One common question that seems to come up this time of year has to do with taking downtime in the off-season. The off-season is a long ways away for me right now, since I’m headed off to Europe to start getting things rolling. I’m currently at that stage of the season where running feels good every single day, workouts are coming together, and when I look at my week in my running log, I laugh at how effortlessly things seem to be now, things that were so dang tough a few months ago. You know what I mean….take a week of training during your peak training season and imagine your coach giving you that exact same schedule for a week in August. Repeat 400’s in what?! No way! Man, but that time of year when you can just clip off those 400’s, miles, tempos, and just show up to practice with the attitude “Bring it on, Coach,” that’s the best feeling around. If only you could bottle it up and sell it.

The problem with that awesome feeling is that you don’t want it to stop. For many people, this time of year is followed by a peak and then a downward slide where you feel tired and burned out. This makes it easy to transition into a period of rest and regeneration. But for others, (and this is dangerous,) they are afraid to let go of their fitness at the end of the season. It is scary to think about starting over from scratch sometims. Letting your fitness go willingly can feel like watching money slip out of your wallet and blow away in the wind: you have to resist the urge to reach out and grab it because you worked hard to earn it. You have to sit back and let some of it blow away.

I was on a run yesterday and it felt completely effortless. I was listening to The Shins latest album on my ipod, running along the railroad tracks in Eugene, playing around with pace and changing speeds just because it felt so easy to do it. I was thinking about my upcoming workout for Saturday and how I can’t wait to do it, whereas a few months ago I would have cringed at the prospect of fast repeat 800’s. I relished in that feeling for a minute and then it popped into my head:

“I don’t think I should take a break this year; just imagine what I could do next year if I don’t lose any of the fitness I have gained so far. I could just build on this and build on this. All I need to do is not let myself get burned out and then I won’t need a break.”

The feeling I had was that I wanted to protect the money in my wallet and continue packing more in. But improvement isn’t as simple as that. The wallet gets full of small bills and you can’t fit any more in. Its literally bursting at the seams. By taking a break, I can sit down and sort through the ones and fives and tens in my wallet and think about the year and how I earned each one. A few blow away in the wind while I sort through them, but in the end, I can add most of it up, go to the bank, exchange them all in for a couple hundreds and slip those into my wallet for next year. They don’t take up much room in my wallet and they are filed away. This is called the cumulative effect of training. Now with my slim wallet with a couple big bills, I can spend some time planning how I want to fill up my wallet next time around. Every year, there are fewer one dollar bills and more fives and tens. By taking the time to rest and think about last season, I develop an action plan with my coach that is more effective, with less waste.

Time and time again, I see athletes give in to the elation of being on top of their game. Getting back into shape after a break is hard. It hurts. Bad. But the alternative is stuffing the wallet so full that the seams rip and money spills out everywhere, sending you scrambling for scraps.

Trust me, its worth the break. Take it before you need it. Otherwise you set yourself up for a couple really big highs, sandwiched between some terrible-aweful-no good-really bad lows. These lows could be serious injuries, emotional pits, or mental burnout. Take control by planning an ebb and flow into your seasons and into your years. You will work your way up the improvement ladder and enjoy the benefits of cumulative training.

How I take a break:

Time: 2-4 weeks of no running. For two weeks or so I just chill out. I watch TV, go on road trips, spend time with people, stay up late, sleep in, etc. I DO NOT RUN A STEP! The next two weeks I am more active, going on bike rides with friends, hiking, swimming, playing. I listen to my body and if I feel like going for a run, I’ll go. If I don’t, I don’t. The important thing is that I don’t have a plan that I have to follow…if a run works its way into the day, so be it. On average I end up running about 5 or 6 times total over two weeks. Preferably, I’d spend this two weeks water-skiing or hiking and do very little running, but sometimes I’m stuck at home and bored and crave a run. Sometimes its 20 minutes, sometimes its 60 minutes.

Weight:

I let my body recover by not trying to force it to stay at a certain weight. It is important to keep race weight for racing only. Just like training, body weight should ebb and flow some. For me, there is about a five pound swing between my highest and lowest weight.

Diet:

I eat pretty balanced most of the year, so I don’t feel this huge need to pig out all the time on my break. I learned that being crazy strict about things just makes you swing the other way in the off-season. Its not good for anyone to eat tons of junk in a two week period of time, whether you are an athlete or not, so it would be silly to go on a mission to get a heart attack. In the off-season, I eat more ice-cream and cookies than usual, (because they are sent from heaven directly,) but basically the biggest change is that I don’t worry about timing my meals to maximize my energy, and I just eat whatever is served. There are times during the season when I would turn down chocolate cake at a dinner party, but the off-season isn’t one of them.

