Matthew Futterman’s Running to the Edge tells the story of the Jamul Toads, a motley crew of junior college runners from Southern California who were coached by the legendary Bob Larsen in the 1970’s. Larsen hadn’t become legendary yet, hadn’t become known as the coach who would put a fire under Olympians Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi; he was simply a guy in love with the sport with a penchant for experimentation. Futterman profiles the runners under Larsen’s tutelage, and the profiles are memorable, time-capsule snapshots of the 70’s running boom, the ragtag spirit, and the testing grounds of what would eventually become the tempo run, or the threshold run, a bedrock workout so championed by coaches and recreational runners that it’s hard to believe it never had a name. There was no exercise science backing up Larsen’s theories in those days. It was all trial, error, and intuition. Larsen would warm up with his runners, and then he would let them loose: Run to the edge, he told them, and hold it. Hold it as long as you can.
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When the horn blasts, I take one last look up into the sky at the stratus clouds smeared against the dusty, orange and magenta sunrise, and say, “Thank you.” It’s become a pre-race ritual. I’m not even sure who or what I’m thanking, but it puts me at ease and lifts me out of my monkey mind, if only for a moment. The wave of runners ripples before me, and I go out charging. Some of us purposely scorch the first two miles because of the nature of the course—hilly, with plenty of climbs. But the first two are downhill, so why not just enjoy the ride and use them to your advantage? I zag a little, trying to find my teammate Joshua, who shares my 1:04 goal, but I can’t see him through the busy pack. Clattery, carbon-plated race shoes slap the concrete. There’s an anxious hush as we search for our rhythms.
At the second corner a runner goes down, and almost as quickly fellow racers hoist him up, and he folds back into the pack. I sidle up next to my old college friend Bree and ask if she’ll come with me. She’s a strong, 3:03 marathoner, and we’re pretty evenly matched pace-wise. “Bree! 1:04-ish?” She says no, not today, that she’s racing again next weekend, so she has to save some energy, and we wish each other well.
Mile two of the Medtronic Twin Cities 10 Mile is a scream. You descend 75 feet as you turn off of the downtown streets and onto the river road heading southeast. The descent allows me to take stock. The Weisman Art Museum’s tortured Cubist façade glimmers across the water. The fall colors have begun to bleed through the lush tree lines. There is little to no wind—at least, from my vantage. I say another thank you and prepare for the first big hill.
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The intensity at which a highly-trained athlete could sustain for about an hour: that’s the crude definition of lactate threshold. For me, that’s about 6:20-6:30/mile, depending on the day, the weather, and how many beers I had the night before. (Have you heard the one about Bacardio?) These runs slowly squeeze you like an ever-constricting straight jacket. They demand a lot of energy and a millpond mind. Focus. Relax. Find a pocket. These workouts have the propensity to taunt, because on the best days they make you feel weightless, zoned, tapped into another level of consciousness, and other days they make you feel like a heap of flaming garbage.
Scientific theories abound about lactate threshold, but few corroborate its role in endurance performance. Should you run over threshold pace? Under? For how long? How much during a week, a month, a training cycle? Colloquially, coaches and running clubs and competitive recreational athletes use the term all the time to describe what Matthew Futterman calls “running to the edge.” When you run to the edge, you push for a sustained amount of time. Like the Toads did day after day in the 70’s under Bob Larsen’s tutelage, you “search for that precipice of unsustainable fatigue and stay just short of it.” The Toads were doing these runs nearly every afternoon, while we—my training partners and running club teammates—will run these difficult runs no more than once a week. Comfortable hard, they say, but I’ve never liked that description. It’s more like sustained discomfort.
I sense endurance athletes and experimental artists have more in common than they think. We both grate against dissonance for long stretches of time. The tension of Low’s droning wall of noise for 27 minutes at their Rock the Garden performance in 2013. (“Drone, not drones,” Alan Sparkhawk said as he marched off the stage.”) The extended shot in a Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, which frames a plodding horse and buggy for twenty grinding minutes. My wife Rebekah once described an interpretive dance she sat through for thirty minutes, where dancers evocatively touched themselves and made sustained eye contact with members of the audience. If you’ve ever persevered through something like this, you know the feeling of a tempo run. How long can you take it? Every step a test of will. When will this end? And what’s the payoff? And why, oh, why am I choosing to endure?
