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Marathoning A to Z
Hal Higdon's latest book is due out April 2002. Inspired by the many answers Hal has provided to participants in his Virtual Training, this book offers 500 short tips that will motivate you to become a better runner. The following excerpt is from "E is for Exercise." See also: E is for Exercise.
Introduction
When we hadn't heard from her in nearly two weeks, Richie wondered, "Where is Anne?" He joked that she might be off somewhere feeding the squirrels. Hydee suggested that Anne (who worked as a fitness instructor for a Detroit YMCA) might be at a health conference learning new exercises to teach us. I kiddingly said that she could be attending a Polish wedding in Hamtramck, and hinted that if we hadn't heard from Anne within a week, we would send out a search party. "I miss her advice," admitted Erika.
When we learned where Anne had been, we all were somewhat chagrined. Within a day of our inquiries, Anne surfaced and informed us that she had undergone emergency surgery. This resulted in a flood of condolence messages directed to the recuperating Anne. "I opened my email box and 45 greetings popped up," she later told me. We were all Anne's concerned neighbors, but only in cyberspace. Richie lives in Atlanta; Hydee in Vienna, Austria; Erika in Fair Haven, New Jersey. I manage their back-and-forth email messages from my home in Long Beach, Indiana. Among my various writing duties, I host a Virtual Training forum on the Internet. We were all members of "Hal Higdon's V-Team" and had V-shirts and singlets to prove it. Sponsored by The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon, Virtual Training has an unpaid membership of perhaps 10,000 runners, some of them training for that marathon, some for others. On a given day, I might field 20 or 30 messages: questions concerning training or injuries or where to find a good Italian restaurant the night before the race.
I now enjoy dispensing advice on the Internet as much as writing articles for Runner's World, or books such as Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide. Yet there's a certain impermanence to cyberwriting. Because of the sheer volume of V-Team messages, comments by myself and others move rapidly down and off the computer screen to unseen archival regions. Yes, you can do a "search" and read what I've written about various injuries or how fast and far to do your long runs, but in one recent six-month period, I posted 2,115 comments or answers! That was out of total of 18,795 postings on Virtual Training. Obviously, we are a garrulous bunch.
Marathoning A to Z is an attempt to gather more than 500 of these postings (the most important and interesting ones) and put them between the covers of a book for easy access, as well as for a more permanent record. Here is a paper trail of my thoughts about running, particularly about running the marathon.
Certainly, the marathon has attained a peak of popularity in 2002 that nobody could have anticipated when I first started running the event four decades earlier. In 1959, when I ran my first marathon in Boston, only 151 started the race. There were only two or three other marathons in the United States that year and not too many more elsewhere in the world. None of those who ran Boston in 1959 was female, because at the time women actually were prohibited from running races more than a few miles long. By 1980, however, running had experienced a boom with nearly 8,000 running Boston and dozens, maybe hundreds, of marathons elsewhere. At the 1996 Boston Marathon, 36,000 participated. Moving into the new millennium, fields larger than 25,000 had become routine at marathons in Chicago, New York, Honolulu, London, and Berlin. And many more of those running 26 miles were women. In 1980 the typical marathon had only 10 percent women compared with 38 percent today.
The success of Virtual Training partly reflects the success of long-distance running as an important participant sport. But it also reflects the success of technology in bringing us instant information. One attraction of my cyberspace column is that if you have a training question, you can ask it online and get a quick response. Either I or one of the other been-there-done-that V-Teamers will provide the answer you need. If you're worried whether to do your 20-miler this weekend or next, we'll tell you. If you wonder what pace to run during your mid-week "sorta-long" runs, you can find out. If you're a newcomer and don't understand the meaning of fartlek, tempo runs, interval training and carbo-loading, I've got the definition on the tip of my keyboard.
I serve as coach not only for the 10,000 or more active V-Teamers, but also for that many or more who follow the various training programs on my separate Web site: www.halhigdon.com. I suggested to a reporter before one recent Chicago Marathon that I probably trained half the runners in the field, "everyone except Khalid Khannouchi." I was being facetious, but maybe not.
Not all the tips offered in this book originated with Virtual Training. Some come from my writing in earlier books, or from articles in Runner's World and other publications. Still other tips are part of the Conventional Wisdom that exists around the sport of marathoning. When you've been running for half a century and have finished more than a hundred marathons, you do acquire a lot of information that can be--should be--passed on to upcoming generations of runners.
Writing Marathoning A to Z was the best way to accomplish this end, because regardless of the speed and convenience of cyberspace, sometimes it's faster and easier to grab a book off the shelf when you have a specific question about running. Also, not everybody has the cybertools to surf seamlessly through the massive amount of material available now on the world wide web. Gathered between the covers of this book is a lot of information on marathon running that you would be hard-pressed to find in cyberspace without a better search engine than currently exist. Did you say you had a question about Qualifying for Boston? Flip to the Q chapter and go to page 143. Want to know when to get a Massage or how to treat Blisters? You have the answer in your hands.
So here are more than 500 tips for marathoners, new and old. They do reflect the best of my writing. Before setting you free to browse at will through this alphabetized book, I must acknowledge that it would not have been possible without the help and support of my V-Team. Both directly and indirectly, they have inspired Marathoning A to Z. The marathon, it has been said, is a journey, not a destination. Please benefit from my thoughts on the experience of running 26 miles 385 yards.
To Excerpt: E is for Exercise
This is the Introduction from the book Marathoning A to Z by Hal Higdon, Copyright © 2002 by Hal Higdon, all rights reserved. Autographed copies of this book are available from Roadrunner Press, PO Box 1034, Michigan City, IN 46361-1034.