the morning shakeout | issue 537

A brief race recap, reframing rest and recovery, joy as the most important element of performance, and a lot more.

I spent Saturday trying to keep up with kids on the track and Sunday chasing grown men around on the trails. Maybe that’s the secret to aging well? (Shot on my iPhone.)

Good morning! I lined up on the track at the Cal All-Comers meet on Saturday—twice, in fact—and the race that made me nervous wasn’t even my own.

I kicked off the morning by pacing my West Valley Track Club teammate Danny DeMartini in the 3000m. Danny and I have similar goals this season and we’ve been meeting up for workouts regularly the past couple of months. He wanted to run around 70 seconds a lap and I offered to get him through four or five of them on pace. The responsibility of trying to help someone else accomplish their goal always weighs heavier on me than my own performance and I didn’t want to f*ck it up for him.

Danny and I stood next to one another on the start line, bumped fists, and waited for the gun. We got off the line a little quick but not too crazy, hitting 69 seconds for the first lap. I never race with a watch on the track but I wore it for this one so that I could check my splits every 200 meters and make adjustments if necessary. Two laps in, we were at 2:21 and I could feel Danny start to lose contact. By the third lap he’d fallen off, so I slowed a bit to try and get him back on pace. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. I came through four laps at 4:45 with Danny four or five seconds behind me. I stepped off the track at that point and he called it a lap later with a tight calf, not wanting to risk injury. I was bummed for him but also glad that he didn’t compromise the rest of his season.

About an hour later I lined up for the second heat of the 1500m. The nerves were non-existent for this one. There were 13 of us in the race. Most of the field was high school and college athletes half my age or younger and, as expected, the kids took it out hot. My plan was to stay out of trouble and move up after the initial excitement died down a bit. I didn’t wear a watch and I didn’t hear any splits, but I can tell you that after 400 meters there was only one runner behind me. Half a lap later the accordion compressed and I went around a few guys before getting back on the rail. It was high-speed human chess, my favorite game. I closed strong over the last lap and a half, finishing 6th in 4:15.37. That’s the equivalent of a 4:33-ish mile, which is what I ran on fresh legs a month ago in Boston, and it left me excited to continue exploring what’s possible the rest of this season, and beyond.

OK, let’s get right to it.

Quick Splits

— As I’ll touch on later in this newsletter, rest and recovery aren’t rewards for hard work. They’re part of the work. They also shouldn’t be goals in and of themselves. So how do we define rest and recovery, and what are they in service of? Performance specialist Robert Wilson digs into these questions (and then some) in Part One and Part Two of a deep dive worth bookmarking and revisiting. What I appreciate about his take is that he cuts through the noise by reframing recovery not as a metric to be optimized, but as a relationship to be understood. “Herein lies the core issue,” he writes in Part Two. “Recovery isn’t a property of a number. It’s a relationship between the athlete, their past, and the demands they’re about to face. Wearables can contribute information to that judgment. They can’t make it for you…By all means, work to understand the cost of stress on your mind and body. But remember that the goal, especially in sport and fitness, is adaptation to the training stress you’re intentionally imposing on your physiology. Does anybody really want the gold medal in HRV?”

— This is a great profile of Olympic figure skating gold medalist Alysa Liu that contains an important piece of performance wisdom that I think often gets overlooked in a world that’s wired for achievement and optimization. “Joy is her brand,” said Liu’s coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo. “She pulls people out onto the ice with her and you experience that with her.” Whether it’s trying to win a medal in figure skating, training to run a faster marathon, improving your deadlift, growing a business, writing a book, learning a musical instrument, or some other pursuit that’s personally meaningful to you, make sure you’re doing it with joy. Of course, these things are hard! And sometimes they’re not fun. But I think a lot of us lose sight of experiencing joy while getting distracted by outside expectations, optimized metrics, or other forms of performative bullshit. “Liu understands who she is well before self-discovery tends to happen,” writes Marcus Thompson II. “She can’t legally purchase alcohol in the States, but she knows what she values in this world. She’s found freedom while being a young adult in an era of social media, which can operate as a predatory arm of forces manipulating minds. She’s choreographed peace in a sport that attacks it in its athletes. With its minuscule margin for error. With its relentlessly discerning eyes. With every tenth of a point. With a gold medal on the line, with history in her grasp, with potential crushing disappointment looming, Liu wasn’t fazed. She danced on blades as if no one was watching, because she knew everyone was watching.”

— While we’re on the topic of ice sports, this episode of the excellence, actually podcast with Olympic ice dancer Lilah Fear of Great Britain is one of the best conversations on performance that I’ve listened to in a long time. Fear, who is just 26 years old, offers a remarkably mature perspective on the importance of self awareness, staying present, honing the ability to turn it on and off, taking feedback appropriately, managing pre-performance nerves, learning to let go despite a desire for control, and a lot more. “What happens on the day, it’s sport,” she explains to hosts Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg. “You have to perform on the day and that’s up to you. Anything that I do, like, ‘Oh, I hope you do badly,’ what is that going to do other than distract me from my purpose and my task? But I’m also really great at dialing in and dialing out. So when I get on the ice, when I’m tying my skates, we could chitchat about the weekend. I can ask them about their family or what they’re watching on Netflix and get those good vibes going. But when it’s time to work, I lock in too.”