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I lean into the Franklin hill, feeling the first drop of sweat run over my left eyelid. My teammate Annie pulls off the road ahead of me, then turns and pumps her arms, then pulls off again. She’d been coming off a bout with sickness, she’d told me during the team warm-up, and wasn’t sure how today would go. “Let’s go, Annie! Come with me!” I say. She says something I can’t comprehend and gets back on the course, and we keep charging up, a minute-forty-four lung-squinching climb up to the loop—the swoopty, as we who run the river road often call it—to the Franklin bridge, where we will get a small taste of descent before we climb in elevation again for three straight miles. Joshua’s long gone, out of sights, evidently having an A day. I fall in step with a few other Mill City runners who I don’t know by name, but we shout a few encouragements and slip into the stretch along the east side of the river, bracing for the unrelenting hills.
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Hard and sustained. The threshold run keeps you honest. It is never easy. I like to think that these runs teach me about resilience, grit, stamina, etc., putting yourself in pain’s way to get stronger. The old “stress plus rest equals growth” adage.
Threshold runs, unlike track workouts or fartleks, stretch out in long repetitions. It could be 2x15 minutes with rest between sets, 3x3 miles, or simply a four-to-eight mile continuous effort. Run hard, find a rhythm, relax, and hold on, essentially. Easier said than done. The tempo run used to be my favorite speed workout, but lately it has become one of my least favorites, for reasons I’m not totally sure of. Maybe I’m getting soft. A few weeks back, my teammate Dre and Coach Danny and I ran what I’ll call a Tempo Lite™, where we held goal marathon pace—6:50—for eight miles. Dre, who recently ran a half marathon at a 6:10 average pace, said she was a little bored, and Danny is a 2:15 marathoner, not even breaking a sweat, but I was feeling pretty good. Comfortable hard. The description finally made sense.
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I know these hills well. I’ve run the Twin Cities Marathon twice, which shares part of the course. Miles 3-10 of the 10 mile are miles 19-26 of the marathon. These are the most brutal, challenging miles of the long haul, right where we fear the dreaded wall. Did you run the first half too fast? Did you under-fuel? Did you high five kids and dance and expend too much energy early on? The wall will always, always be there to greet and punish you. We fear the wall, train to beat it back, guzzle gels to stave it off, stare it down like it’s the Dark Lord menacing his way into our 22-mile hallucinations. Only, this not the marathon. It is a mere 10 miles, and we are staring down a different Dark Lord.
I come upon the other Annie, newly christened “ball boi,” my little burgeoning training crew.
“Time to fly, Annie,” I say.
“Hey!” she says. “Oh, I need to take these hills conservatively.”
“I gotcha. Feeling good?”
“Yeah, pretty good. You?”
“Yeah!” I say. All this is a bit ragged, falsely cheery, said with a warble.
“Go get ‘em!”
“You, too!”
I hit my headphones, pop the music button on my watch, which I’d been saving for the halfway point. Field Report’s “Summertime” jangles to life and gets me pumping my arms up this road I’ve run hundreds of times. Past the country club, flat for 400 meters, then up again past the pedestrian sign with the attached ghost bike, then flat for 200 meters, then around the bend and up again past what we who run the river road lovingly refer to as “The Peen,” thus named for its phallic shape on the map, and for its Strava segment name. Hard turn and burn. Mile 5, 6:25, Mile 6, 6:33, my slowest miles yet. That’s OK, I tell myself, I bought enough time in the early downhills that I can still rally after this next long, slow grind to mile 7 and the race team cheer zone. Come on, push. I say a few mantras and force a smile.
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“Try to keep running harder for longer than you think you can,” Futterman says in Running to the Edge, “bringing your body and your mind closer to the edge, that moment when the ritual becomes the revelation. This is the origin of what eventually everyone will refer to as the tempo run.” This is my favorite definition of the threshold run, “that moment when the ritual becomes the revelation.”
