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Good morning! My brain is functioning in a diminished capacity as I write this so please bear with me the rest of the way here. I was in Sacramento this past weekend supporting my wife and eight athletes I coach at the California International Marathon. It was a nonstop adrenaline rush hitting a few different spots along the course on Sunday, refreshing the tracker every few minutes, and trying to pick my people out of a crowd.

As these things go it was a mix of elation and disappointment afterward. Most of my athletes hit their goals, some broke through some longstanding barriers and/or set personal bests, and a couple came up short of what they had set out to do. As a coach, it’s challenging to balance the highs and the lows of such a day. Riding an emotional roller coaster like that can shake you up and take quite a toll.

When I got home that afternoon I went for a shakeout to decompress and process it all. Between acknowledging everything that went to plan and racking my brain for things that could have been done differently, what I kept coming back to was a feeling of immense gratitude for the opportunity to get to do what I do. I view my role as that of a co-pilot, riding shotgun alongside my athletes while offering guidance, perspective, and steady support as they navigate the inevitable twists and turns of the pursuit we’ve set out on together. Sometimes we get where we want to go, other times we don’t, but it’s the privilege of a lifetime to be along for the journey.

OK, let’s get right to it.

Quick Splits

— Graham Blanks, who recently repeated as the NCAA cross-country champion, and even more recently broke 13 minutes in the 5000m for the first time, gave up the rest of his collegiate eligibility yesterday and signed a pro contract with New Balance. Here’s an amazing story on the wild workout that explains how Blanks got his groove back a couple weeks before NCAAs. It was a variation on a workout he did a year prior, and while the details of both workouts will make your legs cramp, it was Blanks’ description of his former teammate Acer Iverson that had me literally laughing out loud. “So we’re running, like 2:00s (for 800m reps) on the grass and it’s just like your legs are just completely full of lactic and you’re sprinting,” he explains. “And then we went onto this road loop with one hill on it. That’s about it, and we did some two-mile reps. This is back when Acer Iverson was still on the team. And he’s an absolute psychopath. I mean, he has no foresight. Like he has this part missing from his brain in terms of racing and training where he doesn’t think about how hard stuff’s going to hurt at the end. And it’s an amazing asset to have as a runner. A lot of times when I race the worst, when I overthink stuff, think about the pain I might feel, Acer doesn’t have that.”

— “The human body is resilient, but it needs consistent, adequate fuel to keep performing at its best,” Brady Holmer writes in the most recent issue of his excellent newsletter, Physiologically Speaking. “As athletes, we grasp this intuitively, but sometimes what we put into practice doesn’t reflect this knowledge.” This is a good article that looks at the consequences of low energy availability, which includes but is not limited to: performance declines, injuries, illnesses, hormonal imbalances, and compromised recovery. This is an important and personal topic for me. In my early 20s I was training very hard but fueling myself very poorly in an attempt to “look the part” of a distance runner and, long story short, it f*cked me up for a while. I experienced everything in the description I shared two sentences ago (and then some) and it took me a few years to dig myself out of that hole. Now, as Holmer points out in the article, low energy availability isn’t always intentional—but, if you’re someone who’s training hard, be careful to make sure your nutritional intake is keeping pace with your energy output.

— Where I live in the Bay Area is home to a diverse population as well as world-class trails. And yet, trail running as a sport is disappointingly homogenous, which is something my friend and athlete Paddy O'Leary, along with the Dipsea Generations film team, want to help change. To do so, they’re going to follow four young athletes from across the Bay as they take on the iconic Dipsea race, sharing their stories in an effort to promote access to trail running for the diverse youth of the Bay Area. Paddy and friends recently launched a fundraising campaign to help cover the production costs of the film project. I recently supported it and I’d love it if you’d consider doing the same. Find out more about the project, watch their exciting teaser, and pledge your support for the project at this handy link.

— Over the past 8 or so years we’ve seen major performance breakthroughs in the marathon from the tippity top of the sport all the way down through the age-group ranks. The most obvious and known contributors to this are super shoes, which reduce energy cost and enhance recovery, and improved fueling products and strategies, which help prevent runners’ glycogen stores from draining all the way down to empty before the finish line. Not as widely talked about, however, is the increased use of heat training and exposure at the top levels of sport, which has been shown to help boost endurance performance. Here’s an interesting article about Jacob Sommer Simonsen, shared with me by friend of the shakeout Jonah Rosner, that explores how he used the latest research on heat adaptation to help take nearly 4 minutes off his marathon personal best a few months ago at Berlin, where he ran a Danish record of 2:07:51. “When we consider the results, I believe Jacob’s four-minute improvement is a mix of factors,” explains Lars Nybo, a professor in the Department of Nutrition, Exercise, and Sport at the University of Copenhagen. “But it probably happened because we optimised his heat adaptation and calibrated his energy intake for training – ensuring that he had just enough, but not more than he needed.”

— I already had this TV On The Radio Tiny Desk concert in the queue when my friend Patrick not-so-subtly nudged me to check it out ASAP. Holy shit it’s so good. “Wolf Like Me” brought me back nearly half a lifetime and put a huge smile on my face. It was on my pre-race playlist for years—added it back after this performance.

— From the archives (Issue 213, 5 years ago today): If you read one thing I link to this week, set aside 15 to 20 minutes and check out “Running Dysmorphic” by Devin Kelly. It’s a long read about competitive running, identity, and giving yourself permission to be exactly who you are. I really can’t recommend it enough. “If you run long and far enough, you’ll find something good in yourself and see something good in someone else,” Kelly writes. “The thing is, this isn’t even that strange of a concept, because life is like that, too. All these people. All different. All on the start line of today’s morning wearing different things and being different heights and sizes. It’s not really a cliché so much as a fact. It’s difficult enough, life is. Who cares what you look like doing it?”

— A big thank you to ​​my partners at Tracksmith for supporting my work this month (and throughout 2024). The brand recently released its 2024 holiday gift guide and it's full of ideas for the runner in your life, so check it out. I’ll add a couple of my season favorites to the mix, the Brighton Base Layer and the Varsity Runner’s Cap. I’m wearing one or both of these pieces on the daily right now as morning temperatures have been on the chilly side. I’ll rock the Brighton on its own if it's not too windy but it usually serves as the perfect insulating layer under a lightweight jacket. The Varsity Runner’s Cap is stylish and soft and packs a lot of warmth into a lightweight package. Both pieces are made of Merino, so they’re warm, they wick well, and they don’t stink when you sweat. If you buy anything from Tracksmith.com between now and December 24th, enjoy 15% off when you combine any top, bottom, and footwear, or 10% off when you combine any two of the three categories.

Workout of the Week: The 5 x 5

One of my favorite all-purpose workouts to assign my athletes, whether they’re burning rubber on the track, shredding grass on the cross-country course, kicking up dirt on the trails, locking into a rhythm on the roads, or doing some combination of the aforementioned, is the 5 x 5. Here are the details.

The bottom line.

“I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried...tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn’t complacent, who doesn’t cop out.”

—Paul Newman

That's it for Issue 474. If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to a few friends and encourage them to subscribe at this link so that it lands in their inbox next Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Mario

​Support the morning shakeout directly on Substack and help keep my work sustainable for years to come.

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