Author Archives: robinandrew0804

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About robinandrew0804

Robin Andrew is my pen name; I’m a runner, a writer, and a parent, from a small town in central Colorado. As a youngster, my biggest athletic aspiration was to not be the last person picked when teams were chosen for games. Since taking up running for stress relief (right about the time our kids entered their teen years - go figure) and fun, I’ve run fifteen marathons and dozens of other events, on both pavement and trails. This site is my way of sharing the joy and sense of accomplishment I’ve found in simply putting feet into motion, plus a few other bits and pieces of what I find interesting and worth caring about.

Curioser and Curioser

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When I was taught science, we learned there was a clear divide between physical forms – defined by genes, varied by combination and mutation, passed down through procreation – and knowledge – which could only be passed from one living creature to another through behavior, communication and living memory; not encoded in a genome.

In a recent Nat Geo (11/14) I came across the fact that Monarch butterflies migrate on an interval longer than their life span, so the individuals who make one migration are the great-grandchildren of those who made the last.  So how do those youngsters know to migrate, if none of the individuals present when it’s time to start were alive to experience and remember the previous migration?

It’s not too difficult to imagine genetic traits that would pre-dispose butterflies to travel in groups, to flee cold weather, maybe even to sense that traveling south is generally the way to do so. But to cause them to all fly at virtually the same time every year, on virtually the same routes from year to year, purely through some combination of physical traits?  And even if those pre-dispositions are passed from one generation to the other, wouldn’t we expect the behavior to be eroded by those generations that never get to experience it – “Oh yeah, Grandpa’s always talking about his famous migration. He’s so full of pollen….” (Unless, of course, butterfly adolescents are much wiser than human ones…)

Or do butterflies have the intelligence to understand and recall their own migration, communicate it to their offspring – and those to theirs and those to theirs – and then to act on that knowledge passed down to them; even though they themselves have no experience with the act of migration, or the conditions that make it the most likely path for survival? Not exactly the level of cognition we generally attribute to the brain of an insect.

In the same issue, Neil deGrasse Tyson is quoted as to how the ember of curiosity seems nearly extinguished in some adults he meets, while in others it barely burns, and I wonder – how could anyone not be curious when confronted with these fluttering Magellans.

“Everything you think you know is wrong,” they say, and what fun it is to think about what might be right!

 

No More Weekly Long Runs!

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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!

Kick Up Your Heels

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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!

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorris

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A work which grows, as one progresses through it, from anecdote, to story, to fable.  Dorris effectively manipulates the reader by telling first the tale of the youngest of three women – Rayona – inviting us to form opinions (or judgments, given the poor nature of some of her choices) of her character and actions.  He then proceeds to tell first her mother’s – and then her mother’s – stories, overlapping, braiding and, in the process, shattering our neat conceptions about what is good or bad, and who is right or wrong, victim or abuser.

Dorris’ prose is generally straightforward, allowing objects, events and his characters’ thoughts to tell the story.  Only occasionally does it rise to more florid description, but it is the detail and personalities which make the story seem so real, the women totally convincing even when their actions are not ones with which many readers may sympathize.  That, and the author’s even-handed telling, which seems to reflect the moral conviction with which his bio suggests he lived his too-short life.

A work which has its own objectives, neither the quick entertainment of the popular novel, nor the showy intellectualism of the academic, but an honest desire to tell of people too easily forgotten, and thru them reveal a bit of basic human truth.

West With the Night, Beryl Markham

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It is delightful to read of a woman having such adventures in the early 20 th century without apparent trace of gender resistance or romantic overlay.  Perhaps it is the wildness of Africa that allows this, or perhaps self-editing, but either way, Beryl Markham’s memoir  furnishes a shining example of the non-universality of our commonly held stereotypes.

As a writer, Markham tends to the florid, as is typical of her era.  Still, she can kindle excitement at a chase, and when it comes to her own actions, she leans to dryness and understatement.  One actually wonders if a biographer might expose even more drama in this material than does the subject herself.  The Africa of which she tells has plenty of inequality, though the racism which underlies it seems, in what is perhaps a Colonialist’s view, genteel and respectful.  Of course there is plenty of exploitation going on beyond the horizon, setting the stage for later, less sanguine, interactions.

An enjoyable and eye-opening artifact of time and place, as well as a glimpse of an admirably independent spirit.

Any Human Heart, William Boyd

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What a Find!

I picked this up at the informal lending-library outside a local liquor store, just on the strength of the back-cover blurb, and it turns out to be one of my most satisfying reads in years. A sort of super-literate anglophile Forrest Gump, this is neither more nor less than the story of one life, well-lived and equally well-told.

While the central conceit – a bundling up of episodes & intermittent journals – at first sounds limiting, it actually frees the author to tell only the parts of Logan Mountstuart’s life he chooses, and to insert ‘editorial’ exposition where needed to bridge the gaps of time or detail. At the same time, the first person voice of a protagonist who is credibly both educated and introspective gives access to thoughts and emotions without seeming fake or forced. The upshot is that this reader experienced Logan’s ups and downs quite personally, especially the decades-later mourning of his second wife and daughter, random victims of the London Blitz.

In my book, Boyd is a writer to seek out, up there with Ann Patchett and Michael Cunningham – smart, generous, entertaining and meaningful.

Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer

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Journalism at its best, as Krakauer rescues a worthy role model from the politically-motivated banality to which the mass media reduced him.  His telling makes one feel the loss or Pat Tillman – and the Defense Department’s subsequent cover-up of the fact that it was friendly fire that killed him – as a visceral personal tragedy.  His extensive attributions and quotations of the perpetrators’ self-justification convincingly assure that this is not a hatchet job.  What it is,  is one more example of the random wastage of a nation’s greatest resource, with no point or benefit in the instance, whatever one’s opinion of the validity of the cause which has been proclaimed.

Especially poignant is Krakauer’s treatment of the moment of Tillman’s death – a passage which cannot be read without pausing for tears and an acknowledgment of the ubiquity of death and injustice.  Equally moving is the plight of Marie Tillman, Pat’s widow, who seems consigned to live on, knowing how unlikely it is she can ever match the heights of love and joy she shared with Pat.

Painfully-effective storytelling, and a service to both the protagonists and the wider community.