There’s a funny quote that my coach, Jon Waldron, has repeated over the years. Brendan Foster (one-time world-record holder in the 2-Mile, bronze medalist in the 1976 Olympic 10,000m, and founder of the Great North Run) was famous for responding to people complimenting his athletic ability with “… but I’m not even the best runner in Gateshead!”

My feelings about my own athletic ability and have followed a similar trajectory. Like Foster, ever since I started running in high school, I’ve always been close to the best of my peers, but never at the top. Each year, I end up improving, but as I find myself around better and better runners, I feel like I’m relatively – to my peers, that is – getting worse. I often tell people that every year since high school, my ability has increased but my ego has decreased.

 

Before my Junior year of college, I had just gotten back from a summer of working for STRIVE and training at high altitude in Pisaq, Peru. It was my first run back with the boys through the steamy streets of Somerville and I felt great. The oxygen-thick air and my huge summer base ensured that neither the humid air nor the hot pace bothered me. After the run, I remember one of our team captains taking me aside.

“A lot of guys thought you had hit your ceiling,” he told me. “But seeing you out there today, with that snappy new stride, looking real relaxed up front, you looked… good.”

Compliments aren’t particularly popular in a group of all-male college athletes, so the conversation stuck with me. Not because he padded my ego and told me I was good at that moment, but because he enforced in my mind the idea that there was room to improve.

From that moment on, I’ve more or less ignored where my performances are relative to those around me and focused on where I am relative to myself. This can be difficult (nearly impossible) in the high-intensity collegiate system, where everything revolves around team standings or qualifying for national championships. It’s hard not to compare yourself to the rest of the team or the country. But right when I begin to feel disappointed for finishing 11th in the country, I look backwards six-months, a year, and look at my progression.

To make a dorky engineering analogy – if my race times were a moving object – I’ve tried to focus on the rate of change (the velocity) as opposed to the exact position. As long as I was improving (and improving at a similar rate – now we’re bringing in acceleration!), I was less concerned with how my performances related to those around me.

And so, when I ran 5’00.4/mile pace for 20km (12.4 miles) in Trujillo, Perú this fall, I had to shake off the initial disappointment of finishing 4th in the race. In terms of the time on the clock, this was the best performance of my life. But it was still hard to not feel mediocre – I’d spent the whole fall running 20 damn miles per day to generally finish between 3rd and 5th. Why wasn’t I winning races?

Once again, I had changed my environment; the bar was higher than ever. I wasn’t running against high schoolers, or even college kids. I was running against some of the best professionals in the country, competing for – by South American standards – a lot of money.

On April 21st, 2014, I’ll raise the bar even higher. The Boston Marathon is the most famous marathon in the world, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and full of the best runners on Earth. I have no false hopes about winning this race. Finishing in the top-20 would be an enormous accomplishment for me.

 

I’ve decided to go all in. In my build-up to the 2014 Boston Marathon, I want to leave no stone unturned, nothing in the tank. I quit my comfortable job at the hostel and found an apartment right next to the park where I train in Quito. With only my work for STRIVE and my athletic training, I am unencumbered by externalities. There are no classes nor exams, night-shifts nor staff meetings.

In a most practical sense, what will be the biggest differences in this block of training?

1. More flexibility in scheduling. Not having set work hours allows me to be much more flexible with how I schedule my training.

2. More time for recovery. With a more flexible schedule, I can spend more time focusing on recovery between workouts. This could entail sleeping more overnight, spending more time in the gym on strength and stretching and rolling after workouts, or fitting in a nap between training sessions on heavy-days.

3. More time for strength work. Especially for a difficult course like Boston, Jon and I agreed that it was super important to focus on strength, especially in the early season. This includes hip/mobility work, upper-body strength, core, and lower-body strengthening.

4. High/Low training. Again, due to having more flexibility in my schedule, I’m planning to employ a significant amount of high/low training. This comes from the old adage “Live high; train low.” Quito is well placed in that I can get from 9,400 ft to sea level in just three hours by bus. Descending to sea level for important workouts allows me to train at a much higher speed than at altitude, while still maintaining the long-term physiological benefits of living at altitude.

5. Focus on The Task. Finally, like Quentin Cassidy (the protagonist of John L. Parker Jr.’s “Once a Runner”) my immersion in my training allows me an unprecedented focus on The Task at hand. Training at a high level – running over 20 miles per day at high altitude – requires a significant mental focus in addition to the physical sacrifice (and a few thousand extra calories). In removing as many distractions and externalities as possible, I’ll be able to truly “live like a clock” (another Cassidy-ism).

 

I’ve always valued my training, sometimes at the cost of other parts of my life – going out with friends, forsaking other hobbies or activities. I can’t even count the times I’ve had the internal debate: Is this worth it? Like Brendan Foster, I’m not even the best runner in my town! I wasn’t even the best runner on my college team. But I’m still improving. The rate of change is still positive and even the rate of change of the rate of change remains in my favor.

And so, the follow up question is: What’s the ultimate goal of all the sweat and shoes and early morning 35km long runs? I guess the answer is frustratingly vague, intangible. I don’t know where to set my goals because I still haven’t found my ceiling. I want to push myself in training for as long as I keep improving.

Legendary coach Alberto Salazar once said “If you don’t stop improving, eventually you’ll be the best in the world [barring an exponential decay in rate of improvement, but now this author is getting all dorked out again].” For now, I am still improving. I can’t see my ceiling yet and I know I won’t be satisfied until I can. At this point in my life, I’m lucky to have the resources and physical strength to keep pushing. As I narrow my focus – living like a clock – in these next few months, I have no doubt I’ll learn more about my ability, my training, and myself. I’m intimidated by the tasks ahead, but, at the same time, I can’t wait to wake up every morning. Can life get better than that?