the morning shakeout | issue 547
A conversation with Ken Rideout, the performance-enhancing benefits of a pre-run poop, a nugget of wisdom from Steve Kerr, and a lot more.
Good morning! I am literally and figuratively all over the place right now so this week’s issue of the newsletter is going to be on the punchier side. Let’s get right to it.
Quick Splits
— Later today, at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST, my friend Raziq Rauf (who you may remember from the last podcast I published, a little over a month ago now) and I are going live on Substack for what we hope will be semi-regular conversations about running, writing, and where and how the two overlap, intersect, and interact. We’re both stoked to get this little project off the ground and hope you’ll join us at this link if you’re free. (And don’t worry, this will be recorded and shared far and wide afterward. I’ll be sure to link to it here next week.)
— Back in March I recorded a conversation with my athlete and friend Ken Rideout, whose memoir, The Other Side of Hard, is now available everywhere books are sold. The plan was to publish it as a podcast, but there were audio issues and it just wasn’t going to work in that format. Fortunately, you can read a transcript of our conversation right here. In this one we talked about the importance of running your own race regardless of what everyone else around you is doing, his complicated relationship with satisfaction and what drives him to keep pushing, what it was like to relive some of the harder chapters of his life in writing the book, and a lot more. It’s an honest exchange with someone I have an immense amount of respect and admiration for, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
— I was shaken yesterday by the news of Parker Morse’s sudden passing from a cardiac event at the age of 52. Parker, whose wife, Alison Wade, writes the excellent Fast Women newsletter, was the original webmaster for Runner’s World way back when; he reported regularly for World Athletics’ website and other outlets, and performed behind-the-scenes media work at the Boston Marathon. I didn’t know Parker super well but we exchanged emails on occasion. He was a kind and generous man. I’ll never forget the first email he sent me back in 2005. I had just had my first interview published for Fast Women, a website that New York Road Runners owned (and Alison ran) at the time, and he wrote to me out of the blue, encouraging me to pitch Kate Gwyther’s story as a feature to New England Runner magazine. (n.b. I took his advice, and it was the first print magazine piece I ever had published.) He also told me to pursue doing more interviews and gave me the emails of editors who might be interested in publishing them. It was an unselfish gesture that had an impact on 23-year-old me and helped shape the trajectory of my career and life in a way I never could have imagined. Please keep Parker, Alison, and their two daughters in your thoughts as they navigate this devastating time.
— If you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough then you know Steve Kerr is one of my favorite coaches across any discipline. This recent wide-ranging interview he did with Charles Bethea for The New Yorker is refreshingly candid and contains a few nuggets of timeless wisdom like this buried within it. “I wake up excited to come to the gym and coach basketball and collaborate with the staff and see the players and try to help them achieve something. That’s an amazing life,” he explains. “And that’s all that really matters is: Do you enjoy what you do every day and are you fulfilled? I still am.”
— Over the weekend I listened to this episode of The Running Effect podcast with Charles Hicks and one of his coaches, Alex Ostberg, which led me to this article by Ostberg outlining ten takeaways from Hicks’ seventh-place, 2:04:35 finish at last month’s Boston Marathon. Both are excellent and worth your time. Here are the biggest things that jumped out to me from what Hicks and Ostberg shared: 1. Hicks’ maturity. He’s only 24 years old but the way he thinks about training, navigating failure, and taking the long view on his career is well beyond his years. 2. Ostberg’s humility. The Swoosh TC assistant coach is maybe five years older than Hicks, but admits to learning from his charge on the regular. Listening to him talk about their relationship on the podcast and reading through the long list of articles he’s written about training and coaching leads me to believe that he’s going to be one of great coaches in our sport someday. 3. Hicks’ restraint. Something I tell/remind my athletes of all the time is that I don’t want them to beat the workout. If it calls for 6-minute miles, that does not mean 5:45s are better. I think many runners could take a page out of Hicks’ book in this regard. “[Runners] chase confidence by trying to win workouts—overrunning paces, extending sessions, and turning the training program into a test they must pass. Charles doesn’t chase that kind of validation from each workout,” Ostberg writes. “He shows up, executes the session’s intent, and moves on.” (To quote 2x Canadian Olympic marathoner Reid Coolsaet from Issue 148 of the shakeout: “Sometimes I have to remind myself that the point of a session is to gain fitness, not to prove fitness.”)
