As we gear up for our goal races for the 2024-25 season, we set up objectives, benchmarks, training plans and invest countless hours, sacrifices, money, and emotions into what we want it to be. So, this may be an appropriate time to remind ourselves that we do this because we like challenges, because we are a little bit crazy, and because we like running. Nobody runs (or shouldn’t) because of a desire to be miserable.
Unfortunately, the ubiquitousness of the GPS watch in our sport has made us a bit miserable by turning our attention to countless measurements, mostly of parameters we don’t understand or should even care for. This, combined with social media oversharing, has turned training into competition. It has led to many a runner burnout, injury, and the withdrawal of the fun element of running.
I am writing this blog post because I recently saw the meme below (Credit to the appropriately named website www.dumbrunner.com). Is this you?
From www.dumbrunner.com
Unfortunately, this is not meant to be a funny meme. It is a sad reflection on what many of us have become thanks to a combination of what our GPS watch can measure and what we can share in social media. If this is not you, someone close to you certainly is.
We all know that person who:
• stops the watch at a traffic light or water break because it will mess their averages.
• equates their personal or athletic self-worth to their racing PRs.
• complained that a World Marathon Major was mismeasured because their GPS watch said so.
• ended up on the verge of death on a day it just wasn’t meant to be rather than show their unknown Strava friends that they had a difficult day.
• lives by his/her VO2Max fluctuation without even understanding what that VO2Max measures.
• refuses to take a day off because they’ve been predicating they are in a streak and nothing can stop them.
I once heard Coach Jonathan Marcus state that “the watch is a record, not a director”. What a deep thought! And sure, we all want to know what’s happening with our running, especially now that instant feedback is a wrist flip away. But most of what is being measured is product our running, it is not our running per se.
We must understand that:
• A 9.94 vs. a 10.00 run is not going to make a difference in your training.
• Not all intervals are supposed to measure how far or fast we can run on a predetermined amount of time or distance.
• Not everyone is interested in the splits of each one of your 20, 200-meter repeats.
• It still counts towards your fitness even if you did not post it on Facebook.
• Sure, courses may be mismeasured sometimes, but this is not determined by your GPS watch, regardless of how advanced it is.
• A day off, or two, is not a sign of weakness.
Not looking at your watch from time to time is a liberating experience. Try it. And the coolest thing of all is that your run still counts towards your fitness, your yearly milage and your training log even if your friends don’t know about it.
I am not advocating against GPS watches. It is a useful tool, with mass appeal, affordable and has revolutionized training in almost every sport. I can only imagine what Emil Zatopek, Paavo Nurmi or Frank Shorter could have done with one of those on their wrist. What I am promoting is the return of having fun on our runs. Making sure we are putting ourselves through a 20-mile run on a muggy summer day for the right reasons. In my book, showing strangers on Instagram how tough you are is not a valid reason.
Have you experienced and unhealthy relationship with your GPS watch? If so, share how you were able to overcome it, in the comment box below.
I still can’t believe that it has been 40 years since my first marathon. Four decades since that unforgettable January 22nd of 1983 inside the old Orange Bowl Stadium in Miami. 14,610 days have passed since that unprepared 17-year-old higschooler crossed a finish line that became the gift that kept on giving.
Since I can remember, I wanted to run a marathon. Not sure why. Maybe because I read about the athletics exploits of Abebe Bikila, Emil Zatopek or contemporaries like Frank Shorter and Bill Rogers. Who knows? Somehow, I always loved the extremes. I started running when I was 12 or 13 while living in Caracas, Venezuela, and at 15, ran my first 10K race. Then, a couple of months after turning 17, my dad told me he was running the Orange Bowl Marathon in January 1983, and if I trained, he would take me to Miami. Maybe I just wanted the trip and a few days off school, or it could have been a legitimate attraction for the physical challenge. Regardless, what I know is that 6 weeks later I was lining up at the foot of the iconic home of the Miami Dolphins, who eight days later were taking on the Washington Redskins in the Super Bowl.