Journaling:

Writing about last season while it is fresh in my mind has proven to be the most educational thing I could do for my running. The best person to learn from is yourself.

Best of luck with your off-season! I hope you enjoy your well-earned break!

Off to Europe for me…

-L

Its official:

My coach is messing with my head.

I’ve always suspected Coach Lananna’s gift for coaching moved beyond the physical, but now I’m sure his little hands are wrapped tightly around my over-active brain. After seven years of working with one of the most legendary coaches of the present time, it took a simple 8×400 meter workout on Wednesday to make his methods (a tiny bit more) clear. He is coaching my mind.

When it comes to exceptional coaching, you don’t have to be Bill Bowerman, Arthur Lydiard, Jack Daniels, or Phil King to create great results. Hundreds of coaches all over the world will stumble upon a magical formula that works on some of their athletes, guiding those athletes to levels they never dreamed possible (on every level from the Olympics to breaking the 6 minute mile). What makes exceptional coaching is often a mystery; a certain magic happens between a coach and an athlete that makes the blah blah blah physical preparation translate directly into competitiveness and confidence. The best coaches have left a legacy of artistry and finesse, and the specifics of their workouts are simply scraps left behind for the rest of us to chew on.

Whether its 10×400 vs. 12×300… stair climbs vs. hill reps… its all hard work. Writing out workouts is one thing, and “executing them” is another. My coach, Vin Lananna, has always treated coaching like an art, executing workouts to complicated levels requiring 5 or 6 stopwatches and several assistants, pulling athletes out early because of “how they look”, even if they are hitting all the right times. I never picked up on the subtleties, and would try to figure out why so many Stanford Athletes were running well. In the track office, I’d ask Vin about his training philosophy and what workouts were going to make me a faster athlete. Time and time again, he would lightly dismiss physiology talk and direct the conversation to my goals, my motivations, and other non-related subjects that exposed how my brain worked and what made me tick. It was as if I were asking Willy Wonka for his recipe for chocolate and Willy Wonka, (pointing to his giant magical Chocolate Factory), says “the taste has got very little to do with the actual recipe, my dear.”

During my time there, Stanford was Coach Lananna’s Magical Choclate Factory, and I was an everlasting gobstopper. The success was never meant to end, so long as we believed. NCAA champions and All-Americans were popping up all over the place. I had four uninterrupted years of incredible fun that I will never forget. This was of course complicated by graduating from college, and Coach moving to Ohio and leaving coaching behind for a little while. Outside of the magical factory, the training plan over email became just a recipe. Left only with numbers and symbols on a calendar, it no longer looked so impressive. “Is that all?” I’d think. “That can’t possibly be enough training…” I’d muse. Left only with my workouts, I looked around at what workouts other people were doing for comparison. Slowly but surely I was looking everywhere else but right in front of me. I’m sure you can guess that my racing started to suffer a bit. The whole grass is greener thing is disasterous in sports. Just don’t do it, ok?

To my great excitement and good fortune, Coach Lananna made a big move back into coaching last year and moved to Eugene, Oregon to coach the ducks. There was very little question in my mind that I needed to move there too. I missed the magical chocolate factory. I missed being the everlasting gobstopper.

Yesterday I came down to the track at Hayward Field for 8×400 meters with Coach. We’ve been working together again for a couple months now and it feels like a good old pair of shoes getting broken back in. Even though the routines came back immediately, the magic takes a little longer to brew. We both have our own sparkle, but does the potential for magic leading up to the 2008 Olympics still exist?

After yesterday’s 400’s, I have a feeling it does. And how do I know? Because I came face to face with Willy Wonka himself on #6 of 8 400’s.

You know how in 8×400, #5, 6, and 7 are the hardest? But somewhere after #6ish, you know you are home free and there is a big relief inside knowing the worst is over. Suddenly you feel better, you focus on doing the last one well, etc. Your focus changes from being a tough cookie to being finished soon.

Now imagine at the moment of switching to the relief of being nearly done, you coach leans over right before #7 and says, “You are going to do 10 instead. Can you do 10? Ok, #7…GO!!!”

So I’m off on #7 running, and my mind is like “What the heck! He can’t do that! This is supposed to be my almost-last-one and now I’m not even close! Ow, this is really hard! I’m tired. My legs hurt. I can’t breathe! I can’t possibly do three more after this. What a jerk! Grrrrr…..”

