Forty-one years after my first Marathon, a lot has changed in the sport. However, as I wrote these last three posts, I began to realize how much this first marathon continues to mean to me.
Here are some of the lessons from that first marathon that I continue to think about.
1) Training partners matter
Though completing this marathon was never our intent, I was lucky to partner with a good friend - Steven Levin -- through most of the training that went into the Baltimore Marathon of 1981.
Although attending different High Schools, Steven and I became friends in the spring of 1980 and then college teammates both matriculating to Franklin & Marshall College. In June of 1981, we received a letter from our new college coach. It said the following. Over the summer try to gradually increase the amount of miles you run. By August try to get to 70 miles a week. Also try to gradually increase the pace you are completing those miles. By August try to run most of them at 6 minutes and 30 seconds a mile.
We thought that was a lot to ask for but by working together we accomplished it and more.
As I remember it, Steven and I would get together about twice a week and complete two different workouts. We would do a hard 10 mile run, and we would do an interval workout -- usually 1/2 mile intervals -- on the track. Then we filled in the gaps on our own. More on those workouts later.
The summer of 1981 was our first summer of consistently training all summer long, and we had each other to lean on and get out the door. If you have someone who expects to see you, you are so much more likely to train. At some point in the summer, I remember Steven's mom saying to us, you guys are in great shape and are going to surprise people when you get to school. In many ways, we did. Steven qualified for Nationals in Cross Country as a freshman and I made the top seven of our team for our Conference and Regional Meet.
When we got to college we made other friends who supported us even more. That fall of 1981 the most influential was a co-captain of the 1981 Cross Country team at F&M Mike McGrath. Mike was from Silver Spring, Maryland and had run both the Maryland Marathon and the Boston Marathon.
In many ways Mike came from a much more serious running background than Steven and I had. Not only had he completed the Maryland and Boston Marathons, he had transferred from the University of Maryland where he had been on the track and field team with world record holder Renaldo Nehemiah. His stories about running and what people did who were serious about the sport were both inspiring to me and changed my perspective on the sport.
On Marathon Day November 29th 1981, Mike (and his Dad who took the great picture of me approaching the finish line) were there to support Steven and me.
There were others too on that team. Bob Schwelm was a senior as well who became prominent in my running years post collegiately. Bob accomplished what I hoped to which was run in the Olympic Trials. He would often eat dinner with the freshman because of his vegetarian diet and share his love and experience in the sports. Although our 1981 cross country team did not accomplish all the competitive goals we wanted to, it was a diverse group who came together and shared their love of the sport and are all doing well in their lives today.
Here's a picture of that team. We had agreed not to smile for the picture, but this was definitely a fun group.
When people ask me today for marathon training advice the first thing I say is find a group to train with. The social experience of training together is the most influential aspect of training in my opinion.
2) Running Long and Hard Matters
This is a lesson that has taken me a while to reconcile. However, the reason I believe I ran as well as I did in the 1981 Baltimore Marathon is that at least once a week from June through November I ran long and hard once a week. At first it was because our coach had told us that by August we should be running around 6:30 per mile pace on our runs. But then it was because Steven and I made a goal over the summer to run a particular 10 mile course in Baltimore under 60 minutes.
Our course started at my house and headed north out of the city turning around at Baltimore's Loyola Academy campus on Charles St. Its a steady climb the whole way and on the way back there is a 3/4 mile climb up Charles street between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 miles. Then its downhill for the last three miles. In many ways it was very similar to the topography of the Baltimore Marathon course. Our goal that summer was to run it in under 60 minutes so sub 6 minute per mile pace.
We would typically use the first 5 miles as a warm-up and then see how fast we could bring it home, trying to negative split. (A negative split means to run the second half a run faster than the first half.) Other than feeling good about our effort when we did this hard 10 mile run, there was no consideration why we did it or how it was fitting into an overall plan. It was just can we complete this challenging run in under 60 minutes.
Finally one day in August of 1981, we broke 60 minutes for 10 miles in training on our Charles St. course. After many weeks of trying to do this, I remember charging together down the last 1/2 mile to my driveway thinking wow we are going to do it!
Once we got to college, our coach had said we would be on our own on Sundays to train but we should try to fit in a 10 mile run. Steven and I committed to each other that we would meet each Sunday morning and continue this pattern of getting a hard 10 mile run in.
