Running Tech

Egyptian water clocks.  Romans roads and bridges.  Aboriginal long distance relay communication.  Waffle Irons.  Running has always advanced alongside technology, and in this age of Apples and Blackberries, opportunities are ripe for the picking.  What was once Aboriginal is now Abodigital. Here are some ideas for the future of running technology.*

The Virtual Reality Treadmill.

Imagine being able to run anywhere in the world without leaving your basement.  Surrounded by projections of Google street view as the wind rushes by, you smell the bakery you're running past in Paris, hear dockside clamor in Singapore and feel the burn as the incline changes automatically in downtown San Francisco.  Nano particles in the tread change the feel of the terrain from road to grass to dirt as you train in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx.  Of course by the time you've acquired this six-figure treadmill you might as well have bought some plane tickets.

Programmable (Wolverine) Spikes.

There's five minutes before the start of the cross country race, you're moving through your pre-race ritual, and suddenly coach tells you the mud is really thick in the third mile.  Uh oh, you only have quarter inch spikes in your shoes.  Relax, Don't Do It, no problem.  They are attached to programmable polymers inside the spike plates and a quick setting adjustment lengthens them to half-inch wolverine claws.  Just remember to retract before throwing em over your shoulder after the race...

Clockwise Tracks.

Runners (especially 10k people) have a risk of becoming ambi-turners if they continue to only turn left during track races.  Paint an additional set of lines and markers to allow for occasional meets in which all running events are held in the clockwise direction.  (Actually I have John Simons to thank for this idea).  The other way would be to put a massive mirror on one side of the track.  That would do it, right?

Downhill Tracks.

Imagine a track that turns clockwise and goes downhill....

While I'm on tracks, I was thinking we must be far along enough to make M.C. Escher's vision of a track that always goes downhill but somehow comes around to the same point reality.  World records and shins would come crashing down.

Permanently implanted timing chips.

This one is a bit Big Brother.  At an early age when you are indoctrinated into the cult that is running, they surgically implant a chip in your chest that will identify you at every race for the rest of your life.  No more pesky shoe chips or bib numbers you aren't supposed to fold.  The chip ID would be associated with an online database containing all you race results, splits, workout stats, 24/7 whereabouts... creepy.

Power Generating Training Shoes
Piezoelectric materials like lead zirconate titanate generate a voltage when they are compressed.  Put some in the soles of running shoes and you could charge your dead phone after running five miles right from your shoes.  Or they could power LEDs for safer nighttime running.  DARPA  is trying this in soldier's boots.

Facial Recognition Fan App.
How many times have you been watching a race and asked "who the hell is that guy taking it out like Diego Estrada?" or "wow, who is their fifth runner?  She is making the race for them."  With FaceTrack, simply point your mobile device at a pack of oncoming runners and it matches their faces with pre-loaded athlete profiles.  Then fans could view all results, media, and history for that athlete.  Don't forget to keep an eye on the race.  Doesn't work if all the runners in the frame have Derek Rubis' face.

Alternate Alter-G.

Definitely the best editing job I've ever done.

There has to be a better way to simulate lower gravity during rehab training than a sweaty plastic bubble that forces you to run like a T-rex.  I'm sure someone could figure out how to locally block the gravitons interacting between your body's and the Earth's matter... or maybe some kind of magnetic levitation suit?  An attractive option.  Wait, no, a repulsive one.

Holographic Pacers

I've heard that Harvard's indoor track used to have lights in the rail around the oval that could be set to a pace for workouts or races.  The "Hare-o-Gram" would take it a step further: project a hologram of a runner on the track for competitors to follow at a certain pace.  No more "what pace is the rabbit going?" "58 through the quarter" and then the guy runs a 61.5.  Hare-o-Gram would hit 58.00.  You could even pick the pacer's image, bringing back Matt Scherer from retirement or drafting off Big Bird.  Unfortunately, holograms can't provide a wind shadow so this is mainly for psychological pacemaking.  Puts people out of jobs too.

"Track Casual" Trainer-Dress Shoes.

This is actually possible, I think.  Have you ever had to squeeze a double run in between a flight and your friend's wedding, a first date, or a job interview?  Just because a training shoe has to withstand hundreds of miles, rain, snow, mud, and vomit during its lifetime doesn't mean it can't look like an Oxford.  Saves packing space, but probably not worth the smell at more formal events.

