• It is a runner’s truth that the very same piece of terrain that was clearly a gentle uphill grade when you ran it heading one way, can also be an uphill climb when you run it back in the other direction, even just a few minutes later.

  Now if you were on a bike, you could always figure out the truth – just stop pedaling and see if you slow down, coast along, or accelerate.

  Digression – There are times I envy the cyclists passing me up as I run – how nice it must be to take a break now and then; set your tired legs in one spot and let yourself glide along, or keep on pedaling just enough to maintain your speed, breathing gently or chatting with a friend as the meters vanish almost by themselves.  But then I think of how hard it can be to get the body-machine back up to full power after a pause like that… As runners we have the burden of constant effort – there’s no coasting on feet – but that teaches us to seek out the ‘steady state,’ that level of exertion where inputs of nutrition and hydration are most nearly equal to the output of energy, so we can keep up that level of effort for quite a long time.   (Long is relative of course, at one stage in a runner’s development, ten or twenty minutes is a very long time; for others, it may be hours.  Whatever yardstick works for you, there is an immense satisfaction in looking back over a run and realizing, wow, I kept that up for that long? Hot Damn!).

  And if that conditioning benefit isn’t enough to shoot down my cycle-envy, the hammer falls for sure as soon as I see a rider squatting on the shoulder repairing a flat, or when I hear a mountain-biker friend explaining over coffee that both of his (very expensive) bikes are out of service with mechanical problems, and he is looking to rent one for tomorrow’s ride.

  But back to the issue – perception.  I’ve run plenty of events and training routes that start and finish at the same point and have established one firm conviction which flies in the face of Newton and Aristotle and everything we’re taught in science classes:  on any run that finishes at the same place it started – whether it’s an out-and-back, or a closed loop – there is always more uphill than downhill.

  Maybe it has to do with the mechanics of converting the expansion and contraction of muscle fibers into a back and forth movement of the legs and arms, and then converting that into a solely-forward movement of the entire body – come to think of it, put that way, it’s no surprise that flat feels like uphill, heck it’s a bit of a miracle it works at all!

  Then again, maybe some little gremlins have cranked up the jacks beneath the road, or moved the earth’s center of mass, just at the moment I switched directions…

  Personally, I’ve given up trying to understand how this can be – and endeavor instead to take it as part of the challenge, the wonder, the endless variation and complexity of the world around us; up-hill feet and down-hill feet are not created equal.

‘The Boston Marathon.’  Magical words to many runners.  Famed for attracting the world’s top performers to its historic route and spectator-jammed finish alley, it might seem strange for an avowed mid-pack-runner to talk about going to Boston, but then, the very competitiveness (and size) of the event ensures that even people who might stand out on other days will experience the BAA’s yearly celebration from somewhere in the middle of the pack.

It also helps that the qualifying times for Boston are graduated; though dauntingly-short for younger runners of each gender, they get considerably longer for us older folks, which is pretty much the only reason this MPR got to run there a couple of years ago.  That was one of the greatest thrills of my running life, and now that I’ve learned I will be going back in 2015, I’d like to share some observations about it all, from the mid-pack perspective.  Hopefully I can do justice to the experience, and maybe motivate some other MPRs to see themselves reaching for this particular brass ring.

Truth is, running Boston hardly entered my mind during the first seven years, and ten finishes, of marathoning.  I’d entered the St. George Marathon hoping for a new PR and thanks to a great fast course managed that plus a little more.  I don’t recall whether they listed ‘BQ’ on the results posted during the race, or if I found out later, but it was really only after learning I had qualified that I imagined going, and once I did, it was only more good luck that made it possible.

Boston registration happens in early September, opening first to the fastest over-qualifiers, then working down in several tiers to those who (like me) just barely made their required time.  These days, the field fills up as soon as that last tier opens, but in 2012, for whatever reason, there was still space even in the first week of October.  Thanks to the Internet, I was able to submit my registration as soon as I returned from Utah, and received a tentative notice the next day, with the formal printed Certificate of Acceptance (yes, the BAS does things up right: from the moment they verify your qualifying time, every runner – regardless of standing – is treated like a valued competitor) arriving by mail a week or two later.

Thus my number one observation: even before stepping on the plane, ‘Boston’ reminded this generally-pretty-pragmatic MPR of the value in looking beyond the expected, in having eyes and ears open for opportunity, and in being ready (and quick) to seize it when it appears.  To – in the archetypally-simple lyric of Mr. Lennon – “Imagine.”

