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Good morning! I was going to share an update about my current training but that’s neither important nor very interesting right now. It can wait until another day. Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the news of the wildfires that have been ravaging the Los Angeles area over the past week. And while I don’t live near where these blazes are burning, they have hit particularly close to home, affecting a number of people I care about in various ways. Two of those people, Jinghuan Liu Tervalon and Dennis Slavin, are longtime members of the morning shakeout community and both of them lost their homes and most of their possessions in the Altadena fire. I’ve known Jinghuan for seven years and just had breakfast with her a few weeks ago at the club cross country championships in Tacoma (where we took the above photo). I was honored to have her as a guest on the podcast in 2022, where she shared her story as a runner, writer, and advocate. Dennis, who I’ve never met in person but have corresponded with through this newsletter, is a volunteer cross country and track coach at a local high school, as well as for a youth team, and his wife and two sons are also runners. The magnitude of devastation, loss, and emotional anguish that Jinghuan, Dennis, their families, and thousands of others in the Los Angeles area have faced over the past week, not to mention the heroic ’round-the-clock efforts of firefighters and first-responders, is hard to wrap my head around. In times like these, the sense of community we share, especially through running, becomes even more meaningful, and I’d like to use this week’s introduction as an opportunity to encourage anyone who’s able to lend some support to Jinghuan and/or Dennis and their families through their GoFundMe pages, which you can find here and here, respectively. Or, if you can contribute to any of the number of funds, foundations, and programs that are helping provide various forms of recovery, relief, and services to affected residents throughout the area, that’s great too. Every little bit adds up to make a big difference. Thank you.

Quick Splits

— I’ll preface what I’m about to write by saying that I read this recent essay by psychologist and professor Adam Grant through my coaching lens. In it he writes about effort and how, “No, you don’t get an A for effort.” (In fact, that’s the title of the piece.) His main argument is that grades, or outcomes of any sort, really, should reflect the quality of someone’s work, preparation, and mastery of the pursuit, not just the quantity of effort they put into it. In general, I don’t disagree. Effort is important, and should be both encouraged and recognized, but it alone can’t be the arbiter of success or failure. “Teachers and parents owe kids a more balanced message,’ he writes. “There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result.” I’d argue that if you lumped coaches and bosses in with teachers and parents in the above statement, and just owe the overall message to people in general instead of just kids, it would still hold true. It’s not just about putting in the most work, it’s what that work yields, and how your approach translates to the results you desire, which is ultimately what defines success in any context. Effort without direction or strategy can lead to burnout or wasted potential, while focused effort—guided by skill, intention, and adaptability—can produce better outcomes and more meaningful progress in general. Case in point: As a coach, it’s not uncommon to hear an athlete bemoan the fact that they didn’t win the race/hit the time/achieve the goal, as if they’re owed the result because they “put in the work.” And oftentimes in those cases the athlete will compare themselves to someone who did the thing but “didn’t want it as bad, didn’t put in as many miles, etc.” And while I understand the feeling (hey, I’ve been there myself as an athlete!), more often than not—bad luck or circumstances beyond one’s control notwithstanding—the result was commensurate with the quality, not the quantity, of the effort that went into it. Garbage in more often than not equals garbage out. If you want to consistently produce high-quality output, you first need to focus on making sure you’re getting consistently solid input. (And even then you’ll probably need to go back to the drawing board, tweak some things for the next attempt, or maybe even go in a totally different direction.)

— How can you not be a Quincy Wilson fan? Not only is the high school junior one of the hottest 400m prospects in the world, he’s got a more level head on his shoulders than a lot of people two to four times his age. In this latest interview with Chris Chavez from Citius Mag, the 16-year-old Wilson discusses his Olympic experience as a member of the United States’ gold-medal winning relay team, what it’s been like returning to real life since, his thoughts on competitiveness, motivation, nerves, and the like, as well as how he’s thinking about his future–one which is ripe with possibilities, from college scholarships to professional contracts to national records and who knows what else. Wilson’s just fun to watch rip around the track but, for me, it’s the mature example he’s quietly setting off it that really separates him from his peers. “For me, academics always come first. Nobody can ever take your academics away from you. I always stand by that,” he explains. “Also, it’s the last season for a lot of the seniors that I came into Bullis with. It's our last time to make memories and run 4x400s together. Last year, we fell short of some of the things that we had our goals set on. This year, we're coming back more prepared and really have our eye on something that we want to accomplish. I want to go back and do it with my team and do it with a lot of my friends that I had since coming into the school.”

