Shortly after I arrived at Tidelands Park on the island of Coronado, site of the 34th Annual Independence Day 15K, I realized I had forgotten to bring my Garmin Forerunner 305 with me. I could have kicked myself, not because I depend on the device for proper pacing (or so I thought) but rather because I am co-writing a book about how to train and race with such devices (The High-Tech Runner, to be published by Human Kinetics in spring 2009), so I’m trying to lead by example by keeping as complete a data set as possible in the analysis software I use. As it turned out, however, my internal GPS was not quite as well calibrated as I liked to think, as I ran the first mile of the race “by feel” in 6:03, or 14 seconds slower than my target pace.

Based on the fact that this 6:03 mile did not feel super-duper easy, I was a little worried that my internal fitness meter was also poorly calibrated–that I was not yet quite fit enough to run a 15K at 5:49/mile pace. But my second mile was a 5:47 and did not feel appreciably harder than the first, so I committed to continuing to reclaim a second or two per mile until I was back on pace at the finish.

But a stupid traffic cop had other ideas.

At roughly 4.2 miles the racecourse came to a four-way intersection. As I approached it I saw a woman police officer standing in the intersection pointing emphatically to my left with her right arm. So I made a left turn, as did the three guys trailing behind me. It looked wrong right away. First of all, I no longer saw the two runners ahead of me whom I’d been slowly gaining on before taking the turn. Also, I was now heading even farther away from the start/finish area, which really didn’t seem right considering that I was almost at the halfway point.

I was only vaguely reassured when I first looked back and saw the three guys behind me. I had gone about a tenth of a mile before the traffic cop who’d sent us the wrong way shouted after us and got us turned around. I was crushed. Running 9.3 miles as hard as you can is challenging enough. To have a surprise extra two-tenths inserted into the middle is hell.

I said nothing more than “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” but another guy berated the officer and demanded an explanation for her emphatic arm gesture in precisely the opposite direction she knew we were supposed to go (after all, there were about five guys ahead of us who’d gone the right way). She explained in so many words that her straight arm extended to our left was intended to indicate that we were supposed to make a right turn, but to run around her far side before cutting right to avoid colliding with oncoming runners turning onto the road we were turning off, from the right.

There had to be a better way to convey this information.

As I regained my rhythm I thought about what I should do. For only a fraction of a second did I consider “quitting” (that is, slowing to a jog and taking the short way back to my car). But almost as quickly I realized that I no longer wanted to destroy myself for maximum performance, only to get a result that was some 80 seconds slower than what I was capable of. So I eased off the gas just a bit and ran comfortable 6:00-6:05 miles the rest of the way.

Well, almost the rest of the way. I actually stopped cold two feet from the finish line, in front of scores of spectators (and, more importantly, several race officials), tore off my race number, held it high, crumpled it in my hand, threw it to the ground, and walked off without crossing the finish line. This was my protest. An impotent one, I admit, as the officials I was targeting with my gesture had no way of knowing what my beef was–until and unless one of the other three runners who was turned the wrong way protested. Then they might figure it out.

But my refusal to cross the finish line was about pride more than vengeance. See, a lot of people in the running community know who I am, and I could not bear the thought of some of these people seeing a finishing time of 56:40 next to my name in the results when in fact I would have run roughly 55:00 if not for that idiot traffic cop. It’s silly, because nobody really cares one way or the other how fast I run, but that’s pride for you.

Shortly before driving away from Tidelands Park it struck me that if I had had my Garmin, things might have turned out differently. I might have chosen to keep running 100% all the way through the finish despite the setback and then shown my distance reading (9.5 miles instead of 9.3) to the race officials, along with my actual 15K split, and demanded a corrected result.

I’ll never make that mistake again.

Appetite is important. It is your body’s built-in mechanism for food intake regulation. Its job is to drive you to eat enough to meet your body’s energy and micronutrient needs, and no more. The appetite mechanism works very well under normal circumstances. Obviously, it never would have survived millions of years of evolutionary testing if it did not work to the benefit of our health. But our modern lifestyle does not constitute “normal circumstances” in relation to the environment in which most of our evolution took place. Consequently, our appetite cannot be entirely relied upon to ensure that we don’t overeat.

