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Week 3: Turning the dial (a little)
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Week 3: Turning the dial (a little)

Lessons from Gretchen Reynolds and Keira D'Amato

Terrell Johnson
Jan 19
17
22
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Week 3: Turning the dial (a little)
www.thehalfmarathoner.com

So, we’re a couple of weeks into our training now. We ran 12 miles the first week, followed by 14 miles last week — and we have 15 miles coming up over the week ahead of us. That’s real progress! Each of us deserves a pat on the back, as we really are starting to get somewhere 🙌

These first couple of weeks, you’ve probably guessed, have been about easing in to our training cycle. We haven’t attempted anything extra-challenging just yet, especially if you’d been running regularly coming into January.

Instead, we’re establishing a habit of running 4 days a week, every week, and keeping our mileage low enough so that creating and sticking to that habit won’t be too much, too soon.

If we wanted to, we could stay at this mileage, at the times and distances we’re running, indefinitely. And it would be great for our health. As Gretchen Reynolds points out in The First Twenty Minutes, her excellent 2012 book on exercise, “the greatest benefit from exercise comes from getting up off the couch… everything after that is incremental.”

What she means is that most of the health benefits most people get from exercise come in the first twenty minutes. (Hence her book’s title.) If you’ve been sedentary and then begin exercising regularly, you experience a steep curve upward in those first few weeks that plateaus soon after.

But if we want to see improvements in our fitness level or athletic performance, we need to apply the overload principle — “the one overriding truth in exercise physiology,” Reynolds writes:

“Overload is not a complicated idea. The word encapsulates the concept. Overload simply means that … ‘improved athletic performance is the result of systematic and progressive training of sufficient frequency, intensity, and duration.’ You can’t keep doing the same old workout and improve athletically. The body gets used to a certain level of activity with impressive rapidity. So you have to ratchet things up.

You’ve no doubt experienced overload in action. Maybe you used to puff and struggle on the elliptical machine after twenty minutes and soon felt obliged to quit for the day. Then after a few weeks those same twenty minutes became easy. From then on, you could, should you so choose, repeat that same undemanding workout — with unchanged time, distance, and resistance level — for the rest of your life and continue to accrue health benefits.

But if you wanted to become fitter, faster, or in general tougher, you’d have to dial up the resistance or prolong the workout. You’d puff and struggle again, and slowly grow used to the new workload. You would have overloaded your cardiovascular and other systems, let them readjust, and from a fitness and athletic standpoint, improved.”

As she writes later in the book, we have three dials we can turn to achieve this: the number of times we work out — in our case, run — in a week, the length of time each workout lasts, and/or the intensity of any given workout.

The good news is, if you’ve been following our training plan these past couple of weeks, you’ve already begun this process. Slowly but surely, we’re ramping up the number of miles we run — we’ve already started the process of becoming fitter.

(For you, it might not quite feel like it yet; some days, it doesn’t to me either! But my body is already beginning to feel more comfortable with each run, I noticed yesterday. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll soon experience a similar feeling.)

How did your running go over the past week? How is each run going for you? What’s the toughest/easiest part? I’d love to hear, either in the comments or in a reply back.

For the week ahead, here’s our training schedule:

  • Thursday, Jan. 20 — 4 miles

  • Saturday, Jan. 22 — 5 miles

  • Sunday, Jan. 23 — 3 miles

  • Tuesday, Jan. 25 — 4 miles

I hope this week goes well for you and, as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running is going, whether you’re following our plan or not.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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This inspired me

If you haven’t already heard about it, something happened over this past weekend that shook up the running world — Keira D’Amato, a 37-year-old mother of two who quit distance running after college, broke the American record in the women’s marathon.

(You may have even seen her on The Today Show this week!)

What’s so amazing about D’Amato’s story is how she has juggled her passion for running with raising her two children and her career as a real estate agent in Richmond, Va. “If you would have told me I’d be here now, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said in one interview, adding that she picked running back up in recent years as a way to “have a little space in a chaotic life.”

