Recently I received the following email message:

Matt, I’m reading your Performance Nutrition [for Runners] book and have a question. I’ll be 50 years old this year and have been taking naNOx9 by MuscleTech for almost two years. I take no more than four tablets before training runs and races. Most of the time only two. I started taking it while training for my first half-marathon. I was having a really tough time getting over 5 miles. I gave it a try and it seemed to work. What is your opinion on this supplement?

I will now give you the long version of the short reply I sent to this gentleman.

NaNOx9 is one of many arginine-based nutritional supplements that are used mainly by bodybuilders to achieve fuller-looking muscles. The amino acid arginine is a precursor to nitric oxide, a chemical that dilates the blood vessels and thereby facilitates increased blood flow when released by the body.  That’s how arginine supplementation creates that pumped-up look bodybuilders covet.

Most of the nitric oxide boosters on the market are essentially the same, beginning with their arginine-based formulations and ending with their claims that the tiny differences in their formulations result in faster and more efficient arginine “delivery.”  NaNOx9 is no exception, as evidenced by the following snippet of hyperbole from the product website: “[N]aNOX9 represents an astounding technological advancement in nitric oxide supplementation through harnessing the power of nanoparticulation. Team MuscleTech researchers sought out the world’s leading authorities in nanoparticulation to assist in developing a formula so powerful and fast acting that it has made regular nitric oxide products a thing of the past.”

We started to see the makers of creatine supplements (and every nitric oxide-boosting supplement maker is also a creatine supplement maker) promote their creatine products with similar claims after the market became completely saturated with such products, making brand differentiation a real challenge.  I’ve looked into the creatine delivery system claims and found that they are all baloney, except one: creatine is in fact delivered more effectively when consumed with sugar.  And you don’t need some fancy patented nutrition technology to achieve this effect. I feel safe in assuming that the nitric oxide booster claims are hogwash, too.

Most nitric oxide-boosting supplement makers stop short of making performance claims for their products.  They claim their stuff will make you look stronger, but not that it will actually make you stronger.  That’s good, because there’s no evidence that arginine supplementation makes weightlifters stronger.  To the contrary, there is some evidence suggesting that it might actually make them weaker!  One of the most important hormones for muscle growth is growth hormone. Resistance exercise increases growth hormone levels by three to five times.  However, when resistance exercise and arginine supplementation are combined, this increase is cut in half. 

Interestingly, arginine supplementation actually increases growth hormone at rest.  This effect was discovered before it was discovered that arginine attenuates the much greater growth hormone increase that normally occurs after exercise.  Since growth hormone is beneficial for recovery from and adaptation to endurance training, scientists (before they learned that arginine attenuates post-exercise growth hormone elevation) also looked at the effects of arginine supplementation on endurance performance.  Such studies, including a 2005 Swiss study, whose results are no longer surprising given what we now know, have found no performance benefit.

Growth hormone levels decline with age.  Thus, older athletes tend to be particularly interested in supplements that purport to increase growth hormone.  I imagine that’s why the 50-year-old runner who emailed me about NaNOx9 started using that product. But the available research suggests that any benefit he’s experiencing is probably a placebo effect.

In my own MedLine research I was only able to find one, small piece of weak evidence that arginine supplementation might be ergogenic. In a recent Chinese study, arginine supplementation was found to increase the swimming endurance of older mice.  It also reduced exercise-induced inflammation and free-radical damage. But since we already have human studies showing no performance benefit of arginine supplementation for endurance athletes, I wouldn’t put much weight on this study.

What can you possibly accomplish in just four minutes on the bike?  A lot, actually.  All you have to do is ride as hard as you can.  Better yet, instead of riding as hard as you can for four straight minutes, ride at your true maximum power output level in several short bursts, resting just long enough between bursts to avoid a precipitous decline in power output from one burst to the next.

