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Good morning! I didn’t have any time to write a thoughtful intro this week. Let’s get right to it.

Quick Splits

— Let’s all take a few minutes and re-watch the men’s 1500m final, shall we? At risk of sounding like a total homer, which I am, pay particular attention to Cole Hocker and Yared Nuguse in the last lap of the race. Hocker, who didn’t go with the white hot pace early on, really began moving up with about 300 meters to go. In the span of a hundred meters, he went from fifth to third, putting himself in medal contention with 200 left to run. Coming into the final straightaway, Hocker was stuck behind Jakob Ingebrigtsen on the rail, while Josh Kerr of Great Britain was positioned perfectly on the Norwegian’s right shoulder in lane two. Hocker tried to muscle his way through on the inside but the reigning Olympic champion was having none of it. But rather than panic and try to go around on the other side, which many athletes would have done in the heat of that moment, Hocker showed incredible poise and just stayed put for a few more strides. That’s the move that won him the race. He knew that he had another gear in his back pocket and trusted that daylight would eventually open up, which it did a few meters later as Ingebrigtsen focused his attention on Kerr, who was going by on the Norwegian’s right. Hocker slid through on the inside at just the perfect time, leaving Kerr no chance to respond before the line. Meanwhile, two lanes to his right, Nuguse was charging hard past a fading Ingebrigtsen to claim bronze, demonstrating why you always run hard through the tape. Hocker won in an Olympic record 3:27.65, Kerr was second in 3:27.79, and Nuguse was third in 3:27.80. It was the fastest, closest, and most exciting Olympic 1500 in history, hands down. (That said, and as much as I love the 15/mile, I think I still stand by last week’s assertion that the men’s 10,000 was the event of the meet. Don’t @ me.)

+ As I watched Hocker rally past Ingebrigtsen and Kerr in the final meters the first thought I had was something my college coach, Karen Boen, began drilling into my head 24 years ago: From strength comes speed. What she meant by that was it doesn’t matter how fast you are if you’re not strong enough to maintain that speed and/or tap into it when you need it most. Hocker has long been known for having a great finish, but until this past season he was usually a little too far back when the kicking started in a fast race. I’ve read and listened to a few interviews with him in recent months where he explained how running under 13 minutes for 5000m this season—which he did back in May, clocking 12:58—was important to him even though the 1500m was still his main event. Why? He knew that taking home an Olympic medal wasn’t a matter of needing to harvest even more speed—he recognized that he was lacking the aerobic strength necessary to use the lethal speed he already possessed to its fullest potential.

— I swear that Oliver Burkeman excavates questions from my brain and then writes newsletters that answer them better than I ever could. His latest is one that I’ve been wrestling with for a while: What does it mean to be done for the day? As someone who’s self-employed, there’s always something I could/should/need to do. The trouble is getting comfortable with the feeling that it’s OK to have stuff hanging over my head. The trick is not letting my eyes get bigger than my stomach, so to speak. “Asking this question daily is a training in patience, because when you start getting serious about what you can reasonably expect from yourself, it’ll be painful how short the list is,” he writes. “For the first few days, you’ll probably fail to finish even that list! And so the days go by, and your lists get even shorter, until eventually you find yourself getting through them, and permitting yourself the feeling of doneness.”

— Along these lines, last week my buddy Brendan Leonard wrote about learning to rest, a problem familiar to endurance athletes, Americans, and other pushers who don’t have much of an off-switch. “So many things I like to do—running mountain ultramarathons, climbing mountains, long hikes and bike rides—require learning how to push through pain, fatigue, and common sense,” he writes. “So I’m pretty used to the line of thinking that discomfort is actually just a side effect of meaningful experiences. Except when it’s not.”

+ Leonard’s piece reminded me of a line from John Moreland’s song, “The Future is Coming Fast,” in which he writes and sings: “But we don't breathe, and we don't rest. We just choose the lie that feels the best.”

