REPORT: Too many training partners leads to underperforming on marathon day, especially in Boulder

New Strava findings confirm that high altitude and brainlessness independently exacerbate this "too many legs spoil the dream" relationship

I spent a couple of hours on the phone yesterday with an old friend from a faraway running galaxy, learning the details undergirding a certain high-school team’s failure this fall to meet justified early-season expectations. As usual with these annual-ish conversations, the particulars were worse than I imagined, with every glaring problem eminently fixable with one or two administrative moves and an hour-long seminar for the runners involved. When I took to Strava to investigate, I was almost agog at the unregulated masochistic mayhem I saw, all of it springing from the noblest of intentions and every bit of it dovetailing toward inevitable individual and collective frustration.

I maintain a Strava account mainly for monitoring the efforts of a handful of friends and clients. Every two months or so, I feel moved to upload the data from one of my own runs to the platform; even though Strava has thousands of aerobic heroes providing evidence of four-mile jogs at 7:30 pace, there’s always room for one more W00T-able mundanity from the shuffling herd. But these already anomalous uploads are trickling off to nothing as I gradually disengage myself from pointlessly translating my exercise bouts into numbers, so now I use Strava almost entirely for spying.

Much of my recent ranting about Boulder and its rollicking cavalcade of inglorious pretenders involved such spying. What I was mainly looking for was instances of established fame-hounds having regular on-the-ground contact with people they could brag about being seen with. Despite being a runner since Ronald Reagan’s first term as U.S. president, living in Boulder for around half of the current century, and observing the unlikely in-universe ascendancy of Citius Mag and of a spate of other water-headed pundits and deliriously self-interested podcasters, the phenomenon of runner-groupies still amazes me. And while It’s not just Boulder that allows someone’s running times to automatically boost their local sex appeal, the phenomenon has to be more flagrant and unapologetic here than anywhere on Earth.

While it’s little more than a snarky waste of time to poke fun at people who organize their running around the who more than they do the what, being too involved in other people’s running can, and usually does, have precisely the opposite effect of the ostensibly desired one, which is to become a faster runner by surrounding yourself with runners of equal or greater capabilities and knowledge.

In “researching” Boulder’s reliably sized and still-growing complement of trust-fund douchebags, I was reminded of how many people around here crater their own goals by doing too many runs at the wrong pace, and in many cases not even having a clue about how to translate sea-level marathon goal times with workouts they do at 5,300’ to 8,000’. They do speed sessions, long runs, and tempo runs in groups, but most of them seem to think that chasing slightly faster people all the time is as helpful as writing out and adhering to workouts with specific pace goals that make sense considering what they hope to accomplish in their races.

Since many of these people have specifically moved here to improve their times—so they say—it represents a massive loss of collective potential that so many of these people, some of them with NCAA-level competitive experience, never develop an honest inkling of what it takes to translate 5K or 10K speed into a similarly proficient marathon performance. Some of them even consciously reject advice that they very world-class elites they suck up to have themselves followed en route to becoming the decorated runners they are; raw talent is the major difference between world-class and wannabe runners, but far from the only one.

Some people have a basic problem distancing themselves from the vibe for even, say, one hour. Out the door, ringer on!

I could be the one missing something, but why has it become the norm to brag about being interrupted on a run by someone who was also out running and hosts a running podcast to celebrate people who don’t run fast, including other superfluous podcasters?

Surely this has competitive implications. Bromka missed the Olympic Marathon Trials several times by a narrow margin, and now he’s too old to ever attain it; he would probably credit his online capering before the 2020 cycle to supplying him the energy to come as close as he did, but I hardly think this is settled science, given the intrinsic natures and habits of most truly successful runners. And I define a successful runner as someone whose marathon meets or exceeds expectations based on other race times, not necessarily someone who has reached the Trials level.

If you are training for a marathon properly, you’re going to be either running a hard workout, recovering from a very hard effort, or getting ready for such a thing at least two-thirds of the time. This means that if you are running with others daily or regularly, you’re probably not running the pace you naturally would on these days. Your easy-run pace will, or should be, all over the place compared to when you’re training for a track or shorter road distance, because you’re dealing with certain metabolic forms of fatigue that simply don’t crop up when training for shorter distances. So unless a given runner happens to be the one dictating the pace in every group run he or she is in, that runner might be causing himself or herself chronic problems.