What will this hellishly challenging four-minute session accomplish?  It will boost your aerobic and anaerobic capacity simultaneously, increase your fatigue tolerance, and lead directly to improved cycling performance in triathlons.

The session I just described is known as the Tabata protocol.  It is named after Izumi Tabata, Ph.D., a former researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Kanoya, who learned about the workout from the coach of the Japanese national speed-skating team.  Specifically, it consists of six to eight maximum-intensity sprints lasting 20 seconds apiece, with mere 10-second passive recovery periods between them.  The session is so challenging and painful that most of the world-class speed skaters who were lucky enough to be the first to try it were totally exhausted after seven intervals.  Only a handful could do eight.

Tabata’s primary research interest was the effects of exercise intensity on fitness.  Through his work he came to believe that exercise intensity was at least as important as, if not more important than, exercise duration.  So when he heard about a workout that packed two minutes and 40 seconds of maximum-intensity work into a four-minute period (and that’s for those who could do eight intervals), he was intrigued.

To test the effects of this workout, Tabata first transferred it from speed skating to stationary bikes.  Then he recruited subjects and had them perform the protocol five times a week for six weeks.  At the beginning and again at end of the study period, Tabata and his team measured the subjects’ VO2max and their anaerobic capacity.  To provide a basis for comparison, Tabata conducted a second experiment in which subjects pedaled stationary bikes for one hour at a moderate intensity (70% of VO2max) five days a week for six weeks.  Their VO2max and anaerobic capacity were also measured before and after the intervention.

The results were staggering.  Subjects in the moderate-intensity exercise trial improved their VO2max by a healthy 9.5%, while their anaerobic capacity did not change at all.  Subjects in the maximum-intensity intervals trial—despite exercising only 20 minutes per week, compared to five hours per week for the other group—improved their VO2max by 14% and their anaerobic capacity by a whopping 28%.

Needless to say, this study got a lot of attention when it was published back in 1996, and coaches and athletes began to adapt the protocol to sports ranging from swimming to boxing.  Virtually everyone who tried the Tabata protocol made the same report: it was excruciatingly painful, but damn was it effective!

I learned about Tabata intervals from Brian MacKenzie, owner of Genetic Potential, a fitness facility in Newport Beach, Calif.  Brian trains a number of triathletes and incorporates stationary bike and treadmill Tabata sessions into the program of all who are willing to endure the suffering they entail.  An ultra-runner himself, Brian credits his own twice-weekly Tabata sessions with enabling him to improve his performance on a training schedule averaging only 6.5 hours per week, and says his triathlete clients have reported similar benefits.

If you think you have what it takes to survive the Tabata protocol, set up your indoor trainer and warm up with a few minutes of easy spinning followed by a few short (10-20-second) efforts at 90% of maximum intensity at increasing tension levels.  Reset your computer to zero so you can record the total distance covered in the following 20-second intervals alone.  You will try to increase this total each time you repeat the workout.

To perform your first interval, simply churn out the highest wattage total you possibly can for 20 seconds.  You can stay in the saddle or get out of the saddle and use whatever combination of gear ratio and cadence works best.  After 20 seconds have elapsed, stop pedaling for 10 seconds—and 10 seconds only.  Now do your second interval.  Do not expect to be able to do more than six intervals in your first attempt.  Cool down with just a few minutes of easy spinning.

If you’re like a lot of triathletes, you will be tempted to incorporate this session into a longer workout.  Don’t.  If you do more than a warm-up beforehand, you will fall apart completely after just a few intervals, and while you will still be giving a maximum effort, you will not be working at your true maximum output level, and that’s what counts.  And you simply won’t be able to even think about doing anything more than a short cool-down after completing your Tabata intervals.

There are two approaches you can take to incorporating the Tabata protocol into your regular training.  One option is to do the session regularly—from once every 10 days to as often as twice a week—during the base-building period of training to quickly and efficiently boost your aerobic and anaerobic fitness.  Continue to do the session regularly until your performance (i.e. your maximum total distance covered) within the session stops increasing and levels off, and then turn your focus to more race-specific types of high-intensity workouts.  Henceforth just do the session whenever you feel the need for a good blast.

