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Good morning! I got a little wordy this week. Let’s get right to it.

Quick Splits

— Hats off to Conner Mantz and Clayton Young, not only on their 8th and 9th place finishes, respectively, at the recent Olympic Marathon in Paris, but for being refreshingly open about sharing so much of their journeys with their followers and fans of the sport in general. I’ve linked to Clayton’s fantastic YouTube series in a previous issue, but if you missed it, here’s the playlist with all 13 episodes to date. They’re so well produced and provide an incredibly transparent inside look into what he and Conner’s buildup to the Games looked like: the workouts, the behind-the-scenes, the in-between moments, all of it. Both of these guys also shared all of their training (so far as I can tell, anyway) to Strava—Conner’s here, Clayton’s here—and you can pick it all apart down to the second and read some of their reflections afterward, which is super insightful. If that’s too much to sift through, however, someone on Reddit did the lord’s work and transcribed Young’s entire 16-week block, which you can check out right here. On one hand, most people won’t want to try this at home—120-mile weeks with big workouts for months on end aren’t for everyone—but on the other, there are a few things to learn from the approach of coach Ed Eyestone, who has guided both Young and Mantz since their BYU days: 1. Don’t rush. Young and Mantz run a lot, and they put in some big workouts, but Eyestone has gradually built up their ability to handle that kind of workload over the course of many years. 2. To borrow a line from Sara Hall, which I first shared in Issue 144 of this newsletter: “What you can do for a workout and what you can do for a workout on tired legs are two different things. That distinction is everything when it comes to #marathontraining.” Young and Mantz do a lot of workouts on tired legs—and a lot of repeats within workouts on tired legs, e.g., a tempo run followed by some faster mile repeats, which improves their ability to maintain goal pace and close hard at the end of the race. 3. Don’t neglect different speeds. Young and Mantz run a fair amount of miles at marathon pace, as you’d expect, as well as a lot of easy miles to round out the overall volume, but over the course of 16 weeks of training for Paris they also touched 5K pace, 10K pace, and half-marathon pace regularly throughout the block. 4. Easy runs are easy! If they’re not running something at a prescribed pace, many of Young and Mantz’s “just running” miles are 90 seconds to 2 minutes per mile slower than marathon race pace. This is something I can’t hammer home enough to the amateur age-group athlete: if you are running 30 to 60 seconds a mile slower than your marathon pace, it might (and should, in most cases) feel easy, but that is not easy running! 5. These dudes are strong! No, they’re not big guys, but Mantz and Young are sturdy, which allows them to handle the running they do week in and week out. I can’t find the details of their strength routines online, but you can watch Young in the weight room throughout the docuseries.

— Like this guy, I also hated all the A.I. ads during the Olympics, and the ones that had anything to remotely do with running—the father asking Google’s Gemini A.I. to write a letter to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, or the woman in the Meta ad asking the A.I. bot to design her a training program—really got under my skin. And no, it’s not because I’m worried that A.I. is going to take my job as a writer or coach, it’s because I’m scared shitless that artificial intelligence is going to erode humanity’s actual intelligence to the point where we don’t actually know how to do anything for ourselves, e.g., a young girl writing a sincere letter to her hero, or a coach actually thinking through why they’re putting a training program together a certain way. Now, I’m not a technophobe by any stretch, and there are certainly advantageous use cases for some forms of A.I., but I see so many people not using their brains to actually learn how to do shit or understand how and why things work the way they do, and that’s going to be bad news on a number of levels if we’re not careful. (On the flipside, I also believe opportunities will always exist, if not open up more, for folks who are really paying attention, care deeply about developing an understanding and cultivating meaning, and generally aren’t lazy or trying to cut corners.) OK, end mini rant.

— Kenenisa Bekele and I are the same age (42), and while I’m not as grumpy as he seems to be about the effects of new technologies like supershoes and pacing lights on running performance, he and his co-authors make some valid points in this peer-reviewed editorial that was published a few months ago. The short of it is that these technologies have pushed performances forward “well beyond any reasonable evolutionary step.” And while they’re not wrong, at the same time, what do you do? Banning supershoes, doing away with pacing lights, and/or not trying to make tracks faster isn’t the answer, and would only kill interest in the sport. (At all levels, I believe.) Whether it’s in sport or some other situation, when something is relatively new and unfamiliar, there’s always going to be resistance. As ethicist Thomas Murray told Alex Hutchinson for Outside, the greatest potential for unfairness (and arguments, amongst other things, I’d add) exists during periods of transition. Eventually, however, as is becoming the case with supershoes today, what was once new and unfamiliar starts to become relatively standard. Expectations get reset and over time everyone adapts to the new normal. Of course, it’s important, as Hutchinson notes, that when new innovations come along they’re relatively accessible to everyone involved, which is not exactly the easiest circle to square. (Never has been, never will be.) But when it comes to putting things like records on the track and roads into context, while I understand Bekele’s frustrations—hey, I too wish I had supershoes in the early 2000s!—I also think this is part of what makes it fun to be a fan: speculating what Roger Bannister could have run for a mile with superspikes and pacing lights on a superfast Mondo track; wondering how fast Bill Rodgers could have run at Boston in a pair of supershoes; arguing about whether or not Jakob Ingebrigtsen would have been anywhere near Hicham El Guerrouj had they raced 20 years ago.

