“Who will go the distance? We’ll find out in The Long Run.”
(Don Henley/Glenn Frey – Title song from The Eagles’ last album, 1979)
Long distance runners and triathletes are defined by how far they run fast. Successfully finishing a race with a run from 6 miles on up requires endurance which can only be provided through steady practice at … running long distances. Hence, we do a weekly Long Run. Everyone else is just a casual jogger.
Here are the things the long run is said to help accomplish. Burn fat, and help keep the body lean. Strengthen the tendons and ligaments which support the muscles, bones and joints. Encourage mental stamina through development and rejection of pain, boredom, suffering. Develop the chemical pathways in contracting muscles which rely on fat as fuel. Increase the ability of the heart, lungs, and cardiovascular system to speed oxygen from the air to where its needed, in those muscle energy pathways. and generally toughen us up, make us feel superior to those fast-twitchers who sprint, or the couch potatoes who don’t run at all.
So let’s examine each of these tasks a little bit. First, fat burning and getting lean. This is helpful to the long distance runner for the very simple reason that, each and every time I take a step while running, I am lifting my whole body off the earth momentarily. I am literally jumping from foot to foot, almost like skipping. Take a picture of me at the right moment, and both my feet will be of the ground. Running is a series of connected, very short, long jumps. It’s no accident that the very best sprinters have sometimes been the very best long jumpers: Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis. So, it makes sense that the lighter one is, the easier it is to break gravity’s velcro. Getting rid of fat – which for the most part does not help one run – is not such a bad idea. (More on this later.)
But as I come back to earth with each leap forward, my legs and back have to stiffen to absorb pressures greater than my weight, over and over. I hit the ground, and my spine gets slightly pressed, my leg muscles tighten up to lock my joints which then get squeezed. The muscles moving the bones, the tendons attaching the muscles to the bones, the ligaments holding the joints together – all of them get are asked to absorb this unnatural shock at least 45,000 times over the course of a 4 hour marathon. They’d better be ready. The long run provides a simulation of the stress; the rest afterwards allows time for repair, to increase their strength and resilience for the next test, a week later.
45,000 steps – that can be mind-numbing, especially when each one starts to produce sensations of pain and weakness, begging for release, for the whole repetitive agony to come to an end. Learning to ignore those signals to stop is as hard as learning, say, the names of all 640 muscles in our body. And doing the same thing – anything – tens of thousands of times, over and over for hours on end, is mind-numbingly boring. This becomes a vicious cycle. The very power of the mind which might be needed to overcome to painful urge to stop running is sapped by the shear drudgery of the effort. Running for 2 or 3 hours at a stretch offers a golden opportunity to practice ways to ignore or overcome those twin urges to stop, pain and boredom. Thank God for the 21st Century, Steve Jobs, and his iPod. And thank Buddha for showing us how to lose our (conscious) self.
Back to burning fat as fuel. This is a little technical, but basically, muscle contraction requires little packets of chemical energy. That energy can come either from the interaction of fat molecules with oxygen (“aerobic” metabolism), or the direct breakdown of carbohydrate molecules (“anaerobic” metabolism). Fat, per unit weight, contains 2.25 times the energy value of carbohydrate, so is a more efficient source of fuel in that regard. But fat breaks down at a constant steady rate. Sudden bursts of increased muscular activity always requires carbohydrate for fuel. Both can occur at the same time. Fat stores in the body are basically infinite. One would faint from dehydration or tear muscles, before he ran out of fat for fuel, even the scrawny little Africans you see running marathons. On the other hand, carbohydrate sources are finite – even the best runner will run out somewhere between 2 and 3 hours at a marathon pace, or 3 to 4 hours at Ironman pace. Eating more won’t help, unless one stopped running after eating to allow full intestinal absorption of the calories.
So, the goal of the long run is to increase the ability of the muscle fibers to contract using fat as a fuel source – this is variously called running efficiency or endurance. Remember getting lean to reduce weight to run faster? Well, if my body fat percentage is 4% (about what those skinny Africans are), and I weighed about 56 kilograms, like they do, I would still have 2.24 kilos of fat, or 20,000 calories of fuel, which could take me close to 200 miles – far longer than I could ever hope to run. Put another way (using me as an example, this time), running 26.2 miles on fat alone would drop my body fat percentage from 5.5 to about 5.2%. So fat as a fuel is my friend. Running long trains my muscles to run better using fat as a fuel, as long as I don’t also run FAST during that long run. In that case, they would learn how to use carbs as fuel, and I would start to fade way too early, when that runs out.
What about training the heart, and the plumbing it uses to spread oxygen throughout the body, especially to the muscles, which need it to break down the fat for fuel? Well, that’s really the easiest thing to train, and at this point in my career, I doubt that my heart is getting any bigger or stronger, no matter how much I train. But the little vessels, the capillaries barely one blood cell wide, which lace every micron of my muscles – those can come and go quickly. If I don’t keep running every week, they begin to disappear, and my muscles lose their power source. Same thing happens to the mitochonrdria, those strange parasite-like turbines which convert the fuel to energy in my muscles – I am always losing and building new ones; they can disappear literally overnight. Running long triggers more growth of these little guys.
So all of this is happening when I run long. No one really knows how long is long enough or too long. I won’t go into all the theories here, only note that for me, at least, running any more than about 16-17 miles at a time, or about 2 hours and 30-40 minutes, begins to become counter-productive. Meaning, the length of time I need to recover from that, for my muscles to stop being sore, for my joints to not ache, for my body to generally stop feeling exhausted, starts to increase, and I can’t do any training for too many days afterwards. At 2.5 hours, I can snap back the next morning. At 3 hours, I take days, losing several opportunities to get back in the pool or on my bike or into the weight room to build other assets. It’s tough being a triathlete, and even tougher being an Ironman.
Today, my long run took me from my home up north onto the heights above Gig Harbor, then down along the bike path to the Narrows Bridge, across Puget Sound halfway through Tacoma, and back home again. Luckily, the cities have turned their water fountains on for Spring, and I can get by with just one water bottle carried in my hand, refilled twice en route. I take a package of GU, and one or two Shot Blocks for interim fueling. I run in the heat of the day, under direct sun, cause I’m a mad dog Englishman Ironman.