Super shoes—models with curved carbon-fiber plates embedded in tall stacks of lightweight, hyper-responsive foams—are now ubiquitous in the road racing scene. And with their performance benefits well established, more and more recreational racers are giving them a try—not just in racing, but in training.

There’s just one problem: the shoes have only been around for a few years, and while there is no doubt that they can make people faster in racing, there is little information on how to use them properly in training.Ìę

Two-time Olympian turned podcaster and NBC commentator Kara Goucher says it’s a topic she’s discussed with many people she knows. “How often do we use them? How often do we not?” are common questions Goucher says she hears. “We need to be careful, but we also do need to use them in practice because we want to get [the] advantages—but we don’t want to get hurt
It’s so complicated.”

Finding answers begins by understanding how the shoes actually work.Ìę

How Your Body Reacts to Training in Super Shoes

For reasons that are not fully understood by biomechanics researchers, super shoes have a combination of foam and plate that make them function as springs, says Jay Dicharry, a Bend, Oregon, physical therapist, running gait expert, and author of . “You’re basically making a trampoline.”

This has a number of effects. One is that your brain automatically reacts to the softer impact by reducing the amount of knee flexion upon landing, says Simon Bartold, a sports podiatrist and biomechanist in Adelaide, South Australia. The leg becomes stiffer because the shoe is absorbing the impact. It’s part of why they are less tiring to run in.Ìę

Another big change, says Dicharry, is that the thick, cushiony foam increases the amount of time you spend in contact with the ground, as the foam contracts, then rebounds. That changes not only impact forces, but also cadence, the location of foot plant for the next stride, and a host of other factors. “Everything’s different,” he says.

These changes make the shoes fast, but they don’t come without side effects, especially when the shoes are used in training. When the shoes first came out, Dicharry says he was working with elite-level athletes who were trying to figure out how to use them in training, “and every single one got hurt.”

More recently, a paper by a group of physicians in reported a possible association between training in super shoes and navicular (mid-foot) stress fractures. Bartold’s podiatrist and runner friend says he’s been seeing an uptick in hip and lower back injuries since people started training in super shoes. The reason, Bartold suspects, is that the stiffer landing on impact allows what shock isn’t absorbed by the shoe to travel up the leg, affecting you anywhere from the knee to the lower back. All told, Bartold says it’s important to remember that these shoes weren’t designed as trainers. “They were designed as a racing shoe,” he says.Ìę

Principles for Training in Super Shoes

Given the benefits of super shoes, many athletes are going to wear them, even with their associated risks. “The results from using super shoes are undeniable,” says Greg McMillan, exercise physiologist and founder and head coach of McMillan Running. “Has any record not been broken since the shoes came out? All performance-oriented runners should try them.”

The question, then, is how best to use them. “The shoes are a tool, like anything else,” says Dathan Ritzenhein, head coach of On Athletics Club in Boulder, Colorado.Ìę

While a lot of this is being invented in real time by coaches working mostly by trial and error, a few basic principles do seem to be emerging.

1. Allow your body to adapt to the new mechanics.

If you are new to super shoes, the first step is simple. You need to allow some time to get used to them, before you wear them in a race. “It’s important to try them in practice to make sure there are no problems,” Ritzenhein says.Ìę

That doesn’t mean taking them out for a 20-mile training run right out of the box. Use them for part of a run, then take the time to stop and change shoes. How much of the run you use them for is an open question, but if you’re using them in a speed workout, Dicharry suggests you might want to start with as little as five minutes. “Do slow, progressive changes,” he says. “You need to be careful, because it’s very, very different.” And, he adds, don’t even start the process if you have an ongoing acute problem, like a knee or Achilles tendon injury.

2. Most people shouldn’t run in them everyday.

“I ask my athletes to wear them only in more important and pivotal workouts,” says Paul Greer, coach of the San Diego Track Club. For him, that mostly includes time trials or marathon pace runs, when you want to wear the shoes you plan to race in.Ìę

Mike Caldwell, coach of Greenville Track Club-Elite does something similar. “Our athletes use super shoes for both faster training sessions and competition,” he says, noting that these usually add up to 12–15 miles of running per week for elites doing 85–90 miles total—roughly 15 percent of their training.Ìę

McMillan, on the other hand, knows some runners enjoy using super shoes for every run, and thinks that’s fine for those who can afford it, have built up their super shoe mileage slowly, and haven’t experienced any problems. However, the people who seem to be able to get away with this, he says, are the ones whose muscles and mechanics are unusually strong to begin with.

3. When you’re not using super shoes, run in more flexible shoes.

“Easy running in a less cushioned and more flexible shoe is a good counter to long training sessions in super shoes,” Ritzenhein says. Greer adds that if, like his group, you only use super shoes for key workouts and races, you need to accept that your pace will be slower and possibly more tiring when using more conventional shoes. Don’t let that get in your head, and don’t try to fight it by turning workouts into races. That’s a formula for overtraining.

4. Don’t use super shoes to cram in more hard workouts into your calendar.

Yes, there are indications that some pros may be taking advantage of the faster recovery you get from the shoes to do just this, but for most people—and many elites—it’s simply not worth the risk. “We don’t try to increase the frequency of workouts,” Ritzenhein says. “I feel the same principles apply to when the body is inflamed after workouts, so we try to not make the training week too dense and instead focus on the next quality session at the right time for recovery.”

5. Use super shoes to do more intense workouts.

Greer does this by having athletes run time trials and marathon-pace runs in their shoes. Ritzenhein takes advantage of the lower impact of super shoes to increase volume in key workouts, such as long threshold runs. In both cases, it’s increased intensity, but not increased frequency.

6. Avoid the temptation to add excess volume to your overall week.

“Because you do have so much foam on your foot, people feel as if they can go longer and harder,” Bartold says. “Then you’ve got an increase in training volume which is potentially an issue for overuse injury.”Ìę

7. Be aware that not everybody will get the same benefit from any given shoe.

“Experimentation is the only way to know,” McMillan says. In general, he says, runners who are “pushers”—meaning they are forward-balanced runners often with midfoot strikes and strong hip extension behind their torsos—get more benefit than “pullers”—the more shuffler, heel-striking type of runner. “This is why one runner may love super shoes and the training partner doesn’t.” It may also be necessary, he says, to take the time (and expense) of experimenting with different brands of shoes, because each super shoe is tuned differently, and what works for one person may not for another.Ìę

8. Don’t ignore the need for supplemental training.

“Feet can get weaker if you use [the shoes] a lot,” Ritzenhein says. “Spending time on foot and lower leg strengthening is important.” Exactly what such training you do is up to you. It could include something as simple as taking your shoes off once a day to free your feet, or more complex exercises like doing “alphabets” in which you attempt to write the alphabet in the air with your big toe. It might be doing barefoot strides on the turf after track workouts. Other options are calf raises, single-leg balancing exercises, or knee-strengthening exercises like wall squats, hamstring curls on a ball, or single-leg hamstring bridges. The bottom line is to be inventive and pay attention to your body. “If you want to run in super shoes, you need to put in the work to show up with stable parts,” Dicharry says.

9. Listen closely to your body when recovering from races wearing super shoes.

Prior to super shoes, a rule of thumb was that recovering from races took about one day per mile of race. Runners varied, but a 5K might take three days, a 10K might take a week, a marathon the better part of a month.Ìę

Today, these rules no longer apply. People racing in super shoes seem to bounce off half-marathons like they were 10Ks and marathons like they were half-marathons. Why this is the case is a bit unclear. It is likely that by absorbing some of the vertical forces created by each foot strike, the shoes relieve our leg muscles of having to do the same.Ìę

“If I told you to jump 100 times on the ground, you might feel a bit sore,” Dicharry says. “If I said jump 100 times on a trampoline, the trampoline does all the work. It’s the same thing with the super shoes.”

Another potentially important cause of faster recovery might be the shoe’s effect on reducing what Bartold calls vibration, which is the shockwave generated each time your foot hits the ground. It’s not a good thing if it gets all the way up to your brain, so in normal shoes, your leg muscles contract to stop it. “If Nike [and later super shoe manufacturers] happened to stumble on a shoe that [in addition to its intended purposes] significantly reduced vibration, that means you don’t have to contract your muscles so much, and if you don’t have to contract your muscles so much, you don’t get the fatigue,” Bartold says.

That said, the best advice is probably still the oldest: listen to your body, though it may require a more refined “ear” than before. That’s because prior to super shoes, recovery was largely dictated by muscle fatigue. Now, there may be less of that more obvious fatigue, even though the race may still have produced deeper, less obvious effects. “If you pushed yourself to the max in a race, internally the same damage is done regardless of what shoes you wear,” Ritzenhein says.Ìę

Dicharry agrees. “[There is] a central aspect to it,” he says. “If you put in a hard race effort, your body’s centrally tired. Just be honest with yourself and see how you feel. If you’re in that gray zone, don’t push it.”

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If you are like most runners, you often fight anxiety and nervousness before races.Ìę

Part of that anxiety is simply that in any race, you are putting yourself to a test in which you might triumph 
 or not. But there’s another issue most of us don’t easily admit. Racing all-out hurts. “The 1500 feels like fire for a few minutes,” says two-time Olympian Molly Huddle. “The marathon is more like an hour-long ache.”

Holly Hight, a road runner and novelist with a 16:39 5K PR, says that whenever she stepped to the line she knew, “I was going to put myself through hell to see what I wanted on the clock. I felt anxiety over both the pain and performance.”

Or, as I myself often wondered in the middle of races, why do I insist on doing this to myself every few weeks?Ìę

In the middle of the race, it is too late to do anything about it because you are already committed, and you know you aren’t going to quit. But before the race, however, this type of anxiety can be crippling.Ìę

The Psychology of Pre-Race Anxiety

“Fear is the mind-killer,” Frank Herbert wrote in his acclaimed science fiction novel Dune. “Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”

, a sports psychologist at California State University, East Bay, puts it a bit more clinically. “Anxiety and pain have a reciprocal relationship,” he says. “Pain naturally stimulates fear, and fear makes pain intolerable.”