Coming up, more about being allowed into this big-ring of the running circus.

If, like me, you read books and magazines about running, it seems just about the most universally-accepted truism of training is “THE WEEKLY LONG RUN!” to gradually stretch your time and distance.

Always the eager student, I hopped right on board that strategy – shorter workouts during the week which each focus on speed or tempo or intervals or something, then a long relatively slow run (usually on the weekend because those of us who have lives outside our running shoes only have the time then…) – and agree it works, but with an important caveat that I suspect may apply to lots of other MPRs:

A couple of years ago I decided to try for a particular time in an October marathon.  Being an MPR, I was looking at a high level of effort for quite a few hours, and so set out to follow the plans I’d read; gradually lengthening my long runs about ten percent each week, and it did work – up to a point.

But once that long run got around three hours, I found myself hitting the wall every week.  Instead of feeling my endurance build, I just found the runs getting harder and harder, and my pace in the latter part of each one dropping farther and farther.  It was painful and disheartening, as I imagined that goal time slipping out of reach.

That discouragement may be why, when family commitments made it difficult to fit a long run in one weekend, I let my commitment slide and skipped it, despite the conviction that I’d lose even more of whatever little edge I’d managed to build.  To my surprise (though maybe not yours…) when I did my next biggie at a two week interval, I found not only had I not lost the conditioning I’d worked so hard to build, but that long run felt better than any of the other recent ones.

In hindsight it’s clear what was going on: for this particular MPR, at that age and level of effort, one week was simply not sufficient time for biological recovery from an extended effort.  I had been going into each weekly run still tired and depleted from the last one, and paying the price.

From then on I began alternating weekly long runs with more moderate ones, though since I was doing a two week cycle but still living in a 52 wk. year, I further departed from what I’d read.  Instead of 10% pushes, the difference between one long run and the progressively longer one two weeks later was more like half an hour (or three miles).

So am I recommending that two week cycle for anyone else? Not really, just offering it as an example of how to use all running advice.

Read, talk, hear what the experts have to say. Then try it out – carefully and gradually, and if it doesn’t seem to work for you, try something different. (As a matter of fact, I’ve recently moved even farther from the big weekly, but more about that another time).

Make your running your own; no one is else is just like you, so your running life may not be just like anyone else’s, and that itself is actually one more of the many things I love about this sport – it can help each of us become even more our own particular (or maybe peculiar?) self.

And that is a goal worth training for!

OK then; you’ve got your body position slightly forward (so gravity pulls you to the finish), are landing feet beneath yourself (to avoid putting on the brakes), and you’ve even got your cadence nice and high. If it works for you like it does for me, your pace will increase, or your endurance get longer, or your perceived effort go down (or any combination of all that, depending on your own intensities and priorities).  But what if you’d like to improve even more?  If you can’t take mores strides in a given time (180 steps a minute is pretty much the limit, at least for this MPR), the only other way to cover more distance is to make the strides longer, right? But doesn’t that mean your feet need to extend out in front of you again?

Maybe not. The trick is to lengthen the duration of each stride behind you, not in front, and the way to do that is to picture your heels coming up a little bit closer to your butt.

I got wind of this when reading a description of some elite marathoner in a treadmill demonstration. The author – who was far more of an authority than I; which is not saying much – made all the expected noises about relaxed upper body, forward C.O.G., forefoot landing (you can’t land on your forefoot if it’s very far in front, unless you’re a prima ballerina – and willing to look like one), very high cadence, then remarked about how high his heels came up, like that was a really big deal.

What the heck, I thought. If your heels come up higher, they are travelling farther, but not in the direction you want to go, so how can that help?

The answer that make sense to my little brain goes back to that description of running as catching yourself when gravity wants to make you fall forward. With that in mind, if makes sense that a foot that comes up higher behind you is off the ground a little longer, and that means gravity has more time to pull you forward a little farther. And since gravity is an acceleration, its effect is the square of its duration, so a little time goes a long way.

They ain’t no free lunch though, so we must admit that pulling heels up higher takes some energy, and doing that while keeping cadence up requires your feet move faster (just as they would have to if your stride lengthened out front), but done right, it’s a high-efficiency technique – maximum performance increase for minimum added exertion. Way better than stretching strides out in front.

Once you’ve got the other stuff working the way it works best for you, try kicking up your heels a bit.  You may just find your pace goes up as well!