A recommended read for anyone who is interested in the benefit of the long hard run is Running the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed. It's a great read and I think captures the benefit of how to run long and hard. I so prefer this term of Running the Edge rather than the pseudo-sports-science that has become the TEMPO Run today.
One frustration for me is I did not realize the benefit of Long and Hard Runs until a number of years later when I was training post-collegiately in Philadelphia. Bob Schwelm included me in a Sunday run group there that ran long and hard and that led me to my next breakthrough of 2:26.
3) Learn to Run By Feel
I ran the 1981 Baltimore Marathon without a watch. When I had my next breakthrough which was the Marine Corps Marathon of 1988, I also ran without a watch. Learning to trust the wisdom of your body is hard, and I actually think getting more challenging with the number of coaches who talk about zone training or are very prescriptive about paces. There is nothing more miserable than not hitting your paces in a workout. Late in my competitive running life, Jim Spivey coached me and introduced me to words instead of paces for the effort you want to create. The origin of the these words comes from the Hungarian Coach Mihaly Igloi. There was "fresh, good, very fresh, hard" which all described a feeling you wanted to create. In so many ways the words took the pressure for me off of a workout and every workout was much more successful as I tried to fulfill the prescribed effort rather than a pace that could be influenced by uncontrollable variables. One of my challenges today as a coach is to get the most dedicated athletes I coach to stop watching YouTube videos of coaches telling them about some training formula or magic pace they need to hit to be good but rather to trust themselves and their bodies. If you feel like you worked hard, you did.
4) Mileage is Important but it has diminishing returns
To be good at the marathon, you have to run a lot of miles. For my first Marathon I peaked out at 70 miles a week. I experimented in years to follow with longer mileage weeks. However, those longer weeks often compromised my ability to do the harder runs of the week. I was just too tired. My inconsistency in racing in later years I believe now was due to too much emphasis on getting my mileage up instead of focusing on the key workouts I need to consistently get in. I prefer to talk about frequency and consistency of training now rather than mileage. Some of the best distance runners in the United States come from Brigham Young University. Because of Mormon beliefs they never train on Sunday. But I am sure their best runners are getting 10-12 workouts in every week -- spread over six training days. My college coach did not believe we should go over 70 miles a week of training. He thought that training beyond that was just unnecessary but he also believed that running would too dominate our lives if we were running more than that. I disagreed with him when I was younger but now have more respect for the wisdom of that point of view today.
5) Do Some Interval Training & Vary the Surface
The summer of 1981, Steven Levin and I went to the track once a week and did 4 x 1/2 mile hard. We thought that was a lot of speed work. Later that fall in college, we did 5 x Mile, 10 x 1/2 mile and 20 x 1/4 mile. Almost all of the Interval Work we did in the Fall of 1981 was on grass. The 20 x 1/4 mile was done on a cinder track. I am not sure if the volume of interval work we did had a big impact on my performance in the marathon. However, I think the consistency of it did and I think going from training on soft surfaces to racing on the roads made a difference. After training for months on soft surfaces and then racing on the roads, your foot strike seems so much more effective on the roads.
6) Consistency of Training over all other aspects.
For at least 24 weeks (from early June to end of November 1981) I rarely took a day off from running. That was the most consistent training of my life to that date. There are a lot of marathon preparation plans out there but nothing beats 24 weeks of consistent running. You can fill in the details of your training formula from there.
I started these posts last week to write up my marathon experience. There's a lot more I can tell as I learned a lot more in the next few years. Others helped and guided me including the previously mentioned Bob Schwelm and Jim Spivey as well as a local High School coach in the Lancaster PA area Art Harrington. I may get back to writing more about their influences on me at a later time.
As I pledged to my friend Steven Levin, I did not run a marathon again after November 1981 until November 1986. I was mostly focused on college running and of course as my college coach hoped -- academics. I also had a chronic injury that shortened my college running seasons in 1984 and 1985.
That next experience with the Marathon in 1986 was a comeback effort and a bit of a failure as compared to my 1981 run. But eventually by 1988 I made a break through.
Like lots of athletes, I wish I knew then what I know now. But it's what you learn and the people you meet along the way that makes the journey the best part of the story. Thanks for reading my journey. I hope it will help someone run fast in the future.
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