And for that whole 68.1 seconds, I’m mentally fighting a war. He did the same thing to me on 1000 meter reps last week and I mentally fell apart, and now I’m realizing that this is a test. Its part of the training that isn’t on the recipe….its part of the magic. I pull myself together and focus on passing this mental test. I CAN be tough when things turn out harder than I expect them to. I CAN change from cruise-home mode back to tough-girl mode.

After 9, he stops the workout. “I’m on to your little trick, Coach…” I want to say to him. But I don’t say anything. I play my role and scowl at him and I let him be the magician. I may not have aced the test, but next time I will. Thinking about it later that night, I realized that lots of women can run 400 reps in 67 to 68, yet only three stand on the podium. It is my belief that what sets those three apart is often the artistry of coaching and the chemistry between coach and athlete. It takes a little magic.

So when I started out by saying that my coach was messing with my mind, that’s what I meant, and its a good thing.

I believe in magic.

Bring it on.

-L

Training on vacation.

I don’t know about you guys, but for me, there is nothing more fun than getting all my training in when I’m on vacation. I love having to do all my runs early in the morning between long days of being up on my feet, or baking in the sun. The stimulation of running 90% of my mileage on the two-inch shoulder of some highway is almost too much to bear. During the holiday break, I’m especially motivated to get out the door and do a track workout while everyone else sits around all day enjoying the conveyer belt of treats, sweets, brunches, music, TV, and relaxation.

Personally, my favorite part of training on vacation is around 6pm, when I haven’t gotten in my run yet and have been out with family doing a million things all day. I love to just sit there on the couch staring out the window at the last 30 minutes of sunlight, thinking about how I planned to get in one hour tonight. Oh! The sun sets as my mind starts to think about all sorts of motivating things, like how my tacos from an hour ago are hovering somewhere in my esophagus; that laying on the beach all day without drinking water sucked every drop of water out of me, turning my blood into syrup, my legs into lead, and my mind to mush; and how I really haven’t had a proper day off in at least…oh wait…it was 2 days ago. To run, or not to run…

The truth:

Look, there is no way around it. Training on vacation really sucks. I joke about it, but as you know, all those things I mentioned really happen. Whether its Christmas Break or family reunions or ski-trips or weddings, there is a common thread: we are out of our routine, and the trip is not all about us.

It is in situations like this that we are really challenged as athletes.

Now, you will probably expect that as a professional runner, I will now say that if we want to be the best, we need to rise to this challenge! We must prioritize our training and do whatever it takes to get it done. If we are serious about improving, then we should let no adverse conditions, no family commitments, no turkey dinner, no Christmas cookies stand in our way. Ummmm…no.

I can’t say that to you because, for one, I would be a complete hypocrite, and for two, I don’t agree with that approach. Its unrealistic, unnecessary torture if you ask me.

In my experience:

I set training goals on vacation and always come up short. In high school and college I would blame it on not having my own car, or my family not making my training their #1 priority. And it just wasn’t fair! I mean, I’d wake up from camping in my tent to the smell of bacon and pancakes, and I’d be faced with the decision to run now or later, knowing that later had a good chance of becoming never. I’d put on my running stuff and stand there, watching everyone laughing and relaxing and flipping pancakes, carefree and easy. My stomach would grumble. And then I’d just start to get mad.

Enter Lauren and Mom on camp trip:

“Oh good morning honey! How’d you sleep? Come get some pancakes. Did you hear the raccoons last night? It was….”

“I have to go do a tempo run.” (Grouchy frown).

“Well the food might be gone when you get back…are you sure you don’t want to grab some greasy slabs of pig before you go run up the giant mountain we’re camped on the side of?”

Camera pans to the road that switchbacks up the cliffs.
Exit Lauren in exceedingly bad mood.

You get the picture.

When I’m on vacation, I often feel that there is no right decision. There is no good time to work out. Its easy to sit there and think that if only I were more dedicated, I would have gotten it all in. I used to think that professional runners would be the ultimate example…that they’d know how to make a fail-proof vacation plan, and then when I went pro, I was disappointed when nothing magically changed. For my first year or two, I thought that it was something that I lacked…that the best athletes must either not go on vacations, or else they must travel under stipulations that are totally unrealistic for my family.

But now I look at things differently. With experience, I’ve learned that the biggest challenge is NOT actually getting in all the training exactly as planned. If I really wanted to, I could be completely blind to the people around me and make running the most important thing in the universe. But not only is this unnecessary, it’s actually destructive.

To use a simple but illustrative simile..If training in the routine of home is like swimming in a silky smooth Olympic Pool, training on vacation is like swimming in the choppy waves of the ocean. You can’t expect to swim in a perfectly straight line…stubbornly fighting the waves will leave you exhausted. Successful vacation training requires moving with the waves as they come.

