Run Like a Pro (Even If You're Slow): Elite Tools and Tips for Runners at Every Level - Softcover

Fitzgerald, Matt; Rosario, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593201914 ISBN 13: 9780593201916

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Cutting-edge advice on how to achieve your personal best, for everyone from casual runners to ultramarathoners.

In 80/20 Running, respected running and fitness expert Matt Fitzgerald introduced his revolutionary training program and explained why doing 80 percent of runs at a lower intensity and just 20 percent at a higher intensity is the best way for runners at all levels--as well as cyclists, triathletes, and even weight-loss seekers--to improve their performance.

Now, in this eye-opening follow-up, Fitzgerald teams with Olympic coach Ben Rosario to expand and update the 80/20 program to include ultramarathon training and such popular developments as the use of power meters.

New research has bolstered the case that the 80/20 method is in fact that most effective way to train for distance running and other endurance sports. Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow) shows readers how to take the best practices in elite running and adopt them within the limits of their own ability, lifestyle, and budget.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matt Fitzgerald is an acclaimed endurance sports writer, coach, and certified sports nutritionist. He has authored or coauthored more than 25 books, including The Comeback Quotient, Running the Dream and How Bad Do You Want It? Also an award-winning journalist, he has written for Bicycling, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Outside, Runner’s World, Shape, Triathlete, and other major magazines and websites.

An All-State runner in high school and an All-American triathlete as an adult, he continues to compete at a high level as both a runner and a triathlete. He has coached other endurance athletes since 2001. He is a cofounder of 80/20 Endurance, an Internet-based training resource of runners and other athletes.

Ben Rosario is the head coach of the HOKA NAZ Elite professional distance running team in Flagstaff, Ariz. His athletes have finished in the top ten of the Boston, Chicago, New York City and London Marathons, and have won multiple national titles including the 2020 Olympic Trials Marathon. Before founding NAZ Elite, he co-owned Big River Running Company, a run-specialty store in his hometown of Saint Louis, Mo. Ben has co-authored two previous running books, Inside A Marathon and Tradition, Class, Pride.

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1

 

Follow the Leaders

 

 

Running is a uniquely democratic sport. When you line up at the start of, say, the New York City Marathon as a middle-of-the-pack runner, you are standing on the same bridge (the Verrazzano-Narrows) as the professionals, feeling the same nervous tension they feel and hoping to reach the same finish line in Central Park. Such inclusiveness may also be found at events like the USATF Cross Country Championships, where elite and recreational runners alike have the opportunity to test their fitness on the host course. Even made-for-TV competitions such as the Millrose Games feature races for pros, high school athletes, and club runners of all ages. In running, we're all in it together in ways that professional and amateur athletes in other sports are not.

 

Away from the racecourse, however, the sport of running is oddly divided. In their training methods, eating habits, recovery methods, and other practices, elite and nonelite runners could scarcely be less alike. The pros do most of their running at low intensity, whereas nonelite runners do most of theirs at moderate intensity. The pros perform functional strength workouts designed especially to meet the specific needs of runners, whereas nonelite runners are more likely to eschew strength training altogether or do it in forms like CrossFit or yoga that were not developed with runners in mind. The pros typically maintain a balanced, well-rounded, inclusive, and shtick-free diet based on natural foods of all kinds, whereas nonelite runners more often go for elimination-type diets (like keto, plant-based, or Paleo) that are all about exclusion.

 

You get the idea. It almost seems as if nonelite runners are deliberately doing the opposite of everything the elites do, though the reality is that, for reasons Coach Ben and I will get into later, most aren't even aware of how the pros balance their intensities, strength train, eat, and so forth. As that rare runner who, in a sense, has a foot in both worlds, elite and nonelite, I am keenly aware of this rift. An amateur runner myself, I coach fellow amateurs, but I also interact with the pros through my writing and can use what I learn from them to help my runners and myself improve.