— My partners at Final Surge recently released an HRV & Morning Readiness feature as part of their Athlete Premium subscription and after testing it for a few weeks, I am super impressed. Here’s how it works: First thing every morning you place your finger over your phone’s camera for about a minute and the Final Surge app determines your HRV (Heart Rate Variability), resting heart rate, and gives you a Readiness Score. It’s super easy to use and I’ve found it to be incredibly accurate. This feature has helped me make better decisions about my training on a particular day and I’m going to be rolling it out soon to the athletes I coach. There’s more info on it here, including how you can take advantage of a 7-day free trial on Athlete Premium. (And coaches: Head over to finalsurge.com and take advantage of a free 14-day coaching trial today. Use the code MORNINGSHAKEOUT when you check out to take 10% off your first purchase. Any questions? Just reply to this email and send ’em my way!)

— I hope this makes other fans of Sublime as happy as it made me: Jakob Nowell, the 29-year-old son of Bradley Nowell, founding guitarist and vocalist of Sublime who died of a heroin overdose in 1996 at the age of 28, performing “Santeria” and “What I Got” with his old man’s old band on a recent episode of The Howard Stern Show. As soon as Jakob started singing it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up straight. It’s uncanny how much he sounds like his dad while still putting so much of himself into each song. I was wondering how weird/hard/cathartic it must have been for Jakob to fill the role of a man he never really got to know, so I went down a rabbit hole. As you might expect, it was “emotionally complicated” for Jakob, as well as his bandmates Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson, a.k.a. his dad’s best friends. “I think stepping into this role has given me a lot of closure,” he told People. “The story feels complete.”

— From the archives (Issue 249, 4 years ago this week): This article about why success won’t make you happy isn’t about running specifically, but many of the points made in it certainly apply. Embracing a pursuit for the pursuit itself, not for where it may lead you or what it might bring you, is something I work with my athletes on all the time and remind myself of often. And defining—and continually redefining—our relationship to success in different areas of our lives is an important exercise to undertake if the pursuit of success, however you might define it, comes at the expense of happiness and satisfaction. “Many of them had made the success addict’s choice of specialness over happiness,” Arthur C. Brooks writes in The Atlantic. “They (and sometimes I) would put off ordinary delights of relaxation and time with loved ones until after this project, or that promotion, when finally it would be time to rest. But, of course, that day never seemed to arrive.”

— A big thank you to my partners at Tracksmith for supporting my work in August (and throughout 2024). Ninety-nine percent of the time when I’m running (heck, even when I’m not), I’ve got a hat on my head. It’s become something of a signature look, though style is far from my forte. I just like having my head covered, and, when I’m running, a hat helps keep the sun and sweat out of my eyes. My running hats are all pretty lightweight and breathable, minimally designed, and, more often than not, there’s some kind of story behind the one I’m wearing, e,g., a race I ran, a cause I support, or a brand I feel connected to. So, imagine my excitement when Tracksmith released the Wottle Cord Hat a little over a week ago. It pays homage to Dave Wottle, who wore a similar hat when he won gold in the 800 meters at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. (Learn more about Wottle and the inspiration behind the hat here.) I got mine last week and wore it right away. Like Wottle said about wearing his iconic hat en route to 800m gold, “I didn’t even know I had it on.” (If you buy the Wottle Cord Hat or anything else on tracksmith.com, use the code MarioGIVE at checkout for 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 Mixed Bag

Variety, it’s said, is the spice of life. It can also be the key to spicing up some of the same old workouts you do week in and week out. Can’t decide between hill repeats, a tempo run, or an interval session? Try rolling them all into one workout! I call this cover-all-your-bases butt-kicker “The Mixed Bag” and it will help to stimulate fitness gains that you didn’t even realize were stuck in stagnation. Here are the details.

The bottom line.

"Many athletes want to test their fitness in training during peak seasons. We however have a different approach. We think of training as if we are farmers, and what we are harvesting are carrots. Many athletes want to pull the carrot out of the ground early to see what they have made, but in reality, once you test it, you can never put it back in. We won't pull the carrot out of the ground until race day, but trust that our preparation and experience will give us the best odds of success."

—Jakob Ingebrigtsen in this cool deep data dive into his gold medal performance in the 5000m at the Olympic Games in Paris.

That’s it for Issue 458. If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to a friend (or five!) and encourage them to subscribe at this link so that it lands in their inbox next Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Mario

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