Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (5 page)

It was the skis. My high school formed a boys cross-country ski team when I was a sophomore, and because I liked being outside and figured I wasn’t going to be a star point guard or tailback, I joined. The coach, a tough Norwegian named Glen Sorenson, showed us some fundamentals, took us to meets where we piled up losses, and ordered us to spend the summer before our junior year building our endurance. He said that he didn’t care how we did it as long as we did it. I didn’t own a road bike or inline skates, so I ran.

If my shift at the Dry Dock started early, I’d run in the afternoon. If I had to help my mom in the afternoon, I’d run at night. I’d go a little farther each day. One day I made it 4 miles out and 4 back, and my dad said, “You ran out to Adolph Store!” He and my mom were both blown away.

I didn’t run because it always felt good. My muscles ached, I had blisters, and I was having to go to the bathroom on the run—that was the summer I learned about the runner’s trots (cramps, gastrointestinal distress, and the urgent need to move your bowels). That was the summer I got honked at and run off the roads of northern Minnesota. I enjoyed the sense of movement and progress, discovering that I could reach places on my own without anyone driving me. But that’s not why I kept running. I ran because I wanted to ski.

Coach Sorenson told us stories about how he and his brother would go up to the Arctic Circle and fish from canoes for weeks. He also told stories of chasing deer on foot until they (the deer) collapsed from exhaustion. Coach Sorenson was one of the only people I had ever met who asked why as relentlessly as I had and then explained the answers. Why alternate sprints with distance training? Why move your arms one way and not another? Why lag back rather than take the lead early? Coach was usually asking the questions and providing the answers, but if one of us asked something he didn’t know, he seemed even happier. Knowing pleased him not nearly as much as wondering. Finally, a place where—and a man who—I could ask why.

To call our team motley would have been a lavish compliment. Duluth had three school districts. There were the cake eaters on the East Side, and in the middle were the greasers, the city kids, the ones who hung out on street corners and who we were sure carried switchblades and pulled stickups. Then there was us, the poor kids, so far out of town that we weren’t even technically part of the Duluth school district. The tough redneck kids.

There was Jon Obrecht, whose parents thought sports built character, and the Szybnski brothers, Mark and Matt, who were both around 6-foot, 225. They wore tights and long baggy shorts over them. They looked like a cross between linebackers and ballerinas. And there was lanky me. Before Coach Sorenson, not one of us had ever been on cross-country skis before.

We might not have been as experienced as the other teams, and we definitely weren’t as well equipped, but we were focused. Coach had only three commandments: Be in shape. Work hard. Have fun. They were the perfect fundamentals for a bunch of poor redneck Minnesotans. His motto was, “Pain only hurts.”

Other teams had bigger squads and nicer uniforms, but we’d show up in our blue jeans and flannel shirts, and by the time I was a junior we’d kick their asses. Or at least some of their asses. The cake eaters at Duluth East were in a different class than everyone else. They wore red Lycra uniforms, and each one of them carried two or three pairs of skis. They were our version of the Evil Empire, or the New York Yankees, or whatever group was rich and powerful and had everything they ever wanted but wanted more. They showed up at meets in privately hired buses. Of course we hated them.

I was probably the best skier on our team then, and a lot of it was because of all the endurance and fitness base I had built up running. We did interval training on the skis—racing up hills—and Coach Sorenson told me it was the first time anyone younger than him had ever beaten him. He seemed happy about it.

It wasn’t just our team that was winning. I started collecting individual prizes that season. My parents would come to the meets, and because they took place in the woods, my dad built a sled. He’d put my mom in it and wrap her up in a sleeping bag and put big mittens on her hands, and he’d pull her so she could watch me. That felt good.

I was ranked fifteenth best cross-country skier in the state, and my dad had found steady work as a boiler operator at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. Even though my mom needed a wheelchair now, and even though I still had to stack wood and do the laundry and cook and clean, I had learned that if
sometimes you just do things,
well, sometimes things worked out.