Real Time Form Analysis.
In-lab form analysis with the little Velcro ping pong balls and wire frame modeling already exists, but there's no way to get scientific stride or posture feedback on the roads and trails.  Let's say you are trying to improve your arm carriage or your rearward leg extension.  Gyro and accelerometer sensors inside bracelets and anklets measure the angles, rates, positions, and distances your limbs are swinging in.  They wirelessly update your watch, reminding you to focus on desired improvements.

Autonomous Meet Coverage.
Cover track and cross country meets with teams of drones.  They fly around with cameras getting aerial and trackside views.  Commentators work from a central control station and can cover multiple meets simultaneously all over the country without having to travel.

Prolonged careers with time travel.

I always have to include relativity in these more serious blog posts.  Let's say you want to dodge a rival doing particularly well this year or you want your career to last ten Olympic cycles instead of only two or three.  Just board a spaceship going close to the speed of light and time will move faster for you relative to Earth's, and when you come back you'll have "traveled into the future."  Though it might be hard to train on the spaceship since your relativistic mass would be at least... three times bigger.

Tear Away Short Shorts.

We love running in nice short shorts with big splits, but what if you get challenged to a game of HORSE (or ZAP) on the way to the run?  You'd be wearing the wrong equipment.  I envision a pair of basketball or lounging shorts that tear away to running shorts.  Man would you get made fun of.

But when it's all said and done, running is a gritty and visceral sport.  At a certain point, automation takes away from its purity.  Really the only thing that matters is getting results quickly after races.

*I do not claim to actually know anything about any of this.

**I know I know, I totally just botched special relativity.

Take The Chance

I've migrated North from Austin to my hometown, Milwaukee in favor of cooler temperatures and proximity to my next few races.  Between mama's home cookin' and the familiar high school running routes it makes for a good training base camp.  The comfort of home isn't without its consequences: training alone changes the mental game up a bit.

Today I drove to Marquette University's track for the last hard workout before the US Championships.  The gate was closed so I hopped the fence, thinking how much it would suck to get kicked out halfway through a rep.  The track is blue, just like it will be in Des Moines - that's training specificity for you.

I'm assigned a set of six thousands at 5k pace with three minutes (generous) rest.  I'll follow that with some 200s at mile pace to turn the legs over.  The workout is starkly simple compared to others I've done this year with Texas - sessions I've come to call 'mixed workouts' that might hit a wide range of paces and recovery lengths.  But today it's no nonsense Jack Daniels taken straight, no chaser.

The disadvantages of training solo become apparent during a workout like this. Warming up I feel a bit negative.  'it's warmer this morning than it's been, it's windy, I don't feel that good.'  The usual distance runner whining.  This time of year, as championship season begins, we're especially on edge, believing everything should be feeling perfect.  Today I'm putting the workout on an undeservedly high pedestal; as I begin the first rep, I sort of feel like I'm climbing up to a gallows.

The guy mowing the grass around the track has flooded his engine and I smell gas every time I run the curve.  The first interval usually feels off because your body still needs to warm up.  I run it in 2:42.7, on the low end of the 2:42 - 2:45 range I should be in.  Most of the time I can execute a workout without too much mental agony - focusing on the current rep and not the rest of the workout.  But today I'm being negative.  On the second and third thousands I run 2:43 and 2:43, @StilinIt but not feeling good.  Usually the halfway point serves as a nice mental checkpoint but today the workout is half empty rather than half full.

Hubris attacks on the fourth interval.  Somewhere during the second lap I start letting up.  These thousands require sharp focus literally the entire time, and the slow down snowballs when I check my 800 split at 2:15, five seconds off.  I start thinking about ending the whole thing as I finish in 2:50.

If you go off to die, then take us, too,
to face all things with you; but if your past
still lets you put your hope in arms, which now
you have put on, then first protect this house.

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 2, lines 914-7

For the next couple minutes I wage a mental war with myself.  Had my coach been there he would have pulled me off the track.  If I end the workout now, my confidence will be shattered leading into important races.  If I try to go on, I'll most likely continue dying and end up feeling worse.  But there's a chance I could sack up and salvage the thing.  I reach a compromise: I'll run 800 of the next rep, on pace, in spikes, and see how I feel.  I beat my chest, let out a war cry that echoes off the casino across the street, and go for it.