Mackenzie Havey, author of , assigns part of the blame to a primitive part of the brain called the amygdala, which controls flight-or-fight responses to perceived danger.Ìę

“When you have pre-race nerves or pre-race panic, the amygdala hijacks your brain,” she says. “Stress hormones cascade. You’re letting your brain wander, unchecked, and what the research says is that when we let our mind wander, it goes to bad places.”

How to Cope and Accept the Pain

So, what do you do about it?

One way to start is to remember that you aren’t actually damaging yourself with the that comes from intense activity. (Trying to race through an injury is, of course, a different matter.)

Also, realize that the pain is under your own control. To make it go away, all you have to do is back off. Not that you will, but you can.Ìę

During the race, I never had an answer to my “why do I do this to myself?” question, so I postponed it until afterward
at which point I was no longer interested because I was already planning my next race.

What this taught me, over the years, is that fear of the pain is something you only experience before it comes. During it, the fear is gone because you are in the moment. Afterwards, you forget it.

One of the best ways to get through Herbert’s “little death” into the reality of the race, Simons says, is to “reconceptualize” the pain that you are fearing.

Herbert put it this way: “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Havey puts it in terms of “affect labeling” — recognize your anxiety and acknowledge it. “I think of it as putting a Post-It note on the thought and letting it go,” she says. Then, redirect your mind to the present, using whatever tools works best for you, whether they be meditation, breath control, or something different. “Anything to anchor your mind to the present,” she says.

It’s a process I’ve used in waiting for everything from races to dental appointments to surgery. Something unpleasant is going to happen in the future, but it is not happening now.Ìę

But ultimately, postponing the fear may only get you so far. That’s where reconceptualizing comes into play.

It begins, Simons says, by changing your mental language. Instead of thinking in terms of “pain,” which is inherently frightening, he says, think in terms of discomfort or something similarly “more neutral.”

Also important is to realize that you really aren’t facing torture in a Gestapo holding cell: the pain you are fearing is something you’ve entered into voluntarily and chosen to encounter. “Some of the reconceptualization is simply recognizing the relative transience of the [discomfort] and juxtaposing it with [the] meaningful, wondrous, and fulfilling parts of the experience,” he says.

In fact, it’s even possible to reconceptualize the pain into something positive. “My philosophy has been to embrace the fact that it’s going to hurt,” says Ben Rosario, head coach of HOKA’s Northern Arizona Elite program. “Make the pain the best part, the part you’re looking forward to most,” he says.

Huddle agrees. “I try to reframe it as leaning into and embracing the parts that hurt,” she says, “because [that’s] usually when the ‘racing’ happens, which is the fun part, and the deciding factor of the race.” Also, she notes, “I’m getting the most out of myself if it hurts.”

Ultimately, says Simons, the goal is to convert the pain you fear into “information,” rather than a “scary ‘threat’ of something awful.”

This, he says, allows you to be “action-oriented” and feel more in control, rather than at the mercy of external forces.Ìę

“This is also where your strategy can be extended to, ‘What can be done right now?’” he says. And the shift from fear to that mindset, he says, “is almost always a winner.”

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Years ago, on a vacation in Scotland, I ran a hill climb as part of a small-town games day in the Highlands. Competitors charged 2,100 feet up to the top of a looming peak, then came flying back down, all in about three and a half miles, much of it off-trail.

I did fine on the ascent, but I was terrible on the descent. Parts of the returnÌęcut through shin-high bracken, where I simply couldn’t see what I was stepping on. I had no idea how the others could run so confidently through that stuff without courting a nasty wipeout. At the finish, the local runners were charitable. “You have the wrong shoes,” they told me.

Today I know that these experienced hill racers didn’t just have better off-trail shoes. They also had superbly trained proprioception.

Proprioception is sometimes called the sixth sense: the body’s awareness of its location and movement in space. Proprioception is what enables you to touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed, or walk without watching your feet, or catch a ball without looking at your hand. “It seems magic,” says Mike Young, a coach and kinesiologist at Athletic Lab in North Carolina, “but there are sensors in the body that can detect changes in the length, speed of movement, and stretch in muscles, tendons, and joints. Even the skin is thought to have some sense of this.”

In the case of the Scottish hill runners, good proprioception was what enabled them to sense how their feet were interacting with an unseen surface and adjust quickly to tilted terrain or roots and rocks. But it’s not merely important for people trying to run downhill through dense overgrowth. It’s important to everyone from marathoners to track speedsters.

The Benefits of a Well-Tuned Response

“Every time yourÌęfoot hits the ground, it has to be able to receive feedback,” says Ryan Green, a kinesiologist and athletic trainer at Southeastern Louisiana University. Proprioceptors in our feet send information about their position and the forces they encounter to the brain, which processes them and tells the muscles in our feet how to react—automatically, within a matter of milliseconds.

When properly honed, this process translates not only to a reduced risk of tripping but also increased power and speed. Good proprioception enables rapid control over the pliability of our feet, allowing them and connectedÌętendons in our legs to absorb impact energy and rebound perfectly for the next stride. Well-tuned proprioception makes us efficient, and in running, efficiency means greater speed and endurance.

“Think of a tennis racket,” Green says. “If the strings are loose, you’ll have to work incredibly hard to make the ball go. But if you have a new racketÌęthat’s been well strung, you don’t have to swing quite as hard.”

Good proprioception also helps reduce the risk of injuries, not just by making you more responsive to an incipient misstep, but because the better we can control our motions, the less likely we are to make errors that eventually add up to an overuse injury. Quick reactions enable you to use small muscles in your feet and ankles to correct balance before you get too far out of line and have to engage big, propulsive muscles for stability, a task they are ill-suited for and which quickly overtaxes them.

Amy Begley, elite coach of the Atlanta Track Club, says, “The stronger and more efficient the feet are, the less energy is wasted trying to stabilize each step.”

Why You Need to Practice Proprioception

To some extent, good proprioception is something we are born with, like good eyesight or good hearing. But in most runners, proprioception is probably not as well honed as it could be. There’s a reason those Scottish hill runners beat me so easily: they’d been practicing on rough, unseen surfaces and improvingÌętheir skill at sensing and reacting.

Also, the proprioception most runners have today is probably not as good as what they had in their youth, says Matt Walsh, a physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach in Oregon.

That’s because proprioceptors—the sensors that make it work—are largely associated with joints and connective tissues. “Any time there is injury to a joint or damage to a ligament [or tendon], you have altered proprioception and compensatory changes,” Walsh says.

According to Walsh, an ankle sprain is a classic example. From the moment of the initial twist, you alter your movement to avoid pain. Eventually, the pain recedes, but the alteration has become a habit without you realizing that you’ve changed your movement patterns. “You don’t know where your foot is in space,” he says. Your stride is inefficient and possibly liable to producing new injuries down the pike.

Luckily, this isn’t irreversible. I learned this a few years ago when I had a hip replacement. In my first physical-therapy visit, I was asked to lay on my stomach and lift my foot toward my butt. It was a massive fail. My foot flopped all over the place, like a fish out of water. Unable to see it, I had close to zero control over its motion.

The reason, the therapist told me, was because a lot of proprioceptors related to that movement had been contained in the hip joint, which wasÌęnow replaced by unfeeling titanium and ceramic. The good news was that the second try was better. “You have other proprioceptors that can make up for it,” he said. Today when I try this exercise, I can’t tell the difference between the hip-replacement leg and the other. Both work equally well.

How to Train Your Control

Whether you’re recovering from an injury or simply honing your athletic skill, proprioception can be improved with training. For runners who want to improve foot and leg control, Young, Walsh, Begley, and Green all recommend the same basic types of exercises: ones that challenge your balance on an unstable surface or that force you to react, off-balance, while on a more stable platform.

You don’t have to perform endless drills to see substantial benefits, Young says. A consistent five to ten minutes of workÌętwo or three times a week is enough to make a difference, and it’s a lot better than a 30-minute workout plan that only happensÌęin the imagination.

The simplest exercise is to close your eyes and stand on one foot. The proprioceptors in your feet will collaborate with your inner ear to help your brain know if you are swaying and determine what to do to keep yourself balanced. You’ll only be able to hold it for a few seconds at first but should be able to work up to 10 to 15 seconds at a time. Aim for a total of around a minute per leg during each session.

Young says you can try drills that involve skipping, or hurdle-mobility work, or any exercises that require one-legged balance. One option is called : first stand on one leg, with the other knee raised high and your arms positioned like a sprinter in mid-stance, then bend over and extend the free foot behind you as you touch your hand to the ground. You can also do single-leg squats or single-leg Romanian deadlifts if you’re able to execute them stably, keeping your posture tall and your knees aligned over your feet, not drifting in or out.

Other options include skipping sideways up a hill or practicing a skating motion on the flats, jumping side to side as you move forward. When those become easy, Walsh says, make them more difficult by raising your arms over your head, possibly holding a small weight.

A more advanced option, Young suggests, is to stand on a wobble board. When you’ve mastered that, have someone throw you a medicine ball—first with advance warning, then more unpredictably. If a medicine ball is too heavy, try something simpler. Walsh uses small sandbags likeÌęjuggling balls or Hacky Sacks.

The bottom line is be creative in introducing balance challenges, and practice them regularly. “You spend a lot of time in a single-leg stance during running,” Begley says. “So this type of training is a must.”

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It used to be called the female athleteÌętriad: a condition characterized by lost menstrual periods, a decline in bone density, and stress fractures resulting from taking in too few calories. For years, the condition was regarded as a concern only for women—and only those who lost their periods. Women who retained their periods weren’t considered at risk, and men, whose hormone systems are different, were thought to be unaffected.

