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Good morning! I’ve got a couple exciting announcements to kick things off this week:

1. The podcast is making a return! I’m going to experiment with a quarterly rotation consisting of one new episode (and one episode only) each month from now through at least the end of the year (and throughout 2025 if all goes well): The first month will be an AMA (Ask Mario Anything) and the next one of these will drop a couple weeks from now. Got a question for me about running, coaching, training, writing, media, business, or anything else you’d like my take on? Send it my way by replying to this email and I’ll try to answer it in that episode. The second month will be a “Going Long”-style interview, a.k.a., a 1-2 hour conversation with a special guest. I used to put out 40 or so of these a year from late-2017 through 2022 but the breakneck cadence of trying to grow a podcast eventually ended up crushing me. Recording and releasing a fresh one every few months feels exciting and sustainable. (n.b. You can catch up on the morning shakeout podcast’s back catalog here. There’s about 400 hours of quality conversation to tide you over in between new episodes.) Finally, the third month will be a topical conversation with my friend Simon Freeman, co-founder and editor of Like the Wind Magazine. We’ve been doing these since early 2023 and you can listen to the latest one here. Past topics have included navigating pressure, how we handle change, shifting priorities over time, defining our values, and emphasizing quality in our work, what we can learn from the pros, and a lot more. Is there something you’d like us to talk about in a future episode? Reply to this email and let me know. I’m really looking forward to getting back on the mic with a little more regularity and I hope you’ll listen in when new episodes roll out. (On that note, make sure you’re subscribed to “the morning shakeout podcast” on Apple, Spotify, or whatever your preferred app may be.)

2. Are you running Boston in April? Not quite sure how you’re going to train for it yet? I’m stoked to announce the morning shakeout racing team’s second annual 100 Days to Boston Training Program, beginning on Saturday, January 11, 2025 and culminating on race day, Monday, April 21. It is limited to 15 athletes who are registered for the 2025 race and if the feedback from this year’s program is any indication, it will fill up fast. (Check out the bottom of this page to see what some members from the 2024 squad said about their experience.) The team will be coached by me, Mario Fraioli. This is a unique offering that combines my experience and expertise as both a coach and athlete with an incredible community of likeminded teammates and amazing support from our brand partners—New Balance, Precision Fuel & Hydration, and Final Surge—in an effort to help you have the best race you possibly can on April 21. Over the course of the program’s 100 days you will learn a lot, ride an unending wave of motivation, meet some awesome people, and feel as prepared as ever when you step up to the starting line. Learn more about what’s included and join the team here!

OK, plenty more to share with you in this issue. Let’s dive right in.

Quick Splits

— This article on the Chicago White Sox’ abysmal season has nothing to do with running, at least not directly, but it’s a poignant and well-written reflection on something all of us will experience once or twice over the course of our lifetimes: losing. Writer Sam Anderson, through the lens of the Sox’ season, looks at how losing affects things like team morale and culture. (Spoiler: It’s complicated.) He also tries to understand how it impacts identities and relationships while also exploring the potential for growth and redemption that can only happen when you learn to accept and deal with loss, in whatever form it takes. “To live is to lose, in all the many senses of that word — to lose socks, friends, arguments, opportunities, brain cells and everything else,” Anderson writes. “And while we can all agree that losing is basically the absolute worst, we must also acknowledge that it is underrated. Losing, obviously, makes winning possible; it is the negative space in which success exists. But its virtues go far beyond that. To lose is to acknowledge that, in spite of all your hopes and efforts, things have not gone your way — and so, to maintain the peace, you will walk away. It is a civic miracle that keeps us from tearing each other’s heads off. To lose, and to deal with loss, is one of the most profound things a human can do.”

— A big thank you to John Davis of Running Writings for doing an incredible public service and translating/transcribing (via AI) Marius Bakken’s appearances on the Norwegian-language podcast I det lange løp (“In the Long Run”) from 2019-2023. Over the course of several episodes Bakken spoke extensively about double threshold training, sprint training, periodization, heat training, and a LOT more, and you can read all of it in English right here. It’s a great director’s commentary accompaniment to Bakken’s legendary 2022 blog post on the Norwegian model of lactate threshold training and I’m still making my way through this monster of a resource. Once I do, I’ll share some detailed thoughts in an upcoming issue of the newsletter, but in the meantime you can chew on this quote from Bakken: “It's the volume that should make you tired,” he explains, “not the intensity. Simply.”

— “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” This has long been one of my favorite quotes. Who actually said it is up for debate but that’s not important right now—whoever said it hit the nail on the head. Excellence is not a one-time thing, it’s an all-the-time thing, which, by definition, means it takes quite a bit of work to keep performing at a high level, whatever your chosen pursuit. Friend of the shakeout and performance coach Brad Stulberg recently published this great post with 10 core mindsets, skills, and practices for sustaining excellence, and, well, it’s excellent. They’re all great, and necessary, but my favorite is the first one he lists: “Be the best at getting better.” This mindset encapsulates the apocryphal quote I led off this paragraph with—excellence is not an outcome, it’s an infinite game. “The human brain did not evolve to arrive, it evolved to strive,” he writes. “It’s critical to find meaning and satisfaction in the path. If you make the ultimate goal getting better, the rest takes care of itself.”

