the morning shakeout | issue 548
A rant against optimization culture infiltrating running, a conversation with Tracksmith co-founder Matt Taylor, why America needs more public tracks, and a lot more.
Good morning! Kicking things off this week with a little bit of a rant. Let’s get right to it.
I am more than a bit irked by how optimization culture has infiltrated running and the way we talk about the sport these days. Everywhere I seem to turn of late I’m met with fueling plans broken down to the gram and the second, training loads quantified to two decimal places, and recovery scores dictating whether an athlete should even bother getting out of bed. The promise of exactness and certainty underneath it all drives me batshit crazy: follow the formula, hit the numbers, unlock the result. If only it were that easy or straightforward!
Now, if you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough then you know that this is not a new argument that I’m making here. But over the past week, for reasons ranging from being interviewed about the value of listening to your body, to coming across several social media posts breaking down athletes’ fueling plans, to reading a couple pieces about what we can learn from the sub-2 hour marathon and the Ethiopian running secret, it’s come into even sharper focus for me.
I left a comment on the first article, written by my friend David Lipman, in response to Yomif Kejelcha’s nutrition sponsor suggesting that “everything could have changed” if he hadn’t missed his bottle at the 35K aid station in London. In short, I don’t think that bottle would have made a lick of difference in the final outcome. Kejelcha had a hell of a debut, but he wasn’t beating Sabastian Sawe that day. Sawe was tightening every last screw in the final stages of that race, knowing he had the marathon rookie on the ropes, content to keep the pressure on until his competitor couldn’t take it anymore. It was incredible to watch. And yet, it seemed to me like more people were talking about the missed bottle afterward rather than the battle that took place. I’m worried that we’re losing the entire plot.
This trickles down, of course. I get more questions about fueling quantities and frequencies from my athletes and curious readers than ever before because that’s a lot of what they’re being fed on social media and in YouTube videos these days. (Pun intended.) Having a plan and executing it is important, of course, and while I genuinely appreciate and learn from everything that’s being openly shared about athletes’ fueling protocols, what bothers me is the framing of it all, i.e., however much you’re consuming, you better take down even more or you’re leaving time on the table. Ingesting an exact amount of fuel at exact intervals is what will determine your outcome, nothing else. It feels stupid to even type this, but let’s not forget that this is sport, not a lab experiment.
Along those lines, the second piece, written by Michael Crawley and Geoff Burns for Aeon, takes a closer look at Ethiopian runners and what their success actually tells us about human performance. The article pushes back against the prevailing Western fixation on data and optimization, pointing out that many of the best runners in the world have built their careers not around lactate levels and HRV scores, but around community, instinct, and something the authors describe as a sense of “dangerousness,” i.e. chasing adventure, even fun! Crawley and Burns describe two Ethiopian runners, Gojjam and Zeleke, getting up at 3 AM to run hills in the dark, not because their watch told them to, but because it made them feel like a couple of crazy badasses that competitors wouldn’t want to race. It reminded me of stories I read growing up about runners like Mark Nenow, who would head out for fartlek sessions in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep, or Sebastian Coe, who felt uneasy after Christmas lunch one time, not because he was full, but because he knew Steve Ovett had likely done a second training session that day and he probably should do the same. (Years later, when Coe told Ovett this story, Ovett laughed. “Did you only go out twice?” he asked him.) Or a similar story with Frank Shorter and Jack Bacheler running into one another at midnight in Florida, each guy trying to out-mileage the other that day. What I’m getting at here, in line with the argument that Crawley and Burns make in their piece, is to not lose sight of the human element in these pursuits. This goes for the competitive amateurs among us as much as it does the best of the best. Don’t try to turn yourself into a programmable robot.
As I wrote in this newsletter just a couple months ago, I am neither a luddite nor anti-data. I wear a GPS watch for most of my runs and I’ve been logging my training in meticulous detail for nearly 30 years. As a coach, I use various tools and data to track trends over time and initiate deeper discussions with my athletes about where we’re heading and why. But there’s a big difference between a tool and a crutch. Data should be used to inform your decisions but outsourcing your decisions to a data point is a fool’s errand. I worry that in our rush to optimize every aspect of our training and racing that we’re losing touch with the parts of this pursuit that can’t be measured and why most of us started running in the first place.
The main point of my ranting here is that sport is not meant to be a formula resulting in an optimized outcome. It is not fully solvable or predictable and that’s a big part of the appeal. (It is for me, anyway.) The best moments, whether it was the sub-2 the entire world saw in London a couple of weeks ago or the breakthrough workout you had last Wednesday that exactly zero people witnessed, happen not because someone cracked the code, but because a human being surprised themselves with what they thought was possible.
Many of the questions worth asking about running can’t be answered by your watch or eliminated by a perfect protocol. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe that’s the whole damn point.
Quick Splits
— One of the highlights of Boston Marathon weekend for me last month was getting the opportunity to sit down with Tracksmith co-founder Matt Taylor for a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a decade now. In this episode, which is available wherever you listen to podcasts or at this handy link, we trace the full arc of Matt’s journey, from a cold letter left at a hotel for IMG founder Mark McCormack, to embedding himself in top-tier college cross country programs for Chasing Tradition, to funding the early days of Tracksmith with an Usain Bolt iPhone game. We talked about how each of those pursuits helped shape the brand he eventually built, and got into what has always set Tracksmith apart: narrative-driven storytelling, reverence for the history of the sport, and a refusal to be everything to everyone. This is a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, craft, entrepreneurship, and what it means to build something with genuine staying power, and it did not disappoint. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it.