Equally pressing is the widespread lack of attention to matching altitude workouts to sea-level goals. I can fix this in two sentences: If you train in Boulder proper, divide your time for any sustained run of 10 to 20 minutes by 1.03, and divide your time for anything longer than 20 minutes by 1.035. If you were born here, use the divisors 1.025 and 1.03 instead. But even most runners who maintain an awareness of this don’t do their faster sustained runs at the right pace. I’ve long been a big proponent of marathon-pace runs, but a lot of locals don’t even bother with doing them at the wrong paces; they just skip them outright, pleading that it’s too much stress and that a magical combination of 70-mile weeks and doing intervals on tracks stained with world-class sweat will get the job done. It never does, yet these people rarely change a thing—other than, sometimes, the identities of their many training partners.

The real curiosity here is that the evidence of these people’s training malfeasance isn’t just being supplied by degruntled middle-aged joggers on radioactive newsletter-blogs. Nay, the very locals they idolize and are racking up admirable times across the country do things very differently from their worshippers. For example, I don’t know 31:37 10,000-meter runner Carrie Verdon’s every habit, but I do know that I have seen her coach, Lee Troop, biking along with her and only her at Davidson Mesa (see? I’m no better than the gawking rabble), and I am fairly certain that this is because Verdon’s workouts are exquisitely tuned to both her capabilities and her goals. And while I don’t know how often she does easy runs with others, I believe her primary training partner on most of these is a dog named Scout, and he probably doesn’t take issue with any of Verdon’s chosen paces.

I can name a couple of others of somewhat lesser talent who have quietly moved out here, kept mainly to themselves on the roads and trails, and thrived as runners, not as brew-pub gossip-sharing mates, as a result. This doesn’t require being antisocial; it just means picking one’s group encounters far more judiciously than most locals do. Verdon, not incidentally, is a full-time schoolteacher. Bless her for that anyway, but Troop is perhaps on to something in urging his top runners to maintain full-time employment. Maybe that wouldn’t be required elsewhere, but for obvious reasons it’s a damned fine practice around here. And even if one proposes that Beck of the Pack is a fountain of speculative-at-best raving, no one makes that argument about Lee Troop.

Running is just a different enterprise for fans and athletes than it was even ten years ago. Before the New York City Marathon, Keira D’Amato—one of the more obvious candidates for a future Athlete Biological Passport anomaly, one likely to be suppressed until Russian hackers become interested—made an Instagram post in which she was careful to tag everyone who’s paid for her efforts or helped publicize them. The responses in turn were all gushing attempts to climb to or remain atop the electronic suck-up heap for purposes of self-promotion.

Maybe all of these people clamoring for a slice of the publicity pie recognize that perhaps one American in 200 recognizes the name Keira D’Amato; maybe they don’t. But social-media hijinks are the media game now. There is precious little real money in the sport, and it only makes sense that a cluster of people raised to treat social media as an absolute requirement for personal and professional success would behave as they do. By itself, this is not a sport-crippling development, just a weird and unruly one.

But although running may be a third-rate sport—and to be frank, this grade could be even lower, as assigning such a mark depends on the total number of rates one chooses to visualize—it’s worth trying to be good as well as trying to stand up and frantically wave your hand in the presence of greatness. This is true even when your chosen idols aren’t doped-up kooky tomatoes or others enjoying advantages, legal and otherwise, that you lack access to yourself. When you live around too many runners who unconsciously externalize and misappropriate their own aims, and like Peter Bromka eternally worry that the vibe might be passing them over, you don’t just run the risk of becoming one of them; you already are one of them.

This is not a suggestion that runners isolate themselves from other runners, which would seem facile advice given the source. But if you don’t have a real sense of what every workout or recovery run in a given week is generally supposed to look like and feel like, a course in California with a net elevation loss and possibly a tailwind isn’t going to compensate for your lack of proper attention. There are a lot of runners over forty around here who lived and loved the vibe for years, before it was nearly as all-consuming as it is now, who not-so-quietly wish they had access to a few practical, sweeping do-overs.

(Social share photo: The FloTrack 2018 Beer Mile Champsionship.)