— I enjoyed Molly Seidel’s recap/gear review of her 100K debut two Saturdays ago at Black Canyon, where she finished fourth and earned a golden ticket to this year’s Western States Endurance Run. Her writing is refreshingly candid and funny, especially the following bit about running with bottles after years of grabbing them off a folding table. “My years of grabbing bottles off folding tables are now completely wasted, and instead I have to get comfortable racing with a variety of soft flasks and bottles strapped to my body in ever-increasingly uncomfortable means,” she writes. “I’m already quite sensitive to sensory stimuli as a spectrumy girlie, so this is a fucking nightmare and results in me trying to carry as little as possible. I’m not even trying to be minimalist, I just HATE how it feels to be touched by that many things for so long. Hence why I threw a mild fit at needing to wear a vest, and blatantly refused to carry hand bottles.” This sounds like many a stubborn road marathoner I know (including myself!) that eventually learned the ways of the (ultra) world. In fact, I’ve run my last several road marathons with a handheld bottle and recommend to the athletes I coach that they at least start their race with one. It’s the only way to fulfill your fluid needs unless you’re a pro with the benefits of bottle service.

— The opening lyrics to Sarah McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery” give me goosebumps every time I hear them and her recent appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk kept that streak alive. McLachlan sounds incredible during this short set that consists of a few classics and a couple newer tunes. Somehow she manages to slow down “Angel” to close things out and…well, damn. Just beautiful.

— From the archives (Issue 433, 2 years ago this week): Are you absorbing your training or merely tolerating it? This is a question that I believe every athlete should ask themselves once a week. Here’s why:

If you’re ABSORBING your training then you’re doing a good job balancing the demands of runs, workouts, strength sessions, etc., with the appropriate amount of rest and recovery: making sure your easy days are truly easy, staying on top of nutrition, managing outside stresses, and taking care of your body. Energy levels and mood are generally pretty good, things are “clicking,” and you’re setting yourself up to be a happy, healthy athlete that’s able to make sustainable progress.

If you’re merely TOLERATING it then you’re checking the boxes but not doing what you need to do outside the training schedule to make meaningful progress. Signs include: feeling like you’re “forcing it” most days, constantly pushing through pain, not getting enough sleep, doing a poor job fueling, and not taking appropriate downtime after a training cycle. You’re constantly stressed and fatigued, performance has completely crumbled (or at best plateaued), and there’s a general lack of enjoyment in the process.

So how can you flip the switch from just tolerating your training to actually absorbing it?

Here are few tips:

— Treat rest and recovery as a part of your training program—not separate from it. Build these elements in just as you do key workouts.

— Prioritize sleep and nutrition. These are the glue that hold a training program together over the long term.

— Slow down. Dialing back the intensity a bit—on your workouts as well as easy days—can go a long way toward making your training sustainable and productive.

— Do a little less. If stress is high in other areas of life, and there’s not much you can do to immediately bring it down, reduce the training stress a bit by backing off your overall workload, dialing back the volume and/or intensity, and/or taking some races off your schedule. Stress management is a key piece of the absorption puzzle.

— Find a friend(s). If you’re not looking forward to another grueling solo session, try and find a friend(s) to share the workload with, even if you end up doing a different workout than the one you had planned that day. You’ll actually end up getting more out of it than forcing yourself to do whatever is on your schedule that day.

It’s not just about “doing the work” every day. You also have to set yourself up to truly absorb it so that you can reap the full benefits.

— What numbers should runners and other endurance athletes focus on in training? I get some form of this question a few times a month. Well, I recently sat down with my friend Andy Blow, the founder of Precision Fuel & Hydration, and spoke with him about how to handle the firehouse of data that we’re getting blasted with from every which direction. Here’s a transcript of our conversation that will help you to cut through the noise and focus on what actually matters, how to find balance, how to develop a healthy relationship with data, and a lot more. (And if you’re interested in trying PF&H products for yourself, check out this link and save 15% off your first order.)

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Spring may still seem far off in many places but the yearning for warmer weather and less layers is already in full effect. My partners at Tracksmith just released their Spring Collection, “a much-needed dose of vernal optimism and hardy pragmatism.” I’ve been rocking a few of these pieces with some regularity already (not trying to rub it in, I swear!) and the Session Tee has been a staple. When it’s warm enough I’ll wear it on its own, but I love rocking it over the Brighton Base Layer on cooler mornings when a jacket isn’t necessary. If you want to pick up something from this collection for yourself (or buy anything else on Tracksmith.com for that matter), use the code “MARIO15” for $15 off an order of $75 or more.

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Workout of the Week: Descend the Ladder

One of the biggest keys to racing a successful half-marathon is honing the ability to stay under control early so you can close hard late. The Descend the Ladder workout is a great way to simulate that shift in both effort and mindset. It teaches you to stay composed while also building the resilience required to dig in when every fiber of your being is screaming at you to back off. Here are the details.

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The bottom line. 

“It’s about so much more than just running. It’s literally just a choice daily to live deeply and thoroughly and with beautiful effort—not for results, not for money, or fame, or lifestyle, but for the richness of being alive.”

— Rob Shaver, a 49-year-old runner who has been living with stage four cancer for 20 years, in “The Life We Have,” which is worth 25 minutes of your time this week. Shaver, who can no longer run, ran at least a mile a day for over three years straight as a step-by-step refusal to surrender to his disease. This one’s heavy but beautiful, and incredibly well done. (Hat tip to Brendan Leonard for first sharing it.)

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That’s it for Issue 537. If it made you smile, think for a second, or reflect upon something you hadn’t considered, and you know someone else who might like to do the same, please forward this email to a friend (or five!) and encourage them to subscribe at this link so that it lands in their inbox next Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Mario

P.S. Do you live in Los Angeles or will you be there two Saturdays from now for marathon weekend? Join me and the Hermosa Run Club on Saturday, March 7, at the New Balance pop-up, 1220 Abbot Kinney Blvd., in Venice, at 9:30 AM for a community shakeout and post-run reflection session. I’ll also lead a short pre-run clinic on running by feel, there will be shoes to demo, and plenty of post-run refreshments. Register here and lose track of time with us!