The trouble was, sometimes they didn’t. One day in March, I drove my brother and sister over to our great-grandmother’s to take her out for lunch and shopping. When we got home, my mom was lying on the floor. She had fallen when she was trying to get up from the toilet, and she had broken her hip. We called my dad, and we called for an ambulance. My mom never walked after that. My dad changed, too. First he gave us—especially me—hell. He said he counted on me to take care of things at home when he was working and I had let him down. I tried to explain that Mom had insisted we go to Grandma’s. She said she’d be fine. But he was not having any part of it. He was pissed.

Soon, a new physical therapist came to help my mom; the help she needed now was much more intensive. His name was Steve Carlin, and twice a week he worked with my mom on some pretty involved exercises. He saw me watching them, and one day he said, “Hey, you’re an athlete, you can help out here, you’d be good at this.” That’s when I first thought of being a physical therapist instead of a game warden. So I started being Mom’s physical therapist, too. I’d always felt close to her, ever since the days she had pulled my hands around the cookie bowl, and I think my helping meant a lot to her. My brother hated how things were at home, and he spent all his time skiing and causing trouble with his little buddies. Those were his ways of escaping. My sister kept her head down. My dad withdrew.

That summer I was nominated to go to the Team Birkie ski camp for the best high school cross-country skiers in the state. It was held in Cable, Wisconsin, at Telemark Lodge, and all the skiers stayed in a youth hostel in the woods. There were kids from all over the Midwest and coaches from all over, too. The three-time Olympic medalist Nikolai Anikin and his wife, Antonina, were our guest coaches. Antonina spoke almost no English and communicated in yips and yells. She said things with this great accent, like “ski valking” instead of “ski walking,” like Drago from
Rocky IV.
We imitated that stuff, and I tried to soak up every Russian-sounding word.

I learned about VO
₂
max, the maximum amount of oxygen we can use for aerobic respiration. I learned about different kinds of waxing and finishing kicks and plyometric strength training and lactate threshold, the point at which our muscles accumulate lactic acid faster than they can clear it. I learned about pacing and how to wear a heart rate monitor to measure how hard I was working. We watched videos of the Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns who were the best skiers in the world, and I was amazed. It was like finding the best book in the world on cross-country skiing.

As much as I focused and listened to the instructors, I think I might have learned even more at mealtime. The camp served vegetable lasagna, all kinds of salads, and freshly baked whole wheat bread. At the time, anything more than iceberg lettuce with some cucumbers and creamy ranch dressing seemed bold to me, if not amazingly sophisticated. Whole wheat anything and cooked spinach? That was flat-out exotic.

I didn’t have any choice, so I ate it all. And I couldn’t believe how good it tasted! What was even more amazing was how great I felt. I trained more, and more often, at that camp than I ever had before. And I had never felt better, stronger. I suspected that what I was eating had something to do with how I was feeling, but it wasn’t until years later, when I began to study the connection between diet and exercise, nutrition and health, that I learned the importance of diet for everyone—not just athletes.

I would learn that a plant-based diet meant more fiber, which sped food through the digestive tract, minimizing the impact of toxins. The same diet also meant more vitamins and minerals; more substances like lycopene, lutein, and beta carotene, which helps protect against chronic disease. And it would mean less refined carbohydrates and trans fats, both implicated in heart disease and other ailments.

When I got home, I couldn’t stop talking about the camp. My dad built me a slide board out of Formica and plywood and two-by-fours. I spent hours in the basement on that thing, going back and forth, back and forth, trying to replicate the skating movements of the Norwegians and Finns. Dad welded me a bicycle, too. He got an old girls’ bike and welded a bar across the top. When I wasn’t in the basement on the slide board or riding my bike or logging mile after mile running, I was studying the Finnish videotapes and the Swedish books on exercise physiology that I’d managed to get through interlibrary loan (that took some doing).