“Threshold” and “tempo” are commonly, though somewhat mistakenly, used interchangeably. (I won’t bore you with particulars. If you know you know, as they say.) Essentially, they’re accomplishing the same thing: the hard effort of a threshold run breaks down carbs and glycogen, using them for energy. But when the body creates too much hydrogen, it becomes too acidic, thereby producing lactic acid, which then becomes lactate. Some people claim they can feel and/or taste lactic acid, and they can speed up or ease the effort based on that feeling of heaviness in the legs or that taste in the mouth. During hard efforts, I sometimes taste briny saltwater, not unlike an oyster, and my mouth goes sticky, and my stomach wibble-wobbles. Others say they feel it rush to their legs or feel it climb like bile in the back of their throat. It’s enough to make you want to become a hobby jogger.
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I’m thankful for this body. I’m thankful for this mind. I’m thankful for my family. Mile 7, 6:40. Shit. Come on, push. I taste that familiar briny taste and my mouth goes sticky. I make eye contact with the volunteer at the aid station, stick my pointer finger into the cup, pinch, and slurp—an ounce, maybe two if I’m lucky. I grab another, splash my face to try to cool down. My stomach lurches. This is the last quarter mile of the climb, and from there it’s flat and down. The race team cheer zone reels me in at the crest of the hill. Is that “ball boi” Mike? And is he wearing….a bunny suit? And double-fisting beers? I smile a big smile and get a big rush of energy, relish the thunderous cheers and clanking cowbells, kick, and clock 6:20 for mile 8. I’m still in this.
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I keep writing about different areas of my life and crossing them out, and every analogy feels flat. I’m force-feeding metaphors. Parenting stretches you to the edge. Work, at its busiest, is like a threshold run. It can demand every faculty and energy zone and, hopefully at the end of a project or deadline, you’ll reap some rewards, get that promotion, score some team rapport, pave new pathways in the brain. But is the comparison one-to-one? Maybe the tempo run is just a tempo run. Maybe these moments of hard training are just moments of hard training, running faster so that we can train our bodies to, well, run faster. The older I get, the more impatient I become with forced metaphors, farting around, and just want doses of urgency. (I’m thinking of the Hulu series The Bear here.) Sunsets and rainbows? Great. But we—a discerning audience— know those are just conceits wedged in by the author to make us aware of the metaphors, but does that make a story visceral and magnetic? Does that make something worthy of attention? Or is it something else? Some nebulous sense of urgency? Where do we find urgency? And how? Where is that edge?
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Mile 9, just past the Governor’s mansion, I cramp up, a sudden onset needle of a side stitch wheedling its way under my right ribcage. I press into it and try to breathe, but by now my heart rate has been steadily walloping in the high-170s for forty minutes, so I’m doing everything I can to just get a gulp of air. I read once that you can fight side stitches by pressing into them, so I keep feeling around, pressing into my side at different angles and with different fingers and sets of fingers. I test out other things, quickening my steps, slowing my steps, lengthening my stride, running tall, hunching, pumping my arms, letting my arms hang loose, anything to get this pain to subside. I was so ready to crack 1:04—an important goal in yet another buildup for a Boston qualifying attempt—but I feel it slipping away. I have no choice but to slow, and breathe, and just try to get a few soothing hits of oxygen.
I feel the heat of David at my back, a teammate with whom I have a friendly rivalry. We’d texted the night before. His strategy was to conserve energy in the first half, and mine was the opposite, to use the downhills to my advantage. He playfully said he’d catch me around mile 8. Here we were approaching mile 9, and I still hadn’t seen him. Sure enough, as soon as I shake the stitch, my watch bleeps a 6:46, my slowest mile, and David clomps beside me in his Nike Alphaflys, “Let’s go!” he says in his soothing baritone, giving me that shit-eating grin. I groan, maybe laugh a little, and let him pull me down Summit Avenue, past all the Victorians, around the bend by Nathan Hale park, and down the final hill past the Saint Paul Cathedral. The Capital building comes into view, with its gleaming gold sculpture at the base of the dome, and I see the giant flapping flag and throngs of finish-line crowds. I never do catch David, but I put down everything I have and run to the edge.