He bunked with a race walker named Tim Seaman, who taught him the trails through the mountains on the edge of the Mexican border. His friend and college rival, Adam Goucher, invited Meb to move to Boulder to train with him. Meb considered the offer, but then decided that his LTD probably wouldn’t make it all the way, so he stayed in California.
He boosted his mileage. Larsen had been upping it 10 percent each year, and it finally surpassed 100 miles a week for the first time. He took seventh at the national cross country championships, which got him a spot in the worlds, where he finished 26th and was the top American. He did two 5,000-meter tune-ups ahead of the Olympic Trials in Sacramento.
In that race, Meb did what Meb had been doing since high school. He stayed cool for the first chunk of the race, in this case the first six kilometers. Then, with two miles to go, he put down a 63-second quarter to separate himself from the lead pack. Pushing the pace, he stretched his lead to 20 and 30 meters. It nearly disappeared on the final straightaway, as Alan Culpepper, the six-foot Texan, sprinted to try to catch him. Not that it mattered all that much. In the Olympic Trials, third is as good as first. At the finish, Meb raised an arm and leaned to win by three hundredths of a second in 28:03.02.
It was a nice win, and it was Meb’s first professional national championship. But he and Larsen both knew how much distance remained between Meb and the world’s best distance runners, those vaunted East Africans who had been hogging medals and victories and posting record times no one thought possible just a few years before. There was plenty of chatter about the supposed genetic advantages of the Kenyans and Ethiopians. Some suggested that the unique shape of their long and thin lower legs, and even something as yet undiscovered about the innate efficiency of their hearts and lungs, made the East Africans so much better. The difference between Bob Larsen and nearly everyone else in the U.S. was that he thought all this theorizing about the advantages was way overstated. Now it was a matter of figuring out how to prove it.
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For several years now Bob has been studying the science of altitude training. It’s not so different from the early 1960s, when he became obsessed with the connection between heart rates and success. Back then it was an understanding of the heart as a muscle like any other. The more it works the stronger it gets. Train the heart to beat quickly for a longer period of time, over all those miles of running on the edge without a break for rest, and you will be able to run farther, faster than you ever have.
From his research, Bob now understands that the East Africans, who are going to take all the distance medals here in Sydney, are doing plenty of threshold training, piling up those 130-mile weeks that America’s best runners have grown fearful of, and they are running them in the highlands of the Rift Valley, which lies more than 7,000 feet above sea level. Even better, they are running through the valley, to school, from village to village, from early adolescence. They pack miles into their legs and gain a head start of five or ten years. That amounts to a roughly 18,000-mile training advantage over many of their competitors from the rest of the world.
There’s a smattering of elite U.S. runners who train in Boulder, like Shorter did, at 5,000 feet, but most of them do their work at sea level, in or close to America’s major cities, instead of in the high air of the Rocky Mountains or the Sierras. They might spend an occasional week or two, or maybe even a month at altitude, but Larsen is certain that is nothing like living above 7,000 feet and training at altitudes as high as 9,000 feet, every day with a collection of like-minded elite runners. They push each other to the edge in a way that is not unlike Terry Cotton and his Toads did back in the 1970s.
The Africans aren’t genetic freaks, Larsen thinks. They simply run far and fast in groups, all the time. They are willing to endure discomfort in a way Americans are not, or seemingly haven’t been urged to, or haven’t been given the opportunity to try. In the U.S., the sprinters are winning all the American running medals, so the money—most of which comes from the shoe companies—follows the medals.
Financial issues aside, the numbers tell the story. Since 1968, more than 90 percent of all the Olympic and world championship medals from 800 meters to the marathon have been won by athletes who trained and lived for long stretches very high above sea level. The human body isn’t naturally built for high-elevation living or training. In thinner air, the lungs instinctively breathe harder and the heart beats faster to get the same amount of oxygen. The heavier breathing forces the body to release too much carbon dioxide. That causes the acidity level in the blood to drop, producing the symptoms of altitude sickness, such as dizziness and nausea.
The body is very good at adjusting to the adverse circumstances though. Its solution is to produce more red blood cells. The red blood cells carry oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. That includes all the muscles we use when we run. Live at altitude for just three weeks and endurance performance begins to improve. The challenge is to find a balance between training at altitude so bodies get used to the thinner air without overdoing it and overtaxing the athlete. Exertion at elevation is exhausting and far more difficult to recover from, especially in the beginning.
There is a solution, though. Larsen and anyone else interested in the subject have come to know the work of an American cardiologist and former competitive cross country skier named Jim Stray-Gundersen, and two other sports science researchers, Rob Chapman and Ben Levine. Stray-Gundersen has become the world’s leading expert on the effects of altitude on sports performance. He works closely with Norway’s Nordic athletes, who dominate their sports in ways that no other country dominates another, even though there are only about four million Norwegians. The trio has developed the concept of athletes living at a very high altitude—helping to increase the production of red blood cell and hemoglobin levels—and then moving to lower elevations to train at maximum intensity. Live high, train low, so to speak.