— As I tend to do, I fell down a rabbit hole last week and it led me to this 1997 newspaper column by Mary Schmich, which was supposed to be a graduation speech that never got delivered, and it reminded me of my annual life lessons post that I update every year on my birthday. “Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it,” Schmich writes. “The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.” The advice she proceeds to dish is oftentimes punchy, sometimes funny, and a little all over the place, but on the whole they’re timeless and pretty damn on the money if you ask me. “Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old,” she writes. “And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.”

— In general I don’t love algorithms but when it comes to feeding me new music, YouTube has rarely steered me wrong. River Crombie, an Australian based in northern Germany, wasn’t on my radar until last week but he’s got a whole slew of incredible acoustic covers on his channel, my favorite, perhaps, being this rendition of Alice in Chains’ “Down in a Hole.” He slows the song way down, both the guitar and the vocals, and makes you feel every word on a deep level. (I also appreciate the simplicity of his setup—it’s just him and his guitar, and presumably a microphone to pick up the audio.)

— From the archives (Issue 99, 7 years ago this week): Whether or not you want to believe Ethiopian Guye Adola’s claim that he found out he was running the Berlin Marathon just four days before posting the fastest debut in history, you can’t help but respect him for racing Eliud Kipchoge head-to-head and not worrying about the fact that he was running world-record pace alongside the best marathoner in the world in an event he’d never previously contested. “Anyway, they kept telling us we were five or six seconds outside the time (world record pace),” Adola told Michael Crawley for letsrun.com, “so I decided not to worry about it.” Plenty of runners would do well by taking a page out of Adola’s book: Stop worrying about whether or not you’re on pace and just commit to competing. All too often, runners are ruled by the clock and drive themselves crazy chasing splits from race to race. If this is you, forget about the watch next time out and try chasing (or running away from) your fellow competitors instead. Find your race. Roll the dice once or twice. Make a move. Respond to one. See what happens. You might fail. But then again you might not. Either way, you’ll learn something valuable. Heck, you might even surprise yourself like Adola did and run faster than you or anyone else ever possible. Racing involves risking: if you’re not going to take one, why bother stepping on the start line in the first place?

+ I got a kick out of reading that Ethiopians don’t even bother mentioning the hour when talking about a runner’s marathon time. While some might view the omission as pretentious, there’s something special about such a designation that helps define the unique culture of the sport in that country. “The ‘two hours’ is assumed,” Crawley writes at the beginning of the same piece I linked to above. “You’re an ‘and three’ or an ‘and ten’ runner. It was a few months before I realized that when people were talking about me, they were saying I was an ‘and nine’ runner, generously removing 10 minutes from my marathon time to save face in fast company.”

— A big thank you to my partners at New Balance for supporting my work this month (and throughout 2024). There’s some exciting new stuff coming in a couple weeks but until then, I’m going to tell you about one my all-time favorite shoes for speed work: the FuelCell Rebel v4. This is the trainer I rock for nearly every workout I do. As fast and fun as carbon-plated shoes can be, it’s important not to be overly reliant on them for all your track sessions, fartleks, hills, and tempo runs. The Rebel v4s allow your feet to do what they want to do while providing plenty of protection underfoot when you’re putting a lot of extra force into the ground. They offer a responsive ride in a flexible, lightweight package that will fit a variety of foot types (n.b. my wider-than-average forefoot really appreciates them!). The FuelCell Rebel v4 is available at your favorite run specialty store or at newbalance.com (men’s sizes here, women’s sizes here).

Workout of the Week: Surging Mile Repeats

Let me know if this situation sounds familiar: You’re in no-man’s land midway through a half-marathon or marathon. Or maybe you’ve been towing a group for several miles and none of the other runners in it want to help out with the pace. There’s a good-sized pack about 10 seconds down the road but they’re not really pulling away anymore. What do you do? If you want to ride that wave’s momentum and take advantage of the collective energy in front of you, you need to make a move and surge ahead. The Surging Mile Repeats workout is a session designed to help give you the fitness and confidence to do just that. Here are the details.

The bottom line.

"Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.”

—Albert Camus, The Stranger (I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this quote. What I take it to mean is that none of this, i.e. life, existence, cohabitating with millions of species on this tiny planet in the middle of a vast universe, makes any sense at all. Why are we here? What’s the point? As Camus says, it’s (endlessly) absurd! But it’s in the process of trying to make sense of this absurdity, through the ups and downs and triumphs and failures and everything else we experience in life, that we can even begin to appreciate this opportunity we’ve been given and gain clarity on how we best make use of the time we’ve got.)

That's it for Issue 464. 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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