— I’ve never met Howard Calvert but the 47-year-old recently broke 2:30 at the London Marathon for the first time and wrote this piece for Runner’s World about how he did it. Forget about Calvert’s finishing time for a second, as that’s not what matters here, and focus on the first six changes he outlines in the piece. (The last one, beetroot juice, may or may not make a difference, but nowhere near as much as everything else he lists before it.) What Calvert did echoes the tried-and-true principles and secrets of training I’ve written about time and time again. Best of all? Whether you’re trying to break 2:30 or 3:30 or 4:30, they’re accessible to everyone (and proven to work!). “It’s almost become a cliché now, but in the past, I’ve certainly been guilty of running my easy runs too fast. So this time, I consciously dialled back every run that wasn’t a structured, high-intensity session,” he writes. “I actually began to look forward to these runs, as I knew that as well as helping to build a stronger aerobic base, they were helping me to recover from the previous session while also preparing me for the next hard session so that I wouldn’t feel too beaten up.”
— One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to was David Gray in Oakland ten or so years ago. The man just did not miss a note. Everything felt so deliberate and every element of every song was executed with precision. Anyway, YouTube recently served me up this version of “Babylon,” recorded in November of 2019 on the Howard Stern Show, and the performance reminded me a lot of that show in Oakland. This one is just Gray and his guitar and if it doesn’t give you goosebumps, you might want to make sure you’re feeling OK.
— From the archives (Issue 391, 3 years ago this week): I don’t know about you but taking care of business in the bathroom before I head out to run helps make me more comfortable and also provides me some peace of mind. On race day, it’s a non-negotiable for settling my nerves, as well as my stomach. According to a new study, summed up here by Brady Holmer in his excellent newsletter, Physiology Friday, it turns out the pre-run poop has performance-enhancing benefits too. “In this study, defecation resulted in greater blood pooling to the prefrontal brain during exercise than the non-defecated condition,” writes Brady. “This suggests that defecation allows for more efficient blood allocation towards the prefrontal brain, which is essential for maintaining high-intensity exercise performance. The higher brain blood flow was related to improved high-intensity endurance performance.”
I’ve been having a ton of fun ripping around in the FuelCell SuperComp Elite v5 from New Balance, their carbon-plated super shoe that’s engineered specifically for racing fast on the roads. I’ve worn them for races, track workouts, and tempo runs and it is by far the best-fitting, best-feeling super shoe I’ve ever put on my feet. 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 running fast. (Case in point: I rocked them in a road mile on Sunday and ran a 3-second course PR.) The FuelCell SuperComp v5 is available at your favorite running speciality retail store and on newbalance.com (men’s sizes here, women’s sizes here).
Workout of the Week: The Reverse Michigan
I first wrote about The Michigan Workout several years ago for Competitor.com. That article now lives in Outside’s Running category—you can read it here—but the gist of the session is that it blends a set of descending intervals on the track (each one gets a little shorter and a little faster) with longer stretches of steadier tempo running off the track. It’s a great mix of strength and speed that can be beneficial to nearly any runner whether they’re training for the mile, the marathon or anything in between. “This is something that is very unique,” legendary Michigan coach and creator of the workout, Ron Warhurst, told Lope Magazine a few years ago. “It’s not just an interval session. This gives the athlete an opportunity to explore where his or her head is at. Where their emotions are. When the grinding starts, it tests your mettle.” A couple years ago I got the idea to assign some of my athletes what I call a “Reverse Michigan,” where we’ll do an ascending ladder on the track—starting with a fast 400m, ending with a strong mile—interspersed with longer stretches of tempo running off the track between intervals. It’s the same volume of total work at the same range of intensities—just distributed a little differently than the classic version—but it provides some unique benefits of its own. Here are the details.
The bottom line.
“I think it’s in the head, more than it is physical.”
— Lester Wright, after running 26.34 for the 100m dash at the 2022 Penn Relays, making him the fastest known centenarian in history. Wright passed away on April 20 at his home in New Jersey at the age of 103.
That’s it for Issue 547. If you’re enjoying my weekly missive, 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
+1 for beets. Add it to the "boosts my belief" column.
not beating the workout is likely the biggest thing helping me train more consistently this year.