It was a long meet, spread out over 11 days, I believe, and Tuesday, June 26 was the first of a two-day break in the action. There was a Starbucks right outside one of the main entrances to the U of O and I went there that day to get a coffee and catch up on some of my coaching work. At the time I had a group of women that I was coaching back in San Diego and a handful of individual athletes I was working with remotely. One of those athletes, César Lizano, was less than two months out from the Olympic Marathon and I had just finished writing his training schedule for the following week. As I packed up my stuff and got ready to leave I did a double-take: Joe Vigil, one of the greatest distance running coaches in the world, was standing in line to get a coffee. I hate bothering people and convinced myself to walk out of there without saying a word, which is exactly what I did. Less than a minute later, however, I forced myself to go back in and clumsily introduced myself to Coach Vigil. I told him I was a young coach and just wanted to thank him for all the knowledge he’d shared so openly over the years. He shook my hand, asked me if I had anyone competing at the meet (nope!), and then insisted on buying me a cup of coffee. We sat down and talked for 45 minutes or so. I hung on his every word, which he delivered with incredible clarity and conviction. He spoke to me about the importance of character and aiming for excellence, both in coaching and in life. We talked marathon training and he gave me some specific advice to help César prepare for the London Games. He encouraged me to never stop learning and shared how he still woke up at 4 AM every day to read the latest research. He told me that coaching is an art and a science, and that the art is being able to apply the science. He also asked me about my athletes, my own running background, and what I believed in as a coach. When we finished up he gave me his email address and told me to stay in touch. The entire experience blew my mind. Here was one of the best coaches in the world, who doesn’t know me from the next person walking through the door at Starbucks, paying for my coffee and taking time out of his day to answer my questions without ego or agenda. As Deena Kastor, who Vigil coached to an Olympic bronze medal in the marathon in 2004, told me years later on my podcast: “He has no time at all but he will give it to anybody.” As we parted ways I tried to give him a few bucks for coffee and his time but he wouldn’t let me. “Pay it forward,” he told me. “What good is knowledge if you don’t share it?”
I’m sad to share that Coach Vigil passed away this past Saturday at the age of 95. The term “legend” gets thrown around a lot these days but Coach truly was one. His resume is unmatched. His greatness, however, isn’t measured in wins and records and medals, or in how his research on the physiology of running helped revolutionize how we think about training today, but it manifests in the generosity of his spirit and the impact he had on peoples’ lives. That’s what made him a great coach, a special human, and an example worth trying to emulate.
In the years since that first encounter in Eugene, Coach and I stayed in semi-regular touch, mostly via email. He was always willing to answer whatever questions I had for him, and whenever I’d run into him at an event he always had time to chat over a cup of coffee. One of my greatest regrets is that I was never able to get him on my podcast—we tried remotely a couple times and had technical issues, and I never made it to his home Arizona—but I did get Deena Kastor (starting at 33 minutes), Brenda Martinez (starting at 14 minutes) and Terrence Mahon (starting at 45 minutes) to speak about their relationships with him at some length, and I’d encourage you to go check those out when you got a chance. His influence is undeniable: the lessons and principles his athletes live by, the stories they tell (Mahon recalled how Vigil would say to him, “Terry, get in the car, we’re going to coffee!” and then would proceed to talk his ear off about training and such), and the reverence with which they all speak about him. I think Martinez may have summed it up best a couple days ago on Instagram: “He led with compassion. He believed in people before they believed in themselves. He changed lives—mine included,” she wrote. “We will do our best to carry your legacy forward, Coach. Your impact will live on for generations.”
Rest easy, Coach. And thank you. I will continue to pay it forward.
August, from Issue 511: Sam Robinson dropping eternal truths in his latest post on playing the long game is required reading this week. “Love. It’s the only way you’ll make it,” he writes. “Love will help choose your project and drag you back on the bad days. Love will wake you up with deep yearning for the work, such that you’re miserable when away from it. Whatever it is. You’ve got to love it.” I’ll only add this: Remember that love is a choice. It’s not always an easy one, or even the right one sometimes, but it’s what keeps you going when shit gets hard and everyone or everything else is telling you to quit.
September, from Issue 513: In my own personal Mount Rushmore of running coaches, Percy Cerutty would be front and center. The old school Australian wasn’t known for his programming so much as his philosophy, which was anchored in discipline, simplicity, and resilience, and tailoring training to the individual based on their physiological and psychological skills, needs, and limitations. I’m fortunate to have a few of his books on my shelf and they’ve influenced my own approach to the craft of coaching (and life in general) in a profound way. You can purchase some of them for yourself right here. The fundamentals of Cerutty’s approach, which you can learn more about in this great post by John Davis at RunningWritings, still hold up half a century after the eccentric coach’s passing in 1975. Cerutty, who wasn’t married to high mileage, high intensity, polarized training, anaerobic thresholds, or any of that, aimed to develop dynamic humans, not robotic athletes. “Such concepts as the rigid schedule, the worked-out and laid-down day-by-day training routines, find no place in this book, or my ideas as to the fitness of things athletically,” he wrote in Athletics: How to Become a Champion. “Despite the efforts of the industrialist, we are still ‘humans’, not machines.”