A second option is to use the Tabata protocol primarily as a time-saver.  Whenever you’re pressed for time but you still want to get the fitness benefits of a long workout, toss in a Tabata, and have it both ways.

I’ve just received an assignment to write an article on the science of pacing for Runner’s World. I would like to start the article with an anecdote about a runner who paced himself or herself disastrously (going out way too fast and bonking) in his or her first race, but learned a lesson and ran much more evenly in the next race. Are you one of those runners who sprinted the first 100 yards of his or her first one-mile fun run as a kid and then death-marched the rest of the way, or did roughly the same thing in your first high school cross-country race, or even as an adult? I want to hear from you! If your story fits my needs I will use it in my article and millions of other runners will read your name!

To have your anecdote considered, please email it to me: fitwriter@hotmail.com. It doesn’t have to be exhaustively detailed or poetically written. Just share your memory and I’ll take it from there.

On Tuesday I published a post on the rationale for doing progression runs. Now I’d like to share a few practical tips. There’s not much to it, really. Because the purpose of progression runs–as Brad Hudson prescribes them, anyway–is to provide a moderate training stimulus, progression runs need not become progresively more challenging as hard workouts such as intervals, hill repetitions and threshold runs should do.  They can be fairly static, like recovery runs.

Progressions work very well in the context of long runs. In fact, I think it’s a good idea to end every long run with a progression unless it’s so long relative to your current endurance level that you finish it in a state of near exhaustion even without a progression or faster running is incorporated into it in a different way (for example, marathon-pace surges sprinkled throughout the run). A long run should never be easy. So if it’s not a hard run, make it a moderate run with a progression. Just run at your standard junk mileage pace until you’re one to three miles from home and then increase your pace by a minute per mile or so.

It is sensible to make your long progression runs somewhat progressive by gradually increasing the length and pace of your progressions as you gain fitness. But this evolution should not be drastic. Even your hardest progression runs should still be only moderately challenging. Three miles at marathon race pace or slightly faster is a good upper limit. If you want to do more, then make it a hard session by doing a proper marathon-pace run instead.

Progression runs also work well as preparatory work for threshold runs.  In the base phase of your training, do a progression run each week on the same day you plan to do your threshold runs later in the training cycle. Start with a half-mile or five-minute progression at marathon pace or thereabouts at the end of a moderate-intensity, moderate-length “base” run. Slightly increase the pace and/or duration of your progressions over the next few weeks until you’re finishing these runs with roughly 20 minutes of running at a pace that’s close to your lactate threshold pace (or the fastest pace you could sustain for one hour with a gun to your head). Once you reach this point, start doing threshold runs.

Another good time to do threshold runs is on the second day after a hard run (assuming that second day is not slated for another hard run). For example, if you typically do high-intensity runs on Tuesday and Friday and a long run on Sunday, then Thursday would be a good day to do a progression run. In these runs you can go completely by feel. When you feel great, run as much as the last three miles at the fastest pace that still feels comfortable. When you feel thrashed from previous training, accelerate just slightly for half a mile.

As long as you’re not hindering your recovery from previous training or sabotaging your performance in your next hard run, yet you’re also doing a little more work than you would do in a steady-pace run, then whatever sort of progression you do is serving its purpose.