Lindsay Crouse, a New York Times journalist who writes often about running, tells her story much better than I can:

Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
If you’re ever feeling like you can’t take a break: Keira D’Amato quit distance running after college. Thought she was done. Got a regular job, had 2 kids. Then slowly started running again, for fun. Now at age 37 she just set the American record in the marathon. Incredible!
Image

January 16th 2022

1,053 Retweets11,698 Likes

As Crouse notes in her tweets, in recent years D’Amato has competed in races like the Boston Marathon, always aiming to improve her times:

Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
Keira got faster and faster. The whole time she was working as a real estate agent in Richmond, fitting her training around caring for her 2 kids and everything else we do with our lives. She finished 15th at the Olympic Marathon Trials in Feb 2020 — an outstanding feat.

January 18th 2022

30 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
Then the pandemic. Sports were upended along with everything else — right as Keira was on the athletic kick of a lifetime. She gave herself a moment to mourn. And then she doubled down. Trained harder. Even held her own mini-races, where she blew her old best times away.

January 18th 2022

23 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
In Dec 2020, Keira ran one of the top 10 fastest marathons in American history. It was her moment. Remarkably, she was also unsponsored—beating professional runners who had been training for their entire lives. But in distance running, the roads are open. No one could stop her.

January 18th 2022

42 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
Keira set her eyes on a crazy goal: The Olympics. But it wasn't crazy anymore at all. She was now one of the best distance runners in America. The marathon team may have been set, but why not try the track? And at age 36, for the first time in her life, she turned pro.

January 18th 2022

26 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
Keira signed with Nike under an unusual set of conditions: She would run for the brand, but nothing in her life would change. Not her home, not her job, not her coach, and definitely not her training. Unorthodox as the setup was, it was working. And she liked it. On she went.

January 18th 2022

33 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
Then, disaster. A few months ago, Keira was training for a dream she'd when she was a little girl: To be an Olympian. That dream had slipped away, but she'd revived it & was chasing it with all she had. But an injury popped up. She realized a hard truth: she had to stop. Again.

January 18th 2022

1 Retweet12 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
She did stop, and she did miss the Olympics. But this time, she didn't quit. She rested and she corrected the underlying issues and she came back smart — and better. She ran the Chicago marathon. Last month she won the US Half Marathon Championship. It was her 1st national title.

January 18th 2022

25 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
But she knew she couldn't take anything for granted. She is 37; each race is precious. I asked her last week what she would say to herself after Sunday's marathon. She replied: "I'm proud of you." Because she'd already done the hardest thing: starting this crazy journey at all.

January 18th 2022

35 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lindsaycrouseLindsay Crouse @lindsaycrouse
As @KeiraDAmato says, "I sat on the sideline for almost a decade wondering 'what if." There are not many chances in life, especially with time, to find out the answer to that question. But now she doesn't wonder — she knows. Because she took a risk, worked hard, and tried again.

January 18th 2022

3 Retweets49 Likes

Can you ask for a more inspirational story than that? I don’t know about you, but when I hear stories like D’Amato’s, it makes me want to go out for a run so I can experience some of that energy too. Let’s all have a great run out there today — and, see you on Friday! 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️🏃


Photo at top © Zhanna Danilova | Dreamstime.com
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Maria
Jan 20Liked by Terrell Johnson

One of the reasons I love this newsletter!!! Wow! Keira's story is so inspirational, but so is our member Jim Gilroy. Because, let's be honest, at age 56, I am never going to come close to what Keira is doing, but I can certainly shoot for being as motivated as Jim is when I'm his age.

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Jim Gilroy
Jan 20Liked by Terrell Johnson

Getting a real winter for the first time in several years, running in the DC area has been a trial these past few week. I'm definitely not getting out 4 times a week due to the ice (I'm 71 and don't want to risk slipping and falling). Streets tend to be safer than many of the sidewalks - but then, there are those cars. However, when I do get out I always try to get at least 4 miles in, so I don't feel I'm falling behind. Just hoping these ice storms (the rain is turning to sleet as I type) don't persist through February. I hope all goes well with everyone out there.

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