The new rules of running

By Christopher McDougall

In the land of the ultra-freaks, the man with toenails is a mutant.

That’s what I discover when I arrive at Grand Targhee Resort, at the foot of Wyoming’s Tetons in the American Midwest, for the Badwater Ultramarathon Training Camp.

For the next five days, I’ll be working out with a dozen or so adventure racers and extreme-endurance athletes, as they prepare for the most fearsome footrace on Earth: a 215-kilometre run across Death Valley and up the side of 4418-metre Mount Whitney in blistering summer heat.

But, unlike some of the serious “badasses” here – guys like the Toenail Ripper, the Army Ranger and Jungle Boy – I’m not interested in running for 60 straight hours across a desert in July.

Nor do I plan to be hunted by trained killers in a Georgia swamp or race through the Amazon on foot, while dodging jaguars and those needle-thin, river fish that swim up your penis or have my toenails removed to improve my ultra-marathon times.

So, what can I learn from these guys? How about the secret of lifelong fitness, for starters.

Ultra-runners, after all, are among the most durable, highly trained athletes on the planet. They’re masters at increasing horsepower without blowing the engine. They know real endurance isn’t about gutsing it out on race day – it’s about staying consistent for years before race day.

That these men can run on roads so hot their shoes melt, is thanks to strategy, nutrition and innovation. They’ve had to learn how hard they can punish their bodies without breaking down and how to get the maximum workout in minimum time. They’d never make it to the start unless they knew how to train for months without injury. And they’d never make it to the finish if they weren’t experts in muscle care and motivation.

These are lessons that can be applied to any sport and that’s why I’m here: to see if I can break my lifelong cycle of on-again/off-again conditioning and become as body-savvy as a man facing three days under a brutal desert sun.

EMULATE GIRL POWER

Day one begins with Cameron Diaz, hill repeats and a puzzle. First, the puzzle: nearly all the women finish the Leadville Trail 100 Ultramarathon every year, but fewer than half of the men do. Why?

“Relentless forward motion,” reveals Cameron, who, despite her Hollywood smile and freckly blonde beauty, turns out to be Lisa Smith-Batchen, 45, the legendary ultra-runner who’s one of our instructors (lisasmithbatchen.com). “Take this hill, for example,” she says, as we cruise up a 1.5-kay slope. “I’ll bet your instinct is to hammer it, right?”

Well, yeah. And I’m glad she brought that up, because, frankly, I’ve been a little disappointed. As soon as we start to breathe heavily, we’re supposed to walk. Even for a plodder like me, that seems pretty wimpy.

But I have to figure that Smith-Batchen knows what she’s talking about. She’s not only a two-time female Badwater champion and a highly respected endurance coach, but also the only American, male or female, ever to win the hideously gruelling Marathon des Sables, a six-day, stage race across the Sahara.

By our second ascent, the wisdom of her hill-climbing method becomes clear. When she walks, she’s gliding upwards with a rhythm that’s as smooth and deceptively technical as a speed skater’s: her pelvis is forward; her shoulders are squared over her bellybutton; her breathing is a series of metronomic belly puffs; her thumbs are pistoning straight back and forth to her hips.

When I throttle back and mimic her technique, I’m surprised to find I move about as fast as I would if I were running, but with only a fraction of the effort. At the top, I can shift right back into a run without having to drop my hands to my knees to suck in air.

“The mistake lots of guys make is hammering themselves or each other and then crashing,” Smith-Batchen explains.

They think it makes them look tough, but it can actually be a sign of self-doubt, because if you’re confident you’ve prepared well, you don’t need to prove it on every hill. Men who do may be unconsciously prepping themselves with an excuse for not finishing. Fly-and-die guys usually end up missing workouts, due to tendonitis and hamstring pulls or find ways to back off before things get tough.

That’s one reason ultra-women have such a great finishing percentage, reckons Smith-Batchen. They realise their true challenger is in the mirror, so theytend to run on brains.

As she is making this point, I recall, with a cringe, how many times I’ve flamed out of basketball games, trail runs and weight circuits, usually because I started writing cheques with my gall that my muscles couldn’t cash.

THINK WITH YOUR DICK

“Before I start a race, I think, ‘Okay, where’s my penis?’”

Ray Zahab isn’t the pervert this question seems to make him. At 33, he’s already won an individual title in the Arctic Yukon Ultra, a team title in the 193km Jungle Marathon and third place in the Trans 333, a non-stop, 322km footrace across the Ténéré Desert in Niger.

Today, he’s leading an afternoon session on core conditioning, demonstrating how a few posture tweaks can have an amazing effect on short-burst speed and long-range resilience. By keeping your body weight properly balanced, Zahab says, you can increase gravitational pull to accelerate and decrease it to diminish the strain on your joints and tendons.

The key is your core – the lower-back and transverse abdominal muscles that girdle your midsection. Most people have developed the bad habit of striding out long when they want to go fast and putting their heads down to grind it out when they’re tired.

It may feel natural, but they’re actually working against themselves by slopping their body mass all over the place. When you hunch over, you’re directing your weight downwards instead of forwards. When you lunge out with a long stride and land on your heels, you’re really throwing your weight back behind you.

Instead, imagine you’re pedalling a unicycle: keep your shoulders plumb-lined over your hips and kick back with your feet instead of reaching out. To speed up, lean forward from the ankles instead of bending forward from the waist – you’ll create a light, controlled fall instead of a muscle-intensive series of push-offs.

“You should use this anytime,” Zahab suggests – hiking, biking, sprinting down the basketball court. In addition to going faster with less effort, you’ll preserve your legs by stacking your weight over your strong, protectively arched midfeet, instead of crashing down on the sensitive nerves in your heels or the fragile tendons in your toes.

