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Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios Run Like the Dickens Holly, December 13, 2008 Molly Brinker won the Run Like the Dickens 5K for the second straight year in 19:51. Fun at the Run Like the Dickens also included a Tiny Tim Trot for youngsters. 5/3 New Year’s Eve Run / Walk Detroit, December 31, 2008 Eventual winner of the Fifth Third New Year’s Eve 4 Mile, Luke Humphrey, front right, leads the pack with the Belle Isle Casino in the background. Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios 62 Michigan Runner - March / April 2009 - Annual Event Calendar Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios Holiday Hustle Dexter, December 13, 2008 Festive fun was the essence of Running Fit’s first annual Holiday Hustle 5K and 1-mile runs. Super 5K Novi, February 1, 2009 Ian Forsyth won the Super 5K in 15:45. Angela Matthews was the first woman in 18:04.
Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios Notes on the Run: DogsRunning with Tom Henderson The single best thing that ever happened to me in my racing career — other than starting to run in the first place — was reading an item in Running Research News about 1986 or so. RRN was a must read for serious racers, no matter what their talent, and track coaches around the world. The Tom Henderson guy behind it, Owen Anderson, is still going strong, through he ended his relationship with the newsletter in 1999. I spent a few glorious years in the mid- 1980s free-lancing baseball stories for the Detroit Free Press, Royal Oak Tribune and the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers, a chain of community papers based in Livonia. The free-lance gigs were a break-even proposition and I considered it a blessing to end the winter with as much dough as I’d started it, and in the process get to hang around ball fields and watch the action in the warm sun far from the bluster of Michigan winter. The real bonus, though, was having warm weather to train in during the week and traveling around the state on weekends looking for 5Ks and 10Ks as many Saturdays and Sundays as possible. I’ve long forgotten the whens and wheres behind most of the running trophies I long ago put away in the attic eaves, but I’ll never forget the shock of winning my first hardware, placing in the Hooters 5K in Lakeland, winter home of the Detroit Tigers. Anyway, I made the short drive to Tampa from my Lakeland base one Friday in February for Saturday’s world-renowned Gasparilla run, then a 15K with enough prize money to bring in the world’s elites to attack what was a flat, world-record course. At the expo, a guy was handing out samples of an interesting-looking newsletter, which translated the impenetrable jargon of medical and scientific research into a readable, understandable compilation of tips to improve your training and running. We started chatting and were pleasantly surprised to find out we were fellow Michiganders. He gave me some samples, I soon sent him a check and became a long- time subscriber. So, what was that single best thing? A tip, based on scientific research, on how to warm up before a race for optimal performance. And, more important, how long to rest, or not rest, between the warmup and the start of the race. What you were supposed to do was warm up relatively briskly for a mile and a half or so before the event. That wasn’t the key. The key was to time it, if possible, so you finished your warmup just before the race started. And if the race started a few minutes later, you were better off continuing to warmup. How short should the rest be? No longer than 30 seconds. By the time you’d rested more than a minute, you’d lost nearly all the physiological benefits of having warmed up in the first place. Until that article, I had warmed up like most others I’d seen. And cooled off like them, too. Stopping my warmup, taking my place in the field and waiting for several minutes for the race to start. And each first mile of each of the 50 or 60 races I was doing a year was painful and gut-busting, everything settling in like clockwork about the mile mark. Every first mile since then was a piece of cake, relatively speaking. I’d keep jogging around no matter how long it took, until I could see things were about to get under way, even jogging in place if I had too, other runners looking at me like I was a whack job or off my meds while they calmly waited for the gun. RRN also provided what would become one of my favorite track workouts — a series of 12 very fast 200-meter runs, 40 seconds or so, which were broken up by 10 seconds, no more, of a brief walking recovery. Hit the finish line, walk in a short circle, check the watch and GO. Owen got his Ph.D. in zoology from Michigan State University in 1983 and found himself with exactly one job offer, a teaching post in Saskatchewan that paid $15,000 Canadian, Canadian then being worth substantially less than American. “My wife and 10-year-old daughter both thought Saskatchewan was a big creature that lived in the mountains,” says Anderson, who decided to do post-doc work at MSU instead. And to start ramping up his running. And, being a scientist, to look for tips on the best ways to train in the various running publications. He found anecdotes, theories and nothing based on physiology and fact. “There was no bridge between the research and running community,” he says. So Owen became the bridge. He started living, more or less, in the MSU library, prowl- ing the stacks and reading all the research journals as they came — “everyone there called me by my first name” — and launching RRN in 1985. He started submitting articles to Runner’s World magazine, too, but got only a series of rejections as his newsletter began getting a foothold in the market. Once it became established as the authority on training, though, RW came calling, and from 1992 to 1999 Anderson’s “Fast Lane” column was a staple of the magazine, back when serious training was of interest to its editors and each issue wasn’t, seemingly, a compilation of five easy ways to take off six pounds, nine ways to a try out new shoes or 11 days to a new you. In 1992, Anderson helped found another newsletter in the United Kingdom, Peak Performance, dedicated to training tips for a wider audience of athletes, including tennis, rugby and soccer players. At its peak in 1995, RRN had a paid circulation of 10,000, including U.S. coaches at Oregon, Wisconsin, MSU and Iowa, and coaches in England, the Netherlands and the U.K. Anderson was smart enough to sell the newsletter at its peak, although he remained as its editor until 2007. If you want to be the authority on training, you better figure out what the Kenyans are doing. So began a series of trips to the mountain training camps of the world’s best runners and a series of articles. Eventually, Anderson even served as an agent for some of them. These days, Anderson has launched a free Web site, www.educatedrunner.com, which went live in July, puts on running camps and seminars and, to make sure bills are paid on time, works as a recruiter for the U.S. Census Bureau. “A key goal of the Web site is to make people aware of the new paradigm in training,” he said. “The U.S. had another abysmal year in Beijing, winning one medal of a possible 36 at distances of 800 meters and above. Our best woman (Deena Kastor) in the marathon broke her foot at the three-mile mark. People are still lacking in knowledge. I want to educate them in better, new ways to train.” While you’re at it, Owen, remind them about the old ways of warming up, too. Oh, and just to keep busy, Anderson is working on two novels: one a murder mystery about an agent whose Kenyan runners start dying, the other about the inner lives of lonely, abandoned people in nursing homes. He got an evening job as a security guard at a nursing home in Lansing to do research, but getting robbed at gunpoint ended that gig. MR Michigan Runner - March / April 2009 - Annual Event Calendar 63
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By Scott Sullivan Some things never
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Maggy Zidar: Long May You Run By Ro
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Photo by Pat Davey Running Shorts w
Page 14 and 15: Beyond the Chip By Paul Aufdemberge
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Page 20 and 21: (616) 893-5830 dwight.sneden @hudso
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