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CONTENTS
Introduction
WINTER
Gifts Blah Running vs. Training Pointlessness Patience The Web The Other Half Efficiency Cold First Principles Child's Play Happiness Going Long, Getting Longer Information Listening to the Man Getting off Your Own Back Warming Up, Cooling Down Belief Systems Dancing with Fatigue Road Thoughts Shivering The Physiology of Confidence Rain in the Face Twenty-One Days from Now Rescue Readiness Letting Fly Wallet Protection, Part I Going Orthopedic Going Systemic Two Cultures Falling Whining Iliotibial Band Syndrome Dancing Sharpening
SPRING
Mariah Beginnings Grace Mechanics Wear-Dated Madness Callousness Taking a Break Pieces World Peace Gravity Deep Recreation The Heart of a Runner Inhale, Exhale Lengthening Antifreeze The Quiet Body Panaceas The W-Word Check It Out Relaxations Going Outdoors Cutting Apexes It's the Law Indoor Thinking Dissociation Proprioception Kettles and Pots Functionality Moods, Part I Virtual Realities Toleration Good News, Bad News The Suit of Lead Rhythmics The Interior Life Maintenance Adversaries Stride Length Ballistics Brains Taking Your Time
SUMMER
Bugs Touch So What? The Elixir of Excellence Records Watering Up, Watering Down The Easiest Way Where the Walls Are Pumps The Annals of Spaghetti, Part I Energy Budgets When Fatigue Helps The Inclinometer The Glories of Muscle In Praise of Soreness Sinew Finishing When Silence Is Dangerous Molecular Theory Like the Wind A Penny Saved Tone Muscle "Pulls" The Break-Over Point The Application of Pain Obsession -- and Other Perfumes Moods, Part II Us Weaklings Moans and Groans More Budgeting Stupidities Heart Gimme a Break Bellies Bored Horses Willpower-and Glycogen N = 1 Healing Wallet Protection, Part II Ignore at Your Peril Now Stale
FALL
Hunter-Gatherers On Taking a Little Off Repetitive Motion Volume Old Cats Running to Run Unified Field Theory Balance Big Veins Laws to Live By Waves Perceived Effort On Becoming Green Examining the Data Fashion Statement Putting It Back Take That, Pain For Fun Problem-Solving Pooped Discernment The Official Word Goofing Off Working at Play, Playing at Work Sugarplums The Annals of Spaghetti, Part II Objective vs. Subjective Eating Invulnerability Your Choice Choosing Your Pace
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The heart is the tachometer of effort.
A lot of writers I know keep a small book calledThe Elements of Styleon a shelf right over their desks. Only seventy-one pages long, it is a perfect gem of advice on clear composition, and an entertaining read in the bargain. It's handy to have around.
It was written by William Strunk Jr., a professor of English at Cornell, in 1918, intending "merely to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English." One of Strunk's students was E. B. White, who went on to become one of the most graceful essayists in American letters. In 1959, White revised what Will Strunk always called his "little book," added an introduction, and had it republished. It has never since gone out of print. Writers refer to simply it as "Strunk and White."
As a runner and a writer I've always thought we needed a similar basic guide to the principles of athletic training. Ideally it would be expressed not in the Tab-A-in-Slot-B manner of most exercise physiology texts, but with a little more sympathy for the reader -- a sentiment acquired from Strunk and White. "Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time," said White, "a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain the swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope."
For fourteen years I've writtenThe Complete Runner's Day-by-Day Log and Calendar.In composing the monthly essays for theLog,I've tried to gather the most useful principles of athletic effort, weave them into a comfortable form, and link them to the larger phenomenal world in which we run. The principles do not represent all one might ever possibly want to know about athletic training, but if your eyes tend to glaze over at discussions of VO2max -- or yet another formula for computing the heart-rate range at which the training effect allegedly kicks in -- what follows is an attempt to toss you a few of Will Strunk's handy ropes.
Runners are able to run because the body turns food into a molecule that comes with a kind of magnet attached to it. The magnet, a free phosphate radical, leaps to make new attachments, and in that leap releases energy, which powers muscle, which drives us down the road. This may not be the most interesting transaction in the world -- except perhaps for chemistry majors -- but its elemental nature is worth keeping in mind.
Running is the most elemental sport there is. We are genetically programmed to do it. One might even say we are the free-ranging, curious, restless creatures that we are because of running. Surely our instinct for freedom is a legacy of this essential mobility.
I think freedom itself is the source of running's great appeal. Slip on a pair of shoes, slip out the door, and you're there: free. No commute to a playing field, no teams or uniforms, no dates to arrange. No score-keeping, no rules, no fancy equipment to buy. Try though the gimmicksellers have to complicate the sport, nothing has compromised running's essential simplicity.
Simplicity, however, is a quality that, in human affairs, is difficult to hang on to. As instinctively as we are driven to run free, we are also driven to analyze and assess, to pry apart, to deeply know. Just as we have marketeers dreaming up new running fads and fashions, we have scientists -- and a thousand treadmills -- searching out the innermost secrets of human performance, and coaches shepherding their guinea-pig athletes through practical trials of those secrets. We can't possibly know too much about a given subject -- to claim that is to deny our curiosity, which is an essential part of our humanness -- but sometimes it feels as if we do.The Elements of Effortis intended as a celebration of running's original simplicity. It is an attempt to illustrate, in familiar essays, the elemental aspects of running.
You do every day's run on your feet, but you also do it in your head. The pieces that follow acknowledge that fact; they are therefore unapologetically personal, as personal as I can make them. Each is a line of thought that came to me while running, that gave me a chance to let my mind go off and play. I hope you'll find in them a suitable collection of ideas to mull over in the course of your own daily runs.
TheLogfrom which many of the ideas in this book spring was originated by Jim Fixx in 1979, two years after he published his masterpiece,The Complete Book of Running.That was easily the most popular running book of all time, and after more than twenty years is still the one responsible for getting most of us started in the first place.The Elements of Effortis dedicated to Jim's memory.
-- John Jerome
Copyright © 1997 by John Jerome
Excerpted from The Elements of Effort: Reflection on the Art of Science and Running by John Jerome All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