— Both Olympic marathon races in Paris went faster than most everyone predicted, with Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia winning the men’s race in an Olympic record of 2:06:26, and Siffan Hasan of the Netherlands topping the women’s field in 2:22:55. The course, which featured 1400 feet of elevation gain and grades of 4 to 14 percent, was billed as a torture test. “It’s really hard to imagine how extreme the course is without running it,” remarked Dathan Ritzenhein, coach of bronze medalist Hellen Obiri, before the race. “The course is unlike any major marathon these athletes have ever run.” So why did it run quicker than anticipated? Cutthroat competition will slice a course wide open, even untested ones with a hefty serving of hills packed into the middle of it. Only 34 seconds separated first and third in the men’s race, a mere 15 in the women’s contest. When place matters more than pace, all kinds of unexpected things can happen. (Which is what makes the Olympics in general so exciting!)

— One of the best songs ever written is “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, which she released in 1983. It’s been covered by numerous artists over the past four-plus decades and I’ve shared a few of my favorite renditions in previous issues of this newsletter. Well, I’ve got one more to add to the pile, and it might take the cake, which is saying a lot. I discovered this version from Eva Cassidy over the weekend while going down a totally unrelated rabbit hole and I can’t stop listening to it. Cassidy, who was an up-and-coming artist in the mid-90s, passed away from cancer in 1996 at the age of 33. Recorded on January 3 of that year, 10 months before her death, this performance stands out for its simplicity (it’s just Cassidy, her guitar, and a mic), its fullness, and its sheer artistry. What a talent, gone far too soon.

— From the archives (Issue 353, 2 years ago this week): The writer Anne Helen Peterson and I have very different athletic backgrounds and goals, but as a fellow athlete in his early 40s I found myself nodding my head at nearly every part of this essay about the quiet glory of aging into athleticism. “How is it, at age 41, that I feel like my body can do more — and that I can take more joy in it — than ever before?” she wonders. “I’m not faster, but I’m more resilient. I’m not doing as many overall miles, but I feel stronger. I love it more, and more feels possible….Exercise just generally no longer feels punitive or disciplinary. Instead, I feel something far more akin to curiosity.” I share similar sentiments about my own pursuit of competitive running these days. At the age of 40 I’m enjoying it more than ever before. This is one of the great mysteries of my life right now and it’s a fun thing to contemplate. I’m not running as fast, or nearly as much, as I did five, ten, or fifteen years ago, but I’m more curious than ever to see what’s possible given the amount of time and effort I’m willing to put into it. Why? I don’t know for sure but I suspect it has something to do with being able to let go of a set of expectations I’d locked myself into long ago, i.e., that in order to be considered worthy as a runner I needed to run this time or finish in that place or run a certain amount of miles per week. Instead of being driven by curiosity, I was fueled by a need to prove something: to myself, or other people, or some mysterious running god in the sky that kept an eye on my training log, I don’t know. It only took me nearly 25 years to learn that pursuing the sport from a place of possibility, and not necessity, is how you begin to age well in it.

— A big thank you to my partners at Tracksmith for supporting my work in August (and throughout 2024). Today marks the start of the brand’s annual Silver Medal Sale, which runs until August 18 on tracksmith.com. It features select colorways and products at a discounted price, so stock up while quantities last. I got a sneak peek at some of the products on offer and one in particular that I want to call out is the Allston Half Tight. If you’ve seen any race photo of me in the past three years these are what I’m wearing, and for good reason: they’re the best fitting half tight you can buy, period. They’re the perfect length, don’t ride up, compress perfectly, feature plenty of pockets, and look great. Lined or unlined, you can’t go wrong. There’s a lot of other great stuff in there as well, so have a look when the sale goes live on the homepage later today and load up your cart. (And if you use the code MarioGIVE at checkout, you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.)

Workout of the Week: The 4-2

This effort-based workout is a great early to mid-season session when you’re still fortifying your fitness foundation and neither pace nor specificity are key concerns. Here are the details.

The bottom line.

“In Zen they say: If something is boring for two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

—John Cage, composer and artist, talking about effective training for distance runners, most likely. (In all seriousness, Cage captures the tediousness, or “drudgery,” that is part and parcel with putting in the miles—do it for long enough, however, as Cage suggests, and eventually it’s not boring anymore. Or, as I like to say, distance running is an “acquired taste.”)

That's it for Issue 457. If you’d like to support the shakeout, please forward this email to someone who might enjoy it or post the web link in a high traffic area of the internet where others can check it out. (And if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time and want to receive it for yourself first thing every Tuesday morning, you can subscribe right here.)

Thanks for reading,

Mario

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