In 2014,Ìęafter an extensive review of the medical literature, the International Olympic Committee the condition RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport) and expanded the definition to recognize that the basic problem is consuming too few calories to support everything your body needs to do—a problem that is broader than the traditional female triad and can affect men as well as women.

When it’s not actively training, the body’s energy balance is skewed heavily toward things other than exercise. The brain needs about 20 percent of the average person’s overall caloric intake. The liver needs about the same amount. Lesser amounts go to the heart, kidneys, and other organs required to keep you alive and functioning. For nonathletes, the muscles are relatively minor contenders in this competition, requiring a mere .

For athletes, of course, the muscle demands are much higher. But as long as you eat enough, everything stays in balance. The problem comes if you try to lose weight or simply try too hard to retain a lean body mass. When that happens, says Lewis Halsey, an environmental physiologist at the University of Roehampton, London, you encounter a mysterious aspect of human physiology known as . “Put simply,” he says, “our bodies partially compensate by cutting energy spent on other things.”

We are designed to survive; when faced with what is perceived as starvation, our bodies will find ways to offset it. This compensation, Halsey says, includes “shutting down in a desperate attempt to limit how far negative you go.” That is RED-S in a nutshell.

The focus was initially on women because women had an obvious sign in the loss of their periods, says Nicky Keay, an exercise endocrinologist at University College London and Durham University. “We now have clear evidence that men should pay attention.”

In , for example, Keay examined 50 competitive male cyclists: four competing internationally, 20 nationally, and the rest at the regional level. She then gave them a questionnaire and a clinical office visit, designed to identify those whose eating habits were restrictive enough to put them in a category she described as “low energy availability.” This evaluation was cycling-specific, but the basic questions were ones that other athletes can also relate to, such as average weekly training volume (including cross-training), how often they trained in a fasted state, history of intentional weight loss, how they fueled for workouts lasting more than an hour, what they ate afterward, and other questions about training and diet.

The results were eye-popping. Those whose training and dietary patterns appeared to be insufficient had substantially lower bone density and testosterone than would be expected for men of their age. There was also an effect on athletic performance. “Those athletes judged to be in low energy availability didn’t do as well,” Keay says. In 60-minute time trials comparing average power output—calculated in watts per kilogram, which theoretically would give an advantage to lighter cyclists—the athletes showing signs of RED-S scored worse.

Kathy Butler, the coach of Run Boulder Athletic Club and the head of USA Track and Field coaching instruction, says that RED-S can harm health in many other wide-ranging ways beyond reduced bone mineral density, including negative effects on the immune system, heart, mood, coordination, glycogen supply, and thyroid level. Athletes should also note that protein synthesis takes energy. If that’s in short supply, the body may not only be unable to rebuild stronger after a workout, but may also struggle to recover at all. One of the possible effects of RED-S, Butler says, is a reduction in muscle strength.

These findings are not restricted to top competitors, says Keay. “A lot of people have the perception that only elite athletes get this,” she says. “But I would say it’s more like non-elite aspiring amateurs.” Elites are susceptible but often surrounded by teams of doctors, coaches, nutritionists, and other experts who can spot incipient problems. “Whereas if you’re a well-intentioned amateur, you don’t have the backup, so it’s easy to misjudge things,” Keay says.

In male athletes, recognizing the signs of RED-S can be a lot more difficult than it is for women. It’s usually diagnosed via a battery of blood tests, but there are also symptoms athletes can recognize on their own. Fatigue not explained by something obvious, like lack of sleep or increased stress, is an important marker, Butler says, as are repeated injuries or illnesses. Keay adds low libido to the list, or just a general lack of energy and enthusiasm.ÌęPoor sleep and digestive troubles may also be signs of RED-S.

While a restricted diet is the cause of RED-S, it isn’t necessarily linked to being too thin, Keay says. People with RED-S may not look underweight and may not seem to have a problem.

The solution, she says, is to trust that millions of years of evolution have programmed your body to perform at its best if you give it what it needs. If you artificially restrict it in an effort to attain some hypothetical ideal racing weight, “the body will get scared,” Keay says. It will go into energy-saving mode, and both your overall health and your performance will suffer.

Butler says the solution may be as simple as the oft-stated advice to consume about 300 calories’ worth of food or drink as soon as possible after training. have indicated that waiting too long between meals or snacks can put your body into an off-and-on starvation mode it would not otherwise encounter. Simply changing the timing of when you eat to ensure that you get what you need when you need it may be all it takes to kick it out of that mode and into a healthy state.

It’s important not to let this post-training fuel replace your normal mealtime intake. If you do that, your total calories may still be too low. And, Butler points out, failing to refuel by as little as 300 calories a day is the equivalent of losing an entire month’s worth of food over the course of a year.

If all of that seems somewhat vague and complex, it is. Nutritional problems are seldom simple. What is simple is the bottom line: men are just as much at risk of having energy-deficiency issues as women, even if the symptoms aren’t as obvious. If your health, performance, mood, or overall energy is in decline and you’re strongly focused on weight or diet, the answer may be that you have overly restricted calories and need to relax. Shift your eating patterns to get a snack soon after workouts, or add an energy bar or two to your normal diet. And if you’re not sure how best to do that, consult a nutritionist.

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Marathoners generally don’t lose any sleep over how fast they can sprint, nor do they spend time developing their top-end speed. But Veronique Billat, a French exercise physiologist and author of Ìęargues that marathoners also need to have a sprint gear, even if they don’t use it in their races.

Part of what helps give marathoners the endurance they need, she says, can be described by a conceptÌęexercise physiologists callÌęa “speed reserve.” During the race, marathonersÌęare never running close to their all-out velocity. The more speed they have in reserve, the better and more efficiently they can run at the slower pace of the marathon. In fact, Billat says, the ideal marathoner should haveÌęabout a 50 percent reserve—meaning a maximum sprint speed of about twice their marathon pace.

She isn’t talking about 100-meter–dash speed. If you do the math, you’ll find that marathon world record holder Eliud Kipchoge averaged 17.4 seconds each 100 meters while covering 26.2 miles in 2:01:39. ÌęCut that in half, and you get 8.7 seconds. If Kipchoge could actually do that, we’d call him Eliud Bolt and give him records in both the marathon and the 100 meters. But by Billat’s standards, the 100 is a paced run, with even the world’s best performers hitting maximum speed fairly early on and then hanging on for dear life as fatigue gradually makes them slow. What she’s talking about is peak, instantaneous speed—the fastest pace you can reach after a brief, all-out acceleration.

To measure this, says Jonathan Edwards, a Florida-based researcher who has watched the process, Billat equipped runners with high-tech GPS monitors and accelerometers capable of capturingÌętheir movements as often as 50,000 times per second. Using that, he says, Billat could detect their top speed at the brief moment before it begins to decay. Her two-to-one ratio comes from testing and comparing this top speed with the race pace of sub-2:30 male marathoners.

Sadly, you can’t measure your top speed without the type of expensive laboratory equipment Billat uses. Furthermore, even if you could capture your absolute top speed, Billat’s ratio is meant to be more of a guideline than a rule, so you can’t predict your marathon time using it. The clear takeaway, however, is that in order to run your best marathon, it’s useful to be able to run really fast—if only very briefly—and it’s worth your while to spend some training time building that speed.

Recruit All Your Muscles

Physiologically, training your sprint speed helps build two processes that areÌęimportant at longer distances. One is what exercise physiologists term neuromuscular recruitment, in which the brain learns to employ more muscle fibers and cycle them in and out of use as efficiently as possible.

The effect is something like building a ladder—you need a strong step at each level in order to climb to the next one. Bob Williams, a coach who trained under Bill Bowerman, says that to run a solid marathon, you have to be 10K or 5K fit. “You have to have the reserve to be able to make the rhythm of running your marathon pace feel really good,” he says. But to have that at the 5K or 10K distance, you need the reserve to be able to do a decent 3K. Williams points out that who placed fourth in the 1972 Olympic Marathon, could run close to four minutes for the mile.

If you think that’s ancient history, from a period before runners started specializing, think again. Sara Hall, who recently clocked a marathon finish of 2:20:32 and , once had a 1,500-meter time of 4:08.55 in her arsenal. Speed at the short distances builds efficiency that carries up the ladder to the longer ones.

Be a Better Lactate Shuttler

The type of training it takes to build a speed reserve also helps develop your lactate shuttle. Lactate shuttle is the process by which your body moves lactate from hard-working muscle cells in the lower bodyÌęinto your bloodstream, where it can be taken up by cells in the heart, brain, liver, and arms,Ìęsparing precious glycogen for use in the all-important legs.

There are many ways to boost this process, but Christine Brooks, a sports scientist at the University of Florida who develops coaching curricula for USA Track and Field (USATF), says it’s dependent on two transporter molecules in the cell membranes, called MCT1 and MCT4.

MCT1 allows cells to import lactate from the bloodstream in order to make their best use of it. It’s built by endurance running, Brooks says. MCT4 does the reverse: it strengthens the lactate shuttle by helping the hardest-working cells to export lactate into the blood and, in the process, reduces their fatigue. MCT4 is built by running fast enough that the muscle cells in your legs really want to get rid of the lactate accumulation.

Touch Top Speed

To train marathoners’ speed reserve, coaches tend not to worry about the exact pace but instead focus on getting runners to regularly hit their top gears.

“We believe in ‘touching speed’ throughout our training cycles,” says Mike Caldwell, coach of the ASICS Greenville Track Club-Elite. “Our marathon training is not too different than our regular distance training for 8K and upward, so incorporating some faster work is typical.”

Caldwell likes 100-meter strides—run fast but not all-out—a few times per week. Or he’ll tack onÌęfive to eight 200-meter cutdowns (each run progressively faster) after moderate-effort tempo runs.

