Overachievers

 At 20, I thought I should be running marathons under 2:30, as I was routinely beating 2:30 marathoners at shorter distances while I was training for marathons. I was stuck at just over 2:40.

Just then, Allan Lawrence (Bronze medalist at 5K in 1956) published a book with marathon training schedules actually used by people who finished in times separated every 10 minutes.  I immediately looked at 2:30. He had listed required times at 10K and the mile before starting and I had achieved them. I could only do the recovery runs.

So I looked at 2:40. I could do the short speed work, but that was it. At 2:50, I could do most of the interval workouts and the shorter fast continuous runs, but not the longer ones. At 3:00, I could do the longer fast runs, but needed easy days before them and a week or two of recovery, not doing hard runs the next day or two. At 3:10, I could do all the workouts as written; I also could (and frequently did) run 3:10 marathons every week as training runs.

I thought "coaching is easy if you take a guy who could run 2:40, but has only run 3:13, get him to run 3:08, and call it a breakthrough." It wasn't until long after my best years were past that it occurred to me that he hadn't cherry-picked underachievers, but that I was an anomaly, an overachiever. 

Overachievers are rare in anything, but almost unheard of in running. I know of one clear example beside myself: Derek Clayton, who lowered the world record for the marathon from 2:12 to 2:08, a record which stood 15 years.

Clayton's maximal oxygen uptake (admittedly not a perfect measure for marathon ability, but what we have) was 69.7ml/min/kg. For comparison, Greta Weitz, measured on the same equipment by the same person, measured 71.6 and she had set the women's world record 4 times, with a best in the mid-high 2:20s, almost 20 minutes slower. There are now many sub-2:08 marathoners and they almost all have a VO2max over 80. People with a VO2max of 70, like Clayton, tend to run about 2:30-2:35. He was clearly an overachiever by that measure. 

He did it by very high mileage done relatively hard. Word got out that he ran 200 miles per week and he said that he'd done that only a few times, he averaged 170. Over time, he's been pushed to say that maybe he could have run faster had he run less. He's made that 170 a six month figure, he really averaged 140 for years. By the time Fred Wilt got him to write down what a typical week looked like ("How They Train, vol. 3" reproduced in "The Lore of Running" by Noakes) it was down to 120.

He ran 170 because he needed to. At 120, he could have run a 2:30 marathon every week and no one would ever have heard of him. The high mileage allowed him (who had not run a sub-4 mile as all 2:08 marathoners today can run) to run sub-5 mile pace for two hours and be able to carry on a conversation while doing it. 

Overachievers train very hard. They're often injured. They're usually tired and irritable. They often have their best performances in training or in races they were using to get ready for their goal (which almost inevitably is a bust). Their careers are very short.

But they know the limits of what they can do, because they've pushed those limits. It is common now to hear top runners say that the worst thing you can do is to take chances and get injured, because that sets you back, that steady slow progress is the way. These are people who have won championships on minimal training, so of course they think that. They will never know what they might have been able to do, because they never had to find out.

Think about it. If you could win races without pushing, would you ever push yourself? Would you push yourself to the breaking point?

How badly do you really want to know "what's the absolute best I could do?"