Zahab has two ways to make sure he’s properly positioned. First is the toe tilt, which he does just before starting to run: if he can lift his toes without rocking back, he’s balanced. The second is the penis test – a handy, in-motion diagnostic that determines whether his hips are far enough forward. Whenever he feels his biomechanics getting sloppy, Zahab glances down to make sure his pelvis isn’t lagging. “If it’s up front,” he says, “you’re fine.”

When I follow his advice, I notice a strange sensation in my calves and ankles: no sensation. For the first time in weeks, my Achilles tendons aren’t aching. Not too brightly, I ran a lot of kays and biked a lot of hills to prepare for the camp, which meant I arrived here with overworked, twinging calves. The relief I feel when I fully straighten my spine is so dramatic, I soon use Zahab’s penis test to coin a mental reminder: “Limp, owww! Erect, ahhh!”

Meanwhile, I’m surprised to see two other guys practising just as intently. One of them is Jim Simone, a former US Army Ranger turned ultra-runner. As part of his combat training, Simone spent three days crossing a swamp, while evading a squad of special forces soldiers.

Since then, he’s run marathons all over the world and survived desert ultras on two continents. Alongside him is Marshall Ulrich, also known as the Toenail Ripper (to me, at least). In a documentary about Badwater, Running on the Sun, Ulrich revealed that he decided his toenails were dead weight and had them surgically removed.

Watching these two taking Zahab’s advice so obediently is all the convincing I need – if their techniques need correcting, mine have a long way to go.

CREATE YOUR OWN HELL

On day three, we studied the case of Frank McKinney, 41, a real-estate magnate who’d never run a marathon and lived in Florida, a good 160km from a decent hill. In six months, he would have to run five, back-to-back marathons across Death Valley, culminating in a climb up Mount Whitney.

So how could he learn to run mountains without any mountains? Easy. If he couldn’t put the resistance in front of him, he’d put it behind him. So he tied a rope around an SUV tyre, clipped it to a weight belt and dragged it from one end of a bridge to the other. He also created his own Death Valley simulator, surrounding a treadmill with heat lamps, a dehumidifier and massive fans (although the fans were ruined when his wife tried to create a desert-storm effect by sprinkling them with sand). In six months, McKinney transformed himself from a weekend tennis player into a member of the elite Badwater finishers club.

“It’s amazing how much you can adapt to your environment if you focus on the essentials that your body needs to learn,” says Smith-Batchen. Take mountain biking and trail running, she adds. Besides raw conditioning, the crucial technical skills you need are quick hands and feet. (Skipping will help you develop those.)

She takes us outside for a brisk, muscle-trembling series of calisthenics. As a working mother, Smith-Batchen is an expert at filling a lunch hour with 60 minutes of running, skipping and plyometric hopping. She borrows from a sport nearly as ancient as running – boxing.

“Who needs dumbbells when you have a park bench?” she shouts, as she leads us through a sequence of incline-push-up salutes. For the tired malcontents among us, Smith-Batchen is ready with a shouted explanation: “You’ll need that triceps power to piston your arms when you’re making your third, 1000m ascent in six hours. And if your pecs aren’t strong, your chest is going to cave in around your lungs when you get tired.”

Calisthenics makes you body-aware; you have to pay attention to form and balance, rather than heaving iron about. I quickly notice a change coming over me. It’s only day three and I already feel differently about my toenails.

Four months later, I barely recognise myself from the waist down. I’m running longer and harder than ever, but the impact is virtually non-existent. I used to think a marathon was a big deal, but now I run one just about every month and still have enough energy to get behind the mower for a few hours or muck around with the kids.

Strangest of all, this surge in my workload hasn’t caused a single injury and it’s cleared up the ones I already had. All those nagging foot and Achilles problems? Gone. Whenever I feel the slightest twinge in my calves or hamstrings, I think of Ray Zahab, check my package position and adjust. That always takes care of it.

Of course, I haven’t completely gone over to the ultra-freak side and there’s no way you’re going to catch me running across Death Valley in July. But there is an 80-kay race in Mexico that looks kind of tempting . . .

NOTES FROM KILOMETRE 421

What you can learn from the ultra-man
Dean Karnazes, pictured here during last month’s 580km run from Mount Kosciuszko to Sydney, is possibly the world’s greatest ultra-runner. In 2005, he ran 560km without stopping, in 80 hours and 44 minutes. We can’t recommend that, but we can all learn from his tips on going the distance.

Run stairs to build strength. Too many runners don’t think about strength – in their legs and lungs – when facing an endurance test. Find a staircase or stadium, ideally with more than 100 steps, for a weekly workout. Start by running to the top a single step at a time and walking back down. Five sets will leave you sore. Work your way up to 10 sets. Next phase: two steps at a time, walking down, five sets. Final phase: two steps up, single steps down, running both ways, working up from five to 10 sets. Keep at it until you can repeat this routine three or four days a week.

Run quicker, not harder. A higher cadence or turnover rate (how quickly you put one foot in front of the other), can make you faster with less effort. Elite distance runners stay in the range of 185 to 200 steps per minute. Varying your cadence can conserve energy and shift the load among different muscles. As you fatigue and slow down, focus on cadence, not speed. This might mean taking shorter, quicker steps. Experiment in training. A rule of thumb: if your stride rate falls below 150 to 160 steps per minute, you’ll want to shorten the stride and increase turnover.

Work to recover. You must exercise the day after a long run. You don’t have to run – try a bike ride, a swim or just a nice walk. The movement increases blood flow, clearing the by-products of intense exercise from your muscles and helping to restore flexibility. Carry bottled water and sip it all day. Your hydrated cells will thank you.