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June 26, 2005
Inheritance and training
Dana claims I've progressed over the last couple of years of running to moving faster than he achieved, although he ran consistently over a period of years. Somewhere I read that an endurance athlete inherits key biological capacities for endurance, like mitochondrial density, from his mom. So perhaps Dana should blame Evelyn. Or I should thank Mom. (Too bad my mom's of German, rather than Kenyan, descent.)
That said, perhaps I'm not starting out with better raw material than Dana. He certainly worked at it much longer than I have. If I'm not getting this mixed up, he averaged over 1000 miles per year for 10 years at one point. Perhaps I'm benefitting from advances made in training runners.
I don't know the history of runner's training theory. Hal Higdon wrote that at one point, probably in the mid 50s, almost all anyone ran in training was intervals. Lots of coaches took the attitude that either you'd succeed in recovering from the training and getting faster, or you'd get dropped. There was a bit of that when I ran middle distance in junior high school. We had one guy who could run a 5-minute mile, and the rest of us were superfluous. Same problem running cross country.
That's reflects a good way for coaches to avoid wasting time with people who won't win, but it doesn't make much sense for people running as a hobby or a way of staying fit, where the primary competitors are our earlier selves. Dana started running during the 1970s, I guess, when the sport was finally being seen as something for normal adults to do. I imagine there wasn't nearly as much information about training available to the average adult runner as there was 30 years later when I started running again.
I remember Dana regularly running the same distances at about the same speed. He probably had heard about long slow distance and intervals, but not about tempo runs. He didn't have a heart monitor, and may not have thought about how to relate his lactate threshold or VDOT to his training. Also, today's idea that you must regularly shake up your routine, running different distances, different speeds in order to progress in your training, probably was not nearly as widespread.
It could be that my children will run faster than I do with less work. Even if their mother says she hates endurance exercise in general and jogging in particular.
Posted by Mark at June 26, 2005 07:22 AM
Comments
I think that you are more able to be immoderate than Dana. If the going gets TOO rough, he is liable to hold back and you would tend to just muscle through. That might explain the effect. He once said to me that he gave up weight lifting, which he tried in college because he could not build the muscles in his upper body. But maybe he did not give it enough chance. His running muscles in his legs are rock hard, so why would the chest be different? That makes me think he might evaluate things differently than you do and make different decisions about what he does as a consequence.
Mom
Posted by: Teena at June 26, 2005 07:28 PM
On one hand, it would be hard to be more moderate than Dana, especially for an eldest child. On the other hand, he has lasted as a runner for many years. He therefore had years where he wasn't much older than I am, but had much more training behind him.
Surely we differ in natural endurance, muscle composition, etc. I simply wonder whether there's not something to the idea that training intelligently makes a big difference.
Another bit of supporting evidence that training can make a big difference is that marathon record times dropped so much during the 20th century. I don't think we can reasonably conclude that all of that's due to finding better runners. If we had the statistics, we might be able to guess what percentage of the improvement is simply due to better training technique.
Posted by: Mark at June 27, 2005 08:18 PM