The Miami Orange Bowl stadium (1937-2008) seated 72,319, hosted 5 Super Bowls and was home of the Miami Dolphins from (1966-1986)
I’ve written before about that race. So, on this anniversary I don’t want to reminisce about that particular day, but on what the race has meant to me throughout my life. Last year, on the 39th anniversary of the marathon, I wrote a memoir about that day because I didn’t want details to be forgotten. If you would like to read more about it, please click here. I also wrote a post about getting my finisher’s medal 37 years later, back in 2020. If you want to read about it, please click here.
After that magical morning, 40 years ago, even if I never ran another step in my life, I was a marathoner. It is a label that sticks forever. It doesn’t fade away with time, or by forgetting the exact date and finishing time, or by never wearing a pair of running shorts again.
I kept running for a handful of years after my first marathon. By the time I turned 21 I had four under my belt, with a couple of them in the 3:30 range. I ran through my first three years of college and even had escalated disagreemtns with my girlfriend, who at times was fed up with not going out with our friends on Saturday nights because I had a Sunday morning long run. Many a time I had to put my foot down and state that I would drop her before my training. Today I would have handled it in a different way, but that was then.
As I have mentioned in other writings, as I was training to go sub-3 in 1986, I had a devastating non-running injury on my left knee that left me on the sidelines. It was such a demoralizing blow that I stopped running for decades. While not running I discovered the pleasures of sleeping in on weekends. I didn’t want to have the same issues with new girlfriends, so I went out partying on Saturday nights, and on Friday nights, too. I focused on getting my career in sports journalism started, graduating from college and all the stuff “normal” people do when they don’t need to wake up early to run long next day. The day I turned 18, I went to bed at 8PM because I was running 30Km (19 miles) next day as part of my training for the NYC Marathon. What a weirdo!
There is not much to be found online about the 1983 Orange Bowl Marathon. Surprisingly I found this cotton race shirt in eBay for “just” $149,99. Thanks, I’ll pass.
Yet, somewhere deep inside, I always knew I had one more marathon in me. Just one, to remind myself I could still do it, or to fool myself into thinking I was still as good as when I was a teenager, or to revisit old glories, or to show my young son what you can accomplish when you work hard towards a difficult goal. Whatever it was, I still wanted to hit the asphalt and take that 26.2 trip once more. Just once.
But sometimes you cross paths with the wrong people and they clip your wings. At 39, after a 2nd knee surgery in July 2004, I told the doctor I still had one more marathon in me and asked if he thought my knee could take it. He told me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t and couldn’t. I was stupid enough to take his word for it.
But one day, out of the blue I started walking for hours at a time, feeling good about it and experiencing the runner’s high once again. I found racewalking and then racewalked four half marathons, transitioning to the 26.2 at the 2012 Philadelphia Marathon. Three years and two more marathons later I realized that I just took the doctor’s word and did not run because he said so, not because I tried and failed. So, I got my running restarted and ran my first marathon since 1985, in 2017. Five years, four marathons and an open-heart surgery later, I am still running and looking towards my next 26.2-mile adventure.
The Marathon Training Academy podcast runs a great tag line: “You have what it takes to run a marathon and change your life”. I certainly had what it took to run it again, and my life hasn’t been the same since I completed that 2017 NYC Marathon after I became a runner for the 2nd time; nor since I racewalked the Philadelphia Marathon in 2012 after a 26 year hiatus, nor after that magical morning at the Orange Bowl Stadium, 40 years ago, this week, when my lifetime love affair with the mythical 26.2 monster got started.
Written by Richard Askwith Reviewed by Coach Adolfo Salgueiro
While the running heroes of the latest generations may be Usain Bolt, Ryan Hall or Eliud Kipchoge, to their grandparents, most likely, there was no greater running hero than Czechoslovakian Emil Zatopek. If you know anything beyond just his name, is that he is the only person in Olympic history to win the 5,000, 10,000 and Marathon, and he did it all in the same games: Helsinki 1952.
