Dear fellow men and women, do-gooders, and the reachers of the highest heights,
My name is Austin, and I want to do good too (gasp). I want to be good at things and think fantastic and incredible thoughts. Like you, I have dreams, and as the Olympians say…Citius, Altius, Fortius…which is probably significant, but I only took Spanish in high school so I don’t know the meaning of it.
We all possess a drive to do great and powerful things, and for me, I feel powerful as I stride effortlessly along the asphalt. As I sit here now, I’m waiting out the London rain before I run one of my final workouts prior to the Valencia Marathon, in which I will attempting to run 5:18 per mile for 26.2 miles, a 2:19 marathon and the U.S. Olympic marathon trials standard. Valencia is a quick hop from London, where I moved recently for work, and a great place to break 2:19 due to its flat, smooth streets and impeccable weather. Qualification for the U.S. Olympic trials has been a life-long dream of mine, and would allow me to race alongside the nation’s other olympic hopefuls, all competing for the three coveted spots on the Olympic team.
To date, I’ve run two hours, 21 minutes and 38 seconds for the storied distance of the marathon, which is more than a stone’s throw from 2:18:59, much to my frustration. I’d love to just excuse this gap away. Excuse it away due to my job, the new and unfamiliar city, the fulsome and fantastic social environment, the history and culture, and the cheap, cheap plane tickets to so many other incredible places in this part of the world, all of which I want to conquer and explore as much as I want to achieve my running goals. I refuse, however, to admit that moving here to the great city of London and having a fulfilling job is an obstacle to athletic success, because……I don’t know, I’m a millennial and I just don’t want to. Where my thinking lies is not in whether working professionals with athletic aspirations can succeed, because they do all the time! The Olympic trials are littered with amateur athletes funded by careers outside of the sport of track and field. On the opposite end of the spectrum, professional athletes themselves often have rewarding and successful careers outside of running, including additional business ventures, families and children, and hobbies that they devote a large amount of time to. It’s been shown that professionals and amateurs (ummm, me) alike want, and can obtain a very balanced life. My question therefore, from an amateur’s perspective, is how to improve running performance without sacrificing the very things I moved across the Atlantic to seek out. Further, I’m seeking to explore and address the common challenges unique to sub-elite athletes, from new enthusiasts to Olympic hopefuls, which I don’t believe are fully addressed through today’s existing running resources.
In getting back to training, most runners, myself included, initially conclude that closing a 2-minute and thirty-nine second gap would require a re-examination of a variety of philosophies…namely running philosophies including Lydiard, Daniels, or many of the other legendary running and coaching philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The running component to running performance is, for obvious reasons, the most discussed and debated topic in the sport. The high impact training philosophies, the racing strategy, the miles…the trials of miles are crucial, as they should be. These often bite-sized chunks relating to training improvements are there for the taking for many, but for me, as someone who is running 100 miles and week and can barely squeeze in a phone call to mom, these sizable training gains seem few and far between when squeezing in my training before and after a long work schedule. While I will absolutely continue to refine my training philosophy, the crumbs appear more delicious, the 0.1%, the .05% magic makers that may culminate into the two-minute and thirty-nine second improvement I am seeking. Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds is less than a 2% improvement, and I am hoping I can bridge this gap in a more immediate manner than through the slow accumulation of physical and aerobic development that results from additional months of slogging through miles of training.
Therefore, rather than a Lydiard focus, I’m exploring the Hippocratic running philosophy, one where the incremental improvements are more based on the basics of the unseen factors of running performance, which is the style of living rather than the style of running and training. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, was an experimentalist and revolutionary, a clinical observer of human health and performance, and great greek philosopher. While I’m not a doctor, and my philosophy is much like my latin, Hippocrates’ systematic and philosophical approach to health inspires me to take a look at all the lifestyle factors that can and do influence running performance. I’m not breaking ground in saying that our lifestyles affect our physical performance, but I’m not convinced that lifestyle and performance have to be mutually exclusive. I idolize this philosophy, the systematic approach to creating a more fulfilling life, running and all, through observation and experimentation. I want to be figure out how to be a Young Hippocrates, living in the 21st century with all of its challenges, though right now, I’m just Young Austin. My mission is to figure out how a Young Hippocrates would live, and how I can use that idea to improve my running and my life here in London without simply throwing more miles against a wall, hoping they stick, or moving out of the city to live at 7,000 ft.
Ipso facto (just learned this wasn’t “itso” facto), I’m on a mission to discover and share these smaller gains so I can earn my 2%, my two minutes and 39 seconds. I don’t care whether they’re from ancient, forgotten knowledge, new technology, the weird or unfamiliar toothpaste hack, or placebo. As long as they’re within the legal bounds of the sport, I’m going to try it and either use it or rule it out to improve my running, my work, my relationships, and everything in between.
Here’s to those .05% gains, may they ultimately get me to my goals, you to yours, and let us enjoy a few more beers along the way. Happy experimenting!
Do good,
Young Austin