As a coach of adults from beginners to Olympic Trials qualifiers, I use something similar. About once a week I’ll add two to six 200-meter repeats, run at a mile pace or a bit faster, to the end of a longer-interval workout. Or I’ll have runners do two to four 150-meter sprints, run at roughly an 800-meter pace, after a tempo-style workout.

Williams likes 30-meter flies, a sprinter drill that can benefit distance runners as well, in which you steadily accelerate for about 30 meters, hit maximum pace for 30 meters, and then decelerate gradually. He suggests three to four of them, resting for at least three minutes between each. “You have to have lots of recovery,” he says. And that’s not something you tack on at the end of another workout. You can do some easy miles, he says, “but that’s all the intensity you do that day.”

Scott Christensen, a USATF endurance instructor and distance coach, is also a fan of the flying-thirties workout. “It is good training for the speed, strength, flexibility, and coordination that define athleticism,” he says. You only need to do it once every two weeks, he adds, on a day when everything else is easy.

There is no magic formula for top-speed training. Find what works for you to feel fast without undue stress. Then time the result, or get a friend to do it for you, and track changes in your sprint speed—whether at 200’s, 150’s, 100’s, or 30–meterÌęflies. Christensen recommends tracking your progression in both top-speed and marathon pace, noting how they correlate, and working to improve your speed reserve.

There are, however, a couple of caveats.

One is that this type of speedwork is still speedwork. When constructing a workout that includes top speed, you need to reduce the volume of the other parts in order not to overtax yourself. You can’t stick 200-meter repeats on at the end of a set of 1,200’s without dropping at least one of the 1,200’s to make room for them. Even four sets of 150 metersÌęis taxing enough that it’s wise to reduce the rest of the workout’s volume by 1,000 meters or so.

Another is that, of course, the marathon remains an endurance event. Sprint work is useful to improve your speed reserve, but it’s no substitute for the endurance work that forms the heart of marathon training, and it should only be a fairly small fraction of your overall work.

And finally, masters runners shouldn’t expect to have the same amount of speed reserve as they did when they were younger. That’s because, as you age, your sprint speed fades faster than your endurance, shrinking your reserve, Brooks says. But that doesn’t mean masters runners should throw in the towel on speed. Rather, she says, they can and should continue to touch their top speed regularly, whatever pace that may be. “I’m 73,” Brooks says. “I know I can’t do what I used to do. Do the best you can.”

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Numerous studies have shown that, contrary to what your sedentary friends may sometimes argue, running does not cause arthritis. New research shows, in fact, that running may actually help strengthen your joints against future wear and tear, says Jean-Francois Esculier, leader of research and development for The Running Clinic (headquartered near Montreal, Canada) and a medical professor at the University of British Columbia.Ìę

In a in Sports Medicine, Esculier’s team examined 43 studies that had used MRI to measure the effect of running on cartilage.Ìę

One major finding of these studies, he says, was that the impact from running squeezes water out of cartilage and into the underlying bone. That means that an MRI taken immediately after running will show a decrease in cartilage thickness.Ìę

So, Esculier says, “If you want to say running is bad, you can show a study that shows it reduces the thickness of the cartilage.”

But the effect is transient and harmless, he says, because the moment you finish your run, the cartilage begins to reabsorb water and expand back to normal. “It only takes an hour,” he says.Ìę

In fact, he says, running may actually be beneficial.Ìę

Historically, Esculier says, doctors, researchers, and runners were taught that cartilage simply is what it is, and won’t respond to training.Ìę

“But we now know that cartilage can adapt,” he says. “Even with novice runners, after only 10 weeks, you see changes in cartilage so that it can actually tolerate more load.”

What’s happening, he says, is a side-effect of having fluid squeezed out of the cartilage into the underlying bone. When it comes back, he says, it brings with it nutrients that feed the cartilage and make it stronger.Ìę

“So not only is running not bad for your joints, it’s actually good for your joints,” he says.

It isn’t just beginners whose joints can strengthen with use. Studies of more experienced runners, he says, suggest that they have developed cartilage that is more resistant to the type of impacts seen in running than that of non-runners.

One of the more dramatic studies looked at competitors in the TransEurope FootRace, a 4,486-kilometer mountain run (2,787 miles) that went from Sicily to northern Scandinavia in 64 days. A team of scientists followed the runners, using a portable MRI to assess them every 900 kilometers or so. Amazingly, Esculier says, they found not only that the competitors didn’t have cartilage damage, but that their cartilage adapted during the race.Ìę

“So, even with highly experienced trail runners and lots of volume, we shouldn’t be scared, because the body can adapt very well,” he says.

Cartilage Strengthening Caveats

There are, of course, caveats for those whose joints are already damaged, whether by traumatic injury or bad genetics.

The biggest caveat is that there is very little research on what people with existing arthritis should or shouldn’t do. “Our group is the only group so far that has conducted a study in people with arthritis,” Esculier says. And even that research is only preliminary, with final results not expected for several years.Ìę

Meanwhile, his preliminary work has examined women runners in their mid-fifties, some with arthritic knees and some without, using MRI to see how their cartilage reacts and recovers. The main finding so far Esculier says, is that you need to listen to your body. If it hurts, adjust your recovery time accordingly.Ìę

What do “if it hurts” and “adjust your recovery time accordingly” mean? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. Physical therapist Jay Dicharry says that you can run if pain stays between a 1 to 3 on a 10-point scale, and you have zero increase in swelling, and no limp. “You can try that for a few weeks and then bump up slightly,” he says “And then maybe add in some speed or hills run and see how it does.” But you still need to be aware of situations that will put undue stress on your joints. Dicharry says, for example, “I’d for sure limit downhill running in someone with advanced or even moderate osteoarthritis until they earn the joint control needed to ensure the loads on the knee are inside the healthy range.”

Laura Matesen Ko, an orthopedic surgeon and triathlete from Seattle, Washington, says that she has often seen runners, cyclists, “and even stair-climbing champions” who have managed not just to keep going, but to slow the progression of their arthritis enough to retard what would normally be the need for a hip or knee replacement.Ìę She too tells them to listen to their bodies, vague as that recommendation might seem. If your body says “maybe not today,” you really need to listen to it.

Cartilage Case Studies

I myself have a cartilage “defect” in one knee — basically a divot scooped out by factors related to a congenital predisposition to arthritis. The orthopedist who discovered it advised me to limit my running.Ìę

I followed that advice for a decade, but recently have been gradually 
with very little pain.

Lots of factors played into my decision to do that, but one was the experience of Jen Seidel, a masters runner from West Linn, Oregon, who I’ve long coached.Ìę

Several years ago, she too was diagnosed with an arthritic knee (although not as bad as mine). “When I was first diagnosed,” she says, “it was questionable whether I could or would be able to run again.” Now, she’s running 50 miles a week, pain-free.Ìę

Even she is surprised by this. But conscientious physical therapy, a very slow return to running, and quite probably the type of cartilage rebuilding described by Esculier paid off. “I have been patient, gradually inching back up the miles,” she says, “and my body has responded and adapted extremely well.”Ìę

But if it doesn’t hurt, you appear to be good to go, Esculier says. “There are a lot of people who have osteoarthritis on imaging, but don’t have symptoms,” he says. “In that case, I don’t think I would do anything different [than for a person with a normal knee].”Ìę

Seibel’s experience backs up the importance of honestly assessing how you feel. “Before my injury,” she says, “I was a bit careless and ignored my body’s warnings regarding my knee. Now I pay very close attention.”

Supporting Strength

Matsen Ko adds that it’s also important to work on strengthening the muscles (or any other arthritic joint). Dicharry is adamant on this point as a prerequisite for creating the conditions for cartilage rebuilding.

“You need to find out what type of pain-free range exists, and then work to use your pain-free range as a way to compress/decompress/glide your surfaces,” he says. “That may be through . It may be through more . And once a joint can tolerate the positions it will see with running, you need to increase the speed of loading to ensure the fast loading times seen in running are ok. And then, yes…..you can compress/decompress/glide joints through running.”

Matsen Ko adds, it might help to prioritize your running to emphasize quality, rather than quantity. “Do the track and tempo work,” she says, “but perhaps do the ‘junk miles’ on an elliptical or in the pool, instead of in running shoes.”

To help the strengthening process work, Esculier adds, you should also go sparingly on ibuprofen or other anti-inflammatory medications. The inflammation that causes pain is part of what signals the body to repair, rebuild, and (hopefully) strengthen, so shutting it off prematurely also shuts down the strengthening process.

Not that any of this is a guarantee of an outcome like Seibel’s. Esculier’s larger follow-up study won’t be finished for another 3-4 years.Ìę

But, he told me, “If you ask me clinically what I would do with patients like you, I’d tell them they have two choices.” One is to do as my orthopedist suggested and limit running as much as possible. The other is to cautiously see what you can do, in the hope of not only having a bit of running fun, but making the remaining cartilage stronger.Ìę

“We know your cartilage can still adapt,” Esculier says. “My view is that you will likely delay the progression of that osteoarthritis by stimulating it.”ÌęÌę

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Fall marathons are looming, and tens of thousands of runners are finally preparing to toe the line to see just what they can do after all these months of waiting. A big piece of success lies in the final stages of preparation where you execute the marathon taper, a stage of training when you back off and try to walk the tightrope between going into the race well-rested, but not so rested that you go stale.

Going stale occasionally happens, but most runners err in the opposite direction by not trusting the marathon taper process, trying to do too much when they should be resting. It’s a mistake that can make the difference between a PR and a disappointment.

Luckily, there are a few basic principles you can remember when the fears we all face about being lazy or missing training tempt you to do too much.