The internal soliloquy of recovery period four is for me the pinnacle of the workout and perhaps the entire season.  Reaching such a low mental and physical point and rebounding motivates me.  I'm a touch slow halfway through the fifth interval when I start feeling good again.  I decide to run all thousand of it as I come through 800, still slow, in 2:14.  I speed up and finish with 2:44.  Suddenly I'm almost there, just one rep separating me and the 200's which are just icing on the cake anyway.  I sense the end of the set and run the last one in 2:41, my fastest split.

Nothing changed in my body from that fourth agonizing interval to the last one.  The 2:50 outlier was a product of my mentality.  This isn't an isolated incident: two weeks ago I ran an outlying 2:10 on the fourth 800 of a set of six, the other five averaging 2:04.  And my last two races at Stanford and Oxy had slower fourth kilometers.  Anyone can open well and I'm able to close well, sensing the finish.  But it's that portion of the work - that third quarter - that seems to get me.  It's like traveling from far away, coming around the bend and finally seeing home and being reinvigorated.  Only the trees were in the way.

Today I was shown, by the workout, that it's in the tank.  No matter how hard it is, I have to take the chance and continue working during that third quarter phase.  In the form of a race it will mean going with the leaders after 3k, something I failed to do at Oxy.  I have to trust that instinct will take me home to the finish.  As I put the final preparations in for USA's I'm confident in my strength and toughness, and being aware of my ability to rally, no matter how hard it gets, is valuable knowledge.

Smileage Addiction

Being a relatively injury resistant runner, (always knock on wood when you say something like that) I've had the ability to run "pretty high volume" (mileage per week) throughout my career.  Injury  proneness places a definite upper bound on volume depending on the person, but there's a gray area just underneath where an athlete is made or betrayed.  By themselves.

For me, volume has always been somewhat of a question mark - I'm still experimenting with how much feels best.  And when you try to isolate variables for results that take seasons and years to produce, the process is not simple.

Sometimes you just gotta do less, Pepiopi.

One problem with running high volume is that it can be addicting.  Finishing a 100+ smile week makes you feel badass when you write those three digits in your running log.  But when it comes time to reduce volume during race season, the heavy volume mindset can be difficult to get out of. There's a temptation to lose confidence in training while lowering mileage.  When you rely on confirmation of your fitness through training benchmarks like weekly mileage, the lengths of your long run, and paces you are able to sustain on hard runs, finding it in other ways can be difficult.

It was during my senior year at Princeton (2011 - 2012) that I really started taking advantage of my potential by being smarter with smileage.  During the summer prior to cross country, I trained hard at altitude in Park City, Utah, running hundred mile weeks beginning in late July.  During the season I ran three awful races, barely breaking 26:00 for 8k in each and finishing far back in the field.  I didn't change anything, believing that a breakthrough was around the corner.  It wasn't.  In late October, when we found that I was anemic, I finally gave my body a chance.  I took a few days off, began taking iron, and decided my mileage would not exceed 80 mpw for the rest of the season.

This is Smileage.

Some combination of the iron, the smileage, and most importantly the refreshed mindset I had after learning there was a reason for my struggles jump started my running.  Just three weeks after slugging through a 25:53 for 8k at the Princeton Invite, I ran a personal best 14:13 5000 in an intersquad time trial on the track, closing in 4:20 over the final mile.  Two weeks later, I won the IC4A meet at Van Cortlandt in the Bronx.   Although my health during the season forced me to watch from the sidelines in Terre Haute at nationals later that weekend, I was riding a huge wave of confidence and momentum into the new year.

I had a lot of fun during the next track season.  Non stop personal bests, tapping into speed in the 1500, breaking school and Ivy records, winning two Penn Relays wheels, qualifying for outdoor nationals and nearly the Olympic trials all indicated that I had figured something out.  The increased amount of iron in my diet probably played a substantial role, but being more savvy with when to train hard and when to recover is what I think really caused the breakthrough.

Nigel knows about volume

When it comes time, I let myself just run, doing what feels natural.  Lifting the burden of having to maintain a certain amount of smiles every day is enormously relieving.  I put the displaced effort into workouts and races, using distance runs for recovery more than for aerobic benefit, their purpose in the base phase.  I forget about mileage goals - the miles runs themselves and just add up appropriately.  I do everything with the singular goal of feeling good.

