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Good morning! Ever felt stuck in the mud? That was me on Saturday at the U.S. Club Cross Country Championships in Tacoma, Washington. I felt like I was fighting it from the start and was never in the mix at any point, finishing far behind a bunch of guys I’m usually competitive with. Every stride felt like it took more effort than it should, and no matter how hard I tried to dig in, my body just felt like it was moving in slow-motion (which, to be fair, it was).

In a lot of ways, the race was reflective of how I’ve been feeling since late May: physically flat, emotionally drained, and mentally tired. The past six months have been challenging in a myriad of ways I won’t get into here and I’ve been engaged in an ongoing battle between trying to push forward and giving myself some grace. If anything, my biggest takeaway from Saturday’s 10K at Chambers Creek Regional Park is that the only way to get out of the mud is to stop trying to force my way through it.

So, to that end, I’m going to dial things down on the running front for a bit and take the break I should have taken this summer and fall. I’m not totally sure what that’s going to look like but in general I’m not going to think about racing again for a while and keep both the intensity and volume low the next few months while I recharge my batteries. As I tell my athletes: sometimes in order to move forward you need to have the confidence to first take a step back.

Outside of my own performance it was still a great weekend for/with my teammates from the West Valley Track Club. Our 40+ team finished second to a strong Club Northwest Squad and our 50+ guys won another national title. Bummed as I was about my race, the overwhelming feeling I had throughout the weekend was one of gratitude: for my WVTC teammates, who provide support and inspiration on and off the race course; for the ability to still be doing this at the age of 42, which is not something I take for granted; and for the lessons this sport continues to impart on me after all these years of doing it. It really is the lens that allows me to see things more clearly throughout nearly every aspect of my life.

Quick programming note before we dive into the rest of this week’s issue: I’m taking some time off work to enjoy the holidays with my wife, family, and friends. The next two newsletters will be pre-prepared and snappier than usual. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming the first week of 2025. Happiest of holidays to you and yours!

Quick Splits

— I admittedly have my biases but if you were an aspiring professional runner how could you not want to run for New Balance Boston and coach Mark Coogan, especially after watching this video of his team working out on a November day in New England? “Coogs’ Crew,” as his team is unofficially called, has established itself as one of the top training groups in the world over the past 10 years and they’ve got the Olympians, national titles, national records, and world championship medals to prove it. Talent helps, of course (and they now have one of the most decorated athletes ever to come out of the NCAA in Parker Valby), but Coogan has built his reputation on developing diamonds in the rough into world-beaters by creating a culture that has as much to do with fostering a family environment as it does trying to run fast. In this video it’s obvious how much fun his charges are having together, how well they all get along and support one another, and how Coogan doesn’t sweat the small stuff, like the exact distance of the loop they’re doing the workout on. “Millie, Katrina, they’ve done like 8 or 10 of these before, you know, one lappers,” he explains. “And I’m not quite sure exactly how far it is, but it’s somewhere around a thousand, I think.”

— How cool is this peek into Bob Dylan’s notebooks and notetaking process? I just love how observant he is of, well, everything going on around him, and how iterative his song-writing process is. (e.g. “Like a Rolling Stone” started out as a 12-page draft!) It’s also worth noting his emphasis on the role that mystery and the unconscious mind plays in songwriting, or any creative pursuit, really. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that, it gives you the song and it goes away,” he explains. “You don’t know what it means. Except that the ghost picked me to write the song.” For what it’s worth, I feel like I get a ghost assist from time to time when writing this newsletter. There are more weeks than I care to admit when I have no idea what the hell I’m going to write about, yet somehow the words eventually come together and form something coherent and respectable enough to publish. I couldn’t explain it to you if I tried, which is why it will remain a mystery.

— A few months ago I had a coronary calcium scan, which I paid out of pocket for because insurance wouldn’t cover it, and luckily my score was zero (meaning no calcium is present in my heart, suggesting a low risk of developing a heart attack in the future). Any score above zero indicates the presence of calcium deposits in the heart's arteries, which doesn’t mean you’re going to have a heart attack, but it does suggest that your risk for one is higher and you might need to monitor things a little more closely. I got the scan done as a precautionary measure after a couple people close to me experienced some issues and it was well worth the $125 bucks for the peace of mind alone. In that vein—pun not intended—I appreciated this recent post from my friend Brendan Leonard, who took the same route as me in getting the scan, and I encourage you to give it a read. (He also provides some good background information, a few helpful illustrations, and a couple candid anecdotes.) “It seems like everybody, including myself, have had friends or older colleagues that have had heart attacks that didn't make any sense,” Dr. Tim McCue, the radiologist in chief at Montana Imaging Center, told Brendan. “That's where I think the calcium scoring is helpful because it can give people an idea of if they're doing everything right and their lipid panel or other labs are marginal, then you can still look at things.”

— Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to catch Justin Bloss opening for John Moreland. It was the first time I’d ever listened to his music and I was immediately captivated by it, partly due to the obvious emotion he poured into every lyric and chord that he played, and partly due to the profundity of the songwriting itself. Justin’s following and footprint isn’t that large (yet!) but his music cuts deep and makes you feel something every time you listen to it. He recently had two videos drop on YouTube: The official music video (his first, so far as I can tell) of “That’s Good Enough,” and this acoustic performance of “That’s When I Knew” from his upcoming album, Claymore. The latter was recorded in his family’s backyard on the Osage Reservation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and it’s fucking awesome.

— A big thank you to ​​my partners at Tracksmith for supporting my work this month (and throughout 2024). The brand recently launched my favorite campaign and apparel collection: No Days Off. Now, I’ll be the first to admit the name is inspiring to some and off-putting to others, but it doesn’t literally mean that you should never take a day off of running—it’s simply a call for consistency and intentionality in your training, focusing on the small regular deposits that eventually add up to a big payout. The No Days Off Collection is carefully designed to help you weather the worst. My favorite piece is the Brighton Base Layer, which serves as a temperature regulating longsleeve on its own or as an essential insulator under your favorite jacket. I wear it most days of the week throughout the winter months. Check it out, along with the rest of the NDO collection. (Every purchase ships with a free 2025 NDO Poster for committing to new goals in the year ahead, while supplies last.)

— From the archives (Issue 162, 6 years ago this week): “I was never happier than when I was moving, a low-budget Mercury skimming along the skin of the earth in torn running shorts,” Chris Solomon writes in this excellent essay for Outside. “The satisfaction lay simply in heading out the door and covering ground. To be able—that was the thing.” If you only read one thing that I link to this week, make it Solomon’s piece, “When Your Body Says No.” When I think about my own relationship with running, and why I want to pursue this somewhat silly desire to see what’s possible at this point in my life, on a fundamental level it comes down to the fact that I’m still able to do it. I’m grateful that my body hasn’t given me a truly resounding no in a long time, which is something I don’t take for granted. Solomon, who has an undiagnosed calf injury that’s prevented him from doing “the one thing that never left me” in almost 40 years of running, will help you to better “appreciate the grace of all you still can do,” whether that’s running, or something else that brings unparalleled joy to your life.

— My partners at Final Surge recently announced full integration with Suunto, allowing athletes to push planned structured workouts to their Suunto watches as well as sync completed workouts from Suunto to the Final Surge calendar. There’s a few more features coming in the new year that I’m excited about and can’t wait to share. Moving my entire coaching operation under the Final Surge roof in 2017 streamlined my workflow and made the day-to-day business of analyzing workouts, planning training, and communicating with my athletes a much better experience for everyone involved. Check out the full list of features available to coaches right here. Fellow coaches: Head over to finalsurge.com and take advantage of a free 14-day coaching trial today. Use the code MORNINGSHAKEOUT when you check out to take 10% off your first purchase. Any questions? Just reply to this email and send ’em my way!

Workout of the Week: Elimination 400s

I came up with this workout for the Wednesday night track crew I coach as a fun way to get in a high volume of quality work while also practicing how to be disciplined, stay focused, and go through a wide range of gears. This session works best in a group environment because it has a competitive element to it—you’re “eliminated” when you run slower than your previous interval; whoever can tally up the most reps “wins” the workout—but it can also be done alone. Here are the details.

The bottom line.

“I’m not motivated by greed, fame, or recognition. I’m in it for the game itself. Ambition, yes. I want to be good. Like myself at thirteen, I can’t hit the ball for shit. I can’t make it go right or left, I can’t hit it as long as I want, and I sure as hell can’t do it on demand. So I do it over and over, and when I’m done I do it over again. I do it in all weathers. And when I’m too tired to keep doing it myself, I watch other players whose level of skill I aspire to. I watch them do it.”

—Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art and other bestselling books, in his memoir, Govt Cheese, which I’m currently reading (and really enjoying!)

That's it for Issue 475. If you found value in it, or know someone else who might like it, please forward this email to a friend (or five!) and encourage them to subscribe at this link so that it lands in their inbox next Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Mario

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