This is the existence Larsen thinks about creating for Meb as he watches the Olympic 10,000 go about how everyone except Meb’s dad thought it would. Meb, who has been battling a touch of the flu, is running about 40 seconds behind the leaders, and on the back straight of the final lap, he looks up to watch on the video board as the epic battle between Tergat and Gebrselassie plays out. It’s depressing and breathtaking all at once. He’s so close to the top of the running world and he is also eons away. It’s as though he has a really, really good seat from which to watch the competition. Bob has a plan to change that, a plan to make Meb into something and someone Meb does not yet understand is possible.
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The plan to turn Meb Keflezighi into one of the world’s fastest distance runners started to take form in the winter of 2000. There were no dramatic pep talks, or an early morning wakeup for an especially taxing run up a mountain. There was merely a moment of concluding thought, after years of consideration, when Bob Larsen finally decided that giving Meb, or any other American runner, a prayer at challenging the Africans was going to take more than just a few extra long runs every month and a few more challenging interval sessions. What Meb needed, what every quasi-talented distance runner in America needed, was nothing less than a 180-degree shift in how runners and coaches at every level, and even the journalists who covered the sport, thought about the life and existence of the long distance runner.
Few who pondered what it might take to create the world’s greatest distance runners thought of teams of Toads trying to kill themselves together. Hell, they didn’t even think of Oregon’s Ducks, even though the Land of the Bills (Bowerman and then Dellinger) had produced Prefontaine and Salazar and a host of other elite runners.
They thought of lonely souls out on roads and woodsy trails at all hours of the day and night, chasing both glory and a kind of ethereal meaning. They gravitated to tales of the so-called runner’s high, that alchemist’s mix of endorphins and transcendentalism
. Distance running was not merely sport but religion. To run long and hard and fast was to pray, to meditate, to search for deeper meaning, a meaning that can only be approached and understood after so many miles, so many hours of rhythmic breathing, after the second wind gives way to the third and a state of levitation. In this state, the feet do contact with the ground, but never actually land on it, and the legs and the heart feel like they can do this all forever, alone. Within the movement lies enlightenment.
Larsen gets all this New Age stuff, but the sport he fell in love with and has dedicated his life to understanding is mostly about competing and achieving in the most elemental way. You head to the start line in little more than a pair of shorts and sneakers, and try to go faster than everyone around you. In a perfect world you go faster than you, or anyone else, has ever gone before. That’s Larsen’s religion. The meaning comes from winning, or at least running to win, and being as prepared as you can possibly be on race day. You may not always finish first, but you always train and prepare for success.
You don’t achieve meaning on some lonely transcendental journey. At least the Africans aren’t doing it that way. You do it with a team, training hard together every day, often twice a day. You adhere to a plan that tests and stretches the outer edge of what your body believes it can endure. You make yourself uncomfortable. In the case of the Africans, that means living in modest stone homes, with limited plumbing, eating only the most basic grains and proteins, and existing at altitudes where the comforts of what Americans would consider the basics of everyday civilization don’t exist. There isn’t anything particularly spiritual about it. It’s just the hard life of running—with teammates committed to the same goals you are. It doesn’t work if you are alone, and at sea level, with little in the way of coaching or guidance or support. The problem is, that’s the way every elite distance runner in the country seems to exist right now.
Larsen doesn’t expect the best American runners to move to the wild or live in huts. But he wants them to come together for a cause that is larger than their individual selves, and to learn to live and train so far above sea level that the numbers they see on their watches after training runs won’t make any sense to them. At first they will wonder if they are getting slower. Eventually though, they will learn the meaning of living high and, eventually, on some days, running even higher. He also knows there is only one person who can help him teach everyone to do this.
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Joe Vigil doesn’t look anything like a runner, probably because he isn’t one. Built like a mailbox, he never has been a competitive runner, not in any sort of serious competitive way. However, Joe Vigil is one of the country’s great running coaches, and he might be the smartest sports physiologist in the world. Bob Larsen is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know, and some of what he does not know, or does not have experience with, Joe Vigil does.
Born in 1929, just as the U.S. economy was collapsing, Vigil played football and dabbled in track in high school in Alamosa, Colorado, located just above the New Mexico border. After the Navy, he returned home to Alamosa, to attend Adams State University, where he got a degree in physiology and, eventually, a job coaching football and track at the local high school. He wasn’t Knute Rockne or anything, but his mix of tough love, inspiration, and hard work got the most out of his kids and made for some decent teams that punched above their weight.
The first turning point in Vigil’s life occurred in 1965, when Adams State scheduled an exhibition track meet against his high school squad. Vigil’s crew won. Not surprisingly, a few months later, he got offered the job at Adams State. The following year a second crucial turning point of Vigil’s life occurred when he decided to attend a running symposium at the University of New Mexico led by Armond Seidler, director of the sports sciences department at the school and one of the pioneers in the new and growing field. Seidler had taken note that the 1968 Olympics were going to take place in Mexico City, at an altitude of some 7,000 feet. This was going to create a unique challenge for American athletes, most of whom lived and trained at sea level.