— I really enjoyed this Athletics Weekly profile on Sifan Hassan by Euan Crumley. Hassan’s one of the best distance runners in the world and has range from the metric mile to the marathon that is virtually unmatched. A fierce competitor and threat to win every time she steps to the line, Hassan’s fun to watch race, yes, but what I like most about her is that she’s interesting and unafraid to speak honestly on all manner of situations (e.g. like how brutal of an event the marathon can be, or how terrible she felt in her first 5K jog after a break from training, or even how satisfied she felt after her medal haul in Paris this past summer). Along these lines, I really appreciated what she had to say to Crumley about dancing with fear, and how leaning into curiosity has helped lead to some of her biggest breakthroughs both in sport and in life. “I’m crazy curious and I’m also a high risk taker,” explains Hassan, who will race the TCS London Marathon in April. “I’m learning to go to the fear and being scared but then thinking ‘let’s find out.’ I think when you finish [a marathon], the endorphins release the happiness and that’s why it makes people curious.”

— On the topic of legendary women in running, Joan Benoit Samuelson cemented her status as one of the all-time greats over 40 years ago with her win at the 1984 Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles. Not only did that performance open the floodgates for women to explore their possibilities in distance running, but Samuelson’s triumph that day, which was broadcast to a global audience, had ramifications that extended far beyond the finish line. “I ran because there was an opportunity, not because I wanted to prove that women could run marathons,” Samuelson told Kevin Baxter for this recent LA Times profile. “Women had been proving themselves long before the ’84 Games. If anything, maybe my win inspired women to realize that if marathoning were a metaphor for life, anything in life is possible.” (Baxter’s piece pairs well with this interview I did a couple years ago with Steven Lane, author of the book, Long Run to Glory: The Story of the Greatest Marathon in Olympic History and the Women Who Made It Happen.)

— For those of you who are unfamiliar with him or his work, Harry Mack is one of the best freestyle rappers of all-time. I’ve linked to his music here many times before. It’s incredible how seamlessly he’s able to integrate random words from bystanders as well as his environment and on-the-spot observations into his performances. Mack’s latest is a bit of departure from the norm but it might be one of his most impressive bits yet, if you ask me. In it, he’s freestyling while also putting out some Afro-Cuban beats on the drums. (Note: he has a background in jazz drumming.) I don’t know how else to describe it other than two minutes of pure delight.

— From the archives (Issue 322, 3 years ago this week): Brad Stulberg’s most recent essay on owning your distractions hit me at the right time. I find myself getting pulled in a bunch of different directions here at the start of the new year and it never feels good to feel spread so thin. I needed the reminder that I’m in control of where I focus my attention and what I let distract me. “In other words, the more you are never really here, never really there, always kind of everywhere the worse you can expect to feel and do,” he writes. “Meanwhile, the more intimacy and focus you have in your life, the better.”

I’m thrilled to share that the morning shakeout will continue to be supported by New Balance, Tracksmith, Precision Fuel & Hydration, and Final Surge in 2025, all brands that have missions I believe in and products that I trust and use myself on a regular basis. I’ve been fortunate to be in partnership with New Balance since 2020 (and have been running in their shoes a lot longer than that). In any given week I run in 3-4 different types of shoes, which is a privilege I don’t take for granted. Even if that’s not possible for you, having at least two pairs in your rotation—one for general mileage and one for speed workouts/races—can help each shoe last you a little longer, lessen the likelihood of injuries, and optimize performance and recovery. Here’s a detailed roundup of the different models of New Balance shoes I use for various types of runs throughout the week: the Fresh Foam X 1080v14, the FuelCell Rebel v4, FuelCell SuperComp Elite v4, and the Fresh Foam X Hierro v8.

Workout of the Week: Long Run with Surges

Running long this week/weekend? Those miles are going to be a sizable chunk of your total weekly volume. Don’t waste ’em! Avoid a sloppy slog and help the time pass a little quicker by throwing in a 30-60 second surge at the end of every mile. I like to assign this workout early in a training block or whenever I want to get a little more out of the long run without it being an overwhelming stress on the body (and mind). Here are the details.

The bottom line.

“What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.”

—Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe, required reading (or re-reading) for this day and age.

That's it for Issue 479. If you enjoyed 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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