I think some people forget that the point of competitive running is racing.  They focus so intently on training that they eventually prefer it to competition, in the worst cases developing a fear of racing because they feel more in control while training.  The worst thing to do after a poor race performance is go home and amp up the volume or intensity in an attempt to 'get better'.  The instinct should be the opposite.  Amongst athletes who naturally harbor extremely hard work ethics and competitive tendencies, freshness is totally underrated.  Smile : )

The term "smileage" copyright Tommy D., 2009

Binary Sunset

Today I would like to share the most important movie scene of all time and why it relates precisely to what running means.  It is the binary sunset scene from Star Wars a New Hope.

Why is this the most important scene in all of cinematic history?  Luke Skywalker looks to the unknown, to the future, feeling he must leave the confines of sandy Tatooine to complete his destiny.  Yes, the eventual destruction of the Empire is the ultimate climactic event in the Star Wars saga, but it's this moment that touches me the most.  Luke.  Alone, full of teenage angst, energy, Hope.  (Now that I've proven that this is the number one moment in Star Wars, it follows by the triangle inequality that it's the best moment in cinematic history. Q.E.D.)

No girl who's read this far will ever talk to me again, so I may as well continue.  Runners face the unknown all the time.  We have some control over our destiny through training and experience, but a lot of the time we're making big sacrifices for goals that only might be reached.  We look out like Luke does from our current position, knowing we have the potential to end up in one of a million different places at the end of the season, the year, our running careers.  You have to have some kind of weird motivation that allows you to keep working hard knowing you could fail.  To be good, you must tip toe the line between injury and health.  You have to spend years and years doing it.

Most of the miles I run strengthen me physically.  But I'll never forget the lessons I've learned from the many miles I shouldn't have run, when I should've rested or run slower.  I value those just as much. A perfect training program doesn't exist because everyone is different:  the athlete is responsible for finding out who he or she is.  I've learned a lot.  Every time I set out on a run or a week or a season, I feel myself staring at the Binary Sunset, unsure of what's ahead.  But every time I'm just a little more prepared to handle it.

Learn from Han Solo: Distance running doesn't
have to be a lonely endeavor.

Wintervals

My brother Dave and I acting(?) depressed that we have to go
running on Christmas day, 2010

In my experience, December has always been the wackiest month for training.  Most collegiate runners are just coming off rest periods following the cross country season, and with the school semester ending and exams, most student athletes aren't following their normal training routines in the weeks leading into the holidays.  Everyone goes home where there are plenty of distractions - from family and friends to cold temperatures (if you're from where I'm from) to the strong desire to sleep in after eating Christmas feasts.

But December can also be a gold mine of training opportunity.  The same lack of structure at home can be turned into what I like to call freedom of training: the ability to run when you want, spend as much time doing strides, stretching, lifting, and recovering as your heart desires.  It just takes a little responsibility and self-coaching.  For me that means doing things like getting to bed on time, continuing to eat right, and making sure I get those doubles in before it gets too dark (today the sun set at 4:17 in Milwaukee).  That said, for as short as the break from school is, I've never been at home without suffering from a bout or two lack of motivation.  In those times, it's important to remember how soon the January races are.  For anyone suffering from the winter training blues, I'd say this: watch an inspiring race video or listen to some Blink 182 and you'll hop right out the door.  That might not work for everyone but the point is that winter breeds lethargy and lethargy is cured by energy.

Today ends a "down" week in training intensity for me following a 5k I ran last Friday in Bloomington, Indiana.  I ran as I felt all week and turns out I felt pretty good, finishing up with 94 miles at an average pace of 6:19/mile.  Just not doing workouts made me want to run farther and faster by the middle of the week - I could feel my body saying "wait, wasn't I supposed to get beat up today" and when it didn't, I naturally responded by running faster than usual on normal runs.  Today's long run was pure bliss - a little over 18 miles averaging 5:50 per mile, feeling great the whole way.  It's been great to just run for a week and enjoy the extra energy.

This coming week I'll resume workouts, and with my brother Dave coming home soon from school at La Crosse, WI, I'll have a training partner to run with.  I'm looking forward to taking advantage of all the time I have to prepare for track season in the coming weeks... after all, when I'm not doing anything else, I like to think I'm (almost) living the life of a professional runner.