— I was nodding my head the entire time I was reading this David Epstein article about monotasking because I’ve learned the hard way over the years that the only way I’m able to work (heck, even just function) effectively is by shortening my daily to-do lists to no more than five items, doing only one thing at a time, batching my work throughout the day, and implementing self-imposed constraints and deadlines to help me focus on the task at hand. Sometimes this can drive people in my orbit a little crazy, but as someone who’s prone to being easily distracted it’s the only way I know how to get anything done. “The reason such practices are important is that sustained focus is highly unnatural for human beings,” Epstein writes. “Our brains evolved to be extremely distractible, to attend to any novel sights and sounds in our vicinity. Unsurprisingly, research has found that people instantly become more creative when distractions are removed.” (For more on how I use constraints in my work, listen to Raziq Rauf’s and my recent conversation linked below).
— This recent piece from Sam Robinson making the case for why America needs more public tracks is important reading no matter where you live. It’s always baffled me how unnecessarily difficult it is to access a running track in many places and Sam digs into the history of why that is, and what we might be able to do about it. Reading it, my mind went straight to the Wednesday night workout I coach at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. This facility is open to the public daily from 6:30 AM till 10 PM unless there’s a formal event taking place. In addition to our crew, there are at least three other running clubs working out, less formal groups doing the same, soccer teams holding conditioning practice, and dozens of individuals running or walking laps at their own pace. Yes, it can get crowded, but there’s beauty in sharing a space to exercise freely, and life lessons to be learned from doing so. As I tell my group every Wednesday, we need to be good citizens of Kezar and practice courtesy to others who are using the facility. My hope is that everyone goes home with more than just a great workout. “Do public tracks mean people are more likely to bump into each other? Sure,” he writes. “Will conflicts arise around who can use the space? Almost certainly. Will new recreational space require funding and the streamlining of municipal decision-making? Yes. But such are the politics of basic civic interaction, of learning to live together as embodied citizens. It’s a politics we’ve let wither, retreating toward privatized exercise that’s lonelier, frictionless, and atomized—a thousand people in a Peloton class, pedaling alone in a room.”
— Thank you to everyone who tuned in last week to Raziq Rauf’s and my first live conversation about running and writing. Unfortunately, and for unknown reasons, the first 15 minutes of the stream got cut off—sorry!—and with it the part where we spoke about our experiences at the recent Boston and London Marathons: the performances and extracurriculars at both events, why those things are significant, and the explosion of marathoning and running in general. That portion appears to be lost for good, but the final 35 minutes survived and are freely available to listen to right here. We went back and forth about the importance of storytelling and why we can’t forget the history of the sport, some new running books that have come out recently, how we both use constraints in our own writing practices, and a lot more. Please let us know what you think and/or if you have any suggestions for what we should call these conversations. Enjoy!
— Here’s a nearly three-minute clip of Mike D performing “So What’cha Want” live for the first time since the Beastie Boys’ last show in 2009. This happened a couple weeks ago at a small gathering in Ojai, California, and he was joined on the stage by his sons Skyler and Davis and their band, Very Nice Person. I cannot adequately express how happy this made me other than to say I’ve been playing it on repeat for over a week now. (It also led me down a rabbit hole to Mike D’s debut solo single, “Switch Up,” which he released just a few days ago. It’s not the Beasties, but it’s not supposed to be, and it’s quickly growing on me.)
— From the archives (Issue 392, 3 years ago this week): Listening to Coach [Diljeet] Taylor talk about how she balances the demands of her coaching job with being a wife and mom reminded me of this post the author Austin Kleon published a few years ago called “The best thing ever written about ‘work-life balance.’” Kleon is referencing a poem by Kenneth Koch and he writes that “this is one of those poems you tape to the fridge.” The gist of Koch’s poem is this: In life there’s love (i.e. family), work, and friends. On a day-to-day basis you can devote yourself to two of those, but there’s not enough time for all three. Kleon goes on to comment that you can have them all, just not at once, and I think that’s accurate. The point of the poem is that you can’t give your all to everything all the time: you have to prioritize. (And those priorities can, should, and will change over time.) The truth is that balancing everything equally at any given time is impossible—but over a long enough period of time, the distribution of devotion should look pretty even.
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 a couple weeks ago 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 3-2-1 Sandwich
“I wish I just had one more gear” is a phrase you’ll hear muttered by many a runner after a race, particularly if he or she happened to be passed in the final few hundred yards before the finish line. (See above photo!) So how can you work on your ability to finish fast when you’re tired? One workout I like to employ every few weeks for anyone focusing on distances ranging from 1500m up to the 10K is a little session I call the 3-2-1 Sandwich. (In fact, I just did it myself this past Saturday.) Here are the details.
The bottom line.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (n.b. Rilke’s words also apply to runners. See opening rant!)
That’s it for Issue 548. If it made you smile, think for a second, or reflect upon something you hadn't considered, please forward this email to a likeminded friend (or five!) or share the web version, and encourage them to subscribe at this link so that it lands in their inbox next Tuesday.
Thanks for reading,
Mario
The best thing I ever heard about over-optimization culture was something to the effect of, "Why does everything need to be 'the science of?' Like, 'the science of joy.' Can we not just have joy?"
Once a Runner could never exist in this current over-optimization economy