Adaptability:

The most valuable challenge that vacations present to us as athletes is adaptability: your ability to roll with the punches and make adjustments on the fly. You become a better athlete when you can make a plan, but not be made by that plan. Many runners put way too much emphasis on one or two specific workouts and allow them to make or break their upcoming races. Being an athlete requires being better than your workouts. They are a means to an end and their affect on you is cumulative.

Every single athlete will have a couple weeks a year where things don’t go according to plan. These are “pauses” in training, and they are so common they are practically mandatory. For some it’s an injury, for others its bronchitis, for me its vacation, but no one is immune. When these “pauses” come up, you need to recognize the pause and adapt. When it comes time to race, your ability to adapt to the unknown will shine through in your performance.

Improving:

Each year, sit down and think about the number of interruptions and pauses you had in your training. Which ones were avoidable? Which one’s weren’t? As you become more committed to running, you will gradually minimize the circumstances that get in the way of your running. Since you don’t live in a bubble, you can not expect perfection. And the nature of athletics demands that you respond to imperfect situations, so it actually pays to be “good at” imperfect.

When it comes time to race, adaptability will ultimately show you the biggest personal improvements. As you get better at adapting to the unknown, you will find yourself beating athletes who are more talented and physically fit than you. You will be able to rise to the occasion on race day. More than one of my national championships was won in this way so I speak from experience! Friends and teammates of mine were often shaking their heads at how I could “pull a race out” after pulling an all-nighter for a test, or after missing training for some minor injury the week before the race. It seems I rarely ever create an ideal scenario for success. Perhaps I prefer a little sprinkle of chaos. But so long as the chaos can fade into the distance when you step on the starting line, it is inconsequential.

Seven Tips for Vacation Training:

1. Google Maps.
A week before you leave, type the address of the place you are staying into Google and click the maps tab. Use the maps to scope out the area for potential runs, a gym, or anything else that might come in handy.

2. Go-to Run.
Find one simple run from your hotel that requires no driving, even if its just on a main road. Prepare yourself for the worst, and assume that you will have to run on this stupid, boring road every single day. Get over it.

3. Book the Mornings
Because we do not have the technology yet to be two places at once (which I can’t seem to remember), you will have to miss some stuff in order to train, like pancake and bacon breakfasts. But you will never regret getting your training out of the way. Tell your family that you plan to run in the mornings so that they can set that time aside for you. It’s easier for everyone and you will be able to enjoy the rest of the day more. I usually run twice a day, but on vacation, the afternoon runs don’t always get done. If I’ve done the majority of the running in the morning, I feel OK skipping the afternoon run in the name of adaptability. Its just part of the deal.

4. Get Someone in Your Corner
Before you leave for vacation, strategically find someone who will look out for your athletic interests. If you are like me, and no one else in your family is obsessed with working out, it helps to talk to someone in advance about what you want to get done in your training and ask them to help you. Tell them that stuff comes up on vacation and all you need is for one other person to be on your side when Aunt Mary wants to leave for the nature walk at 8am. Its nice to have someone there to say, “Why don’t we leave at 9:30 instead so Alex can get his run in first.” Chances are, this person will be really excited to help you.

5. Don’t Dwell on Times
If your schedule has specific times to hit, take them lightly. When I went to Maui last week, I had some pretty tough track workouts on my schedule, but its turned out to be hot, humid and really, really windy. Like knock-you-over windy. I was freaking out a little bit, but Coach Lananna reminded me that I was on vacation and that times were only a guide. He understood that conditions might be weird, or I might be tired from some family adventure, and reminded me to focus on the effort and listen to my body. If you feel good, run fast, and if you feel bad, slow down. Its really that simple. Being stubborn about your times is a recipe for negative training.

6. Avoid Runner’s Remorse
Don’t talk yourself out of running. Adjust the effort if you have to, but get out the door and do something. Whenever I’ve had to fight the mental battle of whether or not to run, I have NEVER regretted running. I always feel better about the day if I’ve set aside that time for myself and worked
out. I’m happier for the rest of the day, and I contribute on a higher level to the family vacation. You are doing yourself and everyone else a favor by avoiding runners’ remorse.

7. Plan a Day Off
Try to put a flexible day off somewhere during your trip. Don’t waste it on the travel day if possible. Its worth getting up at 5:30 to run before going on vacation if it means that in the middle of the week, you can take the day off when circumstances don’t allow you to get your run in, and not
feel guilty about it.

I hope these tips help! Feel free to add some tips of your own as a comment to this blog.

Yours,
L.