In recent years scientists have learned a lot about how the appetite mechanism works. Let’s take a look at five factors that are now known to influence appetite and how you can manipulate them to make your appetite more reliable.

Food in the stomach

Most people know intuitively that feelings of fullness are generated from the stomach. When you eat, your stomach distends, or stretches. The distension of your stomach stimulates nerves that activate the appetite control switch in the hypothalamus of the brain, which tells you to stop eating and diminishes hunger until it is time to eat again. At the same time, when food enters your stomach it stimulates the release of a protein called cholecystokinin, or CCK. When CCK is released, the first thing it does is to close down the valve from the stomach into the GI tract. This slows the movement of food from the stomach. The longer food stays in your stomach, the more full you feel. Because of its effects, CCK is sometimes referred to as the “feel-full” protein.

The unique properties of CCK were discovered almost 40 years ago when researchers at Cornell and Columbia universities demonstrated that injecting CCK into humans reduced appetite up to 20%.

The appetite control switch was designed to work best with the natural foods that humans ate exclusively thousands of years ago. Many of the processed foods we eat today are far more calorically dense than those natural foods, meaning they contain more calories in less space. Unfortunately, these processed foods enable us to eat more calories than our bodies need before the appetite control switch gets activated. It is not unusual for an individual to eat a fast food meal of 1,000 calories in less than 10 minutes. But it takes more than 10 minutes for food to stimulate enough CCK to make you stop eating. Thus, when you eat high-calorie processed foods, you can easily overeat before CCK–your body’s natural gastric pacemaker–begins to work and you feel full.

Your appetite mechanism will work better if you base your diet in foods with lower energy density: namely, fruits, vegetables, lean meats and whole grains.

Blood glucose level

Due to the recent popularity of low-carb and glycemic index diets, the average person believes that declining blood glucose levels are the primary cause of hunger. There is actually little evidence of a causal relationship between declining blood glucose levels and hunger. However, there is solid evidence of a correlation between declining blood glucose levels and hunger. That is, people do tend to become hungry at the same time their blood glucose level is decreasing. Whether hunger results directly from the sensing of declining blood glucose levels by “glycostat” neurons in the brain or through some intermediary factor remains to be discovered. Interestingly, the feeling of fullness that occurs immediately after eating precedes the rise in blood glucose that follows carbohydrate absorption.

Research has shown that low-carb and low GI diets do not reduce hunger compared to other weight-loss diets. It seems pointless to try to regulate your appetite by eating for blood glucose control.

Leptin production

Leptin is an appetite-regulating hormone that is produced by fat cells. It acts on the hypothalamus, the brain’s hunger center, to turn off the hunger switch. The more fat your fat cells contain, the more leptin they produce and the more your appetite shrinks. 

At least that’s how it works under normal circumstances. However, there appears to be a second factor that affects leptin production, and that’s habitual eating patterns. If you consistently overeat, your fat cells will reduce their leptin output to accommodate your preferred eating patterns by allowing your appetite to remain large despite the fact that you’re getting fatter.

Fortunately, this effect is reversible. If you restrain your eating for a week or so your leptin production will return to normal. However, as you lose body fat, your leptin production will decrease and your appetite will again increase. It’s a Catch-22! Your best way out is to exercise plenty, so you can eat as much as your appetite demands without getting fat.

Social factors

Over the past 30 years, the number of calories in the average American’s diet has increased significantly. This increase is widely believed to have been driven by increases in portion sizes in restaurant menu items and packaged foods that resulted from substantial decreases in the cost of producing food and competition among food businesses. The combination of this influence and that of the constant deluge of commercial advertising for food has essentially inflated our appetites—or created a breach between our physical and social appetites for food. Researchers such as consumer psychologist Brian Wansink of Cornell University have shown that the amount of food we consume is strongly influenced by the accessibility of food, how much food is put in front of us, and social pressure to eat more, including the pressure of commercial advertising. A perfect example of the latter influence is Taco Bell’s invention of “fourth meal,” a late night meal of fast food that the television viewer is encouraged to ad to his or her daily eating routine.

To reduce the effects of food overabundance on your eating, experts generally recommend that individuals train themselves to pay better attention to the physical signs of appetite, hunger and fullness. The goal is to eat only when physically hungry and, when eating, to eat only until comfortably satisfied, never stuffed. As you get a better sense of how much food you really need to satisfy your physical appetite, you can also train yourself to purchase, prepare, serve and order smaller portions that meet this standard without exceeding it.