October, from Issue 520: This is a wonderful essay by AnnaLise Sandrich for the Brown Daily Herald’s creative nonfiction magazine post- entitled “The Progression Run,” best summed up as a reflection on the mirage of continued improvement. The author is the daughter of one of my athletes, which is how I came across it, and she’s wise beyond her years. This past May she qualified for the Boston Marathon, running a massive PR and a little over three minutes under the standard for her age group, but likely not enough to gain entry into the race. So, she took another swing a few months later to try and better her chances, but ran slower than she did in May. Rather than be discouraged, however, she viewed it as an opportunity to fail faster as she sets her sights toward 2027 and beyond. “There’s a psychological phenomenon: We gravitate towards linear progress…We want the progression run, each mile faster than the last,” she writes. “And there’s the obvious truth that life is no perfect Strava bar graph, no ruler-straight trendline pointing up. And it’s obvious to the little girls watching their mothers, and it’s obvious to the little girls watching their older selves become failures tens of miles farther than they ever thought they could go at all.”
November, from Issue 522: A few times a month one of my athletes or a reader of this newsletter will ask me a question(s) about the latest and greatest training method, technological advancement, nutritional intervention, or recovery protocol that came across one of their social media feeds. And I get it! There’s a high-speed train of slickly produced content coming at us nonstop these days and it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out or not doing enough or falling behind in some way. Everyone’s looking for the secret, and there’s never any shortage of folks lining up to sell it to you. It’s a tale as old as time. “What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret,” John L. Parker, Jr., wrote in his 1978 classic, Once A Runner, echoing a sentiment that holds just as strong 50 years after he wrote it. “And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials. How could they be expected to understand that?” It’s in this spirit that I’m re-sharing a link to this post outlining my own “secrets to becoming a better runner” that I pass along whenever one of the aforementioned inquiries comes my way. (I will also often include a copy of my mini e-book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective Runners, which you can download for free yourself at the link below.) My “secrets” are anything but; they’ve been passed down for decades by the best in the business, are freely available to everyone, and come with a lifetime guarantee. [And please, don’t keep these to yourself. Share this link and the PDF below with all your friends!]
December, from Issue 527: I imagine somewhere my Mom’s smiling at Passenger’s acoustic cover of Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love” from the movie Pretty Woman. This is one of those songs from my childhood in the ’90s that always seemed to be playing on the car radio or in our kitchen, with my Mom singing along to it. It’s not necessarily a happy tune but his take on it is beautiful and quietly nostalgic for me.
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. Check out some of the discount codes and special offers available exclusively to readers of the morning shakeout below:
Tracksmith: Tracksmith is an independent running brand inspired by a deep love of the sport. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com between now and the end of 2025, use the code “MARIO15” for $15 off an order of $75 or more. (Note: The code is good for one use between now and the end of the year.)
New Balance: I’ve been fortunate to have a partnership with New Balance since 2020 (and have been running in their shoes a lot longer than that). In any given week I run in 3-4 different types of shoes, which is a privilege I don’t take for granted. Here’s my rotation of different models of New Balance shoes I use for various types of runs.
Precision Fuel & Hydration: I’ve been a devotee to Precision Fuel & Hydration products since 2017 and my last several marathons wouldn’t have gone as well without them. Use the free Fuel & Hydration Planner to get a personalized race nutrition plan for your next event. As a reader of the morning shakeout, you can get 15% off your first order of fuel and electrolytes at this link (the discount will be auto-applied at checkout).
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Workout of the Week: Two-Minute Reps
Not every workout will leave you hunched over with your hands on your knees afterward—in fact, most of them shouldn’t!—but every once in a while you just need to go out and make yourself as uncomfortable as possible. Two-minute reps are one of my favorite means to achieving that end. Here are the details.
The bottom line.
“Get up in the morning and live right.”
— Coach Joe Vigil in Chasing Excellence, a biography about him by Pat Melgares, one of his athletes at Adams State. (This installment of “the bottom line” first appeared in Issue 506.)
That’s it for Issue 529. If you’re digging what I’m doing here, it would mean a lot to me if you shared this email (or this link, either works!) with a likeminded friend and encouraged them to subscribe so future issues go straight to their inbox.
Thanks for reading,
Mario