Still Running (weakly). Issue 140

PAST – inspiration – “When it’s over, you cough up fluid from your lungs for a couple of days afterward.  The 1500-meter hack, we call it.  I like the 1500 the most, but I’ve got to prepare for the pain.  The only way you can win it is by suffering a lot.”  So said Eric Heiden, who won the 500, 1000, 1500, 5,000 and 10,000 metre distances (i.e. all of them!) in speed skating at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

With the 2026 edition of those games approaching, I am prompted to leaf through my mental archive and am inclined to judge that Heiden is perhaps my favourite winter games exponent.

I was inspired by the work he did.  He would cycle 100 miles a day to build endurance, bending low over the handlebars and drilling his body to keep that horrific skater’s crouch.  He lifted weights, he duck-walked for miles, he roller-skated, he spent hours each week sliding back and forth in stocking feet across a 10-ft. Formica-covered slide-board, an exercise that mimics the speed skater’s side-to-side stroking of the ice.  After eight years of such routines, Heiden’s thighs were 29 inches in circumference by 1980.

Whilst the 1500 was perhaps the worse anaerobically, each distance had its distinctive kind of suffering.  Take the 10,000: “you think you’d give your life to be able to stand up.  Your back is killing you so much you’d do anything to get out of that crouch.”  During his victory lap after winning gold in the longest test (the 10,000), he could not even lift his head.

Such suffering is only endured as a result of preparation, and, when he was struggling for motivation, Heiden had his sister to remind him what to do.  “When I am wiped out, and want to go home for the day, I look across and see Beth still out there on the ice.”

Beth Heiden was herself a multiple world champion speed skater, winning bronze in the 3000 at those 1980 Olympic Games.  Also, even more remarkably, in August of that same year, she became women’s World Road Race Cycling Champion!  History in all its gallantry does not record the circumference of her thighs!

PRESENT – perspiration – “That was hard.”  “It was messy.”  These were the first comments of siblings, Emily and Thomas Chaston respectively, who last weekend won both senior races in the Welsh Cross Country Championships.  Their father is Justin Chaston, who represented Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympic steeplechase.

Leaving aside the single-sex successes (easy for you to say) of the Brownlee brothers, Alistair and Jonny, the Ingebrigtsen cohort, the Williams sisters and the Japanese marathon twins, Shigeru and Takeshi Soh, one of the only comparable dual-sex sibling success in athletics that I can think of is that of the Scottish Stewart family – Peter (born in 1947), Ian (1949) and Mary (1956). 

Peter won European Indoor 3000m gold in 1971.  Ian won European and Commonwealth 5,000 golds in 1969 and 1970 respectively, plus Olympic bronze in that event in 1972, and perhaps most impressively European Indoor 3000 gold in 1975, followed a week later by World Cross Country gold.  Mary won European Indoor 1500 gold in 1977 and Commonwealth 1500 gold in 1978.

In addition, while Carl Lewis was amassing Olympic and World Championship gold aplenty in the 1980s, his sister, Carol, won a bronze in the 1983 World Championship long jump and managed ninth place in that event in the following year’s Olympic Games.

FUTURE – suggestion – It’s February, and you know you have to get serious about those long runs if you are to perform as you want to in that spring marathon.

Assuming you’re aiming at a reasonably flat road marathon in April or May, then your long runs should build up, in my opinion, to a peak of at least 22 miles 3 weeks before the big race.

You will naturally reach such a distance by gradually adding your long run each week – with the occasional ‘de-load’ week.  These runs should be completed on terrain similar to what you expect during the race.

And some of them at least should be pretty demanding – perhaps starting off with a couple of easy miles before hitting a pace about a minute a mile slower than your target, finishing with about 4 miles at that target pace.

It is very difficult to train for the last miles of a marathon, but this is the best way that I have found to replicate the fatigue – and the mental questioning – that naturally besiege you in those final miles.

So the last few miles of your training runs are “golden minutes.”  Let’s say you’re training to break 4 hours (9-minute miles.)  Any time that you can put in over three hours is golden, money in the bank, an investment in your race-day capability.  Any time you can put in over three hours at 9-minute miles is platinum!

You won’t run many golden or platinum minutes in the build-up to any given marathon, so don’t shy away from them, embrace them, relish them, put everything you’ve got into them, and feel intense satisfaction when you’ve completed them.

As I have said before, a run along the lines that I have described requires careful planning.  Let’s be honest – it will dominate your weekend.  What you eat, drink, sleep and do before and after it will be the determining factors in its success or failure – and ultimately that of your spring marathon.