Activity level

Evolution gave us bodies that are able to store energy reserves for times of scarcity in the form of excess body fat. These reserves accumulate automatically when we increase our eating without increasing our activity level, or decrease our activity level without decreasing our eating, or simultaneously increase our eating and decrease our activity level. We modern humans are much less active than our ancestors were. Evolutionary biologists estimate that our Paleolithic ancestors each burned 1,000 calories per day more than we do through activity. But our appetites are the same, which means that the modern lifestyle tends to make us fat. In such an environment you can’t trust your appetite, because your body “thinks” you’re trying to store excess body fat by moving so little.

Everything changes when you start exercising, however. As you burn 500 or more extra calories each day through training, your appetite automatically adjusts to help your body run better—specifically, it increases enough to replenish the critical fuel stores (mainly muscle and liver glycogen) that you deplete each day but not enough to prevent the shedding of excess body fat, which of course slows you down. Research has shown that when they increase their training load (hence the number of calories they burn each day), athletes on “ad libitum” diets (meaning they eat according to their appetite, not by counting calories) automatically increase their calorie consumption and lose body fat. Thus, the best way to consistently eat the right amount is to continue eating according to your appetite and increase your training in pursuit of performance.

One of the greatest virtues of being fit is feeling fit. And I’m not just talking about feeling fit during workouts. I’m also talking about feeling fit when sitting at a desk, standing in an elevator and walking down the street. My experience of my body is very different at various levels of fitness. Above all, when I’m near peak shape my legs feel light and springy. My lungs are affected too. I periodically perform a spontaneous deep inhale, filling my lungs fully with vast amounts of air, and it feels wonderful.  My lungs seem powerful enough to deprive a whole room of air. That doesn’t happen when I’m out of shape.

There’s also a sense of containing limitless resources of energy. When I’m fit I feel like the shell of a nuclear reactor might feel if it could feel.

Thus, if I happened to suffer an attack of amnesia at a time when I was at a very high fitness level , such that I could not remember whether I had been training a lot recently or not, I would know that I had been training a lot recently anyway because of how my body felt even at rest.

I’m overstating the phenomenon slightly. The feeling of supreme fitness is not entirely constant when I’m in a state of supreme fitness. Fatigue masks it, and when I am training hard I am often very fit and very fatigued at the same time. That’s why the feeling of fitness is especially strong during a pre-race taper. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. That bouncing-off-the-walls, “somebody-please-give-me-a-tractor-trailor-to-lift” feeling. It is truly one of the best rewards of consistent, intensive training.

And that’s just what it is: a reward. Nature encourages us to do things that are good for us by making those things feel good. That’s why eating and sex feel good. The feeling of being supremely fit is really the feeling of being supremely healthy as a result of training for speed and endurance. It’s nature’s way of saying, “You’re on the right track, child. Don’t ever stop!”

Post-Exercise Caffeine Helps Muscles RefuelMost endurance athletes are aware that consuming caffeine before exercise enhances performance in non-habitual caffeine users by stimulating the nervous system and reducing perceived exertion. Now a new study by a team of Australian researchers provides evidence that consuming caffeine after exercise accelerates muscle glycogen replenishment. 

I first ran the Coronado Independence Day 15K–a popular July 4th event that takes place on a fast course near San Diego–in 1998. At that time I was at an early point in my comeback to running from eight years as a meathead. Only half-committed to that comeback, I had a weird hybrid body: beefy chest and arms and twiggy little legs that looked as though they belonged on another person. I forget my exact time but I recall that my pace was not far under 7:00/mile. After I finished another runner who crossed the line just behind me approached and said, “Good race. When you passed me I looked at your legs and thought, ‘What’s this guy doing back here with me?’ Then I noticed the rest of you.”

In a funny way that moment convinced me to go ahead and commit all the way to my comeback.