5 Facts About the Marathon Taper

1. Tapering works.

A 2007 Ìęled by Laurent Bosquet, then at the University of Montreal, Canada, found that a taper can speed you up by more than 5.6 percent. That’s the difference between a 3:20 marathon and a 3:31 marathon. Note, however, that 5.6 percent benefit is an extreme case. You shouldn’t expect to get that much, but trust that proper tapering will result in a better time.

2. In the final days, extra training won’t help.

The hay is in the barn and your goal is to rest, while not letting your “training” hay go moldy. It’s too late to try to make up for lost training earlier in your training cycle, and if you try to do that, all you can do is to blow your taper
and with it, your race.

3. The ideal taper comes from reducing volume, but not intensity.

You need to do some speedwork during the taper in order to keep all your energy and neuromuscular systems sharp. This means a mix of everything from strides to aerobic work. What you don’t need is to push any of these to the max.

4. It works best by cutting down progressively, not all at once.

Bosquet’s paper found that the ideal taper eventually cut down total volume by 40-60 percent by the final week, including speed workouts. In the ideal taper, you run as many days a week as you normally do (maybe with one or two extra, judiciously timed, rest days), but reduce volume in everything from workouts to long runs, as well as your weekly total mileage.

5. Don’t sweat it if you make minor errors.

“Let’s say you’re scheduled to go six miles at 7:00 pace,” says Thom Hunt, a former American 10K red-holder who now coaches at Cuyamaca College in San Diego. “If you run 6Âœ at 6:45, you’re not going to blow the whole thing.” Hunt was talking specifically about but the same applies to the marathon. In fact, it probably doesn’t matter all that much if you get lost on what’s supposed to be an 8-mile run ten days before the race and accidentally wind up running, say, 11 miles. The stress of fretting about the error will probably cost you more than the error itself.

The Four-Week Marathon Taper

You won’t find much talk in the literature about tapers longer than 2-3 weeks. That’s largely, Bosquet says, because it’s hard to get enough runners to consent to tapers longer than 14 days to conduct a meaningful study.

But a 1996 French study of swimmers found benefits from a , something I find very interesting because I’ve long prescribed a four-week marathon taper.

Not that it’s what most people conventionally think of as a taper, because it begins, four weeks out, with an extremely tough workout. It then returns to normal baseline in volume with reduced intensity for one week, followed by a 21-day progressive taper. If you prefer, you could think of it as a final push, followed by a taper.

Here’s how the four-week marathon taper works:

‱ 28-29 Days Before the Race

On Saturday, even if the race is on Sunday, because there’s another workout next Tuesday, and you need at least three days to recover, do a long run of 20–22 miles, finishing with 13–18 miles at marathon pace. That’s a wide range, I realize; being more specific depends on your experience. For a seasoned marathoner doing at least 70 miles per week on average over the past few months, hold the marathon pace part for 16–18 miles. For lower-mileage runners and new marathoners, drop down to 13. This is not only a major workout, but a critical test of your marathon goal. If you can’t hit your target pace, it probably needs to be adjusted.

‱ 27-21 Days Before the Race

Workout days:

Tuesday: Do a normal speedwork session, IF you’re recovered from the long/fast run 3 days ago. If sore or fatigued, reduce intensity and or volume.

Friday: Do a tempo run. Normal volume.

Sunday: Go long, reducing intensity to easy. Do 20-22 miles max. The marathon is now 20-21 days away.

Total weekly volume: Normal.

‱ 20-14 Days Before the Race

Workout days:

Tuesday: Normal speed workout.

Friday: Tempo. Slightly reduced volume (maybe by 10-15 percent).

Sunday: 16 miles, ending with 50-60 percent as many marathon-pace miles as two weeks ago. This should not be super-hard.

Total weekly volume: 10 percent below normal.

‱ 13-7 Days Before the Race

Workout days:

Tuesday: Normal workout adjusted to about 2/3 ofÌę total volume.

Friday: Tempo. Reduced to about half of normal volume.

Sunday: 10-12 easy.

Total weekly volume: At least 20 percent below normal.

‱ Final week (assuming Sunday race)

Workout days:

Tuesday: 6-8 x 600m @ tempo pace (no faster than 12K pace) with 20-25 sec recovery between reps. Plus, up to 4 x 150m, fast but relaxed. Stop while still turning over quickly without stress.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Two days easy. Take one day off.

Saturday: 20–30 min. easy, with 4 x 100m strides. 20 minutes is enough for most runners to feel warmed up and striding smoothly.

Sunday: Race.

Total weekly volume: For the last 7 days before the race (counting the long run last Sunday), 50 percent of normal.

Other Tapers

Not that this is the only way to do it. Hunt says, “If there was one way, we would have had a form years ago about what to do, and just follow that.” But even top runners with the best coaching follow a variety of tapering patterns.Ìę

Lindsey Scherf, for example, who holds the world record for the indoor marathon, does a quite different taper, though the overall effect is remarkably similar. Rather than tapering progressively from 2–3 weeks out, she finds that she’s done best by taking the big drop in mileage (50 percent) three weeks ahead of the race, then returning to 85 percent of normal for the remaining two weeks. “I inject rest, but then return to a non-overtraining routine where I know I’m in a good rhythm,” she says.

The real key, Hunt says, is to allow your body to rest and be physically (and mentally) relaxed, focused, and ready to go on race day. To this end, he stresses that it’s important to make sure that your final long run isn’t too long. “You need to keep it short enough that you’re not breaking down the body.”

And, he says, the key thing is to trust the processes: “Getting a 100 mile per week runner to go down to half of that mentally freaks them out.”Ìę Cutting back from 50s to 20s is no less stressful.

“Each athlete is different,” Hunt says. “But you still have to follow the general physiological principles.”

Scherf concurs, adding an interesting note: Try out the taper before race week.Ìę

We’ve all been told never to do anything in an important race that we’ve not tested in training. Usually, that’s discussed in terms of nutrition, hydration, footwear, or clothing that might unexpectedly chafe. But why not also apply it to your taper, Sherf suggests, testing it on a less important (and presumably shorter) race beforehand, just to see how your body reacts.Ìę

After all, Bosquet’s study found that the ideal taper ranged from a 40 percent to 60 percent cutback. 40 to 60% isÌę also a wide range, so Scherf is onto something when she says you need to find what part of that range works for you.Ìę “Not every runner responds the same way,” she says.

The key takeaway from Bosquet’s study, however, is that 40–60% is a lot more than most mileage-obsessed runners want to do. Don’t be one of them: Trust the taper, and run your best marathon.

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One of my pet peeves as a coach is the oft-heard advice: “Attack the hill, don’t be weak, don’t let up.” It’s one of those things runners get taught when they are young that are just plain wrong. The idea, it seems, is to show your strength and grit, to prove to yourself and your competitors that you are, literally, king of the hill. Or it is an attempt to keep the pace consistent, to not let the hill rob any seconds through sheer willpower. I can’t count the number of runners I’ve known who’ve been taught just that.

The only problem is that it doesn’t work that way.

When I was first starting to race, on rolling courses in Michigan, I quickly realized that most of the runners around me struggled up the hills, then were forced to recover on the downgrades. Then some older, wise soul in my running club told me that the best way to run hills effectively begins by learning how to run fast on the downgrades.

“Lean forward,” he said, “and let your torso fall down the hill. Then move your legs fast enough to keep up.” Run downhill effectively and you don’t need to kill yourself going up.

Disproportionate Effort

Years later, I came under the tutelage of Alberto Salazar, long before his fall from grace. And whatever you may think of him today, he was an extremely good tactician, with a scientist’s bent toward figuring out the best way to do everything as perfectly as possible.

One of the things he told me was that, curious about the best way to run hills, he’d once gone out and run a 400m hill at “hard,” “medium,” and “easy” efforts — as determined by a heart rate monitor. Then, he went to a nearby track and replicated those efforts on the flat, comparing his times.

What he found validated the wisdom of my long-ago teammate. Uphill, the time difference in running hard, medium, or easy, was vastly less than it is on the flat. He compared running hard uphill to trying to run fast in sand. You can blow an enormous amount of energy and accomplish very little.

Flash forward more years, and I found myself coaching marathoners for the Portland Marathon, which at the time included a notorious 175-foot climb to the top of Portland’s highest bridge over the Willamette River. The climb came at about mile 17, and pretty much everyone was terrified of it.

My answer: run the same effort you would on the flat (not pace). The bridge will suck about a minute of time out of your life, but there’s nothing you can do about that, and if you try to get up it faster, you will pay for it, later.

Calculating Heartbreak

Support for this comes not just from Salazar, but exercise physiologist and coach Jack Daniels, who once estimated the effect of hills on runners doing the Boston marathon. His conclusion, which I use with my runners, was that each 50 feet of climbing slows you down by about 15 seconds. I.e., that 175-foot bridge means about 52 seconds
close enough to “a minute” to justify what I was saying.

Yes, you can run up a hill like that faster. But if you do, you need to view it as the equivalent of a hard surge. Can you sustain it? And if you can’t, how much more will you give back on the recovery? Better is to run the upgrade at about the same energy level you’ve been running on the flats and let the time be what it is. When you reach the top, you want to feel “released” and eager to go fast, rather than spaghetti-legged, gasping for breath, and desperate for a chance to recover.

Discipline and Practice

Finding the discipline to approach hills this way takes deliberate effort. “If I don’t think about it, I’ll just push,” says Janne Heinonen, one of Portland, Oregon’s best masters runners. “I have to make a conscious effort to hold back. It’s hard, because the steeper it is, the more my instinct is to surge up it.”

Luckily, there are ways to practice this. One of my favorites is what I call “dip-bounces.” Find a route with a small dip leading to an equally small hill. On the descent, lean forward and practice the sense of “falling” down the hill, being careful not to overstride. Then practice carrying your momentum up the other side using the same effort. By reversing the order of down and up, you practice the faster descent fresh and have already reaped the benefits so you can relax and float up.Ìę

When I did these with training partners, I’d always find myself two to three strides ahead of them, even with a dip of only 5-6 feet, waiting for them to catch up. Do these whenever you can, making them so habitual that you can’t imagine running such terrain any other way, regardless of the order of ups and downs.