“Today We Die a Little” is a comprehensive biography published in 2016 by author, Richard Askwith, who has also published a few other sports books, most of them on running. A self-confessed Zatopek admirer, he delves into a quest to find as much first-hand information on his subject so he can figure out how to separate the man from the myth. During the narrative he explains his process and his sources, so it becomes easier to establish what and how much goes beyond mythology.
What I liked from this book is that it establishes Emil as a real person, beyond the accolades and the world records. It spends plenty of time on his family background and the political situation that surrounded his childhood, which eventually becomes an inescapable part of his personal history. His first steps into foot racing happen as a teenager and little by little, defeat by defeat, he starts figuring out his talent until he becomes the Emil Zatopek we know. It is then that the Czechoslovakian communist regime figures out they have a propaganda tool at their disposal and begin to exploit it in every possible way.
Zatopek was a household name before Helsinki 1952. These Olympics were just the summit of his career. After doubling in the 5 and 10 thousand, he decided on a whim to give the marathon a shot, which he had never run. Not only did he win, but he also established his third Olympic Record of the games.
Emil is well known for the fierceness of his training. The book spends a good portion digging into his method and the reason behind it, which was more art than science based. He would run full-out 400-meter repeats relentlessly, almost every day. It is said that he would run up to 50 of them on a single session. Emil was big on recovery and took walks or easy runs around the woods, many times with his wife, Olympic champion Dana Zatopkova. But the constant hammering of his body and the frequency of his racing was too much, even for the most gifted of athletes, so his career fizzled out way sooner than if he had managed it with contemporary methods of rest and recovery.
As stated earlier, Zatopek’s life went beyond the track, and given his notoriety and propaganda value for the communist regime in his country, he became an army officer with way more privileges than the norm. Even though at times he was outspoken and fought for what he thought right; his position was never undisputed. He took all the advantages and privileges he could from the regime, until he no longer was useful to them.
Emil had to work an impossible balance act to please both his admirers and his government. There were the ones that wanted him to be the face of the oppressive regime and the ones who needed his celebrity to speak against it. Such an act was so difficult to pull off that he paid for it dearly. At the author well puts it: “It is not as if Emil went un-judged in his lifetime, either: by the Communist who thought he had betrayed them and by the anti-Communists who thought he had betrayed them”.
In his sundown years, he was still an Olympic hero and was invited to many events and sports meets as a goodwill ambassador. At home he was ostracized and hidden from public view, but overseas the government still displayed him as a national treasure, while surrounding him with chaperones that made sure he did not say anything inappropriate while his wife stayed home as a hostage, making sure he didn’t defect.
I really enjoyed this book. Very well researched, very well written and a story very well told. Beyond Emil Zatopek’s life, this story takes you to a period in the history of our planet that most of us in the western world, 70 o 80 years later, may have already forgotten. This is a good read which I recommend to any runner interested in learning about one of the biggest glories of our sport.
![\"\"](\"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c2e49f525bf02ce9657df92/8317d5b9-a44b-4b3e-a021-c1bcdf074f2f/meme.jpg\")
I once heard Coach Jonathan Marcus state that “the watch is a record, not a director”. What a deep thought! And sure, we all want to know what’s happening with our running, especially now that instant feedback is a wrist flip away. But most of what is being measured is product our running, it is not our running per se.
![\"Book](\"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c2e49f525bf02ce9657df92/1621018931757-XDIB55B5W2L9LWUI5DRI/Book+Cover.jpg\")
“Today We Die a Little”![\"Emil](\"https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c2e49f525bf02ce9657df92/1621018745655-P6LDMI59M5TRKTDI5CJ8/Emil+Zatopek+3.JPG\")
As stated earlier, Zatopek’s life went beyond the track, and given his notoriety and propaganda value for the communist regime in his country, he became an army officer with way more privileges than the norm. Even though at times he was outspoken and fought for what he thought right; his position was never undisputed. He took all the advantages and privileges he could from the regime, until he no longer was useful to them.