The second time I ran the Coronado Independence Day 15K was in 2003, by which time I had moved away from and then back to San Diego. I was in a very different place by then–waist deep in training for an Ironman triathlon after having set some big running PR’s the previous year. Although fit, however, I had an incipient ankle injury that emerged in the days preceding the race and I knew I probably should not run it. But I had not yet learned that caution is the better part of valor and I went ahead and ran it–not all-out, but at 90 percent or so. My ankle was begging for mercy by the halfway point but I continued stubbornly to the finish. I can’t recall my exact time for that one, either, but I believe my pace was approximately 5:49/mile. I wasn’t able to run again consistently for more than three weeks, and my Ironman run performance suffered because of it.

The 2008 Coronado Independence Day Run takes place this Friday, and since I’m back in San Diego, I’ve signed up. This year I am neither musclebound nor on the brink of breakdown (knock on wood), but I’m not quite as fit as I was in 2003. Nevertheless I’m hoping to run roughly the same pace as I did five years ago, albeit with a 100-percent effort. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Straight Dope on Salt

Last year my father-in-law and his wife visited my wife and me at our home in California. My wife cooked up lots of good food for all of us. But her dad has high blood pressure and is scrupulous in his avoidance of salt. So he asked her to cook without it, and advised us to avoid excess salt in our own diet

I was tempted to disabuse the man of the widely held but false notion that high levels of salt consumption cause hypertension, but I held my tongue, because that’s what one does with one’s father-in-law. But I certainly went right on eating a high-salt diet after he returned home.

The research-supported truth is that salt avoidance is beneficial only for the roughly 30 percent of already-hypertensive individuals who are “salt sensitive.” In the rest of us, salt intake does not have a significant effect on blood pressure. A recent review of 114 studies performed by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that even an extreme reduction in salt intake would barely lower blood pressure to a measurable degree in those with normal blood pressure.

Endurance athletes have a more favorable view toward salt than the average person does. That’s because we know that we lose a lot of salt every day through exercise-induced sweating, and we’re used to consuming salt in sports drinks during exercise to compensate for those losses. Failure to do so, we’ve been taught, will cause internal fluid imbalances and muscle cramps.

Or are these notions false too? The answer is yes and no. There is surprisingly little scientific evidence that salt consumption during exercise provides any benefit. However, the practice does no harm and is advisable whenever large volumes of sweat are lost and large volumes of fluid are consumed during very prolonged exercise.

The notion that sodium depletion during exercise causes muscle cramps is clearly false. A 2005 study found no difference in blood sodium levels between athletes who suffered muscle cramps and athletes who did not during an Ironman triathlon. Some exercise physiologists now believe that exercise-induced muscle cramps represent a type of tendon fatigue that occurs during unaccustomed levels of exertion. The fact that some athletes are especially prone to muscle cramps while others are not also suggests that sodium depletion is not the cause. 

However, there is some evidence that consuming fluid and salt during prolonged exercise may at least delay cramping in those who are susceptible. In a study from the University of North Carolina, cramp-susceptible athletes were able to exercise twice as long before experiencing cramps when they consumed a sports drink during activity than they when they did not drink.

Gatorade teaches athletes that the addition of sodium to a sports drink improves hydration by increasing the rate at which fluid is absorbed into the blood stream and by slowing the decline in blood volume. But most research supports neither of these claims. A study from the University of Iowa found that sports drinks with different levels of osmolality, both with and without salt, were all absorbed at the same rate during exercise and none reduced blood volume decline more than another. Studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand, found that sodium supplementation during an Ironman triathlon had no effect on blood sodium concentration or blood plasma volume.

Interestingly, the studies showing the greatest beneficial impact of salt on exercise have involved sodium loading before exercise instead of sodium intake during exercise. Another group of New Zealand researchers found that when runners consumed a highly concentrated sodium beverage prior running to exhaustion at 70 percent of VO2max in a hot environment, they maintained a higher blood volume, lower core body temperature and lower level of perceived exertion than when they consumed a low-sodium beverage before running. It’s tough to know what to make of this result, though, since no fluid was consumed during the runs.

No study has found that consuming salt during endurance exercise has a detrimental effect on performance. Couple that fact with the mountains of anecdotal evidence from real athletes who say that salt intake is beneficial to them in extreme endurance events such 100-mile runs and you get the following sensible prescription: Consume salt in the normal amounts contained in sports drinks and energy gels during prolonged endurance exercise, but don’t knock yourself out to get more salt in the form of salt tablets or salty foods.