Another, more advanced, is hill up-and-overs. For these, find a longish paved hill that climbs to a smooth crest then drops down the backside (if the climbs are asymmetrical in grade and/or length, you can alternate the “fast” and “slow” directions. Start 400m before the top and run up, over the top and down the backside.

The target is to hit the top feeling not like you need to back off and recover, but instead, feeling released. This objective is twofold: (a) to practice fast, controlled running on the descent, and (b) to figure out your own most efficient way to cover the entire distance, up and over the hill. After all, the ultimate goal isn’t to be as fast as possible to the top of the hill; it’s to be as fast as you can be to the finish line for the overall race.

There are, of course, races in which you need a different approach. If the descent is too steep, you may need to adjust. If the descent is both excessively steep and technical (as can sometimes occur in trail races or cross-country events) there may be situations in which the primary goal is to remain upright. For these, the strategy is to attack when the footing is good, and recover when it isn’t.

Another exception could be when a hill falls close to the finish and you don’t have distance or terrain to make up for falling behind. Even in this situation, however, you won’t benefit by pushing so hard you have to back off at the top — the uphill push should be proportional to your overall increase in effort and pace.

In general, the best results come not from attacking hills as hard as you can but from learning how to match your energy expenditure to the course — so you don’t just “beat” the hills but run your best race.

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If there’s a rule about deals with the devil, it’s that you don’t realize you’re making one at the time. Especially when the devil in question walks with a cane and looks more like Kris Kringle than Beelzebub. He said his name was August Knox and that he was a researcher working to beat Lou Gehrig’s disease and all the other muscle-wasting disorders the world has ever known. Maybe he was. Or maybe he was just out to make a buck. He was peddling a dream, and you don’t look a gift horse too strongly in the mouth.Ìę

You remember BALCO, right? The ones who, back at the turn of the century, supplied drugs to a whole generation of track stars? Perfect, undetectable drugs — at least until someone blew it and alerted the authorities.Ìę

Well, suppose BALCO visited you at age forty-two and asked if you wanted to be a guinea pig for a new product. Kringle/Knox wasn’t with BALCO, obviously — they’d been out of business for years — but that’s what he was pedaling. Test samples of a new product, guaranteed undetectable by conventional blood or urine tests, that would tune up your muscle efficiency not just by enough to roll your performance back to age thirty, but to match you with the best of them.Ìę

Could you win an Olympic medal? No guarantee there, but you’d be in the hunt. There’s only one catch: there wasn’t any guarantee the process was safe, either. If humans were like rats, you’d peak in a year and stay there for eighteen months. Two years, if you were lucky. After that? Well, once the rats had started to decline they’d done so rather precipitously.Ìę

I’d seen an old movie about that when I was a kid, though I think it was a mouse. I don’t think it had a happy ending, but going from forty-two to forty-three to forty-four stuck in a more slowly declining body wasn’t exactly a happy ending, either.Ìę

“Would I still be able to run?”Ìę

“Probably not.”Ìę

“Hike?”Ìę

“Define hike.”Ìę

I told him about my favorite place in the world, a viewpoint called Angel’s Rest, 1,500 feet above the river. I go there at least once a month to stare into the afternoon sun and think about life. There are never any answers, but the sun and the staring are what reallyÌęmatter.Ìę

“Is it wheelchair accessible?”Ìę

So, what would you do? Go for glory at the expense of a fast burnout? Or be decliningly ordinary for however many years remain?Ìę

Me, I chose the flame and die. My name’s Jefferson Morgan, and ordinary has never been my goal.

When I was twelve, I wanted to be a rock star: not just any rock star, but the next John Lennon — the one against whom all others would be measured. Then my voice changed and I realized not everyone got to sing lead.Ìę

A few other things changed too. At twelve, I was a skinny Goth — at a time when Goths were becoming Tweakers, but before Tweakers became Quillheads. By the time I was ready to enter college, I was still nerdy and skinny, but I’d grown a new skill: I could run. A lot faster than average, it turned out.Ìę

It paid for college.Ìę

I was good, but not spectacular — just like my grades. And then, I was out, with no real idea what to do next.Ìę

And that had pretty much been the story. I kicked around for two decades: tending bar, parking cars, even mopping a few floors. I linked up with a shoe-store-sponsored running team where, again, I was good, but not spectacular. Plenty of free shoes, but no free rent. Then age started to eat at my speed, until Beelzebub/Kringle hobbled up to me at track practice one day with his cane and beaming, beady eyes.Ìę

Of course, I had to reinvent myself and lie about my age. Nobody’s going to believe a middle-aged guy who suddenly runs like a kid. Luckily, I’ve always looked young (maybe that’s part of why Kringle picked me) and a bit of hair dye and Botox made me younger yet. Not all that young, but lots of runners are pre maturely aged by the sun. The college kids fall into two camps: those who worry about skin cancer, and those who are too macho to let on, even if they do. I’d been in the first camp. Now I looked like I was in the second.Ìę

Kringle/Knox had a pocketful of fake IDs, so I picked one from Vegas — a great choice for someone who wants to be anonymous. I even went there a time or two and practiced squinting into the sun. And of course, any runner worth anything who’s from such a climate leaves it the first time he gets a chance, so there wasn’t anything odd about the fact that nobody would remember me. That and the Botox were the perfect cover.Ìę

Kringle helped too, by planting a few old race results and helping me create a bio. No college, no high-school track. If asked, I was a late bloomer who for years had been more interested in training than racing. Every track’s got a couple of those guys, and nobody remembers their names. But if I did hit it big, dozens of folks would be sure they remembered me. “Oh, yeah,” they’d say. “He was the quiet guy who kept to himself. Fast, though. I should have known he’d make it someday.” The rumor mill would flesh out my new history better than I ever could. Same with “my” old jobs. Who remembers bellhops, anyway?Ìę

It was only after I’d started the treatment that it crossed my mind that with all those fake identities, Knox/Beelzebub probably didn’t intend me to be his only product tester. I just hoped I was the only 10,000-meter runner. He’d insisted I pick one event and stick to it, so he probably had other guys doing other distances, and maybe entirely different sports, as well.Ìę

Eventually, I decided there couldn’t be more than a few of us in each event. He could probably get away with having his folks go gold-silver-bronze — if I got a medal, I wasn’t going to complain a lot about its color — but if there were a whole phalanx of us chasing the same three spots, you could bet your sweaty jockstrap that half of us would be screaming to the press, willing to wreck what little was left of our lives for a shot at bringing down the guy who promised us all the same thing.Ìę

Or maybe the treatment wasn’t as good as advertised, and there wasn’t that much chance of a Kringle-fest finish. When you get down to it, even deals with the devil are founded on trust.Ìę

The treatment took the form of shots. Lots of shots. It was based on gene therapy designed for muscular dystrophy patients, Knox told me as he stabbed enough needles into my quads to make me feel like an inside-out cactus. If he had colleagues, I never met them. For that matter, if he had a lab, I never saw it. He just came to my apartment once a week, with vials of amber fluid and a pocketful of syringes.Ìę

For the first few weeks, all the shots did was make me weak.Ìę

“It’s the virus,” he said, having moved from my quads to my hamstrings and then my calves. “It inserts the genes into your muscle cells, and your body sees it as a mild infection. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”Ìę

That’s part of what makes it undetectable, he added. The virus was a common one, like flu or West Nile or some such thing, so while I’d show antibodies for it on a blood test, that didn’t mean anything unless the authorities were prepared to reject anyone who’d ever been sneezed on or bitten by a mosquito. But the gene changes could only occur within a few centimeters of the injection sites, which was why he was turning me into a pincushion. “There won’t be anything in your blood to show you’ve been altered,” he explained between jabs, “and nobody’s going to start requiring muscle biopsies in the near future. That’s just way too invasive.”Ìę

He paused. “Though if someone does ask for one, it might be good to refuse. I don’t think the genes we’re working on would show up unless they knew what to look for, but there’s no reason to chance it.”Ìę

Meanwhile, I started to train. Part of being great is having a good coach, and while Knox hadn’t been able to retain the services of the best in the business, the one he found was no slouch. He was just what a talented dark horse like me was supposed to be able to find: good, hungry for victory, but not too good.Ìę

I wasn’t sure what, if anything, he knew, but Knox made it clear I wasn’t supposed to talk to him about the treatments, so I doubted it was much.Ìę

Knox was a bit chary on specifics, but no athlete allows that many injections without asking questions. Basically, I was being subjected to two types of gene changes. One altered my ratio of muscle fibers. There are two types. Sprinters tend to be born with a lot of “fast-twitch” fibers — the human equivalent of the white meat in turkeys. These are good for short bursts, such as (for turkeys) getting air borne, back before we bred them to be incapable of escape. Distance runners are heavier in “slow-twitch” fibers, the equivalent of poultry’s red meat, which can go forever (or close to it) at a slower speed. The only difference from turkeys, other than who eats whom at Thanksgiving, is that in humans the red and white are all mixed up, higgledy-piggledy.Ìę

Before starting treatment, Knox had biopsied me (it really does hurt) and told me I was 77 percent slow twitch.Ìę

“There’s probably a distance for which that’s perfect,” he said. “But it’s not in the Olympics. I’d rather see you somewhere be tween eighty-five and ninety.”Ìę

Three weeks of injections later, and a month of low-grade flu-like symptoms, a repeat biopsy showed my legs to be 87 percent slow-twitch.Ìę

Knox beamed his most Kringlesque smile. “Magnificent. Time for phase two.” That turned out to have something to do with satellite cells, which are kind of like stem cells in your muscles. Under the right conditions, they fuse with muscle cells to make them bigger and stronger. They also help you recover from races and hard workouts. The problem is that they can only do this so many times. After that? Well, that’s part of the reason Kringle’s treatment isn’t permanent. Most likely, I’d bounce from being a “good” 42-year old to a great pseudo-thirty-year-old, then back to 42 and on to 52, 62, or worse.Ìę

And that, I suppose, is half of why I knew I’d made a deal with the devil.Ìę

The other half was that during the treatment stage, it was hard to pretend I wasn’t cheating. Not just to the world at large, which was easy because I didn’t want to get caught, but to myself.Ìę

Most dopers simply tell themselves every one else does it. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter, because that makes it the other guy’s fault. But as far as I knew, nobody had ever before done what I was doing. Within a few weeks, though, I’d made my peace with it. The first time I was young — back when it was purely natural — the only thing that had kept me from being among the best was the (poor) luck of the genetic draw. I’d always had the discipline, the toughness, the competitive drive. Knox/Kringle had merely redressed nature’s imbalance — equalized the playing field, and all that. Back in my rock-star days, if some one had offered to improve my vocal cords, would I have turned ’em down?

