Category Archives: Running

Mobilitating.

June 11, 2012 By in Reflections on Training Tags: , , 3 Comments

Yes, I know I owe you Part 2 of Strength for Endurance…for all ten of my devoted readers eagerly awaiting, know that I’m busy violating my 1000 word rule for Part 2. I thought you might be interested in the meantime in checking out something new and crazy. Well, not that crazy, really. But definitely new.

If you weren’t aware, I have some severe shoulder mobility issues. It made me a slow swimmer, but these days my biggest beef with my shoulders is the amount of pain I develop in my rear delta towards the end of a run. In fact, most runs, when I finish I can not lift both arms over my head without doing some weird cheating. Longer runs (like marathons), it’s borderline debilitating, and I consider my shoulders my biggest limiting factor. If you’ve seen me at the end of a long run, you’ll see me go to a position of comfort where I lean over and try to completely unload my arms because my shoulders are typically in screaming pain.

Its gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, and in the past few years I’ve tried a lot of different approaches. but nothing helped until I checked out the video you see above. Mobility WOD’s basic deal is that we should all be able to perform basic maintenance on ourselves. Simple, yet elegant, considering that “maintenance” mostly comes in the form of mashing on our soft tissues to break up years of nasty crap.

It only takes a few minutes to do the whole routine, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the results. I try to do it before most runs, or at least once a day. I’ve found that when I do it before a run, I can actually lift my arms over my head at the end no problem. My shoulder pain on long runs has been far less severe, and if anything I’ve noticed a sensation of warmth in my shoulders post-routine. Which tells me I probably have mobility-restricted tissues as a result of fascia buildup somewhere in there, and the tissue manipulation that occurs in the routine is helping restore blood flow.

It’s worth checking out, and MobilityWOD’s link is to the right. There’s a lot of good info on the site, and I’ll probably be trying some more mobility work in the future. Just remember that certain kinds of mobility are critical to running performance, but you don’t need to be a level 99 yoga ninja-master to be a good runner.

Remembering Pedro 66

June 9, 2012 By in Racing, Running, War, Writing Tags: , , , 7 Comments

Mike and Ben

I’m pretty sure everyone who reads this blog knows why I wear the bracelet in this photo. If you’re new, it’s my way of remembering two PJs who at one time, worked under my command, and perished when their USAF rescue helicopter, call sign “Pedro 66” was shot down on June 9th, 2010. Mike Flores and Ben White weren’t the only ones who died that day, either. Dave Wisniewski, Dave Smith, and Joel Gentz, the first CRO to die in combat; none of them came home that day. When I found out, I had moved to another job in South Carolina, and I worked deployed USAF rescue issues. I got into the office, and one of the guys sat me down and told me we lost one of our helos, and some PJs were dead. I made some calls, and learned that Mike and Ben were gone.

Sometimes I wonder why I took it so hard. I wasn’t super close to either. Mike was one of my troops for well over a year, but Ben had just shown up to the unit before I left, so I didn’t know him that well. At the end of the day, all I can come up with is shared experience of the Continue reading →

Foundations: Strength for Endurance, Part 1

June 1, 2012 By in Reflections on Training Tags: , , , 7 Comments

Sorry for how long it’s taken to put this out. When I first thought about writing on strength, I thought I’d share some general ideas and the like. However, I’ve ended up going down the rabbit hole a bit, reading the results of studies, and consulting some big brains for ideas. Anyway, I remembered I’m a Humanities major, not a Physiologist, and I’m supposed to write about stuff. So, let’s get it on…

What is “strength?” What does it mean to be “strong?”

If I have one frustration with the idea of strength as it relates to endurance, it’s how arbitrarily we bandy the term about. If someone “looks strong” in a race, we don’t generally say it unless that someone raced well. In all reality, the dude may be a 130lb weakling who couldn’t do a “girl” pushup with a gun up to his head, yet we have no problem calling him “strong.” What’s the deal with that? By the same token, I’ve had people look at me and based on my musculature, tell me I’m “strong as a G-D ox” and I have no need for further weight training. At the time, I was training to break 1:20 for the half-marathon, and I could barely run 7 miles without having to stop and stretch out my lower back due to core instability issues. I would posit that at that given point, I was “all show, no go,” as one of my former troops put it. It means I may have looked pretty, but it wasn’t doing much for me.

Are you starting to understand what I’m getting at here? The baseline, our approach and mindset on strength is all jacked up. It’s informed by a lifetime of crappy cultural inputs (movie stars with chiseled bods who can sprint for miles without breaking a sweat), cultish phenomenon (Crossfit as religion, anyone?),  and poor instruction. Finally, the truth is that there isn’t a big push within the sport to figure out the strength side. As I’ve done some research over the past couple of weeks, I’ve found out there is a reasonable amount of academic literature covering the effects of strength on endurance. But in twenty years of running and reading everything about running, I’ve never seen one of the studies I’ve been reading mentioned in an article, or even a book. What I find in all the training books are blips on “cross-training” that generally reflect strength training methods that went out of vogue sometime during the height of the Cold War.

So, it’s clear our old approaches to strength are generally broke. If strength is not a state of appearance or an indication of fitness, moving forward, here’s how we need to think of strength to effectively integrate it into endurance-related activities:

1) Strength is first and foremost a state of conditioning which enables endurance training to occur while minimizing, controlling, or eliminating injury. Look, the fact is that even 50 years ago, Americans were far less sedentary. People generally had far more active lifestyles and weren’t tied to cubicle and computer. They grew up chucking hay bales, working as mechanics, and *pushing* their lawnmowers (gasp!). They did things outside of running that kept them healthy as runners. These days, we’re what Mobility WOD refers to as “office athletes.” And of course, the sloppiness that goes along with hunching over a keyboard all day bleeds over into running. So, unless you’re reading this from somewhere in eastern Africa, chances are really good you should be doing strength to keep you running healthy.

2) Strength is the ability to generate force, enabled by mobility, over a period of time that matches your pursuit. Whether you run 5ks, ultras, surf epic sessions in Southern California for hours on end, or run big backcountry lines in Alaska; you need to be able to generate the force required to complete those activities successfully in the time allotted. It’s all about fueling your passion, to borrow some sorry corporate jingo. Strength is not the end, rather the means to the end. And it’s not about what someone else tells you should be able to do. If I have to hear one more Crossfitter talk trash about an elite marathoner’s alleged lack of overhead squat capability, I’m going to slap someone with their compression sleeves.

Subjective enough for you?

I hope so, because if it seems a bit vague, then you’re beginning to deconstruct a traditional mindset on strength and search for a new paradigm. Look: strength and endurance are incredibly complex issues, and we’re really just going to scratch the surface with this series. But I think in treating complexity, falling back on general principles gives us the ability to adapt as we learn more, and that is ideal in the face of uncertainty. Soooo, moving forward, here’s what you can expect. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to cover methodologies, sport-specific approaches, and what I’ve been up to so you can learn from my mistakes and occasional success. Thanks to Kev, Eric, and Megs for leaving some comments requesting some topic coverage – guys, I hope I answer your questions. But feel free to call me out!