Nor do you need to add salt to your diet. However, you just might do it unconsciously anyway. A 1999 Israeli study found that exercise increased the preference for salty foods. So that’s why you crave potato chips after a long weekend endurance session!

I would like to briefly elaborate on yesterday’s post about how distance running records are broken. I think most runners and running experts would agree that the two most important factors in detrmining the possibility of a world record performance are genes and training. To have any hope of breaking a world record, a runner must have a host of genes that favor running performance. There is a sports scientist whom I plan to interview for my article on this topic who has created a mathematicl model showing that as the worldwide population of runners grows, the odds of the emergence of new runners who have more genes favorable to running performance than any past runner has ever had continually increase.

That’s an interesting and plausible argument. But it’s not the whole story. No runner, regardless of how genetically gifted, can break a world record without first completing years of intensive training. But not only that: Because each runner is genetically unique, the precise training recipe that optimally realizes each runner’s potential for running performance is also unique. Thus it’s theoretically possible that a runner with somewhat less raw genetic potential than the current world record holder will nevertheless break the world record because he finds a way to more fully optimize his training. Indeed, I am certain that this happens all the time.

What’s more, I believe that world record times themselves exert an optimizing pressure on the training of those runners who have an interest in breaking them, such that the faster the world record time is, the stronger an optimizing effect it is likely to have on the runner who embraces the standard as an “attractor” to the “complex system” of his training. It makes the runner just a little more creative, experimental, resourceful, dogged, insatiable and whatever else than he would otherwise be.

For example, it would not surprise me at all to learn that Said Aouita had the genetic potential to run a 12:37 5000 meters (Kenenisa Bekele’s current world record), but he never came close to doing so because the 5000 meters world record was “only” 13:00 when Aouita broke it for the first of two times in 1985. That record was too soft to force Aouita to optimize his training to his genetics to the degree that Haile Gebrselassie’s world record of 12:39, set in 1998, forced Bekele to optimize his own training in his quest to break the record.

There’s no way to prove this sort of thing, of course, but it’s fun to try.

A while back I pitched a story called “How Records Are Broken” to Running Times editor-in-chief Jonathan Beverly. He just granted the assignment and I’m very excited to begin working on it. The article will attempt to answer the question, “Why do world and American records for distance-running events keep coming down?” I will interview sports scientists, coaches and elite athletes for their respective opinions on the matter. It’s a classic parlor game, but one that I hope will give readers some practical ideas about how they can break their own personal records.

My personal take is that one big factor and a thousand little factors are responsible for the downward march of record times. The big factor is the simple fact that records are targeted. In the language of complex systems theory, records function as attractors that the entire worldwide sport of running organizes itself around, much in the way that free market economies organize themselves around the attractor of generating wealth. Even though only a handful of runners on earth are in a position to make world record attempts, and such attempts rarely occur, the runners who succeed in these attempts are subtly transformed in the process, and when they return from their world record performances to training with and racing against others, these others are changed, too, and these others change others, and they all change the generation of runners that comes after them like a rising tide that floats all ships (well, not all), such that in a single marathon (say, the 2008 London Marathon), five runners might finish with times that are better than the marathon world record was only 10 years earlier.

Most of these “changes” I keep referring to are subtle and even unconsciously manifested. For example, last year Meseret Defar of Ethiopia broke her own world record for 5000 meters, lowering it from 14:24 to 14:16. The former time represents a pace of 2:52.8 per kilometer; the latter time represents a pace of 2:51.6 per kilometer. Before Defar lowered her mark, her countrywoman Tirunesh Dibaba, also a 5000 meters specialist, probably would have thought about 2:52.8 pace a lot in workouts and used it to assess her split times and even to regulate her efforts. She might have averaged this pace in a set of 1K intervals and thought, “That’s pretty good!”

But after Defar smashed her record, Dibaba, who secretly can’t stand Defar and wanted badly to steal the 5000 meters record from her, would have begun thinking about the new pace: 2:51.6. And if she averaged 2:52.8 in a set of 1K intervals, she would have thought, “That’s not good enough!”

I am suggesting that Dibaba ran 5000 meters in 14:11 earlier this month because she had thoughts such as these, and because these thoughts had tiny, rippling effects on the entirety of her training and, of course, also affected how hard she ran and how she paced herself in the world record attempt itself.

