“So many runners get injured before they reach their full potential. Your top tier racing career lasted for at least (—) years. What supplemental exercises, if any, did you do to avoid injuries?”
First of all, I wasn’t very good at avoiding injuries. Injuries are what ended my racing career on the National stage and injuries were what made me quit my Masters racing in 1991. So, if anyone is looking to me for advice on how to avoid injuries, I’m not certain I am a good reference point.
I did not get an early start on training for distance running. We did not have a Track or Cross Country team at the small high school I attended. However, I did play baseball. It was at the encouragement of my baseball coach after our team was eliminated from the State baseball tournament, that I ran a couple of mile races in high school. My baseball coach knew I enjoyed conditioning, running when he’d have us do a few laps after practice. He also knew that when he used running to punish us for mistakes, I was having a lot more fun than the rest of the team. As a result, he asked if I would like to run a mile in the Class B divisional meet. There weren’t any qualifying races and he just wanted to see how I would do if he entered me in the meet.
Long story short, I finished second in 4:40 and qualified for the State Meet the next week. At the State Meet I graduated from a pair of Converse high top Chuck Taylor All Star tennis shoes to a pair of spikes and again finished second (I defeated the guy that beat me at the divisional meet but lost to a runner from another Class B division)….I ran 4:35. I watched the other divisions (at that time all races were run at the University of Arizona) Class AAA, AA, A, B & C….I believe AAA was won in 4:28 and I remember thinking that if I worked at it, I could beat those guys.
Fast forward a year and I was in the Army at Fort Bliss and had been playing softball on a post team (good field, no hit…softball was hard) and saw a notice at the rec center that they were having qualifying for the post track team. So I signed up to run a 1500. I placed second again but this time is lost to my memory. The reward was a drive across Texas to compete in the Army Championships at Fort Hood, Texas. For some unknown reason, the lieutenant in charge of the team decided that I would run a 5,000 meters. Not knowing how far a 5,000 was, I started figuring it out. When I arrived at a distance of something over 3 miles, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to finish. I decided the best chance of finishing was to save my energy by not warming up. This was a disaster. While I know I did finish the 5,000, the time is lost to my memory.
My brief running career in the Army ended with the 5k at Fort Hood. This was in the spring of 1963 and I didn’t get involved in any further running or racing until I was out of the Army and enrolled at Arizona State in the early Fall of 1965. I responded to an article in the school newspaper seeking runners for the cross country team. By the end of the season I had managed to lose a lot of the weight I had gained during my Army tenure and was running as the 7th man on the team….we usually raced 4-mile races. When we moved on to training for track races, I started having some issues with my hamstrings and in seeking out solutions I learned to incorporate some light stretching exercises into my training.
After the spring track season, my coach (Baldy Castillo) suggested I start incorporating some weight lifting into my training program. Baldy was not, for all intents and purposes, a good distance running coach. I don’t think he was ever really interested in the distances, as most of his success had been with field events and his sprinters and quarter milers. He was a good man but he never really tried to understand distance training. We did have a good group to train wit. Lou Scott was a sophomore when I started at ASU and Alex Henderson and Eric Owers had just finished their eligibility. Chuck LaBenz was a year behind me and we became good training partners and we would make up our own workouts.
So, these were my hedges against injuries. Weight training and stretching. Most of the weight training was done on weight machines. The exception being half-squats that were included once a week during my M-W-F weight training sessions. 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5 for squats and bench press with sets of 10 x 5 for lat pull downs. During the between-seasons lifting sessions, I would go for max lifts on the single rep with my best being 330 on a half squat. I felt that was pretty solid for someone weighing 140 lbs.
I didn’t put as much emphasis on the stretching as I should but it usually included some reps of touching toes, leaning into a wall and leg lifts along with some hamstring stretches that involved laying on my back and stretching my legs into the air and touching the toes to the ground.
I feel the biggest mistake I made was emphasizing over distance and fast distance training. Most of my distance runs were run between 5:00 and 5:45 pace and were usually 10 miles…..and again usually twice a day during the fall and off-season and Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday during the Track season with hard intervals on Monday-Wednesday-Friday. I remember Kerry O’Brien, the Aussie steeplechaser, coming to Tempe to train during a winter when he was running several indoor meets. He accused me of intentionally pushing the pace on our distance runs and I had to explain I just didn’t know any better than that.
The beginning of the end came with an achilles injury during the late fall of 1971. I had tried to ramp up my distance training to the 125-150 mile range and it just overstressed everything.
Once the achilles was injured and I found I wasn’t going to be able to get well and get my conditioning back for the 1972 trials, I just decided that the body wasn’t going to recover. I stopped training during the spring and summer of 1972. I got involved in teaching and coaching and never felt the need to try to race at that level again. I ran a lot with my distance runners at the high school where I coached but didn’t start racing again until the summer of 1979 after I moved to Tahoe and started working out with Tom Von Ruden. I had a somewhat successful career as a 40+ Masters runner but started having more foot and knee problems in 1990 and stopped racing for good in 1991…..I was 47 at that time.
Hope this answers your request.
JDW: I am confused by one sentence.
I feel that the biggest mistake I made was emphasizing over distance and fast distance training.
What do you mean? Too many miles too fast? Not enough easy miles? Not enough rest?
All of those descriptions are accurate. I did run all of my distance runs too fast. Always felt that long slow distance equaled a slow runner. Also, always made it important to get over 100 miles and I kept ramping up from there. Rest days were few and far between and usually associated with a cold or something.
While visiting Tracy Smith last winter in Ecuador we talked briefly about our approaches to training. He was very proud he never broke 100 miles in a week in training. I considered it some kind of failure if I didn’t get the 100 mile benchmark every week. He trained under the Igloi method and felt that accepting the boundaries of that method is what turned him from just one of the guys to a world beater.
I always felt I had to run more, run faster and compete more often. Baldy Castillo at ASU always scheduled a lot of dual and three-way meets. By the time we got into the championship part of the outdoor season, we would have already run 12-15 races….usually miles and two miles. It wasn’t until I was finished with collegiate competition in 1970 and 1971 that I realized I could run a lot faster by not racing so much and concentrating on the longer distances. Overtraining and over-racing is a guaranteed path to overuse injuries.
Another error on my part was thinking I could be a good marathoner. In retrospect I wish I had never learned of the marathon. Road racing at the shorter distances really didn’t get started until after the 1972 Olympics but marathoning was always out there and I decided I could be a fast marathoner. I was wrong. I feel, if I had concentrated on track racing at 5k and 10k with the emphasis on the 10k, I would have been able to escape injuries by avoiding a lot of the pounding I was doing for marathon training.
Oh well, time passes and we learn from our mistakes and maybe we can help others to not make the same mistakes we made. I’ve never regretted being a distance runner. I feel that is what defined me when I was in my twenties and probably led me to make some of the decisions I have made in my life.
There is nothing more persistent than a hard-headed distance runner who wants to impose his will on those around him.