Progression runs seem to have become a fad in the running community. Or at least their popularity has suddenly greatly increased. Type “progression run” into the Google search box and you’ll see what I mean. I must admit that I am more of a follower than a leader with respect to this trend. Like most runners, I’ve always practiced de facto progression runs, which is to say, I’ve always tended to run faster toward the end of my regular “base” runs and long runs. But progression runs have only had a formal place in my training since I started working with Brad Hudson on the manuscript of Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon a couple of years ago. Thus, while there are many specific ways to practice progression runs, and I practice them the Brad Hudson way, more or less.
A progression run is a run in which the first (and usually the longer) part is completed at a steady, moderate intensity and the second (and usually the shorter) part is completed at a faster pace, usually in the range of lactate threshold pace. Hudson’s rationale for progression runs is that they simply add a little bit of a challenge to workouts that would otherwise be relatively easy, and in a way that does not hamper recovery from one’s most recent hard workout or sabotage performance in the next planned hard workout. Hudson likes to have his runners do them in their Sunday long runs and on Wednesdays or Thursdays. (Tuesdays and Fridays are the high-intensity days in his system). Hudson does not believe, as some coaches do, that every run should be either hard or easy. He believes that runners will absorb a higher total training load without becoming overtrained if they do one or two moderately challenging workouts per week in addition to two hard workouts (or three hard workouts if you count hard long runs) and however many easy workouts. And progresion runs represent an effective way to experience a moderate challenge.

I have my own, brain-based rationale for progression runs that does not contradict Hudson’s. It goes like this: The whole reason we tend to do de facto progression runs is that our brains make us feel good and strong and eager to pick up the pace toward the end of an otherwise easy run, because speeding up will complete the task faster and because the brain’s teleoanticipation mechanism is able to calculate that doing so will not be unduly stressful. By the same token, the reason we often feel sluggish from the very beginning of some runs is because the brain concludes from afferent feedback received from the body that the body is still recovering from recent hard training, so the brain makes us feel miserable to prevent us from overtaxing our bodies by running hard again before the body is ready. But with a mile or two left, our brains often lift this “artificial” limitation, knowing that a moderate acceleration to the finish will do no harm at this point. Feelings of sluggishness and peppiness during running are intelligent messages from the subconscious brain to our consciousness. It is good to heed them. Progression runs are just a way of formalizing and taking full advantage of the brain’s capacity to reveal opportunities to squeeze a little extra fast running into your schedule and thereby squeeze a little more fitness out of your body.

Foodeology is a neologism of my creation.  It is a contraction of “food ideology.”  An ideology is a body of doctrine that guides the way an individual or group behaves.  A foodeology is a set of beliefs that guides the way an individual or group eats—or at least the way an individual or group intends to eat. 

An ideology is different from a science.  A science is an evolving body of knowledge in a particular field.  Scientific knowledge changes, because the methods that define a science systematically replace existing beliefs with better ones.  Even when knowledge in a given science stands unchanged for a while, it’s not for lack of trying.  An ideology is different.  It consists of received knowledge accepted on faith.  An individual or group that accepts a given ideology makes no effort to change it.  Indeed, if an ideology changes it is destroyed.

Ideologies tend to emerge in areas of knowledge that concern human beings.  What we know in these areas and what we do with what we know affects our lives for better or worse, such that our beliefs in these areas of knowledge inevitably take on a moral aspect.  Ideas about what is become mixed up with ideas about what ought to be.  For example, in developing his economic theory, Karl Marx did not merely explain capitalism as a particular sort of economic system that was destined to be replaced a different sort of economic system that he called communism, but he also argued that capitalism was bad and communism good.  

It’s this moral component of ideologies that makes them resistant to change.  Communism as Marx envisioned it never did come along to supplant capitalism.  But if he were alive today, Marx would probably still argue that it should—and perhaps that it might yet. Sciences and ideologies serve different purposes.  A science, in its purest form, is a totally honest search for truth.  An ideology, by contrast, comprises a self-serving bundle of truths that validate your values.  We develop, select, and retain ideologies for the purpose of creating and maintaining identities.  Your ideologies say who you are, what you value, and which groups you belong to.  Ideological beliefs are sometimes true, and everyone believes that all of his or her ideological beliefs are true, but usually they are not true, and they serve their purpose whether they are true or not.