Then I quit worrying at all, because once the injections ceased, I started to improve. I ran a road race and hit a time I’d have loved to see when I really had been thirty. Then my new coach went to work on me. Twelve weeks later, I ran the best 10K of my life, by a full fifteen seconds per mile. In case running isn’t your sport, let me assure you: that’s a lot.Ìę

Knox, I decided, was a genius. My coach wasn’t much worse. And, whatever else you might think, I’d never worked harder in my life.

Kringle had merely redressed nature’s imbalance. What I did with that was up to me.Ìę

What I did next was to stress-fracture my tibia.Ìę

My coach was stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me you were prone to these?” he demanded. “We weren’t even working you all that hard yet.”Ìę

But the fact was that I wasn’t injury-prone. I’d never before lost more than a few days to injuries, and never to anything as major as a cracked bone.Ìę

“We’ve seen this in a couple of others,” Kringle said the next time I saw him, confirm ing my suspicion I wasn’t his only Olympic hopeful. “The drugs make your muscles stronger, but not your tendons, ligaments, and bones. They’re still your original age, and need time to adapt.”Ìę

I had to think about that for a while. Not the muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments bit. That made sense. It was the parts of me not all being the same age that was disconcerting.Ìę

It was the first time I’d ever truly felt my years. I don’t know about you, but I’d always felt pretty much the same person at forty-two (soon to be forty-three) that I’d been at thirty. Or twenty. I have friends who say they feel like radically different people than even a few years ago. I’ve never understood that. Whoever I was at twenty: that’s me now. Pre-Kringle, post-Kringle—makes no difference. Oh, I’ve learned things, done things, wished I hadn’t done things . . . But I’ve always been the same me.Ìę

Now, my muscles were thirty, my bones forty-two, and the essential me still felt like that long-gone twenty-year-old.Ìę

There’s a famous statue by Rodin, which shows the soul of a young woman striving to break free of the flesh of an old crone. KringleÌęhad simply made it possible—not just with a rejuvenated body, but with the one I’d always wanted (other than the bones). I just couldn’t figure out if I was the young person, or the older one, or both at once.Ìę

Luckily, physical therapy was the perfect antidote to doubts. That’s because it kept me too busy to think.Ìę

My coach proved well connected and got a sports medicine lab to let me use an AlterG, an odd device that suspends you above a treadmill while you walk, then run, with only a fraction of your weight hitting the ground. The result was that eight weeks later, when the docs pronounced the fracture healed, I was in nearly as good shape as I’d been in before it happened: and I still had more than six months before the Olympic Trials — plus ten more weeks until the games themselves.Ìę

You’re probably expecting a tale of cheating caught and bad behavior redeemed. It didn’t quite work that way. Once we’d gotten over the old-bones surprise, Kringle obviously knew what he was doing. So did my coach. And, as luck would have it, we caught the treatment’s lead-time nearly perfectly. It would have sucked to peak for the Trials, only to be in decline for the big event. Instead, the Trials found me still on the upswing. Maybe a bit too early, actually. I was fourth, which isn’t quite good enough to make the team but does make you an alternate who can go live in Olympic Village. Once, I’d have sold my soul simply for that. Now, it felt like a defeat. What it really meant, though, was that my body was still reacting to the treatments. And, there’s a reason there are Olympic alternates. The third-place finisher developed a gimpy Achilles tendon—I don’t think Kringle/Beelzebub had anything to do with it—and suddenly, I was in.Ìę

The twenty-year-old me, the one who’d never changed, was ecstatic. The forty-three-year old me, the one in my bones, and brains, tried (at least briefly) to feel sorry for the guy who’d had to drop out. But the ageless competitor in my guts didn’t care. I had reached the spot where, if nature had been fair, I’d have been a generation ago. I could handle that. As I said, this isn’t a tale of cheating caught and bad behavior redeemed.Ìę

The 10,000-meters is run in a single heat. There were twenty-seven of us, and I was so nervous two days beforehand that I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just that my entire future de pended on this: if the rat tests were right, I had no future. This was everything: truly the be-all and end-all of my life.Ìę

That’s when my coach blindsided me. That’s not what coaches are supposed to do. They’re supposed to build you up, calm you down, focus you, and point you in the direction of victory. And that’s what he thought he was doing.Ìę

He did it by telling me a story.Ìę

“When I was young,” he said, “I was all piss and vinegar, like you.” (I’ve never met a coach who didn’t talk in clichĂ©s. Maybe everything’s been said so many times the non-clichĂ©s were used up, long ago.) “Then, my wife developed multiple sclerosis.” His voice cracked, then steadied. “Usually, they give you at least a dozen good years. She only got five. But until the very end, she insisted that I run, and came to all of my meets, even when it had to be in a wheelchair, strapped in to keep her from falling out.”Ìę

He paused, while I wondered what this could possibly have to do with me. “This,” he said, gesturing to the track, “isn’t life. A wise man and great athlete once said that. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, and I love every minute of it, but in the big scheme of things”—he pursed his lips and blew out a sound, like pffft—“it’s nothing.”Ìę

He turned from the track to me. “Trust your training. Nobody out there is better prepared. If the gods smile, you’ll run well. If they don’t—well, it’s just a race.” He patted me on the back. He wasn’t really all that much older than me, but he didn’t know it, so I couldn’t tell him how odd that felt. Or what I thought of this entire speech. “So, relax. Have fun. And realize that if you don’t feel you have to win, you’ll run better. And if by some chance you have a bad day . . . well, you’ve got a whole life yet ahead of you. This is only a small piece of it.”Ìę

As a guy who’d barely made it into the race, I wasn’t expected to be a contender. That made it easy to maintain my thirty-year-old identity because nobody did any of those littleÌęspotlight profiles on me that the TV folks loveÌęto plug into their coverage to mask the fact that whatever they may or may not think of their audience’s intelligence, they themselves don’t have the attention span to cover a long race from start to finish.Ìę

Only Kringle, my coach, and I knew how much I’d improved since the Trials. I wondered if Kringle had timed it that way deliberately—though having me come up as an alternate, rather than number three on the team, was cutting it a bit fine. If I won, I’d be the unknown who burst onto the scene: far better than the favorite who lives up to his promise. He’d never be able to go public with that—but in selling his wares to the next generation of do-anything hopefuls? He’d make sure they knew.Ìę

The race came late in the day, a concession to August heat, but not the best thing on the nerves. One place where my fake identity and real life overlapped was that both of us had been mainly doing road races for the past several years. The real me because, at my one time age, there just isn’t much in the way of track racing out there. The new me because it was a lot easier that way to create a guise that avoided unwanted questions. If I won, it would be critical that nobody puncture my new identity. Not that anyone would be actively trying to do so, but it would be embarrassing if someone did it by accident.Ìę

Road races tend to be run in the morning. Here, I had all day to fret. And to try to keep away from my coach before he gave me some bromide worse than, “You have all of your life ahead of you.” Yeah, right. At least now, I knew for sure he wasn’t a Kringle insider.Ìę

But all endless waits eventually end, and at last we were called to the start.Ìę

I’d like to tell you it was an exciting race: the most dramatic 10,000 in Olympic history. But it was probably pretty ordinary. Thirty year-old me had the ability to run with the best of them. And while the inner voice in my head might still be the college freshman who’d not yet realized he didn’t have world class speed, forty-three-year-old me had run a lot more races than anyone else on the track. I figured the experience would hold me in good stead now that I finally had the body my unaging inner voice always wanted.Ìę

It started as one of those tactical duals thatÌęmake the television crews happy they’ve got lots of those spotlight profiles in the can. Twenty of us ran in a big pack, where not stepping on someone and not getting stepped on are your biggest worries. Nobody wanted the lead, least of all me.Ìę

Unfortunately, forty-three-year-old me didn’t know what to do in that situation. I’d never been fast enough to be caught up in such a thing. In big, important races, there’d always been someone streaking away uncatchably in front. Sometimes lots of someones.Ìę

Now, I had the body to streak away—at least for a while, but I didn’t know when or whether to try it. So much for all that experience. It had been with a different body.Ìę

The laps rolled by and nothing much happened except that a few people started drop ping out of the lead pack. Still, at the halfway mark, there were more than a dozen of us. My coach was screaming at me with each lap, but he wasn’t allowed on the field, and from the front row of the stands, I couldn’t tell if he was saying “good job” or “get going.” Some thing that started with a “G,” I think. For all I could tell, he might as well have been giving the weather report.Ìę

Still, I had to do something.Ìę

Before all of the injections, one thing I could do was kick. Sit back and pounce: that would have been my style. But now that most of my fast-twitch had been converted to slow twitch, I suspected that if there were still a dozen folks around at the start of the last lap, I had a better chance of coming in twelfth than first.Ìę

