By Gary Allen
Time is something we human beings are always trying to capture, control, or even freeze, and we probably always will. Runners, and I presume other endurance athletes, have become notorious for recording every step and every second as if preserving a historical record of every foot strike we take is somehow important to proving we ran or that we exist. Companies keep inventing electronic gadgets and devices that not only tell us where we ran, but what our heart rate was, if it was windy or not and if we stopped to pee in the woods and how long our unplanned nature break took.
Don’t get me wrong, I think everything has a use, and if electronically tracking our runs further motivates us to get out there, then it’s far better than not running, right?
I have never visited Kenya (yet!) but volumes have been written about the shear excellence of this small country’s long-distance runners. Actually, most come from one very small region in a pretty vast country. I have pondered over the years, ‘are these literal zen masters of running genetically better, or is it something else?’ Clearly, Kenyan marathoners are very gifted athletes, but I think their excellence is more based on the overall simplicity of their lives. You see, from experience I know running in a small place makes you much, much stronger.
How so, you might ask?
I became a runner on a tiny offshore Maine island. The main road is only two miles long and ends at the always-cold Atlantic Ocean. I have no official record of the tens of thousands of miles I have logged on this one small road and certainly not any kind of an electronic record. However, based on simple math and a steady diet of 70-90 miles per week for decades, it’s easy to calculate that I have covered over 75,000 of my over 100,000 lifetime miles in place that is smaller than many city parks.
Gary training on Great Cranberry Island - photo by Jason Mann, The Art of Perpetual Motion
It’s funny that while we are doing the things we all do, we don’t always know the longer term effects of our actions.
Right?
So, life out on Great Cranberry Island was not complicated; it was a rather simple existence where time didn’t really matter. I knew exactly how long the road was down to every 1/4-mile for speedwork. I lived in the woods in a log cabin I built by hand from trees I felled. This humble, cozy home didn’t have electricity and my water came from a well I dug with a shovel. Heat in the winter came from a wood stove. Self-reliance became a way of breathing. When I ran daily (or even twice a day), and once my weekly mileage got up to 100 miles or more, I found it easy to run because there were no real choices of where to run, or shortcuts, or even smaller loops to opt-out of venturing too far from home, which can be limiting. Instead, there was just one road, waiting to test me with its quietly deceptive hills that slowly hammered away at your body. These hills either hardened or humbled you. The beauty of these years wasn’t the choices of ‘where’, or even ‘if’ to run, but rather how ‘far’ or ‘fast’ to run. It was not strange to have a six mile run turn into 20 simply because I felt good, and stopping always seemed like a missed opportunity. There is comfort, even on the most frigid winter days, that you are never more than two miles away from a warm wood stove. So, running became easier, and weather could never be used as a excuse.
Gary’s log cabin on Great Cranberry Island
“Simple is a lot better.”
Now, I know, or at least surmise, that these formative years of running on a tiny Maine island is likely linked to why Kenyan runners are so darned good. They train in the hills around Eldoret and Iten in Kenya —at least that's what I have read— and they probably know every tree and rock, just as I did, which allows a runner to turn off the energy-burning senses used for navigation and for making choices of ‘where to go’ in the same way a blind person’s hearing becomes sharper because they can’t see. The result is a purer form of running, and yes, you get much better at running. Not to mention, coupling this with the simple lifestyle of Kenyan training camps with my own woodsy existence and I think I got it. Simple is a lot better.
I found it mildly entertaining when I read about a recent Garmin hack that apparently stopped these devices from doing whatever it is that they do. I read about runners in complete crisis who couldn’t upload their runs. I have never owned a Garmin, but I can assure runners that your miles count where is matters: in here (hand on heart); nobody needs to actually see the miles or a picture of your watch to prove you did the work.
Gary and Crow Athletics teammate Angie Zinkus racing hard at the Great Cranberry Island 50K - photo by Kevin R. Morris
Time: 35 years and 280 days.
This is the space between when I ran my first and my last recorded sub-3 hour marathon. I actually have friends who are not this old, yet! Yes, it’s difficult (but not impossible) to run 6:52 pace or faster for 26.2 miles. I have done this 68 times. Of these, I am actually prouder to have recorded 19 sub-2:50 marathons (hard) ten sub-2:45s (harder) and three under 2:40 (hardest). I absolutely believe in a different environment I would have been a maybe 3:10/3:15 guy, at best. The island made me better than I am.
Along with electronic gadgets, many runners are constantly looking for the holy grail of training plans by following written-for-every-man-training-schedules like a child with their first cookbook; carefully parsing out flour and sugar as if a milligram over or under will ruin their cookies. Once you have run a few miles you quickly learn there are only so many types of training runs, and as long as you get all the ingredients into your personal recipe (and in the order you wish to add them), your chocolate chip cookies will come out perfect on race day. One small disclaimer: the faster you get, the more precise your training will become. For example, for Eliud Kipchoge to run 4:36 pace for a marathon, his recipe must be exact; but for the rest of us, (including me), if we opt for simplicity, self-reliance and our gut instincts, and we just run freely with the least amount of noise and complications, we’ll all run much further and way faster, whether a satellite is tracking us or not.
“Time he’s waiting in the wings.
He speaks of senseless things.
His script is you and me boy.”
-David Bowie, Time
About the Author
Gary Allen is one of about 30 people worldwide who have recorded a sub-3 hour marathon in five consecutive decades. He is the co-founder of Crow Athletics, and the the founder and director of the acclaimed Mount Desert Island and Millinocket Marathons, as well as numerous other events held throughout Maine. He has been directing and helping to organize running races and community building events since 1979 including the famous/infamous ‘Mud Mile’ (pictured here) held in the clam flats of Great Cranberry Island.