Food is a thing that matters very much to humans.  After all, we are what we eat.  So it’s next to impossible to think scientifically about food.  By the time any of us is mature enough to be capable of thinking scientifically about food, we are already defined by our dietary tastes and habits.  It is all too easy for a person who is revolted by the notion of eating the flesh of a dead animal to believe that nobody should eat dead animals, for ethical reasons or health reasons or any reason other than visceral disgust.  An idea about what is (in this case, the idea that eating meat is kind of gross) becomes mixed up with an idea about what ought to be (in this case, the idea that eating meat is wrong).

In each specific foodeology something is considered good and something else is considered bad.  In the low-carb foodeology, carbohydrate is bad and fat and protein are good.  In the paleo-diet foodeology, every food consumed by humans before 5,000 B.C. is good and every food incorporated into the human diet thereafter is bad.  There is plenty of evidence that these beliefs are more extreme than the truth, yet those who have internalized them are largely deaf and blind to such evidence, because they want to continue believing what they believe.

Even most credentialed nutrition scientists are foodeologists.  First of all, nutrition scientists are what they eat no less than the rest of us.  Also, as an institution, nutrition science is one of the least pure sciences because it operates in a societal context in which food has all kinds of social, economic and other meanings that bias our perceptions of it.  Nutrition science has produced a number of foodeologies, including the infamous lipid hypothesis (that is, the notion that eating too much fat is the main cause of metabolic diseases).  But at least nutrition science is science enough to have revealed the falsity of some of the foodeologies it earlier produced. Every person who has a definite set of beliefs about the best way to eat has a foodeology, because we really don’t have certain knowledge of the best way to eat, or know whether the best way to eat is even definable.  Every foodeology is therefore wrong, although some foodeologies are demonstrably more wrong than others.  This does not mean they are harmful, nor merely useless.  A foodeology cannot achieve the breadth and lastingness and acceptance needed to qualify itself as a bona fide foodeology unless most of those who accept and apply it find it beneficial. And benefit aside, foodeologies always serve their proponents by informing their sense of identity.  The bodybuilder who gorges himself upon absurdly excessive amounts of protein enjoys a sense of fraternity with other protein-gorging bodybuilders even if all that extra protein does not actually help him build bigger muscles, as he believes it does. The Roots of Foodeology

Foodeologies date back at least four thousand years, and probably much farther.  The oldest known foodeology is the kosher eating laws of the ancient Israelites recorded in the book of Leviticus.  On their face, these laws don’t make any sense.  You can’t eat meat and dairy in the same meal.  You can’t eat fish without both scales and fins.  But the point of the kosher eating laws was not to make sense.  It was to give the Jews a sense of identity by forcing them to eat differently than other peoples.  To that end, the weirder, the better.

Looking back at these laws from a modern perspective, it is easy to assume that they must have had some sort of health-based rationale.  However, no such rationale is given.  The word “unclean” is often used but clearly has the same spiritual meaning that it has when used elsewhere in the bible.  Nevertheless, many modern Jews and Christians choose to interpret the ancient Hebrew foodeology as a health diet.  In his bestselling book, The Maker’s Diet, Jordan Rubin presents a diet based on the kosher eating laws, reaching far for health-based rationales for prohibitions against eating shellfish and so forth. Virtually all modern foodeologies are health-based, or have a dual rationale in health and ethics.  The father of the modern foodeology is John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), the co-inventor of cornflakes breakfast cereal, whose weird life was parodied in the film, The Road to Wellville.  Kellogg, a Seventh Day Adventist, advocated a vegetarian diet and held a fanatical belief in the health-boosting powers of nuts.  Many of Kellogg’s contemporaries considered him a nut based on his use of practices such yogurt enemas at his Battle Creek Sanitarium.