I admit it: I like New Balance’s new LOVE/Hate advertising campaign. I’m sure that many serious runners dismiss it as a lowest-common-denominator message for joggers and couch potatoes who might be persuaded to jog. But I like it precisely because, in my experience, runners of every level of seriousness have a love/hate relationship with the sport/activity. I sure do.

As experienced a runner as I am, and as fit as I sometimes manage to get, I find running uncomfortable more often than not. Oftentimes it’s downright miserable. Those recovery runs I do the day after a hard track workout are such a slog. I feel like I have cancer. Totally carved-out and dead-legged. The whole process of training for competition is such a grind.  You can’t just slack off for a week because your motivation is low. You must keep grinding. Whole weekends are consumed by the need to log heavy miles and otherwise rest so that more heavy miles can be logged.

Do you remember how in interviews throughout his run of seven straight Tour de France victories Lance Armstrong used to openly fantasize about retiring, because being a professional cyclist was such a grind? I always identified with the feelings behind those remarks. Frequently over the past 10 years I have made mental lists of all the goals I want to accomplish as an endurance athlete and looked forward to scratching them all off so I could hang it up and take up golf.

But then there’s the love side. I have just enough good, great and magical runs to keep me hooked on the sport. About two good runs a week. Two great runs a month. Two magical runs a year. Some of the best runs are the brutally hard workouts and races I do when I’m at or near peak fitness. They certainly aren’t pleasant, but there’s an incredible feeling of mastery and might tied up in the misery of those experiences. Those moments feed the love, too.

Being a runner is a lot like being a writer. Writing is a very tough calling–very much love/hate. Any writer who claims he doesn’t half-hate writing is either a liar or not really a writer. Filling blank pages is truly a grind. Language is so incredibly difficult to tame that when writing I am almost constantly conscious of my limitations and only occasionally conscious of my abilities. It’s exactly the same way with running. But as with running, in writing there are those moments when the words flow like gifts from a higher source…

Sometimes I wish I had been good at soccer and music, not running and writing. But I would gladly take the hate with the love of writing and running instead of the numbness of having no great physical and intellectual passions.

Last Friday German Fernandez of Riverbank, Calif., set a new national high school record of 8:34.4 for two miles. I mention the kid’s hometown with pride because Riverbank borders Oakdale, another tiny town that I called home between November 2005 and February of this year.

Earlier in the month, runnersworld.com posted an interesting interview of Fernandez’s coach, Bruce Edwards, by Amby Burfoot. In it, Edwards talked a lot about how lightly and gently he had trained his young prodigy, so as not to break him down and mortgage his bright future. I quote:

I coached him conservatively. We focused on getting strong at the paces that were comfortable for him. He hasn’t done hills. He hasn’t done hard speed work.

I know what Brad Hudson, coach of Dathan Ritzenhein and coauthor, with me, of Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon, would say about this point. He’d say that Edwards had made a mistake in not having had German do intense speed and strength work. Brad believes that young runners should focus their energy on developing the basic foundation of distance running performance, and that foundation has two  components: aerobic  capacity and neuromuscular fitness (speed, strength, power). He believes that runners need to spend a good long time developing their basic aerobic fitness and neuromuscular fitness to a high level before they can get a lot out of more race-specific training. He also believes that maximum speed, strength and power work ultimately makes the runner more durable, so in avoiding it with Fernandez, Edwards might have risked saddling the youngster with the opposite effect he sought.

When Edwards says that he had Fernandez focus on the paces he was comfortable with, I get the notion that he had the kid go relatively heavy on the very sort of specific work that Hudson says young runners should go light on until their foundation is in place. I find a lot of merit in Hudson’s philosophy on developing young runners, but I doubt even he would suggest that Edwards did any catastrophic damage. First of all, just look how he’s performed. And in the worst case, Fernandez will probably just hit a wall in his development that he won’t be able to overcome until he goes back and learns how to connect his brain to all of those unused type II muscle fibers in his legs.

Interestingly, Brad also believes that boys and girls should play a variety of sports before they focus on running, as it will develop their muscles in a well-rounded manner that will make them more durable as runners. (There’s actually some research to back up this notion.) Well, it so happens that German Fernandez played soccer, football and baseball, and did not settle on running until his sophomore year of high school. So maybe he took care of his own foundation building.