I continued my dietary education, too. The winter of my senior year, I joined my ski team buddy, Ben Deneen, and his stepdad, Ben Croft, on a ski trip to Minoqua, Wisconsin. They brought coolers and canvas bags full of whole wheat pasta and spinach salads and black bean chili. We stopped at the house of a friend from Team Birkie ski camp named Kurt Wulff, and his mom served us homemade granola. I asked her for the recipe, and when I got home I told my dad I wanted to make granola for everyone, and I showed him the ingredients. He told me to call a cooperative run out of an old house, with the name Whole Foods Co-Op (no affiliation with the national chain), to see if they had soy flour and wheat germ and barley flakes. I wasn’t eating granola and salads because I wanted to make a better world (that would come later) or be nice to cows. I was just noticing that the more I ate what I thought of then as hippie food, the better I felt—and the better I raced. Before high school races, on the morning bus ride I began to eat a big bowl of brown rice I had made the night before. I hid the rice as I ate it because I knew the grief I’d get if anyone noticed. (I tried to educate my family, but slowly. I suspected spinach lasagna might be too much, so I stuck with granola and occasional brown rice for many months at home.)

By the time I was a senior, I was ranked ninth in the state. There was only one local kid who was faster. He was not only the best skier around, he was also the best swimmer and bicycle racer. He had already won the regional championship in cross-country running and was a top competitor at the state meet. That would have been enough, but the word was, he had been expelled from school at least a few times, as well as been thrown off the team for skipping class and mouthing off to coaches.

I had first seen him two years earlier, when our school bus was going through Duluth. Outside on a street corner stood a guy in a bright pink and yellow ski outfit—
no
school wore those colors—with a yellow ribbon hanging out the back. He carried three pairs of skis and had a punk hairdo, with half of his head shaved, the other half in a ponytail. As if he needed to call any more attention to himself, he was yelling and waving for us to stop. It turned out his coach had left him behind to teach him a lesson because he was such a rebel (he refused to wear his school’s colors; his uniform was a personal creation). So he had called up Proctor, told them where he would be, and asked if they would pick him up. Coach Sorenson agreed; he always had a weak spot for outsiders.

Everyone had a story about this guy—how he never trained, how he would race hungover, all kinds of things. But man, could he ski! I had never seen someone with so much talent. The word around town was, he never made it past regionals because he was such a screw-up and was always on the verge of flunking out (report cards came out after regionals but before state). I remember thinking that if I had his talent, there is no way I’d let my grades slip.

When he climbed the stairs of our dinged-up yellow bus, he didn’t know any of our names. But we knew his. He was the bad boy legend, the greatest athlete in the state, the juvenile delinquent parents warned their kids to avoid. He was the rogue prince of the cake eaters.

His name was Dusty Olson, and he was going to change my life.

Stretching

Some people needn’t bother with stretching. If you have good biomechanics, don’t spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and have the kind of lifestyle where you can nap or take a dip in the ocean whenever you want, you might be one of them. Otherwise, stretch.

Focus on the “runner’s five”: hamstrings, hip flexors, quadriceps, calves, and the iliotibial (IT) band, or connective tissue that runs from your hip down the outside of the leg. These are the muscle groups that tighten even when people aren’t running, from bad posture, sitting, repetitive activities, and just living.

Though there are myriad exercises to choose from for each area (I suggest The Whartons’ Stretch Book for clear instructions and diagrams), what’s important is to do them correctly and regularly.

For example, to stretch the hamstring, lie flat on your back and loop a belt or piece of rope around the ball of one foot, holding the ends of the rope in each hand. Keeping your legs straight, lift the roped leg (without pulling on the rope) as high as you can. Keep lifting until you feel a slight stretch in the back of the thigh, then use the rope to pull until the stretch is slightly—but just slightly—deeper. The stretch should be neither difficult nor painful. Hold for 2 seconds. Then relax and lower your leg to the floor. Repeat five to ten times.

This exercise uses the Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) technique, which I prefer and which is quick (you can do your daily routine in 5 to 10 minutes), easy, and effective. Whether you stretch before exercise or after (as I do), using the active isolated technique, there’s no excuse not to stretch.