Since Kellogg’s time the rate of emergence of new foodeologies has increased steadily.  The primary impetus for this trend is the profit motive.  As the obvious health consequences of poor eating habits have intensified, consumers have become increasingly willing to spend money on informational and food products associated with foodeologies that are promoted as the best solution to these consequences.  Today there is a rich marketplace of foodeologies that they consumer may choose from.  In most cases the particular foodeology chosen has little effect, typically due to lack of adherence.  But in many cases the chosen foodeology results in substantial and sustained weight loss and other benefits.  In any case, the chosen foodeology does for its chooser what every ideology always does for him who internalizes it: conferring a sense of identity and group belonging, if only for a while. 

Choosing Your Foodeology

What are the factors that determine the foodeology or foodeologies that a person chooses to internalize?  Some of them are personal, as in my earlier example of a person who becomes a vegetarian foodeologist simply because he or she has developed a distaste for meat.  Other factors are political.  A conservative-minded person is more likely to accept the nutrition establishment foodeology (best represented by the government’s nutrition guidelines), whereas a liberal-minded person is more likely to preach an organic foodeology.  Still other factors are social.  Overweight individuals who diet frequently tend to buy into whichever weight-loss foodeology is currently in style; it makes them feel with-it in the same way that listening to pop radio makes young people feel connected to the moment.

It’s all very complex, and I don’t pretend to have it all figured out. Yet.

Are you planning to run this year’s San Diego Rock n’ Roll Marathon? If so, I’d like to meet you. There will be a few opportunities. I am scheduled to speak at a Barnes & Noble bookstore located at 10775 Westview Parkway at 2 PM on Saturday, May 31 (the day before the race). The topic of my presentation will be, as it was at my recent Barnes & Noble appearance in Nashville, “The Art and Science of Marathon Pacing.” The event is sponsored by NAL, publisher of my book Brain Training for Runners, copies of which I will have available for signing.

I will also spend a couple of hours at the Accelerade booth at the marathon expo signing copies of the same book. The exact time of my presence there is yet to be determined. As soon as it’s scheduled I will let you know. Finally, I will give my marathon pacing presentation once or twice at the marathon expo as well. Again, the exact times are yet to be determined.

If I don’t see you at any of these events, perhaps I will see you in the marathon itself, which I am running. If my last marathon, in Nashville, was a workout, this one will be an experiment. While I will still be nowhere near peak marathon shape on June 1, I just might be fit enough to run a PR. So I’m planning to start the race at PR pace (6:19/mile) and continue as long as I can. If I make it all the way to the finish line without slowing down, I will be very pleased. If I combust somewhere between mile 20 and mile 25, I will not be disappointed, because I will have at least gotten a great workout in preparation for my assault on my half-marathon PR in San Francisco on August 3.

It’s a very low-pressure way to go after a marathon PR, as it really matters little to me whether I even finish. I live in downtown San Diego, so I can just walk home if it comes to that!

I like to look at familiar training practices with skepticism. Instead of just accepting a given practice as automatically validated by the fact that everyone does it, I like to ask: Is this practice really beneficial? Does it really do what we think it’s doing? Most familiar training practices stand up just fine to such scrutiny, but others don’t. One example that I write about in Brain Training for Runners is recovery runs. It’s not that these workouts aren’t beneficial–they are. But they are not beneficial in the way that most runners think they are. They do not, in fact, promote recovery from previous training.

Another common training practice whose typical rationale dissolves under analysis is the cool-down. Many runners believe that running easy for several minutes at the end of a hard workout accelerates recovery from the stress imposed by such workouts. However, there is no evidence that this is the case. In fact, the small amount of reseach on cool-downs that has been done clearly shows that cooling down has no effect on recovery. For example, a study conducted last year by scientists at the University of Sydney, Australia, found that while warm-ups reduced post-workout muscle soreness, cool-downs had no effect.