Seidler decided to attack the issue as a scientific problem, to figure out what challenges running at an altitude very similar to Albuquerque’s might pose. He and a team of scientists had divided the issue into twenty-one different modules. They included altitude’s effect on blood volume, respiratory capacity, the enlargement of the left ventricle, and the capacity of the body to produce more enzymes that can help ward off exhaustion. As a physiologist, Vigil felt like the subject matter was right up his alley, and he might learn a few things that could help him coach at Adams State, where the elevation is 7,540 feet above sea level.
By the end of the weekend, Vigil had found his calling. Now he understood the potential he could unlock within the runners at Adams State by having them train the right way. There were inherent advantages to living where they did. By the time he was done coaching at Adams State in 1995, his teams had won nineteen NAIA and Division 2 national cross country titles and ten individual championships. In 1992, his runners scored a perfect 15 at the national championships, taking the top five places.
In the 1980s, Vigil became fascinated with how small countries in Europe, especially Finland, with only about five million inhabitants, could produce so many great distance runners. He concluded their system of educating and licensing coaches was superior to what existed in the U.S. The Finns had something else though, something they referred to as “Sisu.” The word does not have a direct translation into English, but it is a combination of commitment, stubbornness, fearlessness, and a willingness to risk and endure pain. If American distance runners were going to reverse their increasingly downward slide, they were going to have to learn Sisu.
While Bob Larsen was tending to all those thoroughbreds at UCLA, Vigil was creating a culture unlike anything else that existed in the U.S. He immersed himself in how to measure exertion rates, constantly taking readings of his runners’ heart rates; their “VO2 Max,” which is the maximum amount of oxygen an individual can process during peak exercise exertion (essentially, the size and efficiency of a person’s motor); and their lactate threshold, which is the moment when the production of lactate in muscles begins to rapidly increase, limiting the flow of oxygen-rich blood. He was essentially writing the science behind the concept of running on the edge—and how to do it many thousands of feet above sea level—that Larsen instinctually came to believe in the 1960s.
He preached five fundamental ingredients of a training regimen.
First, there was work on basic speed and power, which took the form of repetitions of 60–400 meters. Intervals of 60–200 meters were all-out sprints. For intervals between 300 and 400 meters, runners should start with their long distance race pace, say, a 4:45 mile, and get faster with each repetition.
Second, threshold runs, performed at 85–87 percent of the pace at which an individual runner reaches his lactate threshold. These runs lasted anywhere from 20 to 80 minutes, depending on the age and health and speed of the runner.
Third, there were the long endurance runs, lasting from 30 minutes to three hours and run at 70–80 percent of the heart rate measured at the lactate threshold—that moment on the edge of exhaustion—or 75–80 percent of the velocity at the VO2 Max. There was an added instruction for this one—the second half should be faster than the first half. So start at 70–75 percent and end at 80 percent.
Fourth were the mid-range intervals—800s, 1-kilometer and 1-mile, and 2- and 3-kilometer repeats. At sea level there are two minutes of rest between each interval. At altitude, it’s three minutes. Blood analysis and other testing reveals that these workouts increase fat metabolism. They also speed up the production of the aerobic enzymes that help the muscles use glucose for energy, plus they produce additional capillaries and mitochondria, those cellular power plants.
Fifth were the recovery runs. Nothing like following up
a hard morning workout with a 45–80-minute run at 30 percent of the maximum heart rate. Yes, nice and easy, but running to recover rather than resting.
Vigil’s runners, their lungs feeling squeezed in the middle of any hard workout, learn how to survive a 12.4-mile run that begins at 7,500 feet and treks up to 11,000 feet in the San Juan range of the Rocky Mountains. There is the 25-mile Rock Creek Run that winds through the high plain. They do that once a week. They run through the soft dirt of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and they run over the 400 miles of trails on the Forbes family ranch, where, with the exception of the occasional pickup truck, they are alone with the deer, the occasional moose, and all other forms of wildlife. In other words, Sisu.
By the mid-1990s Vigil has spent so much time spreading the gospel of altitude training, and sharing information with foreign coaches, and winning national championships, that thirteen national track federations are sending runners each year to Alamosa to work with him. First stop is the local hospital, where he gets their blood levels so they can develop a baseline. That way they can see how they have improved after four or six or eight weeks at 7,540 feet. Amazingly, of the thirteen national track federations to send runners, the U.S. track and field federation isn’t one of them.
Larsen knows the absurdity of that. He knows what Vigil has put into practice is the scientific justification for everything he pushed for with his Toads a generation ago. He knows that Vigil understands the group dynamic of this sport, that the collective gives the individual strength. Vigil has even put words to the evolution that occurs when an elite runner commits to a team and its ideals. The collective integrity of the pursuit becomes the foundation of the mission. We give back to a team and a sport by giving to ourselves, by pushing our physiology into a new territory, to a place of near-desperation.
Running to the Edge Page 22