If you’re in danger of being out-kicked, the way to win is to run the kick out of your opponents before they get a chance to use it. Or just run away from everyone, which is pretty much the same thing.Ìę

I knew the theory just fine. What I didn’t know were the details. I waited another mile, then moved to the lead and sped up. Before the race, my coach and I had set a target pace, but the pack had been way slower than expected, so I knew I had to be faster now. The question was how much.Ìę

Within a couple laps, I’d dumped half of the pack, but there were still five left. On the backstretch, I looked up at the big television screen at one end of the stadium and saw my self, closely shadowed by a Kenyan who’dÌęwon last year’s world championship and two other guys who’d been here before. I picked it up again with six laps to go, then again with four, and except for the world champion, the others started to drop off. Then, with two laps to go, the Kenyan start ed to push back.Ìę

This was an old game, and I’d always been good at it. Not fast, but wily. Once I passed someone, they stayed passed. But now it did n’t work. The Kenyan pushed harder and when I tried to return the favor, nothing happened. I still managed to stave him off until the last lap, but then he went around me like I was standing still, followed shortly after by the other two. If anything, I was slowing down, frantically looking at the jumbo screen to see who next was coming up behind me.Ìę

I finished totally spent . . . and fifth. Even at that, I’d barely held off number six. I was the top American, but that wasn’t what I’d want ed.Ìę

My coach was livid. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he asked. “First you let yourself get sucked into a slow, tactical duel that you can’t win, then you take off like a scared rabbit.” He drew a big, theatrical sigh, probably trying to remember his own advice about it just being a race. “Okay,” he said. “Live and learn. But you ran that thing like a damn teen-ager.”Ìę

Knox appeared a moment later, and for once he wasn’t beaming. “That,” he said, “wasn’t my fault.” Then he turned on his good leg and clomped off.Ìę

My coach stared at him, then at me. Belatedly, I wondered why Knox walked with a cane, and what, if anything my coach knew of it. Was Kringle making his own vicarious effort to redress nature’s inequities? Even the devil, I guess, has his reasons.Ìę

A week later, my coach resigned. Kringle found me a new one, and the next year I took bronze at the Worlds, beating the Kenyan who’d bested me at the Olympics. But the Worlds just don’t have the same cachet, and while my nominal age of thirty-two wasn’t necessarily too old for a bid at the next Olympiad, I was already fading. Humans, rats—apparently we react similarly to Kringle’s ministrations.Ìę

***

The trail to Angel’s Rest isn’t long, but someone had stretched it while I’d been away,Ìęand I nearly put it off too long.

At my prime, I could have popped up there in thirty minutes, barely breaking a sweat. This time it took two hours, and I’d never have made it without a walking stick.

But the summit was everything I remembered: a big flat slab of rock, capped in head-high brush and scraggly firs, looking straight down on the mile-wide river. Below, a freeway hugged the headland, the monotonous drone of trucks audible even from here. A train rumbled a deeper bass, while down stream, a barge plowed a V-wake through sun glinted water. Everywhere, it seemed, people were on the move, but my own moving days were over.Ìę

Unlike the old days, when this was my private retreat, my brother had come up here with me, in case I needed assistance or (the unspoken fear) rescue.Ìę

The only surviving member of my immediate family (we Morgans aren’t a long-lived tribe), he’d been the one part of my old life I’d insisted on retaining. But at Kringle’s insistence, I’d never let him far into my new life. Mostly, it was easy. He wasn’t much of a sports fan, and while I couldn’t hide my new appearance, I’d told him that it and my new name were because I’d tried to take up acting, only to be halted by a rare muscle disease. Not that it mattered: my brother is very much of the don’t-ask/don’t-tell persuasion.Ìę

In my rock-star-dreaming days, he’d wanted to play bass to my lead. Two years older but twenty years more passive, he’d never claimed to resent our never-was stardom. Still, he’d remained in music, and was now a junior high school band teacher.Ìę

I looked down on the cars, moving antlike:Ìęlinear drones, everyone going where someone else had been. Follow-the-leader, from cradle to grave.ÌęI had stepped out of line.Ìę

My brother was sitting on my favorite life pondering rock, staring into sunlight the color of the medal I’d given so much not to attain. “Are you happy?” I asked.Ìę

He shot me a glance, then looked back to the late-afternoon distance. “Sure.” “No. I mean really, truly happy. Remember when we wanted to be rock stars?” This time he grinned. “Oh, yeah. After that, I wanted to be an astronaut.” His gaze was still on the river. “I grew up. On a ten-point scale, I’m an eight. I’ll take it. But you . . . you did live it there for a while, didn’t you? Were you happy?”Ìę

It was my turn to stare into the eye-numbing goldness. I wondered how much he knew, how much he might have figured out. I wondered if it mattered.Ìę

“Good thing it happened before you got sick,” he said a few minutes later.Ìę

The sun was getting low, and walking down a steep trail isn’t as easy as people think. Luckily, we’d brought flashlights. Declining my brother’s offer of assistance, I heaved myself to my feet. Then, leaning heavily on my stick, I began the descent into twilight.

—

Richard A. Lovett is a coach and writer in Portland, Oregon. As a coach, he works with Team Red Lizard in Portland, Oregon, where he has trained recreational racers, national age-group champions, and competitors in the last three Olympic Trials marathons. He is also an award-winning science fiction writer and author of 10 books (four of them on running) and 3,500 magazine and newspaper articles. Before finding his career in journalism he studied astrophysics, got a law degree and a Ph.D. in economics, and taught law at the University of Minnesota—a diverse background that has led him to write about a wide array of topics. Find him onÌęÌęor visit hisÌę.

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In my science fiction story “” I posited a globally warmed future in which a fictitious Fairbanks Marathon supplants Boston as the go-to race for the nation’s best recreational marathoners.Ìę

The story was written largely as humor, and the prediction wasn’t intended to be all that realistic. But a paper in the British medical journal The Lancet suggests that I might not actually have been all that far off the mark.

The Last Summer Olympics?

Bearing the provocative title “,” it was published midway through the Rio Olympics, possibly causing many readers to think it was (incorrectly) predicting that Rio would be the last Summer Olympics.Ìę

What it really posits is that as time wears on and climate continues to shift, Olympic venue options are going to become more and more constrained until eventually the choices are whittled down to such places as Siberia, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of Canada. After which, there will be no suitable venues left at all.Ìę

The last of the last: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast, the authors say. Not exactly the culture-spanning international festival of cities we have come to expect.

Nor was this simply some fly-by-night speculation. The lead author was Kirk R. Smith, a climate and health researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who was part of the team that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Kirk’s team drew on IPCC climate-change predictions, extrapolating them to 2085 for 645 potential host cities. They then looked to see which of these cities would have weather suitable for the marathon, the most heat-sensitive and iconic of all Olympic distance-running events, calculating where the weather would be likely to be too hot, humid, or sunbaked to make it safe to hold the race.Ìę

As examples of what could happen if authorities tried to run an event under excessively hot conditions, they pointed to the 2007 Chicago Marathon, which had to be cancelled midway through, after hundreds of heat-stricken runners flooded medical tents. And no, elites aren’t safe from such a fate. “In 2016,” Smith’s team noted, “only about 70% of the elite competition in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials Marathon in Los Angeles finished” — and there, temperatures peaked at only 25.6°C (78°F).

And by the standards of future marathons, that might be a walk in the park. In this year’s Japan Olympics, temperatures in the marathon approached 30°C (86°F) before, with vastly higher humidity than in Los Angeles.

To see how much chance there was of even worse weather disasters, Smith’s team looked at the probability that any given one of the 645 potential host cities would see starting line temperatures so hot, humid, and sunny that the race might need to be cancelled. If there was more than a 10 percent chance that one or the other of the races would draw a day hot enough for it to have to be cancelled, they considered the city unsuitable, and ruled it out.

One can argue about the cut-off level they used for safety (it appears that by their metric, the Tokyo Olympic women’s marathon would have been cancelled), but the results were pretty dramatic. Unless something is done to curb climate change, they found that by the 2080s, only 33 of these cities could safely host the Olympics by the 2080s, and all but a handful of them were in Northern Europe. (They reran the calculation only ruling out a city if the chances of an excessively hot day exceeded 25 percent, and saw 39 other cities make the cut, but I doubt that anyone really wants to invest in hosting the Olympics if there’s a 25 percent chance you’ll have to cancel for heat.)

How the “Summer” Olympics Could Still Be Saved from Climate Change

It’s a dire prediction, and it comes with a few caveats. First, due to difficulties with altitude acclimatization for athletes, Smith’s team ruled out cities at elevations above 1,600 meters (1 mile). I.e., no retreating to cooler elevations, such as Mexico City, or even Denver.Ìę

They also ruled out cities with populations smaller than that of Helsinki, Finland, the smallest city to host the Olympics since World War II. These days, they presumed, the cost and logistics of hosting the Summer Games were too much for smaller cities to bear.Ìę

They also didn’t predict what the Japanese did this year with the Tokyo Olympics, in moving the marathon 500 miles north to the (supposedly) cooler city of Sapporo. That still didn’t spare the runners from heat and humidity, but it was a good idea. Who knows, maybe someday the Olympic Marathon might really be in Fairbanks.

Another way to dodge heat is to move the “Summer” Olympics to the Southern Hemisphere as has been done twice, first in Melbourne, Australia in 1956, and then in Sydney in 2000.

But the simplest solution might be to rethink the timing of the “summer” games. Do they really have to be in July and August?Ìę

The first-ever of the modern games, in Athens, Greece, in 1896, were in April, and the first time Tokyo hosted them, in 1964, was in mid-October. The 1988 Mexico City Olympics were also in October.

Bottom line: climate change might indeed spell the heat death of the Summer Olympics as we currently know them. But maybe they will be replaced by something new: the Fall Olympics.Ìę

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