Does this mean you should not cool down at the end of hard runs? No. It just means you don’t have to. However, I have a hunch that cooling down is beneficial in a way that has nothing to do with recovery. When you cool down at the end of a hard run, you run in a state of fatigue. Running in a state of fatigue is a strong stimulus for fitness gains. So it’s plausible that tacking a bit of slow running onto the end of a challenging workout actually enhances the workout’s fitness benefits.

Of course, you could increase the amount of fatigued running you do in harder workouts by extending the hard portion of the workout, but presumably you’re already doing as much hard running as you should be doing in such workouts. In any case, you can always do more fatigued running at a slow pace than you can at a fast pace, so no matter how much fast running you do in a hard workout there comes a point where you can only increase your exposure to running in a fatigued state by running slowly.

So keep cooling down.

I was gratified to receive the following email last week while I was en route to Nashville:

Matt,

Your great book “Brain Training for Runners” was very useful for me in opening up new ways to think about training for events.

Two concepts were especially useful for me as I was training for the USATF National Masters Indoor track meet.

While I have very fast twitch muscles, I have to work hard on endurance.

I always thought it was my body that “hit the wall” and stopped me from reaching my full potential. & I was always reluctant to go all out in training, wanting to save it for the day of the race.

My racewalking coach, Dr. Frank Alongi, always gave me training schedules that were very hard. I did not understand the concept that you have explained so well.

His way of saying it was, “Workouts should be hard so the race is easy.”

It is not easy to train that hard unless you understand why you are doing it.

It is still hard but with training your mind to understand that you can do the speed, you can do the distance—breaking records becomes possible.

Now if I had just had about 2 more weeks to train, I could have gotten that world record.

Every day now before my workouts, I go back and re-read sections of your book to inspire me to improve my endurance, speed, health and results. I often turn to pages 161-168—“go with the flow”

My goal now is to break the American records in the 15K National road racewalk event in Riverside, CA on May 18, 2008. I will keep you posted.

Yours in sport,

Jack Bray, M.A., C.P.G.

USATF Level 1 Coach, Certified Race Walk Instructor

New American record holder, 3K Indoor racewalk-in a time of 17:12 (smashing the old record-17:52), 75-79 age group

My goal for yesterday’s Country Music Marathon in Nashville was to run 2:59 and finish it still feeling human. In other words, I was approaching the event as a hard training run. If I had been truly racing it, I wouldn’t have had two pints of beer with a huge 9 pm dinner the night before, or eaten a Butterfinger candy bar on the morning of. If I had been truly racing the event, I would have exploded with the stress of sitting in gridlock traffic for an hour and 45 minutes on the approach to the event parking area at LP stadium and missing my first corral wave start and any opportunity to warm up and void my bowels prior to starting with the second corral.

I had been warned that the course was very hilly, so I was at least mentally, if not physically, prepared for the rollercoaster ride that began with the first step of the race. Nevertheless I found a pretty steady groove at roughly 6:45 per mile until, at mile 6, I could wait no longer and ducked inside a porta-potty. I had passed the 5-mile mark 37 seconds ahead of three-hour marathon pace. I passed the 6-mile mark 23 seconds behind that pace, meaning I lost a full minute in the loo, but I gained immeasurable relief. By the 9-mile mark I was back on pace.

Upon reaching the 20-mile mark with roughly 35 seconds in the bank I knew I would meet my time goal, but not my subjective goal of not suffering too much en route. The last three miles were very tough. I crossed the finish line at 2:59:05 with aboslutely nothing left. It had effectively been a race effort after all. But because my seasonal peak races are still many weeks away, I am happy to know that I am fit enough to run a 2:58 marathon (factoring out the pit stop) on a challenging marathon course today.

Overall, the trip to Nashville, a city I had never visited before, was a good one. I spoke and signed books at a Barnes & Noble store on Thursday night and did the same at the event expo twice on Saturday. I got to meet some good folks and there was enough free time for my wife and me to check out the city, which we both agreed was attractive and welcoming. I would readily go back, but not to chase a marathon PR!