 

It's a role I was practically born to fulfill. When I was eleven years old, I became both a runner and a fan of professional running in a single moment. That moment occurred during the 1983 Boston Marathon, when I watched my father complete his first 26.2-miler and saw Joan Benoit record a world-best marathon time for women. My dad's achievement inspired me to follow in his footsteps and run, while Joan's admittedly much greater feat moved me to become an active follower of professional running, beginning with local heroes Lynn Jennings, a three-time world champion in cross country, and Cathy Schiro, a national high school cross country champion and Olympian, both of whom lived minutes away from my family's home in New Hampshire's seacoast region.

 

It so happened that the coach of the girls' cross country team at the high school I attended was Jeff Johnson, who held the distinction of having been Nike's first employee and who'd formerly rubbed elbows with the likes of Steve Prefontaine and the legendary University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman. As a member of the boys' team, I was never directly coached by Jeff, but he did mentor me to some degree, instilling in me a better understanding of state-of-the-art training principles than most runners my age possessed.

 

If Jeff Johnson wasn't your typical high school cross country coach, neither was Tom Donnelly your typical Division III running coach. An All-American performer at Villanova University in the 1960s, Tom went on to become the men's cross country and track coach at tiny Haverford College in Pennsylvania. There, he developed a reputation for turning B-level high school runners like me into collegiate All-Americans while as a side gig also coaching elite runners including Ireland's Marcus O'Sullivan, a three-time world champion at 1500 meters. Unfortunately, I didn't actually run at Haverford, having temporarily burned out on the sport, so Tom's influence on me, like Jeff's, was mostly indirect.

 

After graduating in 1993, I took my English degree to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I found a job writing for a newly launched endurance sports magazine. Being immersed in this environment drew me back into running and at the same time afforded me a chance to learn directly from world-class endurance athletes and elite-level coaches. Tour de France cyclist Bob Roll, world champion runner Regina Jacobs (later busted for doping, alas), mountain biker Marla Streb, and triathlon coach Phil Maffetone are just a few of the many luminaries I interviewed and wrote about during this period, and I eagerly applied much of the knowledge I acquired to my own training, racing, and overall lifestyle.

 

By 2001, I felt confident enough in my experience and expertise to start coaching runners and triathletes. Only then did I discover that what seemed obvious to me-that any athlete seeking to get better should take their cues from the champions-wasn't obvious to everyone. Having been taught early on that athletes at all levels should emulate the pros, I hadn't realized that most athletes are not so fortunate, hence know little about the methods they use to prepare for races, much less actually practice these methods. For example, whereas professional runners do lengthy, multimodal warm-ups that include activation exercises, jogging, drills, and strides (short, relaxed sprints) prior to their workouts and races, nonelite runners, by and large, warm up with a bit of jogging and nothing more.

 

In observing such discrepancies, the sociologist in me (I minored in the subject at Haverford) couldn't help but wonder why amateur runners do just about everything differently from professional runners. The conclusion I've arrived at is that, rather than one big reason, there are many small ones. All of them are surmountable, thankfully, and the first step toward doing so and beginning to run like a pro is understanding these reasons. Let's take that step together now.

 

Reason #1:

Most Recreational Runners

Are Late Starters

 

In 1983, when my father completed his first Boston Marathon, running was a very different sport than it is today-a lot smaller and a lot more competitive. Back then there were only a few dozen marathons to choose from in the United States, and although Boston was alone in maintaining strict qualifying standards, self-selection ensured that serious racers were the dominant type at all of them. Indeed, to this day the 1983 Boston Marathon remains the fastest marathon ever staged on American soil, with 316 runners finishing the race in less than two hours and thirty minutes.

 

Among those runners was Ben Beach, who finished 236th with a time of 2:27:43. Ben was typical of the runners of his day. A Maryland native, he started running competitively in high school in the late 1960s, when the first major "running boom" was just getting started. Had he been born a few years earlier, Ben probably would have done what most youth runners did after receiving their diploma, which was to quit the sport. Instead, when Ben moved north to Boston to study medicine at Harvard, he got caught up in the thriving local running culture and chose to continue training and competing, racing his first Boston Marathon as a college freshman in 1968 (and every Boston Marathon since then).

 

If the first running boom served mainly to turn former high school and college runners into adult road racers, the second running boom, which began in the mid 1990s, cast a much wider...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593201914
• ISBN 13: 9780593201916
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland