Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  CALL 911 FOR ALL MEDICAL EMERGENCIES

  That’s for the subject’s benefit should something bad happen during his running test.

  A couple of posters displaying guidelines for rating perceived effort are also taped to the walls. Most of the test subjects Steve works with are very familiar with the Borg scale. Steve’s subjects either know coming in or quickly learn that the test they are about to start will not end until they rate their effort as very, very hard.

  VERY, VERY LIGHT

  6

  7

  8

  VERY LIGHT

  9

  10

  11

  FAIRLY LIGHT

  12

  13

  14

  SOMEWHAT HARD

  15

  16

  17

  VERY HARD

  18

  19

  VERY, VERY HARD

  20

  Not everyone who comes to Room 248 to run is intimidated. One day, during a period when Steve was testing Eastern Michigan’s current crop of cross-country runners, a tall, bony kid walked into the lab munching on a giant chicken burrito. Steve looked at him incredulously.

  “Are you getting tested?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re eating a burrito?”

  “Grand opening at the new Chipotle,” the young man answered. “They’re giving them away free.”

  The hungry runner was Curtis Vollmar, a local guy and one of the best performers on coach John Goodridge’s team that season. He finished his burrito and submitted to the ministrations of Steve’s assistants, who taped accelerometers to his low back and wrists and stuck a breathing mask over his face. Curtis stepped onto the treadmill and was led through the standard protocol, running at increasing speeds until he felt he could not take another step, at which point he quit, dripping sweat and gasping for air. The whole thing lasted about twenty-two minutes.

  Steve analyzed the results and was astonished. Curtis was unique in almost every measurement. His aerobic capacity, or VO2max, was pitifully small for a runner performing at his level. His oxygen consumption peaked at sixty milliliters per kilogram of body weight per minute, a value that was 25 percent lower than the numbers posted by some of his teammates whom Curtis regularly beat in races. He was also the most economical runner Steve had seen. Indeed, he had to be, to run as well as he did with such a small aerobic engine. Curtis practically floated above the treadmill, scarcely braking at all when his feet touched the belt. Moreover, the control entropy reading at the end of Curtis’s test was the lowest in the history of the protocol. To top it all off, no runner had ever continued running as long after reaching his maximal rate of oxygen consumption. Curtis survived for four and a half minutes and two speed increases after he’d completely tapped out his ability to draw more oxygen from the environment.

  “Tell me about Vollmar,” Steve requested of the young harrier’s coach at the first opportunity.

  John Goodridge rolled his eyes and smiled, as if to say, “Where do I even begin?”

  “Well, he’s not the most talented kid,” John said. “But boy, does he know how to suffer.”

  Goosebumps rose on Steve’s forearms. This was exactly what the test had told him.

  John explained to Steve that Curtis tortured himself to stay at the front of every race and every workout. He never mailed in a run, as even the best runners sometimes do, but always turned himself inside out to compete, regardless of how much more talented those he was competing against were, or how unimportant the race or workout might be, or how tired he was from his most recent effort to hang on or die trying.

  Curtis had started running in high school. Before that, in middle school, he’d played football. His coach sometimes made the team run as punishment for making mistakes or showing lack of effort. It was almost half a mile to the baseball field backstop and back. Curtis always finished way ahead of everyone else. It was his favorite part of football practice.

  Smart enough to realize there was another sport whose athletes did exclusively what football players did only as punishment, Curtis left his pads behind in the ninth grade and took up cross country and track. He quickly discovered that outrunning middle school football players is one thing; outrunning high school distance runners is another. Despite high expectations, Curtis failed to make varsity selection as a freshman. Two years later, however, he was the top runner on the team.

  Curtis’s remarkable improvement was fueled by a purely psychological factor: a gigantic passion to compete. He loved to test himself against other runners. He loved it so much that racing was all he ever wanted to do, and he was impatient with training. The concept of running without the intent to win made no sense to him. Running alone made even less sense. Curtis saw no reason to run except to race.

  In college, Curtis’s attitude was the same. Unlike some of the prima donnas on John Goodridge’s team, who wanted to be held out of early-season meets and who chafed against being asked to run multiple events, Curtis would have gladly raced fifty-two Saturdays a year and as many Wednesdays. But when he was on his own over the summer, his training was inconsistent, at best, and he always arrived back on campus in August in poor shape.

  Coach Goodridge, in his thirty years of coaching, had never seen a runner quite like Curtis Vollmar. It struck him as more than a little strange that Curtis wanted every run to be a race and had no interest in running aside from racing. Yet he couldn’t deny that the kid’s eccentricity seemed to serve him well, overall. Throughout his college years Curtis routinely beat runners he had no business beating in championship races, based on their respective best times. He ran above himself.

  “I think running is 90 percent mental,” Curtis once told his coach. “Lots of runners are great in training, but they can’t really race.”

  Curtis was never intimidated by other runners, no matter what they had accomplished, for the simple reason that he was utterly oblivious to others’ accomplishments. Curtis paid no attention to his sport except to do it. He just showed up at the starting line, licking the burrito grease off his fingers, and when the gun fired, he went all out.

  Some runners are running geeks. They frequent running websites, acquire knowledge about the art and science of training, and generally spend a lot of time thinking and talking about running when they are not actually running. Others don’t. Curtis was not a running geek.

  Several months after Curtis had completed his last season of NCAA eligibility at Eastern Michigan, he appeared unexpectedly at his former coach’s office.

  “I was wondering if maybe I could train with some of the guys,” he suggested.

  Goodridge was dumbstruck. He had always assumed that Curtis would be one of those runners who never ran again after completing their last relay in an Eastern Michigan singlet. But Curtis missed the competition desperately. It wasn’t running itself or being fit that he missed. If that had been the case, he could have jogged on his own. It was racing, testing his limits, that he craved. So Curtis set a goal to break four minutes in the mile (his best was 4:07) and got Goodridge’s permission to work out with some of the current university runners and other young alumni.

  One day, when Curtis was only a few weeks into his comeback and still regaining lost fitness, Stephen McGregor watched him perform an indoor track workout. Coach Goodridge had prescribed a tough session of 300-meter intervals on short rest periods. Curtis’s partners for the workout were steeplechasers Jordan Desilets and Corey Nowtizke, both Olympic Trials finalists, and Ethiopian Terefe Ejigu, the team’s current best runner.

  All three were more gifted than Curtis, and he knew it—and that was exactly why he’d chosen to run with them.

  The runners set off together under Goodridge’s watchful eye. The first thing that struck Steve, who had tested all four of the runners individually, was the stark individuality of their running styles. Jordan’s legs seemed to move in perfect circles, as though he were pedaling a bike
. Corey was more of a grinder, with a high back kick. Terefe ran ballistically, like a sprinter. And Curtis ran like he was inside a phone booth: quiet and compact. Studying these contrasts, Steve decided that he would not want to be the coach who had to deal with the consequences of trying to force all four men to run with the same technique.

  Around and around they went. Curtis refused to fall farther back than second position in the group of four. Yet he was the first to show obvious signs of strain, and those signs intensified steadily with each successive interval. By the halfway point of the workout, Curtis’s face was mutilated with hurt. Just watching him caused Steve to grimace empathically. Curtis never backed off, though, and finished the last interval ahead of the two near-Olympians and right behind the East African with a VO2max of 75.

  “And you say he’s always like this?” Steve asked Coach Goodridge.

  “Every time,” he said.

  IF STEVE’S RESEARCH makes an experimental case that hard running is the key to a better stride, then Curtis Vollmar is real-world Exhibit A. Another surprise finding of Steve’s research supports this notion in a different way. Steve’s accelerometer data revealed that faster runners tend to be less economical than slower runners at slower paces and more economical at faster paces. Steve reasoned that since faster runners seldom experience much fatigue at slower paces, there is little pressure for their strides to become more economical in those lower gears. They can afford to waste energy when jogging, so, without being aware of it, they do.

  This finding reminded Steve of one of the oldest mysteries in his field: the widely reported observation that the runners with the highest aerobic capacities are almost never the most economical. It’s usually the Curtis Vollmar types, the aerobically disadvantaged, who exhibit off-the-charts economy. Steve realized he could now explain this curious phenomenon. His research suggested that struggling to keep up with naturally faster runners is one of the most powerful ways to improve running economy. But, by its very nature, this method is not one that the best born runners can exploit. Runners gifted with mighty aerobic engines simply cannot experience the same physiological pressure to keep up with other runners that the Curtis Vollmars do. They never have to pay the same price for inefficiency, so their strides don’t become as efficient. They can always afford to get away with just a bit more waste, and waste in the running stride is diminished only to the degree that it must be.

  Runners with smaller aerobic engines are not always more economical, however. There are plenty of runners who are aerobically weak and uneconomical. Only the ones who “really know how to suffer”—whose brains support an especially high tolerance for the agony of endurance fatigue—are able to take advantage of the opportunity presented by more talented training partners. And that’s another talent altogether.

  The most mind-bending implication of all this science is that the repeated application of will, or mental toughness, changes the body over time. The purely psychological act of trying harder day after day transforms the purely physical patterns of brain and muscle activity that produce a running stride, in ways that save energy—and in ways that a lifetime of conscious tinkering could never duplicate.

  One month after Stephen McGregor watched Curtis Vollmar practically give his own life to an indoor track workout, Curtis beat reigning Olympic 1,500-meter silver medalist Nick Willis in an indoor half-mile race. He caught the New Zealander in a vulnerable moment, weakened from having run a mile race earlier the same evening. But Nick was still one of the best middle-distance runners in the world, not to mention a ferocious competitor. Curtis, however, had only a vague idea who the hell Nick was and went straight after him. The most talented athlete does not always win the race.

  THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER Dave Scott was known for, and was sometimes thought to be limited by, his ungainly running style. Self-critical perfectionist that he was, Dave was not oblivious to his condition.

  “Look at my form,” he said in a 2000 interview. “I’m a horrible runner. I’m terrible. I’ve got the worst form of anyone alive. I see the videotape—my feet are turned, my arms are all weird. And then you look at [some of the top triathletes] today. Their form is just beautiful. I think, What beautiful form. If God would only give me a piece of it. But the other part is, I’ve just run like a dog. And I beat them.”

  Like others in the sport, Dave assumed that the visible awkwardness of his running style was evidence of poor economy. But, as Steve’s research has shown, ugly runners are sometimes very efficient. You can’t judge that book by its cover. Steve has also shown that there is no such thing as a proper way to run, and so the parts of his stride that Dave thought were wrong probably were not wrong at all. Rather, like any athlete who acquires as much running experience and pushes as hard as he did, Dave probably found the best possible running style for his body, or something close to it.

  Dave never made any conscious effort to change his running style. But his stride changed nevertheless. When he started running, before he did his first triathlon, he noticed that his running shoes showed signs of wear at the back of the heel after he’d used them for a while. It indicated that he landed on the back of his heel when he ran. Beginners and slower runners often exhibit this biomechanical pattern, which exerts a tremendous braking effect. But Dave overcame it. Over time he started landing farther forward on the foot, and the heel wear went away.

  Dave’s running improved enormously between the time he raced his first triathlon in 1976 and the time he ran what still stands as the second-fastest marathon in Ironman history in 1989. This progress was largely the result of improvement in his movement efficiency, as his aerobic engine was already well developed when he started running. But Dave’s running economy did not improve by means of any conscious meddling with his stride. Intuitively, he must have known better than to make that mistake. Instead, Dave’s stride improved because, as he said himself, he ran like a dog.

  Although he seldom ran in groups, Dave ran hard. With his time-based games, he pushed himself to the point of discomfort, at the very least, every time he laced up his shoes, and he frequently drove himself to the point of near collapse.

  “I keep the intensity high,” Dave told one interviewer. “Even if I’m doing a longer run, I make a huge part of that run hard, if not the whole thing.”

  All great endurance athletes train extraordinarily hard. Not merely a lot, but hard. And that’s really the only thing that all great endurance athletes do. The details of their training methods are surprisingly varied, which suggests that these details are not terribly important. Dave Scott and Mark Allen understood what was important and what wasn’t.

  “The ingredients to proper training aren’t a secret, and no one has the proper recipe anyway,” Mark said early in his career.

  Many triathlon coaches and experts try to make the recipe more complicated than it really is. “Run like this.” “Keep your blood lactate level between here and here.” Stephen McGregor would tell you it’s all bullshit—or window dressing, anyway. The true keys to greatness—as the athletes themselves demonstrate on the proving grounds, and as Steve reaffirms in his lab—are contained in the baldest clichés. No pain, no gain. Effort is everything. Just do it. Run like a dog.

  Few members of triathlon’s first generation were guilty of overthinking the sport. These athletes shared a pioneer’s mind-set, which is very different from the geek’s attitude. There were plenty of geeks around in the 1980s, but they remained swimmers, cyclists, and runners. It was the more adventurous athletes who became triathletes. Having few proven methods or qualified coaches to direct their training, they leaned on gut instinct instead.

  In Mark’s view, any second spent thinking or talking about training was a minute of life wasted. Paul Huddle, who trained with Mark for several years, can count on one hand the number of technical conversations about training they ever had. Mark’s book, Mark Allen’s Total Triathlete, was a huge disappointment to fans who bought it in search of practical training informat
ion.

  “Several people have beaten me to the punch on books about training and racing techniques and theories,” Mark wrote in the preface. “Enough great information is already available on those subjects.”

  Mark’s training philosophy was anchored to a simple goal. He wanted to win races. To win the biggest races, he had to beat the best triathletes in the world. So when Mark worked out with his training partners, who happened to be the best triathletes in the world, he would measure his abilities against theirs and make subtle adjustments to his training as necessary. If he could beat those guys in the workouts that mattered most, he could win races. Mark’s training partners were often caught up in the competitive dynamics of the group, taking any opportunity to steal bragging rights from the guy who won the most races, even if he appeared uninterested in winning a particular workout. Those days revealed a subtle sophistication in Mark’s simple training method.

  If Mark trained simply, Dave trained more simply still. The goal was to get faster. So Dave timed his workouts and tried to go faster. He knew no better.